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  Charlie was a boy who liked to do things, to act. Stuck in that anchor-chain locker, unable to do anything, his misery seemed about to overwhelm him. But then he heard a most peculiar noise.

  It was music—loud and raucous music, but not ugly. No, it was wild and exciting, pulsing like drums and wailing like violins, though it wasn’t either of those. There was a sound that he half-recognized but couldn’t put a name to—a whistling, pumping sound with a swirling melody, like all the things he’d ever wanted to do but couldn’t, like adventure and danger and strange, interesting people, like long ago and far away. His heart immediately began to beat faster, and he slid out of the locker into the boat’s little cabin without even thinking of the riverpoliceguy.

  As it turned out, it didn’t matter whether Charlie thought about him or not because the riverpoliceguy was busy doing his job: He was up against the railings of his little boat with a megaphone, addressing the ship alongside them, saying: “You are breaking the rules. You are causing a nuisance. Under Waterway Bylaw 1783 zx (1), you are not permitted to play music on a public waterway without a license. Unless you produce a valid license within five minutes, I am obliged to board your vessel and prevent further nuisance being caused. You are under a warning. You are breaking the rules . . .” and so on. But Charlie took no notice of all that. He was too busy gazing at the extraordinary ship before him.

  For a start, the ship was huge: a great, tall, wide, old-fashioned steamer. And not only was she huge, she was crimson. Not a soppy dolly pink, but crimson like blood, like the sun going down on a burning African night, like blood oranges and garnets and pomegranate seeds. Where she wasn’t crimson she was gold: the hair of her gorgeous carved figurehead, for example, with its green eyes and sidelong inviting smile, and the sculpted rims of her many portholes, and the curled leaves and vines carved all over her magnificent stern. She had three masts, a bowsprit, cannons and life-boats along the decks, and two fine smokestacks amidship. In front of the smokestacks was a low circular canvas awning in crimson and white stripes like seaside rock, and gay flags fluttered in her rigging. She was heading out to sea under power, catching the ebb tide, but her sails were not yet up. Charlie suddenly wanted, more than anything, to see this amazing craft under canvas, bowling along on the high seas.

  The wild music was coming from this ship, and it seemed that neither the ship nor her music cared about the pesky riverpoliceguy any more than an elephant cares about a fly on its bottom: He kept on bawling through his megaphone, the ship kept on moving downstream.

  And then suddenly a figure appeared on the deck, and seemed to notice the policeguy, for it leaned over the side as if listening to hear what he was saying, and then disappeared for a moment, and then reappeared, casting down a rope ladder from the deck and making beckoning noises. The ship slowed a little to stabilize in the flowing stream of the river, and the policeguy maneuvered his little boat up to the great crimson hull. He made fast to the bottom of the ladder and began to climb up.

  Charlie, watching for his opportunity, knew exactly what he was going to do. The moment the coast was clear, he was going to board this ship. It was so beautiful, so exciting. What kind of people could be on board? Who would own such a vessel? He had never seen anything so tempting in his life, and he had to find out about it.

  Something was going on up on the deck. He couldn’t see clearly because the little riverboat was tied up against the ship’s crimson side and the deck was way above him, but he could hear shouting, and scuffling, and suddenly—a great splash.

  He looked to where the sound had been.

  There was the riverpoliceguy, closer to the river than he would have cared to be: i.e., in it. He was splashing and struggling and trying to catch his breath, which is hard with your boots on when you’ve been thrown overboard.

  “Sorry, fella!” came a hoarse cry from overhead, and then the tempo of the ship picked up, the music suddenly stopped, and the ship began to cruise swiftly, like a fighting swan, on down the river—leaving the riverpoliceguy in its wake, and pulling his little boat along beside her almost as if it had been completely forgotten. Which perhaps it had.

  Charlie, sitting alone in the little boat’s cabin, being dragged at considerable speed to who knows where, couldn’t say a word.

