Deeper

45

"Remarkable!" Dr. Burrows cried, his voice echoing over and over, then fading until all that could be heard was the splatter of water. It fell in occasional showers as he stood before two large stone columns at what appeared to be the conclusion of the path.

He turned this way and that as he tried to take in everything at once.

For starters, the keystone at the apex of the arch had a three-pronged symbol cut into it. He'd seen it several times before on sections so masonry throughout his travels in the Deeps, and it also cropped up on the stone tablets he'd recorded in his notebook. The symbol didn't correspond to any of the glyphics on the Dr. Burrows Stone, so the question of what it meant vexed him considerably.

But this paled into insignificance as he took a few paces under the structure and the path broadened out into an area laid with large flagstones.

With mounting disbelief, he laughed, then stopped, then laughed again as his eyes fell upon the jet-black void before him. It was the most colossal hole in the ground. And he was standing on some sort of pier that overhung it.

A wind gusted from above as he took small steps over the worn flagstones to the very brink of the precipice.

The sheer scale of the opening caused his heart to pound with excitement. He certainly couldn't see any evidence of the other side — it was completely shrouded in darkness. He wished he had a more powerful light source so he could make an informed estimate of its size, but from his reckoning a pretty substantial mountain could have been dropped into it, with room to spare.

Slowly raising his head, he could also see that there was a correspondingly large opening in the roof — whatever this feature was, it seemed to continue above and was the source of the wind and the sporadic torrents of water. His lips moved, but made no sound, as he began to speculate on where this incredible natural feature might end — maybe it had once been open at the earth's surface and at some point become capped off by a shift in the tectonic plates or perhaps by volcanic activity…

But he didn't dwell on any of that now as he was once again compelled to look down into its depths. It was as if the blackness of the vacuum was mesmerizing him, drawing him closer. From the corner of his eye he spotted some steps leading off the edge of the platform.

"Is this it?" he asked himself with bated breath. "Is this my ticket even deeper?"

He started down the cracked stone stairs.

"Blast!" he said, his shoulders hunching as he found that the stairway hardly went any distance. He kneeled, peering in the gloom to see if a section had collapsed.

"No joy," he sighed despondently.

There was nothing he could see to suggest that the stairs did indeed extend farther down — there was just the small vestigial flight, consisting of seven steps, on which he was perched. Maybe, farther around the rim of the opening, there might be a similar set of steps that was intact. Another way down.

He returned to the top, still trying to make sense of everything. So this was the hole on the Coprolite map, and it had to be the same hole depicted on the central panel of the triptych in the ugly bug temple.

He could see why the ancient people had considered it so significant. They — the civilization that had built and used the temple — clearly believed it was something holy, something worthy of worship. He massaged the nape of his neck, as he began to think.

Were those ant-sized people in the main picture of the triptych throwing themselves into the hole as part of some ritual act? Were they simply sacrificing themselves? Or was there more to all this?

Those questions built in his head, swirling around his cranium as if they were caught in a tornado, every one of them demanding his attention, calling for him to solve them, when all of a sudden his whole body convulsed as if he'd been struck by lightning.

"Yes! I've got it!" he cried, just falling short of shouting out Eureka!

He tore open his rucksack and yanked out his notebook, literally dropping onto it as he dived to the ground and began to dash off what he was remembering. The remaining words from the central panel in the temple had at last surfaced in his memory — he could visualize very nearly all of the detail, not quite photo-perfectly, but enough so that he could use his Dr. Burrows Stone to attempt a translation once he'd gotten the letters down.

After ten minutes of furious scribbling, a big smile formed on his face.

"Garden of the… Second Sun! " he cried. Then the smile evaporated and his brow creased. "Garden of the Second Sun? What the heck does that mean? What garden? What Second Sun?

He rolled onto his side to regard the hole.

"Facts, facts, facts, and only the facts," he said, quoting an oft-used mantra that kept him in check whenever he felt he was about to be swept away by a wave of wild speculation. He tried to think in logical sequences, knowing he had to discipline himself to construct a foundation from all the things he'd discovered. Then, and only then, could he start to build some theories on top of it and set out to test their veracity.

One thing he could quite categorically assume was a revelation in itself. All the geologists and geophysicists back home had gotten it completely wrong. He was many miles below the earth's surface, and by their reckoning he should be cooked to a crisp by now. While he'd run into areas of intense heat, where there was very possibly the presence of molten rock, it certainly didn't correspond to the generally held belief about the composition of the planet and the increasing temperature gradient.

That was all very well and good, but it didn't help him get closer to any of the answers he was seeking.

He began to whistle through his teeth, thinking, thinking…

Who were the people of the temple?

It was clear that they were a race who, many millennia ago, had taken refuge under the surface of the planet.

But, as depicted in the "Garden of Eden" triptych, they'd made a pilgrimage back to the surface of the earth; what had become of them there?

With an expression of utter bafflement, he let out a final high-pitched squeak of a whistle and rose to his feet. He went back through the arch, then picked his way down the steps again.

Maybe he had been mistaken. Maybe the steps did continue somewhere down below, but he hadn't seen them. He took the blue-handled geological hammer from his belt and, squatting on the bottom step, lodged its tip into a fissure in the wall. He thumped it with the palm of his hand to make absolutely sure it was firmly anchored. It seemed secure enough. Then he gripped it with one hand and, with the light orb suspended by its lanyard in the other, he leaned out as far as he dared, attempting to see more of what lay below.

