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

strewn across the floor, books had been flung off the shelves. Cupboard doors were left gaping open, waiting to be closed. A lamp in the sitting room stood illuminating the chaos. I walked towards it and switched it off.
    I went into the kitchen and plucked a couple of cans of beans and a bag of rice from the first cupboard I came to. I told myself that I’d make a list of everything I took, so that if things ever got back to normal, we could replace it all when Michael and his family came home.
    I hurried back to my flat then, putting the cans and the rice into a sling I made with the front of my T-shirt.
    I left the door ajar, just as I’d found it. Perhaps they had left in a real rush and forgot to pull the door closed to lock it. I’d never seen it left open before.
    Or
, a voice in my head said,
perhaps Michael’s mum left their flat open on purpose, so I could take their food if I needed it
.
    I’d never know, but I had a feeling in my belly that she did leave it open for me.

Chapter Twenty-five
    I watched so much television during this time that after a while I realized I wasn’t really watching it any more. It was just noise that was making my head sore. Gaia used to say that too much television was bad for you, so now and again I switched it off and tried to do something else.
    Sometimes I would play this little game that I made up, called Five in the House. I had to clear a space on our table to play it.
    I had collected lots and lots of little yogurt pots which I kept in a box under my bed. They all looked exactly the same because I had taken the labels off and I’d washed them so they didn’t smell or anything.
    I’d put out loads and loads of yogurt pots upside down on the table, until it was completely covered with them.
    It looked like a little city.
    Then I would screw up five bits of paper, so I’d have five little paper balls, and I’d hide them under the yogurt pots. Sometimes I would put just one ball under five pots. Other times I might put three under one pot and two under another. I could do it any way I liked.
    When I’d done that, I would move the yogurt pots round and round, so they were all mixed up. There was no way I could tell where I’d put the paper balls because I’d mix them up for a really long time.
    The object of the game was to lift up the right pots to find all five balls, to find five in a house. I would let myself have ten chances to find them.
    It was quite hard and I’d only managed to do it a handful of times, but I liked it because it took quite a long time to play it. It always took me a while to choose which ten yogurt pots I would lift up.
    The other thing I spent my time doing was filling in my scrapbook.
    Before, when I’d been able to go outside, I had cut out pictures from old newspapers I’d found on the street to stick into my scrapbook. But now I had to copy out pictures and words that I’d heard from the television instead. The pages were filling up.
    I sometimes look back to the page where I first wrote down their name.
    They are called BLUCHERS.
    It took us a long time to find them.
    I’d filled loads of pages with all the terrible things that had been happening before we found out about the Bluchers.
    It was just after they found out about the spores, when they first saw them. I was playing Five in the House, so I’d switched the television off for a bit. When I turned it back on, the first thing I saw was a Blucher, filling the screen.
    Of course, I had no idea what it was at that moment, so my first thought was that it looked quite beautiful. It was shiny and had a bit on the top that was shaped like a sunflower seed, with the tip pointing upwards. Except that it was more like a ball; it wasn’t flat. It was about as big as one of my fists, I suppose, with a little stalk holding the top part up.
    What made me think it was beautiful was its colour. It was almost blue and almost silver. Not like any colour that I could make up with paint or