  Several miles upstream, Rafi and Troy were standing by Mr. Ubsworth’s stall on the riverside. Troy was panting and drooling. He’d run all the way, following Charlie’s scent. Rafi had followed him in the long silver car, and was looking cool and pale. He was staring at Troy, his lip twisted.

  “You stupid animal,” he said, quite calmly to start with. “You stuuuupid animal. This is not the kid, it’s a fish-stall. Didn’t you get a decent sniff of him yesterday in the car? What do you think I feed you for, you plackett! It’s not for the charm of your company, it’s for your nose! And if your nose can’t tell the difference between a boy and a plate of fish, you’re not worth your keep! Are you? So pig off! Go on!” He picked up a stick and jerked it in Troy’s face.

  Troy, whining, his tongue flobbering, went to the edge of the water and ran up and down.

  Mr. Ubsworth observed and said nothing.

  “You been here all morning?” Rafi said to him.

  “Aye,” said Mr. Ubsworth, rinsing a sparrowfish in his bucket.

  “Did you see a boy? Brown boy, shavehead, about so high, with a bag?”

  Mr. Ubsworth looked up. “No,” he said mildly. “You the first boy I seen today.”

  Rafi stared at him. He didn’t like being called a boy. “If he comes back this way . . .” he said.

  Mr. Ubsworth was back to his fishes’ bellies, cleaning out red and blue innards from silvery streaks of eel in the cold water. The heat from his grill shimmered on the air. “Grilled eel sandwich?” he said.

  “Of course not,” said Rafi. “If he comes back—”

  “Ain’t been no boy here,” said Mr. Ubsworth again.

  Rafi stood for a moment, his head down. He was angry.

  Suddenly he threw the stick viciously at his dog, then turned on his heel, his jacket flying. He jumped in the car and went home.

  Troy lollopped tiredly after the car, his tail down. It was a long way home.

  Mr. Ubsworth looked up. He liked lads to have better manners.

  CHAPTER 6

  Charlie wasn’t worried at all about leaving the riverpoliceguy in the middle of the river. Surely riverpoliceguys could swim. He was, however, hungry. He opened each of the two little lockers in the cabin: a half-eaten box of crackers and some tea and sugar cubes and chocolate. He ate three crackers and put the rest in his bag. He pocketed the tea and the chocolate and the box of sugar cubes too—well, the policeguy wouldn’t need them now.

  Then Charlie settled down in the cabin. He didn’t want anyone on the ship to notice him, so he’d stay put until dark, and then make his way up the ladder. He lay back and gazed up at the great crimson hull to which he was tethered, wondering again who would have a ship like that, and where it was going. He could see the ship’s name, Circe, painted in gold on the curve of her great bow. Circe—he’d heard that name before . . . pronounced Sirky . . . now what was it . . . After a while he recalled that it was the name of the witch who enchanted Odysseus on his way back from the Trojan War. His dad had read it to him. She’d turned all his sailors into pigs and kept Odysseus for a whole year, making him forget his wife and his son at home in Ithaca. Circe. Odd name for a ship, when the Circe in the story had disrupted Odysseus’s sea voyage so effectively.

  The angle at which the little boat was tethered made it impossible for Charlie to face the direction of the Circe for long, as all the blood was going to his head, so he turned himself around and watched the last of the city disappear along the banks. By now they were way beyond the tall, shining buildings of the office district. The wharves and warehouses and stone quays of the big dockyards were giving way to the smaller ship-repair yards, the houses on stilts where the wharf workers lived, and fina
lly the wide, empty mudflats and saltmarshes, where the light hung like gauze, and the silvery grasses rippled, and the tiny voices of hundreds of invisible birds carried over the water, mingling with the rush of the river beneath the little boat’s hull. Charlie thought it must be rather nice to live there in one of the stilt houses, with the veranda looking out over the river, and the water slapping underneath. You could fish for your dinner out of your bedroom window, with the great expanse of sky and water all around you, and the sea sliding in beneath your home twice a day. He wondered why they didn’t have stilt houses in the west of the city, farther inland, where he lived; why instead people there lived in housing towers or yard houses like his.