As he peered into the pitch-blackness, the light orb swinging and his brain still whirring away on the triptych, an idea popped into his head.

By jumping into this hole, did the people of the temple truly believe they'd reach some promised land? Was this they way to their Garden of Eden, or their nirvana, or whatever you chose to call it?

Suddenly, like a second bolt from the blue, he was hit with a bombshell of a concept.

Maybe he'd been looking in the wrong direction all this time. He'd been so intent on looking up, he'd never considered looking down!

Maybe there was a very good reason why the ancient people had had nothing to do with the cultures on the surface for so many millennia. Even if they had originally fled from the surface, bringing their ability to write and their enlightened ways with them, maybe they'd never returned there. This could be why he could recall nothing in the historical record of all the earth's civilizations that picked up their story.

So …

He came up from his thoughts for a quick breath before diving straight back into them again.

…did they have the secret of what lies below, in the center of the earth? Was there really a "Garden of the Second Sun" to be found there? And did they really believe that they could get there by throwing themselves into a whopping great hole? Why would they believe that? Why? Why? Why?

Perhaps they were right!

The whole notion was too fantastical for him, but, just the same, the primitive people quite evidently believed the act would take them to their idyllic paradise — believed it with a fervor.

Certainly Dr. Burrows was overtired and suffering from a lack of food, but a nonsensical suggestion popped into his head.

Should I chance it all and jump into the hole?

"You've got to be joking!" he immediately answered himself out loud.

No, it was lunacy! What was he thinking? How could he, a man of considerable learning, subscribe to a pagan belief that by some miracle he'd survive the fall and find wondrous groves of fruit trees and a blazing sun waiting for him?

A sun in the center of the earth?

No, he was being exceedingly foolish. Talk about rational scientific deduction!

Roundly dismissing the suggestion, he pulled himself back onto the step, and then turned around.

He screamed with fright.

The giant insect was there right behind him — his oversized dust mite — its mandibles swishing in his face.

Dr. Burrows recoiled, scrabbling away from it in complete and utter panic. He lost his balance, his arms cartwheeling as he tipped backward from the step.

There was no heroic yell as he fell, just a brief squawk of unwelcome surprise, and he was gone, a tiny figure corkscrewing through the air, down into the dark oblivion of the Pore.

46

From up ahead Chester pulled the rope with such force that it caught against Will's wrist and yanked his arm from under him. He dropped into the hot, sticky mud. He heard Chester's voice, muffled and indistinct, as it uttered what Will took to be curses, most likely directed toward him. Chester yanked the rope again, even more fiercely this time. In light of their earlier exchange, Will knew without a doubt that Chester would be blaming him for this unpleasant leg of their journey, just as he did for anything else that came along. Will's resentment grew — wasn't he suffering just as much as the others?

"I'm coming! I'm freakin' coming!" he shouted back furiously as he began to haul himself along again, spitting and swearing as he went.

He thought he was closing the gap on Chester, but he still couldn't see him through the mist. It was only when Will pulled on the rope that he discovered it must have snagged on something. It was stuck fast.

Chester was shouting again at the delay. Whatever he was saying sounded pretty disagreeable.

"Shut up, will you? The rope's caught!" Will screamed back as he lay on his side and used his lantern to try to see what was causing the problem. It was hopeless; he couldn't see a thing. Guessing it had become hung up around a piece of rock, he flipped the rope several times until it eventually came free. Then he crawled up the slope like crazy until he caught up with Chester, who, once again, had stopped — presumably because Cal, in front of him, had also come to a standstill.

Right from the start the seam had climbed at a constant gradient of thirty degrees. The lack of headroom meant there was no choice but to go up the incline on all fours. The underlying substrate was smooth and ran with copious amounts of water as it drained down the slope and into the sea below. As they climbed, the water was replaced by warm mud. With the consistency of crude oil, it was incredibly slippery and made the going that much more difficult.

A little farther up they came to a stretch where the rock became quite hot to the touch, and Will could see little pools of the mud bubbling. Then they passed through an area in which small jets of steam puffed around them like miniature geysers — clearly these were the source of the ever-present mist.

It wasn't dissimilar from being in a sauna turned up to its full setting — it was intolerably hot and humid. Will was breathing quickly and pulling at the collar of his shirt in a futile attempt to cool himself down. And every so often, the stench of raw sulfur permeated the air, so much so that Will felt quite dizzy and wondered how the others were dealing with it.

Elliott had allowed them to have their lanterns on full beam, saying that the light was unlikely to be detected within the confines of the seam, especially since the mist masked everything. Will was grateful for this; it would have been horribly claustrophobic without any illumination to show the way.

On a couple of occasions, Will heard his brother's voice up ahead. From his curses, he sounded distinctly unhappy. Indeed, all three boys were giving vent to their frustration, interspersing their grumbling and groaning with some pretty choice language. Chester was the most vociferous, letting rip and swearing like a sailor. Only Elliott was her usual taciturn self, remaining silent as they went.

With a yank on the rope from Chester, Will realized he'd almost fallen asleep, and he quickly started off again. In no time at all, he had to stop and, as he wiped the mud from his eyes, he observed a nearby mud pool in which bubbles formed and popped with a noise that was best described as a steady glop glop.

