Behind the Walls. NOVEL By Claire Darcy.

47. Nobody's Saviour.

ACE.

The room was dark and dusty, with a low roof and close walls that made me feel mildly claustrophobic. We had to crawl through it.

"How did you manage to make this?" I asked, looking around at the secret room Rowan had built beneath his floorboards. He shrugged.

"It wasn't hard, although I did have to do a number of measurements to make sure I didn't break through the ceiling of whoever's underneath us."

I nodded, admiring the hard work that had gone into this storage-room.

"So where's this key you speak of?" I asked.

Rowan pushed through the darkness, sliding swiftly out into a more open space and running his hands routinely along the wall as quietly as he could, so as not to disturb Zye who remained asleep above us. Rowan's hand found the light switch, and the room came clearly into view. What we had already crawled through was a narrow entrance, made camouflaged by packing boxes so that if anyone did happen to find it, they would think it was just storage space.

I reached the end of the tunnel and climbed out with a lot less grace than Rowan, the large drop from the tunnel to the floor taking me by surprise. My mouth fell open. The room was warm; cosy even, the walls painted in comforting hues which were nothing like the white walls or grey cement that I had been caged by for the worst parts of my life. The dustiness tickled my nose, but I couldn't help but breathe in the smell of the room. It was familiar and comforting, a blurry reminder of things I'd forgotten.

And the objects in that room made my eyes hungry to discover them, curiosity rippling through my body and making my fingers quake.

I moved slowly to the nearest wall, my eyes still wide and my lips slightly ajar in awe and wonder. Small white rectangles covered the walls, stuck to long strings with wooden pegs. They each held a different image; some dark and others blurry, and some as clear as mirrors. I looked closely at one in particular.

It was a group of people, laughing and holding each other around the shoulders. I recognised them, but not immediately. They were different... they were younger.

Rowan, with pale blond highlights in his barely brown hair, and a gentle smile. There were no dark circles under his eyes then. No tension in his jaw. Frankie hung off him, blue eyes shining with happiness instead of anger. She looked as beautiful then as she did now. Tyler leant forward, reaching out of the square towards me, still handsome and charming even when frozen in time. Next to them was a boy I didn't recognise for a few moments. He had deep auburn hair and hazel eyes. His skin was warm and patterned with freckles, and his cheeks were flushed with pink.

It was Sebastian; before the fs-ox serum.

It was my friends; before time and pain had made them cold and broken.

My fingers timidly brushed over the image, a dull ache in my chest. I missed them, yet I had never known them as they were in that image. I wanted to see them smile, to see them happy and care-free. I had only ever known them when there were broken; broken and strong.

"Photographs," Rowan said quietly, still managing to startle me, "Taken with a Polaroid camera. That one was a couple of years ago, on Tyler's birthday. Frankie made a cake and everything."

The words were a distant memory to me. Photographs. Polaroid. Birthday. Cake. They were outlawed, illegal things that made my body buzz with adrenaline, but they also brought nostalgia. This whole room did.

"These, I remember. But only just. Photographs were one thing my parents refused to let go of. Everything else in this room, I..."

I let my voice trail off. I moved away from the wall, crouching beside a wooden box with metallic strings pulled over the length of it, over a hole in the middle. I tried to think if I could remember it from the old world, but I couldn't. I glanced at Rowan, my eyes questioning. He sat across the room, in a hollowed-out section of the wall which had a bed inside it, covered in pillows to be closer to a couch.