Free Boy in the Tower by Polly Ho-Yen Page A

threatening-sounding word if you said it over and over to yourself?
    I just had to have these conversations in my head and imagine what Gaia might say. It wasn’t the same as actually speaking to her, but it helped a little. Sometimes I would even replay old conversations we’d had in my head.
    ‘You know what I heard on the radio this morning?’ Gaia had said to me one day when we were sitting in the playground. ‘These scientists were doing a test with plants to see if they treated their sibling plants differently to stranger plants.’
    ‘Oh,’ I said.
    ‘Guess what they found.’
    ‘That they don’t treat them any differently. They’re plants.’
    ‘No! They found that they did! They were less aggressive towards their sibling plants. They don’t take up as much root space, so their sibling’s got room to grow too. Isn’t that amazing?’
    ‘But how do they know which plant is their sibling?’
    ‘The scientists don’t know how they do it. They don’t know how they recognize them.’
    ‘That’s weird.’
    ‘It’s incredible. We really only know such a tiny amount about how plants behave.’
    ‘Yeah, I guess so.’
    Gaia used to present me with these little nuggets of information that she picked up all the time. It was always something interesting that I hadn’t considered or realized or heard about, and quite often it was to do with plants because she loved them so much. I missed hearing her telling me something amazing she had just discovered about the world. Gaia had made me realize what a wonderful and strange place we lived in.
    I kept filling in the map that she had given me. It was my way of feeling close to her, I suppose. Each day I drew in more and more numbered red dots. I was running out of space now. There were so many red dots close to each other, it was beginning to look entirely red.
    I found myself missing Gaia a little bit more on the days when something new happened. I wanted to be able to talk it through with her. Otherwise it didn’t feel like it was real, like it was actually happening.
    One of those days was when the news kept showing the same thing on every channel. A woman with curly blonde hair was talking. Her face filled most of the screen, so I could see that she had little lines round her mouth where her face would crease when she smiled. But she wasn’t smiling then. She had made a discovery about what was killing those people. She’d found something in their throats. It was so, so small that we would not be able to see it if we only used our eyes. She had discovered them using a special microscope.
    She called them spores.
    I didn’t know what spores were or where they came from but I was glad that I saw that lady on the news. She said it was best to stay indoors if you could and avoid going outside. I hoped Gaia knew about the spores so that, if she was still in her tower, she would know how dangerous it was to go out. Mum and I were going to be out of food again soon, so I had been planning to go to the shops, but I wasn’t going to leave the tower now.
    In the end, I decided to knock on a neighbour’s door to see if they had any food. I hadn’t left our flat in a good few days now and as I opened the front door, I started to feel nervous about stepping out of it.
    This is what Mum must feel like
, I thought.
    The corridor was completely empty. I couldn’t hear a sound apart from the tread of my own footsteps. I crept out of my flat, looking all around me as if something was going to jump out at me.
    The first door I came to was Michael’s mum’s flat, although I knew that they had gone, so there was no point in knocking. As I walked past it, though, I could see the door had been left ajar by just a few inches.
    I gingerly pushed the door open and it swung wide, revealing the deserted flat.
    ‘Hello?’ I said, although I knew there wasn’t anyone there.
    Inside, the flat looked like it had been turned upside down and shaken really hard. Clothes were