Yet another unnecessarily savage tug of the rope came.

"Gee, thanks, friend!" he yelled up the slope at Chester.

The frequent tugs were a constant reminder of who Will was roped to. With nothing but the grueling climb to occupy him, he began to dwell on what Chester had said.

Words are cheap, especially yours!"

"I'm sick of the sight of you!"

The sentence rang loud and clear in Will's mind.

How dare Chester say those things?

Will hadn't intended for any of this to happen. He'd never in a million years dreamed they'd end up in such danger when he and Chester had set out to discover what had become of Will's missing father. And months ago, as they had walked together along the railway track on the approach to the Miners' Station, Will had apologized to Chester from the bottom of his heart. Chester had given every indication then that he had accepted Will's apology without reservation.

"Words are cheap, especially yours!"

Chester had thrown it all back in his face, and what could Will possibly do to make amends?

Nothing.

It was an impossible situation. It started Will thinking about what would happen when he was reunited with his father. It was clear that Chester had formed a strong allegiance to Elliott — maybe partly to spite Will. But whatever his motivation, the two seemed very close, and Will was soundly excluded.

But if his father appeared on the scene, how would Elliott react to him joining up with them? And how would his dad react to her? Would they all stay together: he, his father, Chester, Cal, and Elliott? Will couldn't imagine them somehow all getting along — Dr. Burrows would be far too cerebral and absentminded for Elliott. In fact, Will couldn't think of two more different people — worlds apart.

So, if they split up, then what about Chester? The lines had been drawn and Chester definitely wasn't in Will's camp any longer. Will admitted to himself that things had gotten so bad between them that he really wouldn't mind if Chester went off with Elliott. But it wasn't as easy as that: Will and his father would need Elliott, too, especially with the Styx after him.

His thoughts ground to an abrupt halt as the rope snapped taut again, and Chester's guttural, grumpy voice urged him to hurry up.

They continued to climb, and Will noticed that the air seemed to be clearing of mist and steam. A faint breath of cold air percolated around them. This didn't help matters any; they were all plastered with thick mud, and as it began to dry it caused their stiff clothing to chafe against their skin.

The breeze grew into a strong wind and, with a final tug of the rope, Will found that they had reached the top. At last he was able to stand up and stretch the kinks from his back. He rubbed the mud from around his eyes and saw that the others were already on their feet and were doing the same as him, easing the fatigue in their cramped limbs. All of them except Cal, who had found a rock to perch on and was massaging his leg with an expression of pure agony. Will peered down at himself and then at the others. The foursome looked like mud people, so thick was the dried crust on them.

As Will stepped into the center of the space, the wind blew with such steady force that it whisked the breath from his mouth. He cleaned his lens of mud and turned on his headset to discover that they were in a large tunnel with a roof that was probably fifty feet high. At its edges multiple smaller tunnels led off — so many that their dark openings immediately made him uneasy, as he imagined Styx lurking inside.

"You don't need the rope now!" Elliott shouted to Will. He tried his best to undo it, but the knot was so stiff with mud that she had to help him. Once the rope was untied, Elliott coiled it up again, and then she beckoned them all over. Will noticed that Chester still wouldn't make eye contact with him as he joined the group.

"You go that way," she said, pointing down the large tunnel. Her voice was snatched away by the wind, making it difficult for the boys to hear her.

"Sorry?" Will asked, cupping a hand behind his ear.

"I said, you go that way!" she yelled, already backing toward a side tunnel. Apparently she wasn't going with them.

The boys looked at her questioningly, their faces anxious.

Sarah was close — so close she could almost smell them herself, despite the jets of sulfurous steam.

The Hunter was well and truly in his element — this was what he'd been bred for. The scent was so fresh here that he was in a crazed rush to get to his quarry. Strings of milky saliva hung from his muzzle, and his ears twitched as he kept his head to the ground. His body was a blur of scrabbling legs, which slewed mud in their wake as he raced up the seam. He was literally pulling Sarah behind him, and it was all she could do to keep hold of the cat. As he paused to clear his nostrils of mud with rapid piglike snorts, she called out to him.

"Bartleby, where's your master?"

Although he didn't need the slightest encouragement, she called to him once more, goading him on in a crooning voice.

"Where's Cal, then? Where's Cal?"

With a flying start, he shot off again at full tilt, taking her by surprise. She slithered along on her stomach and shouted at him to ease off for a full fifty feet before he finally slowed long enough for her to get up on all fours again

"When will I learn to keep my big mouth shut?" she mumbled, blinking through her mud mask.

After she'd seen the flying lizards on the wing, knowing full well what had disturbed them, she and Bartleby had sped along the remaining stretch of beach to the cavern wall. Then, on the rocks, he'd soon picked up the trail that led to the seam, raising his head and loosing a victorious, deep-pitched meow.

Now, as they made good headway up the seam, she spotted tracks the group had left — the odd palm print told her that there was someone else with Will and Cal, someone who was smaller. A child? She wondered.

47

The wind didn't let up as it swept down the main passage, funneled sometimes by the narrower stretches into a gale, which pushed so hard at the boys' backs that it helped them along. After the heat and steam they'd endured in the seam, it was a welcome change, although the air itself still felt warm on their faces.

The roof ran high above them, and all the surfaces they could see were smooth, as if they'd been scoured by the wind-borne grit that even now compelled the boys to keep their heads tucked down, lest any particles catch them in the eye.

