Secret of the Lost Scrolls – A Novel for children aged twelve years.

LONDON. 2030.
Rowena hated Autumn. It always seemed like the end of things. The end of holidays, the end of long light evenings. Even the chill breeze that made her pull up her collar as she crossed Wandsworth Common had an air of finality about it. A pale cheerless late afternoon sun picked out the decaying yellow and blackened leaves that crunched under her heavy regulation boots.
Ahead she saw the perimeter fence of the Detention Centre raked by the last rays of light. Fear clutched her throat. How Mum must have flinched at the finality of the clanging of those metal gates. How that image had haunted her, night after night in her dreams. And, always stalking her in the same nightmare was the figure of a faceless woman dressed in green.
She stopped, suddenly startled, aware that someone, or something was watching her. She turned and caught a gleam of emerald earrings, a glimmer of rich green silk, smelt an exotic perfume, a hood hid the face of the cloaked figure before her. She shook her head in disbelief, she was dreaming again. And yet she was close enough to dare to put out her hand, to touch... but at that moment she heard a screeching police siren. An armoured police van pulled up along side her and the apparition disappeared.
Two officers wearing neon orange uniforms threw open the barred doors, and jumped out. One of them held a laser gun which was directed straight at her.
‘How did you get through the security barrier without using your pass?’ he barked.
Rowena frowned and shook her head.
‘There was no barrier,’ she protested although she remembered having passed a kind of turret or tower. Her heart and mind had been focussed on the Detention Centre at the far end of the road.
The woman officer pushed her scanner towards her.
‘ID,’ she ordered.
Rowena produced her ID disc and watched as her picture appeared on the tiny scanner screen. It still caused her immense astonishment to see her once fair curly hair now a sleek auburn, her once fair eyebrows and lashes now a dark brown. Her name, her new name, flashed below her image, Rhea Watson.
‘Search her,’ said the male officer.
Rowena looked on in puzzlement as she was frisked.
‘Nothing detectable.’ The woman officer bit her lip. ‘You can’t have passed through without...’ she shook her head. ‘Everyone is automatically recorded, every detail checked at the barrier. Are you using...’ any one could see how the outlawed word trembled on her lips ‘some sort of magic?
‘That’s crazy!’
The woman turned to the other officer as if she’d not heard her and said harshly, ‘We’ll have to take her in.’
‘But... I’m going to visit my... a relative. You can’t take me in now.’
‘Name of prisoner?’
‘Ella Dayton.’
‘Scan for Ella Dayton.’ There was a pause while the officers searched the scanner.
‘She’s not here any more. She’s been transferred.’
The words dropped like stones.
Rowena felt a wave of dizziness. She staggered forward and surprisingly the male officer put out a hand to steady her.
‘Transferred?’ her voice barely a whisper. ‘She can’t have been.’ She knew that the word was a cover up for ‘eliminated.’
‘Transferred can mean many things,’ he said almost sympathetically. ‘Don’t fear the worst. Some detainees are simply transferred, just that, another centre, another part of the country.’
‘But we weren’t warned... I have to see her.’ Rowena could see him looking at her strangely. She must keep calm, breathe deeply, she mustn’t give anything away.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘There’s no further information. Try the Adjustment Bureau.’
She gulped back her tears. There was nothing else she could do. She looked at him, appealing.
He glanced at his companion officer. ‘I guess she can go?’
‘Yep, no real breach of security and her ID checks out okay,’ she replied. ‘There must have been some blip in the barrier’s mechanism.’ She looked at Rowena with a cold hard stare. ‘Okay. Off you go then.’
Rowena turned away, unable now to stop the tears streaming down. Transferred, or lost without trace. Oh, Mum, where are you?
She retraced her steps back across the Common to the Transporter Station, kicking viciously at the piles of dead leaves. A crowd of late shoppers were jostling each other trying to push their way into the first glass-sided capsule to arrive as soon as it slid to a halt. Rowena realised she would have to wait until the next one came. She bent her head and wiped the tears from her face. As she looked up at the already ascending capsule a reflection caught her eye. She turned quickly to see a woman dressed in green, her face little more than a shadow, just disappearing into a waiting vehicle. She rushed towards it as it shot off into a vertical rise skimming over the top of cars wedged in a traffic jam. Lingering on the air was an exotic smell of perfume.
Now she was sure she wasn’t imagining it. The reappearance of the strange woman gripped her with a cold foreboding. Haltingly she went back to wait her turn in the queue. How was she going to break the news to Dad and her young sister Mel? She went over every detail of what she’d been told. There had to be a mistake. It was only one police officer’s word. He said they would have to check with the Adjustment Bureau. She remembered the pity on the man’s face. He must have known it was a pointless suggestion. As if they would tell them anything.