  He didn’t want to think about home. He could feel the presence of his mother’s phone in his bag, and suddenly thought—Mum may not have her phone, but what about Dad?

  He pulled out his own phone and swiftly dialed in his dad’s number. His heart beat fast and his hands were shaking. His dad might answer. He might.

  The phone rang in a dim empty distance. Rang too long. Then—his dad’s voice. His recorded message: “Hello, this is Aneba Ashanti, leave me a message and I’ll be in touch with you soon.”

  His dad’s voice. Charlie felt it deep in his heart.

  He wished he’d thought what to say—what was safe to say. If they—whoever they were—were going to listen to the message, he didn’t want to give anything away. But he wanted his dad to know—what? And he had to leave the message now, because what if he couldn’t get through again? He couldn’t waste this opportunity.

  Suddenly he knew what to do. He’d leave a message like his mum’s note. Clear to them, but not revealing anything.

  “Hi, Daddy,” he said cheerfully. “Charles here. I’m being a good boy like Mummy said and I’m at Rafi and Martha’s, but I’m going out quite a lot and I really hope I will see you soon. I’ve been sailing on the river today and I hope I’ll do some more tomorrow! Ring me soon, I’ve got my phone on all the time. Lots of love to Mummy. Bye!”

  He was really pleased with himself. If Dad got that message he’d understand immediately that Charlie knew what was going on. One: He never called him Daddy, or Mum Mummy—so they’d know he’d picked that up from Mum’s message. Plus the “being a good boy” reference and calling himself Charles. “Going out quite a lot” and “sailing on the river” was pretty clear, and the pièce de résistance—the best bit, which had come to him even while he’d been talking—was to say that he had his phone on all the time. Of course he had to turn his phone off during lessons—so now they’d know he wasn’t going to Brother Jerome’s, and they could put that together with the sailing and the “really hope I will see you soon” and know he was coming after them.

  Bother. He should have said something about the cats. If Mum and Dad knew the cats were watching out for them, they could maybe send a message . . . Oh, no. Mum and Dad, astonishingly, couldn’t understand when cats talked.

  When they were living in Africa, when Charlie was little, Aneba Ashanti used to go frequently into the great forests, looking for plants and mosses and funguses for his research. He would go for several days, deep into the dark areas; he would climb the huge trees with the roots tall enough to build houses between, and he would spend days on end in the canopy of the forest where the monkeys and butterflies live, sleeping in his hammock hundreds of feet above the ground while the elephants rooted below looking for big seeds to eat. Sometimes he would take the little toddler Charlie with him, strapped to his back.

  One hot, humid day, very early in the morning, Aneba was very carefully scraping samples of bark from a lustrous green creeper way up in the canopy, with Charlie sleeping on his back. Because he was concentrating so hard on getting a good clean sample, and trying not to cut himself with his recently sharpened knife, Aneba did not notice a leopardess down below on the forest floor, making her way delicately toward a waterhole nearby. Nor did he notice the strong, pudgy little cub following her. Nor, of course, did he notice the tiny emerald green snake on which the cub trod in the dimness of the undergrowth.

  But he noticed the yowl of pain from the cub as the hot poison sparked into its little body, and the howl of distress from its mother as she realized what had happened. In an instant Aneba swung down from the canopy, his knife in his teeth, and landed not far from the leopards. The snake disappeared: It zipped into the vast green forest and was gone. The leopardess stayed. She stared at Aneba, and for a moment he felt a shot of pure fear. But the animals hereabouts were used to Aneba. They knew he wasn’t a hunter, that he just hung around in the woods picking flowers and leaves and digging roots. So she didn’t immediately pounce on him and kill him. She just stared. And he stared at her.

  The leopard cub’s yowling had started Charlie yowling too.

  The two cubs yowled. The two parents looked at each other.

  Aneba’s heart was torn. He desperately wanted to help the baby leopard, and he had in his backpack the antidote to the snake poison—he took it with him everywhere in case he or the child were bitten. But he would have to get it to the cub swiftly—and how to make the mother let him?