After Elliott had left them to their own devices, they'd started out at a brisk pace. But as time passed and she didn't reappear, the boys began to lose their sense of purpose, ambling along lackadaisically.

Before she'd gone, she had explained that they were to stay on the main track while she scouted the route up ahead for what she called "Listening Posts." Chester and Cal seemed to accept her explanation, but Will was distrustful.

"I don't understand… Why do you need to go off on your own?" he'd asked her, studying her eyes carefully. "I thought you said the Limiters were way behind us?"

Elliott hadn't answered immediately, quickly looking away from him and cocking her head, as if she could pick out some sound over the wail of the wind. She listened for a second before turning back to him. "These soldiers know the lay of the land nearly as well as Drake and I do. As Drake did," she corrected herself with a wince. "They could be anywhere. You don't take anything for granted."

"You're saying they could be lying in wait for us?" Chester asked, glancing around the passage uneasily. "So we might wander straight into a trap?"

"Yes. So let me do what I do best," Elliott had replied.

Now that they were without her as a guide, Chester took the front position with Will and Cal following closely behind. They felt extremely vulnerable without their catlike protector to watch over them.

While the relentless gale helped keep them cool, it also dehydrated them, and there were no objections when Will proposed they stop for a break. They leaned against the passage wall, gratefully sipping water from their canteens.

Neither Will nor Chester made any effort to speak. Cal, with his bad leg, had his own problems to deal with and was similarly silent.

Will glanced at the other two boys. He knew he was not alone in wondering if Elliott had deserted them. He believed she was eminently capable of leaving them stranded here. If she was unencumbered by the three of them, she'd be able to move at much greater speed to the Wetlands or wherever she intended to go.

Will wondered how Chester would take it if she'd really left them high and dry. He trusted her without reservation, and it would come as a terrible blow. Even as Will looked at him now, he could see Chester was squinting into the gloom for any sign of her.

All at once, over the howling of the wind, there came the unholiest of noises, a low-pitched whining. It was a sound Will hoped he'd never hear again. Seized with dread, he screamed out in alarm.

"Dog! Stalker!"

Cal and Chester both regarded him with dazed bewilderment as he dropped his canteen and leaped toward them, pushing them to move.

"Run!" he yelled in a blind panic.

Several things happened within a single heartbeat.

There was a low whimper, and a dark blur flew from out of the blackness. It leaped low from the ground, soaring straight up at Cal. If the boy hadn't been so close to the passage wall, it would have bowled him over. Will caught a glimpse of the sinuous animal and was even more certain it was a Styx attack dog. He thought all was lost until he heard his brother's shouts.

"Bartleby!" Cal cried with delight. "Bart! It's you!"

Simultaneously two cracks flashed farther down the tunnel.

"There she is!" Chester exclaimed. "Elliott!"

Will and Chester watched as the girl departed the shadows and stepped into the middle of the tunnel.

"Stay back!" she shouted at them as she crept down the main trail.

Cal was in raptures, completely oblivious to anything but his beloved cat. "Who put this silly thing on you?" he asked the animal. He immediately unbuckled the leather collar and slung it away. Then he hugged the oversized feline, who repaid him by licking his face.

"I don't believe I got you back, Bartleby," Cal said over and over again.

"I don't believe it either. Where the heck did he come from?" Will said to Chester, forgetting their differences for the moment.

Despite her instructions to the contrary, they both began to walk slowly toward Elliott. Will turned on his headset and saw that she had her rifle trained low on something. But he didn't begin to grasp what had happened until Chester spoke.

"Elliott took a shot at somebody," he said flatly.

"Oh no," Will exhaled. The two light bursts must have been the muzzle flash as Elliott had fired. He halted on the spot.

Down the tunnel, Elliott had kicked the weapon away from the body and was squatting down to examine it. No need to check for a pulse — she saw the pool of blood spreading through the dust — if the Styx wasn't already dead, it was only a matter of time.

Her first shot had been aimed at the lower body, to stop the attacker in his tracks, quickly followed up by a second shot to the head, which had clipped him on the temple. Incapacitate… then kill. Her aim had been a little off, not as clean as she would have liked, but the end result was still the same. She allowed herself a satisfied grin.

The Styx had dried mud all over him — so he must have followed them up the seam. With her fingertips, Elliott felt the waxed leather surface of the long coat striped with blocks of brown camouflage, a pattern painfully familiar to her. Well, that was one less Limiter — he wouldn't be bothering them again.

"For you, Drake," she whispered, but then a frown creased her brow.

Something didn't make sense. The would-be assassin had been storming toward the boys with his weapon at his shoulder. Elliott was sure he had been about to take a shot "on the wing," but… he hadn't fired. And he hadn't demonstrated any of the precision or stealth she'd have expected from a soldier of the Limiter division. Their combat skills were legendary, yet this man had been in a mad rush. But it was academic now — he was down — and this was no place to hang around. More likely than not there'd be more Limiters on the way; and she wasn't about to be caught in the open like some sitting duck.

She began to scavenge what she could. No rucksack — that was disappointing. The Limiter must have dumped it back on the trail so she could advance more quickly. At least he still had his belt kit, which she stripped off, lobbing it over by the rifle.

