Free Saving Sophia by Fleur Hitchcock

ask.
    Sophia doesn’t answer for ages. “I’m not sure,” she says in the end.
    We struggle down the cliff on to another beach and start walking east along the edge of the surf so that our footsteps vanish. In
Canada by Gaslight
the heroine walks the whole of the west coast to keep from being tracked.
    Or was it the east coast?
    “Are you sure he killed someone?” asks Ned, emptying water from his shoe.
    “Yes – well, I think so,” says Sophia. “He went to prison for it.”
    “Flip,” says Ned again.
    In the distance, the turrets of a castle appear against the horizon.
    “It looks like a princess castle,” says Sophia. “My mother’s a princess.”
    “Is she?” I ask. “Really?”
    “Yes, really. Princess of some Italian place, I can’t remember where. It’s exactly the sort of place you might find a princess.” She points at the turrets.
    “Or a prince – a handsome prince,” I say.
    “Oh yeah,” says Ned. “There’s a handsome prince sitting in his tower window waiting for you, blowing kisses across the sand. ‘Ah, come here Charlotte, my lovely – I have been imprisoned here for years, release me…’”
    Sophia laughs.
    I could happily push them both into the sea, run back, tell Miss Wesson where Sophia is, go home to my skanky bedroom, stick my inner hero into a box under the bed and listen to Lurve FM until my ears fall off.
    And I’m hungry – so hungry, my stomach’s eaten itself. I wonder if sand’s edible?
    But then I think about Pinhead, the murderer, keeping Sophia and her mother apart, and carry on putting one foot in front of the other.
    “If you’re really lucky he’ll see you wearing those fantastic trousers!” laughs Ned, and clutches his sides theatrically.
    Sophia stops laughing and stares at the ground, but I know she thinks I look ridiculous. I do, I simply do and she looks fantastic in that skirt-shorts thingy.
    I trek on across the sand and do my best to ignore Ned, but he’s slipped back into pondlife in my cast of characters. Something single cell and slimy with no eyes.
    I hate him.
    I’m not sure what I think about Sophia.
    It takes an age to reach the rocks at the foot of the castle walls. They shoot up vertically from the ground and there’s no way we can do anything but walk around them until the beach seems to dwindle, forcing the castle garden wall to run straight into the sea. I can see why you’d buy this place: it’s inaccessible in every sense. I gaze up at the windowsand nothing more than a feather floats down to us. It looks unoccupied.
    “We’ll have to go back,” I say. “Find a way up the cliff.”
    “No, wait,” says Sophia, pointing to a rough wooden door set into the wall. She tries the handle and it opens. She pushes in and Ned follows, which leaves me standing outside feeling stupid and nervous. Eventually, I peer around the door. It’s a walled garden, filled mostly with flowers, but at the end tall pyramids of runner beans flag up the possibility of food.
    I stand inside the door, listening. Apart from bird song, I can’t hear a thing, not even the sea, not even Ned and Sophia’s footsteps. Ned points at the runner beans and we creep deeper into the garden until we reach the vegetables.
    Riches. Fat yellow carrots bulge out of the soil, long tresses of beans hang from the pyramids and wild strawberries dance along the paths. I cram unripe strawberries in my mouth before pulling a few carrots from a line; Ned picks beans and Sophia raises her eyebrows at us until I point to a lettuce that she wrenches from the ground.
    I pull another – a snail sticks to my hand.“Yuk!” I yell.
    STUPID, STUPID, STUPID.
    I hold my breath for about a minute.
    “Flip,” whispers Ned.
    I swallow, ready to run, but no one comes so I pull up six beetroot and pick hard little apples from the tree growing against the wall. I turn to Ned. His backpack’s overflowing, as are my stupid pockets.
    “Time to go,” I whisper, just a little too