  Her eyes were expressionless. Aneba’s face too was a mask.

  There was only one thing he could do.

  He was very scared to do it.

  Slowly and gently, Aneba unwrapped Charlie from his back and sat him on a flat rock behind him, well away from the leopardess. He didn’t take his eyes off her while he rummaged in the bag and found the syringe containing the antidote. Then, holding the syringe up like a totem, so that she could see it clearly, he asked her: “May I help your child?”

  She stared.

  Charlie, on the rock, yowled a bit more quietly.

  The cub was whimpering.

  Aneba moved away from Charlie, gently toward the cub.

  The leopardess narrowed her eyes. Her ears were perked up, her whiskers twitching. In a swift movement, she dropped her head and moved—away from Aneba, away from her cub, away from Charlie. After ten paces, she stopped, and turned, and sat, staring again at Aneba.

  He fell to his knees beside the cub, and swiftly, surely injected the life-saving medicine into the cub’s fat back leg. As he did so—

  “Baby one!” cried Charlie, who had tottered up to Aneba’s side and was now reaching out to pat the cub, who squirmed away from the needle. Aneba gasped, the syringe fell, and a few small drops of blood appeared on the fur. Charlie laughed. The cub, alarmed, put out a claw and scratched, hard. Drops of Charlie-blood were on the cub; drops of cub-blood were on Charlie’s bleeding arm.

  The leopardess and Aneba looked at each other. The cub and Charlie yowled again: in unison.

  Each parent grabbed its child and ran—the cub hanging from the leopardess’s tender jaws like a kitten, Charlie tucked firmly under his father’s arm.

  “Ab ab ab baby one!” cried Charlie happily.

  “Mrrrrow!” scrawled the leopard cub.

  “Mrrrrow!” called Charlie.

  And after that, Charlie talked with cats as much as with people. He was mystified by their constant feuding. Though he understood their language, he didn’t exactly understand their feelings and their mysteries, but he loved them and they were his friends. His parents studied him endlessly: They knew what must have caused it, but they couldn’t work out why.

  “He’s modified himself,” said Magdalen. “Here’s everybody fussing about genetic modification methods, and young Charlie here’s done it to himself.”

  “And can the leopard cub talk English now?” Aneba wondered.

  Another thing—he wasn’t allergic to cats, when so many other kids were.

  “Fascinating,” said his parents, over and over again. This was after Magdalen had shouted at Aneba for three days about getting their child into such danger.

  Charlie had been really happy to be more clever at something than his parents were. But now—well, it would have been useful if they’d had that particular knack too.

&
nbsp; Before the afternoon sun grew too low, Charlie set up his solar panel to recharge his phone. He’d recharge Mum’s as well if there was time. There might be messages on it. There might be something to give him a clue.

  Clue!

  For goodness’ sake, thought Charlie. I have a clue. His mum had given it to him herself. He reached into his bag and there it was, carefully folded.

  Charlie had a bit of a feeling in his chest as he took it out.

  This was her blood.

  So what had she written?

  Oh.

  Letters and numbers. Some in brackets, some not. Mostly normal size, some little tiny ones up at the top of the bigger ones.

  It looked like very complicated math. It made no sense whatsoever to Charlie.

  He looked at it for a moment, wondering if it was a code. He’d played code games with his mum before, and if it was a code, he’d like to think he could work it out.

  But nothing they’d ever done had had all these brackets and tiny numbers.

  “I know what this is,” he said to himself after a while of staring. “This is a formula.” He knew what formulas were because scientists use them all the time.

  So it wasn’t nonsense. But it was nonsense to him, because he hadn’t learned nearly enough science yet to work it out.

  He folded the paper up and put it away again. He’d learn what it was about. He would find someone who would tell him. He’d be careful whom he asked, though. It didn’t seem like something he should show to just anybody.

  And in the meantime, it did him no good at all. He still didn’t know why his parents had been taken. Apart from him, who would want them?

  He thought about it for a bit.