She was searching through the jacket pockets when she came across a folded piece of paper. Thinking it was a map, she shook it open, staining it with crimson smudges from the blood on her hands. It was a broadsheet celebrating some sort of event — she'd seen them before in the Colony. The main picture was of a woman, with four smaller images, vignettes of different scenes, around it. Elliott scanned them quickly before something caught her eye.

There was a sixth picture at the bottom that looked as though it had been added later, since it was sketched in pencil. She looked askance at it.

It was the spitting image of Will — although he looked all cleaned up in the picture, with neatly cropped hair.

She peered more closely at it, bringing her lantern to the paper. It was Will, but there was another detail that caused her to suck in her breath. He had a hangman's noose tight around his neck. The other end of the rope was curled up above he head to form what was very clearly a question mark.

And there was also a shadowy, less clearly defined figure behind him, which vaguely resembled Cal. While Will had the desperate look of the condemned, this second figure smiled serenely. The expressions on the two faces were totally out of sync, and the combination quite unsettling.

She studied the rest of the page, lingering on the central picture of the woman, then read the name in a swirling banner at the very top.

Sarah Jerome.

Elliott immediately bent over the body, pulling the head around so she could examine the face. Despite copious amounts of blood from the head wound, she could tell right away it wasn't a Limiter.

It was a woman!

With long brown hair that had been swept back.

There were no female Limiters. That was unheard of — Elliott, of all people, knew this.

She realized who was before her. Who she had killed.

Will and Cal's mother. Sarah Jerome.

She pushed the head to the side again, thinking she should hide it in case any of the boys wandered over.

"Need any help?" Will called out.

"No," Elliott replied, "just stay put."

"it's a Styx, isn't it?" Will shouted, his voice a little tremulous.

"I think so," Elliott called back after a slight pause.

She hesitated, looking at the blood-soaked head, weighing up whether she should tell Will. With a pang of recollection, she thought of her home back in the Colony. She remembered the heartbreaking moment when she'd been forced to leave her own mother, knowing in all likelihood she would never see her again.

Filled with indecision, Elliott regarded the piece of paper once more. She couldn't keep this secret to herself. She couldn't live with it on her conscience.

"Will, Cal, over here!"

Will came jogging over, with Chester following behind. "You really nailed him," Will observed, eyeing the body with some trepidation.

"You might want to look at this," Elliott said quickly, thrusting the bloodied broadsheet into his hand.

He scanned the sheet as it flapped in the wind. Recognizing the sketch of himself at the bottom of the page, he shook his head in disbelief. "What is this?" Then his eyes alighted on the name at the top. "Sarah… Sarah Jerome," he read out loud. He turned to Chester. "Sarah Jerome?" he said again.

"Not your mother?" Chester asked as he leaned in to see the broadsheet.

Elliott kneeled down beside the body. Without saying a word, she very gently turned the head, pushing the damp hair aside to reveal the face. Then she stood up. "I thought it was a Limiter, Will."

"Oh! It's her! It is her!" Will exclaimed, glancing between the broadsheet and the body on the ground. He didn't really need the picture; the similarities between his own face and hers were remarkable. It was as though he was seeing his reflection in a dusty mirror.

"What's she doing down here? And why was she carrying that?" Chester asked, pointing at the rifle.

Will shook his head, overwhelmed. "Get Cal," he said to Chester as he stepped closer to Sarah. Squatting down by her shoulder, he put out a hand to touch the face that was so very much like his own.

He drew it back as she gave a small moan.

"Elliott, she's alive!" he gasped.

Then her eyelids flickered but remained shut.

Before Elliott could react, Sarah's mouth opened and she drew a breath.

"Will?" she asked, her lips moving weakly, her voice so quiet that he could barely hear it over the desolate howl of the wind.

"Are you Sarah Jerome? Are you really my mother?" he asked in a cracked voice. His emotions were in a complete tumult. Here he was meeting his biological mother for the first time, yet she was dressed in the uniform of the soldiers who were after him. And in the picture she'd been carrying, he had a noose around his neck. What did that mean? Had she been about to shoot him?

"Yes, I'm your mother," she groaned. "You must tell me…" Then her voice failed her.

"What? Tell you what?" Will asked.

"Did you kill Tam?!" Sarah screamed, her chest heaving and her eyes flicking wide open as she stared at Will. He was so shocked that he almost fell backward.

"No, he didn't," Cal answered from beside Will, who hadn't even noticed he was there. "Is it really you, Mother?"

"Cal," Sarah said, tears spilling from her eyes as she squeezed them shut and began to cough. It took her several seconds before she was able to talk again. "Just tell me what happened in the Eternal City… Tell me what happened to Tam. I need to know."

Cal found it difficult to speak, his lips trembling. "Uncle Tam died saving us… both of us," he said finally.

"Oh my God." Sarah wept. "They were lying to me. The Styx were lying to me all the time." She tried to sit up.

"You need to keep still," Elliott told her. "You're bleeding badly. I thought you were a Limiter. I shot—"

"That doesn't matter now," Sarah said, rolling her head with the pain.

"I can dress your wounds," Elliott offered, shifting uneasily on her feet as Will looked up at her.

Sarah tried to say no but broke into another coughing fit. When it had passed, she continued. "Will, I'm sorry I ever doubted you. I'm so very, very sorry."

"That's… that's OK," Will stammered, not really knowing what she meant.

"Come closer, both of you," she urged them. "Listen to me."

