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Chapter 98
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Noughts and Crosses, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism, Division, and Tragedy
Awareness and Privilege
Love, Lust, Power, and Violence
Friendship
Youth, Innocence, and Growing Up
Family
Summary
Analysis
Once Sephy is alone again, she starts to explore her room. The room is made of bricks and plaster. Since she’s not tied and gagged, Sephy figures she’s in the middle of nowhere. Sephy knows she’s seen the man with Callum before, but she can’t place him. She drags the bed away from the wall and finds a note scratched in the plaster: “To my fellow Crosses, keep the faith.” Aside from a bucket, there’s nothing else in the room. Sephy sits back down and wonders if Mr. Hadley knows she’s been kidnapped yet. She hasn’t seen him in six months. Who knows what the LM even wants. This is such a bad joke: Sephy didn’t want to go home, but now she’d give anything to see her family again. She knows she never will.
Sephy isn’t ready to give up on the possibility that she could escape, but it’s looking less likely that an escape attempt would be successful. Particularly when Sephy finds the note from a Cross prisoner scratched in the plaster, Sephy has no choice but to confront the reality that the LM has killed other Crosses in this place. And now, Sephy realizes her fractured family situation has harmed her, and she was perhaps misguided to want to get far away from them. Now, they can’t help her because she didn’t trust them with the truth about where she was going.
Themes
