Dr. Franklin's Island by Ann Halam

noise—”
    He stood up again, with the key. The penlight beam reflected in his glasses, giving him two mad white pennies for eyes.
    “But there’ll be others,” said Miranda quickly. “He’ll get hold of some other teenagers, and they’ll howl too. You said it’s bound to happen. Come with us. You’ve been brave so far, you planned everything really well. Now be braver still. Leave him.”
    “I can’t leave. You don’t know him. He’ll know I let you go, but he’ll forgive me. He needs me. It’s not easy to find a scientist of my caliber who is . . . who is . . .”
    “So hard up for a job that he would torture children,” Miranda finished for him.
    Dr. Skinner flinched, but he was beyond being insulted. “This is my great work,” he whimpered, swaying on his feet. “You don’t understand. This is
the work
. It must go on! Except that you’ll howl, you see. I can’t stand the idea of lying awake at night, listening—” At last he’d managed to unlock the padlock. He held the gate open. “Go on, go. Go!”
    We couldn’t risk arguing with him any longer. Miranda had grabbed my hand, we were in the act of darting through the gate, leaving Dr. Franklin’s hateful compound—
    When the floodlights came on.
    It wasn’t actual floodlights, it was the headlamps of two big Jeeps, parked about a hundred meters away from us. They’d been invisible in the darkness. Dr. Franklin was standing beside the nearer of the two, with a party of the uniformed orderlies. Some of them were holding big flashlights. Some of them had guns in their hands. Dr. Franklin shone his light over our faces, and then fixed the beam on Dr. Skinner.
    “Well, Charles,” he said, in that calm, smooth, cheerful voice, “I had a feeling you were going to try something like this. Inevitable, I suppose. Luckily forewarned is forearmed. . . .”
    The light had paralyzed us, but the sound of that voice spurred us into desperate action. We ran together through the open gate, into the mouth of a narrow footpath between high banks. Fronds of greenery leaped out of the dark and smacked our faces; the men came pounding after us. We pelted down the hillside, barefoot on sharp stones, looking wildly for some way to leave the path . . . straight into the arms of more of Dr. Franklin’s men.
    He was like that, Dr. Franklin. He liked playing games. Maybe he’d wanted to catch Dr. Skinner in the act of helping us, to give him a scare. Maybe he’d forced Skinner to pretend to be helping us, so he could test our “resilience”; or soften us up so we’d give them no trouble in the morning. It didn’t matter much, either way. We’d never had a chance. He’d known exactly what Dr. Skinner would do. He’d known exactly what was going on. We were brought back. Miranda kept pleading with the big men, begging them in English and French to have pity, to think of their own children, to let us go.
    It had no effect at all.
    Back into the brilliant mesh of white beams, the Jeep headlamps and the flashlights. One of the orderlies locked the gate behind us. Dr. Franklin took out a mobile phone, pressed buttons on the keypad, listened for a moment and said something in Spanish. Then he said to us in English, in a kindly tone, “The power is restored to the fence, young ladies. Remember this, if you try to escape again. It would be irresponsible of me not to protect my experiments, so that fence is electrified. Do not ignore this warning!”
    I felt as if I was standing on a stage, one of my worst nightmares. Two big men held my arms. The other uniformed men were staring at me without pity from behind the lights. Dr. Skinner was huddled up beside Dr. Franklin. He’d taken off his glasses and he was wiping them, carefully, over and over. Dr. Franklin was smiling. He wasn’t angry with us for trying to escape. We couldn’t make him angry. We were experimental animals.
    I thought I could hear the jungle cat howling, though we were far away from the zoo. I