As they leaned in to hear what their mother wanted to tell them, Elliott set about applying some gauze pads to Sarah's hip, tying them in place with bandage strips.

"The Styx have got a deadly virus and they're going to spread it Topsoil." She stopped talking, clenching her teeth together with a moan, then resumed. "They've already tested a form of it there, but… but it was only a trial run… The full-strength virus is called Dominion… going to cause a terrible plague."

"So that was what we saw in the Bunker," Cal whispered, looking at Elliott.

"Will… Will," Sarah said, staring at him with an intense desperation. "Rebecca carries the virus around with her… and she wants you out of the picture. The Limiters" — Sarah tensed her body, then relaxed again — "won't stop until you're dead."

"But why me?" Will's head reeled — here was the confirmation he was dreading. The Styx were out to get him.

Sarah didn't answer but, with the greatest effort, looked at Elliott as the girl put the finishing touches to a bandage on her temple. "They're coming for all of you. You've got to get away from here. Are there others you can call on for help?"

"No, there's only us," Elliott answered her. "Most of the renegades have been rounded up."

Sarah was silent while she tried to steady her breathing. "Then, Will, Cal, you have to dig yourselves in deep… somewhere they can't reach you."

"That's what we're doing," Elliott confirmed. "We're going to the Wastes."

"Good," Sarah croaked. "And then you must go Topsoil and warn them what's coming."

"How…" Will began.

"Oh, it hurts," Sarah groaned, and her face went limp as if she'd blacked out. Only the occasional flutter of her eyelids told them she was hanging on to consciousness.

"Mum," Will said hesitantly. Addressing a complete stranger in that way felt so incredibly foreign to him. There were a thousand things he wanted to ask her. "Mum, you've got to come with us."

"We can carry you," Cal said.

Sarah's response was resolute. "No, I'd only slow you down. You've got a fighting chance if you get going."

"She's right," Elliott said, picking up Sarah's rifle and belt kit and handing them to Chester. "We have to leave now."

"No, I'm not going without my mother," Cal insisted, seizing Sarah's limp hand.

As Cal talked to his mother, tears flowing freely down his cheeks, Will took Elliott aside.

"There's got to be something we can do," he pressed her. "Can't we take her with us some of the way and hide her?"

"No," Elliott replied emphatically. "Besides, moving her isn't going to help her any. She's probably going to die, anyway, Will."

Sarah called Will's name, and he immediately rejoined Cal by her side.

"Never forget," Sarah said to the boys. She was really struggling now, her face contorted with pain. "I'm so proud of both of…" She didn't finish the sentence. As Will and Cal watched, her eyes slid shut and she was still.

"We've got to go," Elliott said. "The Limiters will be here soon, very soon."

"No!" Cal shouted. "You did this to her. We can't—"

"I can't undo what I've done," Elliott answered him evenly. "But I can still help you. It's your choice whether or not you let me."

Cal was about to object again when Elliott began to walk away, with Chester close behind.

"Just look at her, Cal. We wouldn't be doing her any favors if we tried to shift her," Elliott added over her shoulder.

Despite Cal's continuing protests, both he and Will knew in their hearts that Elliott was right. There was no way they'd be able to haul Sarah with them. They, too, began to move away. Their mother might stand a better chance if another renegade were to find her and tend to her injuries, as Elliott had told them. But both Will and Cal knew just how unlikely this was and recognized that Elliott was trying to give them what little comfort she could.

As they rounded a corner in the tunnel, Will stopped and turned to look back at Sarah where she lay. With the mournful, unremitting howl of the wind all around him, it was such a forlorn and chilling thought — that she could die there in the dark, with no one by her side. Maybe his fate would be the same, to breathe his last in some far corner of the earth, alone.

Maybe he should have been suffering the most intense sorrow that his real mother was bleeding to death there in the tunnel. But all he felt was just a cloud of confused emotions. To Will, Sarah was little more than a stranger who had been gunned down due to an unfortunate mistake.

"Will," Elliott urged him, pulling him by the arm.

"I don't understand. What's she doing down here?" he said. "And why did they give her Bartleby?"

"The Hunter belonged to Cal?" Elliott asked.

Will nodded.

"Then it's simple, really," Elliott said. "The White Necks knew you and Cal were together. So what better than to let Sarah use the animal to track its master and lead her straight to you?"

"I suppose that's right," Will said, frowning. "But what did the Styx think—?"

"Don't you see? They wanted her to find you and kill you," Chester cut in, his voice measured and dispassionate. He had remained silent until now and was thinking more clearly than Will. "They obviously tried to make her believe you were responsible for Tam's death. It's another of their vile little schemes. Just like this Dominion thing she spoke about."

"Now can we just hurry it up?" Elliott said, sprinkling some Parchers on the trail behind her.

They continued along the main track with Cal walking apart from them, his prancing and overjoyed cat by his side.

And before long they emerged out onto a thin strip of a ledge, the wind still blowing hard. They stopped. They could see nothing before them, and no way down.

48

"What now?" Will asked, trying to put all thoughts of Sarah out of his mind and focus on their current situation. Elliott had brought them to the edge of a crevasse, but what lay beyond or below, he couldn't tell.

Will was aware of Chester's cold stare upon him, and it made him extremely angry. It still felt as though his old friend was silently blaming him for everything. Considering what Will had just been through, he'd have expected Chester to cut him some slack. Clearly he was expecting too much.

