The Key by Sara B. Elfgren & Mats Strandberg Page A

friend. Who told Nicolaus that he could save Matilda, only to let her be burnt alive.
    ‘He’ll deceive you, Nicolaus!’ she says. ‘You must act now! Save her!’
    But she realises that, if Nicolaus
does
act now, all of history will change.
    Suddenly, she feels completely terrified. True, she doesn’t seem able to get through to others, but what if she has and just doesn’t know it?
    Like in the story she read in school once about a man who time-travelled back to the dinosaur era and just happened to stand on an insect. When he returns, he finds the whole world has changed.
    It is a relief to be enclosed in the fog again.
    Once more, she starts running in the Borderland, as quickly as she can. She sees another light, flaring and intensely yellow, smells the smoke from over there, hears the roaring of the fire. She knows that Matilda is dying in that fire, together with her mother who has thrown herself on the pyre.
    Ida doesn’t run towards that light. Then it fades and everything is grey again.
    I’m tired of this shit, she whispers to herself.
    But she keeps running. What else can she do?

II

12
    In the school library, the windows are open. Outside in the yard, the voices are loud, fired up with the two-weeks-to-end-of-term feeling. The library is quiet and filled with artwork. All the students taking Fine Arts are exhibiting their favourite work from the past year. The only people up to have a look are the artists themselves.
    A faint draught from the windows makes a collage rustle. Linnéa stops in front of one of the framed drawings hanging nearby. The art teacher, Petter Backman, picked it because it is one of the few pieces of Olivia’s work that remained after she left school just after the Christmas holidays. This is one of her many self-portraits: a girl with blue hair and black tears running down her cheeks.
    Linnéa remembers the last time she saw Olivia. Her thin hair. The dark gaps where she had once had teeth.
    You’ve ruined everything! Elias will never come back now! He’ll never come back!
    The last words Olivia said to her.
    And Linnéa remembers her own final words to Olivia, whispered as she bent down to take the amulet from her.
    She wonders if Olivia heard her. And if Olivia is still alive. If she is, does she still believe that she is the Chosen One? Does she truly think that Linnéa sabotaged Elias’s resurrection?
    ‘It feels so strange that she’s gone.’
    Linnéa turns and meets Tindra’s eyes. Her black and purple dreadlocks dangle well down her back and she has shaved off her eyebrows.
    There was a time when they both used to hang out in Jonte’s house. Tindra was one of the ones who stopped calling after Linnéa gave up partying. They ended up in different worlds, despite being in the same class and still sometimes sitting at the same table in the dining area.
    ‘I hope Olivia got way out of town and has been having loads of adventures,’ Tindra smiles. ‘Like she always kept saying she would.’
    Her smile can’t hide the fact that she clearly thinks it’s very unlikely. In her view, Olivia wouldn’t be capable of ‘adventures’.
    Tindra has no idea what Olivia was capable of doing.
    He told me to take revenge for his death! Every time I kill someone who has hurt him, my powers grow stronger!
    Linnéa thinks back on the people Olivia murdered. Regina, the psychologist – the one Elias was so fond of; Leila, a primary school teacher with two young children of her own. And a harmless old man called Svensson, who was the retired head of the senior school. And Jonte. Jonte, who had himself messed up other people’s lives, but in no way deserved to die like that.
    ‘Do you know that people are laying bets on what happened to her? Like, did she get out because she wanted to? Or was something done to her?’ Tindra clicks the pin in her pierced tongue against her teeth.
    Linnéa can visualise the moment Alexander walked away, carrying Olivia’s frail, emaciated body.