Chapter VII

"Do you know how many children died from the "vitamins"?" Frans asks.

Ava presses her lips into a thin line and shakes her head. "I don't remember, but there was quite a lot, and most of them are newcomers. You know, the younger ones."

"How did they die?" Sylva asks, "Did they die after having a convulsion or some kind of episode, or did they get seriously ill first and die from their illness?"

His colleagues raised their eyebrows at the question but said nothing. They simply wait for Ava to answer the question.

"I don't think anyone ever died right after they took the medicine, all of them got ill first."

Seth can see the way Sylva's shoulders relax at the answer, but the man's eyebrows are still furrowed in frustration. The question was oddly specific, it was as if Sylva knew the subject intimately, and judging from his reaction to the question, it must have been the answer he was hoping for. He made a note to himself to ask about this later to Sylva.

Beside him, Frans slides all of the things on the table aside and pulls out another envelope, and places the content on the table. They were the autopsy results of Father.

The girl flinches at the photo of Father.

"Cause of death: Stab wound," Frans says, pointing at the writing on the report, "we didn't find any weapon in the crime scene, so I must ask: what did you kill him with?"

The girl plays with her hair, refusing to look at any of them as she answers, "Blood."

"Blood?" Ava nodded. "As in blood weapons? From transmutation?" She nodded again. "Did you do it? Were you the one who transmuted it?"

"Yes," she answers.

Sylva whistled. "Impressive. I only managed to do it last spring," he says, "did Father teach you?"

Ava shakes her head. "Not him."

"Was it Sana, then?" Seth asks.

She shakes her head again. "Not him either," she says, pauses, and continues, "It was Number Zero."

The three adults lean forward on their seats. Seth's dark eyes are focused and sharp as he looks directly into Ava's lighter eyes.

"They were real?"

Ava nods, her expression is less than pleasant.

The tooth that she threw didn't quite manage to get to the roof on her first try. She was standing by the creek then, and when she threw it, the tooth hit the window of the locked room on the first floor, the "Number Zero's Room", and bounced to the soil underneath, so she picked the tooth up and held it in her hand, her eyes staring into the window.

Every time she looked at the window of that room, Ava would wonder what she would be looking at if only the window wasn't fogged by Father's powerful magic. Could it be that was where Father kept the disappearing children? Could the room possibly be full of torture devices? Could Number Zero be real? If they are, would they be a girl or a boy? Et cetera. But of course, they are silly questions that she might never get the answer to, so she shrugged and threw the tooth up to the roof again and made sure that it actually ended up where she wanted it to be and left.

Nothing was special about the rest of the day. She went to the library and waited until Sana was done with his lessons, played, ate, and went to bed. The day was as ordinary as could be.

But the next day came and Father was calling for her the first thing in the morning. She had just gotten out of bed when she heard Father's voice yelling out her number from the corridor of the second floor. Everyone in her room was staring at her, sneering, whispering snarkily amongst themselves, "What had she done now?"

This time, she was as confused as everybody else. Sure, Father would single her out a lot of the time just to embarrass her, but the day had just started and she had not met Father since dinner last night, in which she did not interact at all with the man. She looked at Sana to see if he knew anything, but he shook his head, grabbed a clean outfit, and helped her change in a hurry, then they fast-walked to meet Father.

Father squinted his eyes at Sana. He hisses, "I did not call for you, Four."

Sana bit his lip and looked down in silence, he did not dare to talk back to him. However, he didn't let go of Ava's hand either, the boy squeezed his sister's hand tighter.

Father scoffed at the siblings. "Very well. Come along, you two." He turned away and started to go down the stairs without giving the chance for the two children to keep up with his stride.

It was a portal. The locked room on the first floor was a portal.

It was a portal to a decently sized house by a creek, and it was surrounded by pine and birch trees. The wall was pristine white and it was filled with paintings that were hung in an orderly horizontal line. The paintings were all painted in the exact same canvas size, She noticed.

Father didn't utter a single word as he locked the door back, and neither siblings were brave enough to acknowledge their surprise once they saw the inside of the room, they stood in silence as they waited for Father to finish casting the spell. The man whipped around and left the siblings behind as he entered deeper into the house.

"Aksel!" Father called, "Aksel, come here at once!"

"Aksel was a sickly boy about my age, suffered a terminal illness, and bound to his wheelchair," Ava explains, "one of the windows was connected to the window in the school. When the tooth I threw hit the window, Aksel had heard the sound and he checked to see what made the sound,

"That was when he saw me, staring into the window, holding a rotten baby tooth. He told Father about seeing me, and told him that he'd like to have a friend."

Aksel reminded Ava of the snow. He was frail and scrawny, like a gust of wind would knock him off his wheelchair. His hair and eyes were a curious shade of light grey, and when he stood in front of the wall, the boy was almost invisible.

He spent his days painting alone in that little house. His favourite painting subject was the school ground that he could see from the window that was connected to the school.

"The children always looked like they were having fun going wherever they're running off to," he said.

And it was true, they were having fun. The creek was the only place where everyone could play as much as they wanted without being monitored by Father. Father, you see, never got out of the school; not even once. The children would run excitedly on their way to the creek; chasing each other or pulling on their friends, laughing and yelling without a care in the world.

"The creek here is lonely," he said, "I haven't been around anyone my age ever since the war ended. Father said it's too dangerous and I have to stay here by myself, so I did,"

"Then I saw you, looking my way, but not really looking at me. I knew who you were, I've seen you many times before. I've never seen the two of you separated, and I envy the two of you for having each other." Aksel said wistfully,

Father had gone back and left the three of them alone, and she wasn't sure what to make of her current situation, so she stayed in uncomfortable silence as she listened to the boy's rant.

The house was quiet and peaceful, it was free of kids gossiping behind her back and Father's cold stare and mean comments. Ava liked it there, but it was unclear to her why Father would take her, his worst student, to a place that suited more a reward than a punishment.

Aksel, the frail boy with frozen magi, had been attempting to make Sana and she felt comfortable and at home by offering them to sit down and have tea with him, or perhaps to read some of his books, but it was to no avail. The boy could only look down in disappointment and defeat as the two siblings showed no sign of lowering their guard and suspicion.

"I'm sorry I was getting ahead of myself, you clearly do not wish to be here with me. I can call Father to return you where you came from," he offers, his voice wavering at the end of the sentence.

Sana squeezed her hand tighter for a millisecond and she turned to look at him, face scrunching with hurt and pity. Her brother had always been a soft and caring person; he couldn't stand looking at the lonely boy who had been imprisoned by the same vile person who also imprisoned the two of them, breaking over his loneliness. He couldn't stand to think of the younger boy's life, living with a monster with no one to lean on when even they had each other to lean on.

Ava stared at the boy in the wheelchair who was on the verge of crying and pulled her brother along with her as she approached him. She took the boy's hand with her other hand, she said, "We'd love to be your friend."