"So, are we going to jump for it?" he said, peering at what he assumed was a sheer drop.

"Sure, be my guest. It's several hundred feet down, as the stone falls," Elliott replied. "But you might want to try over here instead."

At the very edge of the ledge they saw two prongs. They went as near as they dared, the combination of the high wind and the sheer drop making them move with caution, and discovered that it was the tip of an old iron ladder.

"A Coprolite ladder. Not as quick as jumping, but much less painful," she said. "This place is known as the Sharps — you'll see why when we get down."

"What about Bartleby?" Cal suddenly piped up. "He can't climb down this ladder, and no way am I leaving him here! I only just got him back!"

Cal was kneeling with his arm around the cat, who was rubbing a huge cheek against the side of the boy's head and purring so loudly it sounded like an overcrowded beehive.

"Send him along the ridge. He'll find his own way down," Elliott barked. "If he's any kind of Hunter, he'll seek us out at the bottom."

Cal humphed indignantly. "What do you mean? He's the best Hunter in the whole Colony! Aren't you, Bart?" He ran his hand affectionately over the creased, hairless pate of the cat's domed head, and the beehive sounded as if a riot had broken out.

Elliott went first, followed closely by Chester, who pushed past Will to the front. "Excuse me," he said brusquely.

Will chose not to say anything, and as soon as Chester disappeared from view, he went next. He found it disconcerting as he took hold of the two rusty uprights and edged his legs over the brink until he found a rung with his foot. But once he'd started to move, it wasn't too bad. Last to follow was Cal, who had dispatched Bartleby on the longer journey down via the ledge but was having huge misgivings himself as he descended the ladder, stiffly and deliberately.

It was a long climb and the ladder trembled and creaked ominously with their combined movements, as if some of the fixings had broken loose. Their hands soon became coated with rust and so dry that they had to be extra careful not to lose their grip. The wind gradually dropped off the lower they went, but after a while Will noticed that he couldn't see or hear Cal above him.

"Are you OK?" he shouted up.

There was no reply.

He repeated the question, louder this time.

"Fine," came the begrudging reply from Chester below.

"Not you, you dork. It's Cal I'm worried about."

As Chester mumbled something in response, Cal's walking stick swished past Will, spinning end over end as it fell.

"Cal!" Will exclaimed, thinking for one awful moment that his brother had slipped and was going to follow after it. He held his breath and waited, but still there was no sign of the boy. Reversing his direction, Will began to climb. He soon came across Cal, who was completely stationary, both arms wrapped tightly around the ladder.

"You dropped your stick. What's up?"

"I can't do this… " Cal gasped. "Feel sick… just leave me alone for a minute."

"Is it your leg?" Will asked, concerned. "Or are you still upset about Sarah? What is it?"

"No. I just feel… feel dizzy."

"Ahh," Will said, remembering. There'd been signs of it before when they were Topsoil. Cal wasn't used to heights after spending his whole life in the Colony. "You don't like being up here; it's the height, isn't it?"

Cal swallowed a yes.

"Well, just trust me on this, Cal. I don't want you to look down, but we're almost at the bottom… I can see Elliott there right now."

"Are you sure?" Cal said skeptically.

"Absolutely. Come on."

The deception worked for about a hundred feet, until Cal again came to a standstill.

"You're lying. We should be there by now."

"No, really, not far now," Will assured him. "And don't look down!"

This went on several times, Cal becoming more and more distrustful and angry until Will really did reach the bottom.

"Touchdown!" he announced.

"You lied to me!" Cal accused him as he stepped from the ladder.

"Yeah, but hey, it worked, didn't it? You're safe now," Will replied with a shrug, happy that he'd been able to talk his brother down, even if he'd resorted to deception to achieve it.

"I'm never going to listen to you again," Cal threw huffily at him as he began to hunt around for his walking stick. "You're a lying slug."

"Oh, sure, feel free to take it out on me… just like everybody else around here does," Will replied, more for Chester's benefit than Cal's.

Will turned from the ladder, his feet making a glassy noise as if he were treading on pieces of broken bottle. Indeed, as they all moved around, the ground produced a grinding and vitreous ringing. From what little Will could see, before them seemed to be a colonnade of closely packed pillars spearing up into the darkness, each one more that 200 feet in girth.

"I'm only going to do this because the Limiters should be far enough behind that it doesn't matter, and I want you to know what we're getting into," Elliott said, turning up her lantern and holding it on the area before them.

"Wow!" Will exclaimed.

It was like looking into a sea of dark mirrors. As the beam from Elliott's light struck the nearest column, it was reflected onto another. The beam crisscrossed around them, creating the illusion that there were scores of lanterns. The effect was staggering. He also caught sight of his and the others' reflections from all angles.

"The Sharps," Elliott said. "They're made of obsidian."

Will began to study the nearest column. Its circumference wasn't rounded after all, but composed of a series of perfectly flat plains that ran vertically up its length, as if it had been formed by many longitudinal fractures. It didn't seem to taper in the slightest toward the top.

Scanning around, Will came across a different style of column. The flat plains along its length were gently curved, like some gargantuan licorice twist. Indeed, as he looked further, there were more like this in between the straight columns, and a small number that were pronounced in their curvature.

