Page 26 of Queen of Nothing

It’s hard to tell with the midday sun glaring into the car, glaring over the phone screen.

“What?” Serena’s shout is so pitched that I cringe. “Just text it—you know what? Stop. I’ll do it.”

She pulls over to the side of the road, then turns off the engine. She swipes the phone from me, her nails scraping my hand as she does.

I bite down on the insides of my cheeks, biting down on the sharp words rising up in me.

My dark gaze slides to her, and I watch as her thumbs clack the buttons.

Words come up on the screen.

Then, “Done.”

That’s all she says before she starts to pull the phone apart.

My eyebrows lift.

She takes out a black brickish thing from the back of the phone, then slides out a tiny chip—which she bends until it snaps.

“Roll down your window.”

I do.

It’s hard work. The little roller that turns and turns and turns, until the window is down and letting in all the heat.

Serena chucks the pieces of the phone out of the window—and I sink back into the seat so the shards of it don’t strike me on the way out.

“There’s a notebook in the bag, it’s black with golden trim.” She pulls back onto the road, blending into traffic that spreads across three lanes in either direction. “There’s a page marked armour. There’s an address on that page.”

I roll up the window first.

The hot wind hits me on the face, and I feel the dehydration of the past week parching my skin. Only when the window is shut all the way do I start to dig through the bag.

The notebook is tucked away in the pages of the atlas. But there’s no local map to go with it.

And we don’t need it yet, apparently.

What we do need is petrol.

So we stop at a filling station off the road, the kind with a café attached to it and a lot more food on offer than there was at the filling stations in Zurich.

But that’s nothing either one of us is excited about. Pizza, chicken strips, burgers. Just more crap to stuff into our bodies.

I need a detox.

Mother would probably find some way to clean out my arteries if she was here, watching me stuff the tasteless, soggy pizza into my mouth.

The thought of my mother is a punch to the gut—and I lose whatever scraps of appetite I had.

The pizza goes abandoned on the table in the café, and we get back to the drive.

The road is busier now.

But my mind isn’t on the traffic or Serena’s slow and steady driving style, like she’s more nervous on the road than she lets on.

My mind is on my mother.

For the first time since we ran, and I saw Mother in passing on our way to the gondolas, the reality of leaving her actually strikes me. Like a hook catching on my heart.