Wanted (Flick Carter Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

passage, taking care not to hit her head on the low roof. After a few metres, the cave curved around to the right and the last trace of daylight was gone. The roof was getting lower and she had to drop to her hands and knees, pushing the torch along the chalk rubble on the floor.
    She held her breath. Was there something moving at the back of the cave? No, it was just a shadow from a protruding rock, caught in the flickering torchlight. She waved the torch around just to be sure.
    ‘Jumpy,’ she muttered to herself.
    Then she saw it, a seam of flint, a good ten centimetres thick about halfway up the cave wall.
    Pay-dirt .
    She wriggled herself into a sitting position, and pulled the bone-handled stone axe from her belt. She was proud of this axe, it was the first tool she’d made by herself, even if it wasn’t her best work. Once she was comfortable she started chipping away at the chalk.
    She worked quickly, putting the rubble into a leather covered basket that she would drag to a small spoil heap whenever it was full. Soon she had a nice pile of flints, and was about to call it quits when something caught her eye. This was a big one.
    She picked up the torch to have a good look. It seemed to be well embedded. She tugged on it.
    Nothing happened.
    That was too simple. She started chipping away at the surrounding chalk, stopping every minute or so to try and wiggle it loose.
    Finally it moved. Just a few millimetres at first, and not in the right direction, but she pulled at it and wiggled it, and gradually it moved a bit more.
    ‘Come on, out you come…’ she muttered, giving it a really hard tug.
    And out it came. Flick fell backwards as the giant flint broke free and fell to the earth with a thud, bringing the cave wall with it.

    It was dark. Flick lay on her back, feeling the weight of rubble on top of her. Panic gripped her chest with icy claws, radiating out to a cold dampness on her skin. Blood pounded though her ears with a rapid thump thump, thump thump.
    Oh Crap!
    The torch must have gone out when she’d dropped it. Cold sweat tickled on her cheeks as it mingled with gritty chalk dust. She spat the chalk away from her mouth, coughing as she pulled in a lungful of the dusty air. A cascade of small stones rattled away, dislodged by her spasming chest muscles.
    Calm down; you’re still in one piece.
    She tried to move an arm and found, miraculously, that it came free from the stones quite easily. She felt about and started pushing aside the powdery rubble. It was only a thin layer of small stones; any big rocks must have dropped straight down as she fell back. She pushed them aside and worked herself up into a sitting position, shaking the last few pebbles from her hair, and wiping the grit away from her nose and mouth.
    ‘Felicity Anne Carter, if you want to see your seventeenth birthday, you should be more careful!’ She imagined her mother scolding her.
    ‘Love you, mum,’ she whispered back to the darkness.
    Flick felt her way back through the passage to the shaft, where a dim grey light filtered down. The flints she had already gathered were in a neat pile near the foot of the ladder, and she transferred them to the basket ready to be pulled up and loaded into the panniers on her bicycle.
    I’m not doing that again in a hurry!
    She brushed the worst of the chalk dust from her leathers and hair. Once she’d let her heart rate get down to something approaching normal, she climbed onto her bike and pedalled off, wobbling slightly. After some minutes she came to the lumps and bumps that made up the earthworks of an ancient fortification and stopped for breath. This was the highest point for miles around and the view was breathtaking. Complex shadows played over the short grass, which rippled in the breeze, but today she couldn’t appreciate beauty of it. She shivered, banging her arms together against the cold, slapping the leather of her jacket, and sending more chalk dust into the air. The sun had