Summary
THE HOSTAGE...
Years pass. Sephy comes to love Chivers—she joins a Cross dissident group that works toward racial equality; she stops drinking; she participates in many activities and decides to become a lawyer. Callum, now 19, has worked his way up to sergeant in the L.M., taking revenge along the way (for example, he “deals with” the girls who beat Sephy up back at Heathcroft). He’s now part of a highly ranked four-person cell called Stiletto. His teammates include Pete, Morgan, and Leila, a woman he recruited and who offers to sleep with him, but he never takes her up on it. He hasn’t seen Meggie or Jude in years, but he sends his mom money when he can.
Stiletto gets a new leader—Jude—and a new objective. Sephy is returning home for the first time in over two years; Jasmine and Minerva are gone, so Sarah Pike greets her and gives her a letter from Callum, asking Sephy to meet. She’s conflicted but goes to the beach that night, where she’s kidnapped by Stiletto. Jude punches her in the stomach. Callum and Jude fight, and Callum demands that Jude never doubt his loyalty again. However, Jude makes Callum send the proof of Sephy’s kidnapping to Kamal, including some of her hair and blood. Sephy resists, but eventually she reads the message they’ve written to Kamal: They’re going to kill Sephy if their demands aren’t met in 24 hours.
Sephy knows that she’s going to die either way—the members of Stiletto aren’t hiding their faces—and she asks Callum to kill her personally when it’s time. He puts her finger in his mouth after drawing her blood as proof of kidnapping, and in that moment of intimacy, he realizes that all of his hatred and anger was manufactured to help him survive.
Because of their success, Stiletto is visited by Andrew Dorn, the General’s second in command, who’s going to oversee the ransom demands. Sephy recognizes Andrew from somewhere. Kamal Hadley temporarily resigns from office, meeting Stiletto’s demands, so the L.M. increases their demands—they want certain prisoners freed, as well as money. Andrew orders Callum to stay behind while the rest of the team does the drop, with commands to shoot Sephy if anything goes wrong.
Alone with Sephy in her cell, Callum sees that Sephy is hurt from Jude punching her. He tells Sephy that he loves her—that was the secret he confessed to her almost three years ago, after climbing her balcony. They kiss and have sex; afterward, Sephy begins crying, and then Jude and Morgan come in.
The mission is a failure—Leila is arrested, and Pete is dead—and Jude is furious that (as he thinks) Callum raped Sephy. Jude puts a noose around all of their throats. The brothers get into a fistfight, during which Sephy runs into the forest. Callum catches up to her and gives her instructions on how to escape. In exchange, Sephy tells him that Andrew Dorn works for her father (he's the nought her father was talking to before the first day of school) and isn’t loyal to the L.M. Sephy runs away.
Analysis
Over the time skip, both Callum and Sephy have changed. Sephy has gotten smarter and wiser about the world, though she still moves exclusively in Cross society. Callum has made himself grow hard, using hatred to justify everything—even the people he's killed—and he can almost force himself to see Sephy as just another Cross. But when he touches Sephy again, he realizes that his hatred was all fake, just a tool to help him survive from moment to moment. Though he struggled with anger as a young man, that doesn't mean that he's an angry or hateful person. With structural and interpersonal support, Callum might never have had to manufacture his hard outer shell.
Callum and Sephy make love in this section, and their sexual encounter is consensual, even though Sephy is currently Callum's captive (and even though no one else in the novel believes it wasn't rape). The most intense scenes of anger between Callum and Sephy (this one, as well as their fight on the beach, and after he climbs her balcony) are the ones that progress to physical intimacy for the couple. What this means is open to interpretation, but as Sephy observes, she and Callum are two sides of the same coin—their overwhelming love for each other and their overwhelming rage at the world for keeping them apart are equally important parts of their relationship. Sephy cries after they have sex, and her reasoning won't be explained until a later section, though it will haunt Callum after her escape from Stiletto.
There are a few interesting things about the L.M. that are worth consideration. Callum's cell is named "Stiletto," which is ironic, as a stiletto is itself a kind of dagger. No other cell is named in the novel, and though Callum knows their cell is respected, he doesn't know many other members of the L.M. Though the secretive hierarchy of the L.M. keeps the organization safe from the Cross government, it also means that people like Andrew Dorn can easily rise through the ranks as double agents. It will be very difficult for Callum and Jude to out Andrew Dorn as a traitor to the L.M., since they don't have direct access to the General. Though there isn't a perfect real-world parallel to the L.M. the way Alex Luther has a somewhat direct parallel in Martin Luther King Jr., many real-world terrorist organizations operate with the same opaque structure.
