Free The Petitioners by Sheila Perry

despair.
    ‘They’ve been taken,’ he said once we were outside the kitchen. Some members of Tanya’s team were still clearing up in there, so there was enough light to see his grim expression properly. In a way I wished there wasn’t.
    ‘Taken? Who on earth by? You seemed to think it would be perfectly safe going up there on a day like this. How do you know they haven’t fallen over some cliff that you had forgotten was there?’
    ‘Get a grip, Gav,’ he advised. ‘Losing it with me will not help.’
    I realised I had been almost shouting in his face. I drew back a bit. Tanya came up to us.
    ‘How do you know?’ she said to him.
    ‘Signs of a scuffle,’ he said. He put his hand in a pocket and brought out a knitted Fair Isle hat. ‘It’s Fiona’s.’ His voice broke. I felt sorry I had shouted; in that moment of knowing Dan was lost, I had forgotten Declan too had lost somebody.
    ‘They must have come over the hills,’ said Tanya. ‘I’ll post extra guards tonight.’
    ‘Extra guards?’ I hadn’t known there were any guards in the first place. ‘Did you know this kind of thing was going to happen?’
    ‘I knew there were bands of looters about,’ she said gravely. ‘I didn’t know they were going to snatch two of our number.’
    ‘But why?’ I said helplessly. ‘What do they want with Fiona and Dan? He’s only a boy.’
    ‘Recruitment,’ suggested Declan, his face still set in grim lines. ‘Maybe they didn’t have enough of a group to be viable. Maybe they lost people.’
    Tanya nodded. ‘That would make sense.’
    ‘What can we do?’ I said.
    I half-expected her to round up a team and go after them there and then.
    ‘We can’t do anything tonight,’ said Tanya. ‘In the morning – we’ll see.’
    ‘In the morning?’ I cried. ‘They could be miles away by then – taking my son with them. I’d only just got him back from… well, never mind all that. Don’t your lot have night vision stuff or something with them? I’ll go too if that makes any difference. If you help me with this I’ll devote the rest of my life to helping with whatever you want me to do.’
    ‘Gavin,’ said Declan. He sounded almost as if he were warning me off. It wasn’t as though I was selling my soul to the devil, though. Even although a shiver ran up my spine when I re-played my own words back to myself.
    ‘Don’t make promises you can’t afford to keep,’ snapped Tanya. ‘I’ll get a team together to set out at first light. If you’re out of bed in time you can tag along.’
    ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Declan. ‘It’ll be quicker if I show you what we found tonight.’
     
    The night went very slowly. Even when I was on the verge of dropping off to sleep, which happened once or twice, I would give a start and become fully awake again. I suppose I was listening for Dan to come in. In some ways I wished Emma were here to help, and in other ways I was glad she was hundreds of miles away, cocooned in her hospital bed, safe in her ignorance of all this.
    I wasn’t sure whether Tanya had meant ‘first light’ absolutely literally, but just in case, I got out of bed as soon as the patch of sky I could see through the gap in our roof, such as it was, started to go through that almost imperceptible change from black to dark grey. I found them all having breakfast, so I was just in time.
    We went up the hill in silence, passing the first reservoir quite quickly and then heading towards the place where the search party had looked the night before.
    ‘Is this really the sign of a struggle, or is it where the searchers milled around?’ I enquired as we all stared in the half-light at the patch of disturbed undergrowth between two small rocky outcrops.
    Declan gave me a look. ‘It was like this when we came along. Then there was Fiona’s hat.’
    ‘The hat. Of course.’ Privately I thought the scuffs and marks on the ground could just as easily have been caused by animals fighting to the