His mind was awhirl as he started to speculate on the factors that could have produced such a unique natural phenomenon. Although he was bursting to say something about the columns, he checked himself, remembering only too painfully the reaction from Chester when he'd waxed lyrical about the flying lizards. But if ever anything resembled a setting for one of Chester's precious fantasy stories, these crystalline monoliths had to be it. The secret lair of the dark fairies, Will thought wryly. No, better still: the secret lair of the dark and extremely vain fairies. He suppressed a chuckle at this, keeping the notion firmly to himself. It wouldn't be wise to antagonize Chester any further; relations with him were at an all-time low as it was.

Chester picked that moment to speak up, sounding distinctly unimpressed with their surroundings, most likely in a bid to tweak Will..

"Uh-huh. The Sharps. So now what?" he asked Elliott, who turned her lantern down again, dousing the confusion of light beams and multiple images. Will was actually relieved because it was so incredibly disorienting.

"It's a maze in here, so do exactly what I tell you," Elliott replied. "Drake and I set up a cache halfway through, where we can replenish our food and water and also stock up on munitions from the arsenal. It's not going to take us long, and then we're heading on to the Pore. Once we're past that, it's a couple of days' haul to the Wetlands."

"The Pore?" Will asked, his curiosity piqued.

"What about Bartleby?" Cal demanded, bringing the exchange to an end. "He's not here yet."

"Give him a chance. You know he'll find us," Elliott said in an understanding tone, attempting to mollify the boy.

"He'd better," Cal said anxiously.

"Let's do this," Elliott said, sighing as her patience wore thin.

There was no way that the boys could move quietly with the clinking and crunching of the glassy gravel underfoot, although Elliott managed it effortlessly, as if she were gliding over the surface.

"All that noise you're making will carry for miles. Can't you rock apes tread more lightly?" she implored them, but it was useless. However much care they took, they still sounded like a herd of rhinoceros stampeding through a glazier's. "The cache isn't far from here. I'm going to check it, then you can follow me in. Understood?" Elliott stated, then slipped away.

As they hung around, waiting for her return, Cal suddenly spoke.

"I think I hear Bart. He's coming."

Leaving Will and Chester, he edged slowly forward, hugging the side of the column.

His dimmed lantern fell on something.

It wasn't Bartleby.

It wasn't his own reflection in the glossy obsidian, either.

A Limiter stood before him in all his dark glory.

He had been skirting around the column from the opposite side, his rifle at his waist.

For the briefest moment, he looked as surprised as Cal, who squawked an urgent, unintelligible warning, alerting Will and Chester.

Cal's eyes and the Limiter's locked. Then the Limiter's upper lip pulled back into a brutal sneer, his teeth bared in his hollow-cheeked, hideous face. It was animal and insane. The grimace of a killer.

Cal's instincts kicked in and he used the closest thing he had to a weapon. He brought up his walking stick and, by some freak stroke of luck, the handle hooked the Limiter's rifle before he could raise it, yanking it clean from his hands.

It clattered across the obsidian gravel.

For another moment, the Limiter and Cal simply stood there, even more surprised than before. It didn't last long. In less than a heartbeat, the Limiter's hand snapped in front of him, gripping a gleaming scythelike dagger. It was standard issue for the Styx military, with a slightly curved and lethal-looking blade about ten inches long, and Cal had seen it used to deadly effect when the Crawfly cut down Uncle Tam. Brandishing it, the Limiter dived at the boy.

But his big brother was already there, tearing in from the side. Grabbing the Limiter's arm, Will crashed into him, sending the man flying. Will followed him down, landing on top of him. Still holding the soldier's arm, Will used all his weight to keep him from using his knife.

Cal followed suit and launched himself onto the soldier's legs, wrapping his arms around the man's ankles as tightly as he could. The Limiter punched at Will's back and neck with his free arm, trying his utmost to get at his face. But Will's rucksack had ridden up around his shoulders, making it difficult for the Limiter to land his heavy blows. Shouting to Chester, Will kept his head well tucked down.

"Use the gun!" Will bawled over and over again, his voice muffled because his mouth was pressed against the Limiter's upper arm.

"Chester, the gun!" Cal shouted hoarsely. "Shoot him!"

As the boys discarded lanterns sent a flurry of random beams glancing off the columns like a confusion of small spotlights, Chester, poised several feet away, had lifted the rifle and was trying to take aim.

"Shoot!" Cal and Will screamed in unison.

"I can't see!" Chester screamed back. Frantically.

"Do it!"

"Just shoot!"

"I can't get a clear shot!" Chester shrieked in absolute desperation.

The man thrashed wildly under Will and Cal, and Will was just about to shout again when something large slammed up against him. He swiveled his head around, lifting it just enough to see that Chester had also piled on. He'd evidently given up trying to take a shot with the rifle and decided the only thing he could do was join the fray. He'd dropped to his knees, pressed one into the Limiter's abdomen, and was raining punches on his face with both fists. As Chester made an attempt to pin down his free arm, leaning forward to grab hold of it, the Limiter saw his opportunity. He tensed his neck and, with a sickening thump, head-butted Chester hard.

"YOU SCUM!" Chester screamed. He immediately resumed the beating, dodging the Limiter's loose arm every time it took a swipe at him.

"DIE! DIE, YOU JACKHOLE! DIE!" Chester raved as he intensified his punches, his fists pummeling the Limiter's face.

If Chester had happened to catch sight of his reflection in one of the columns, he wouldn't have recognized himself. His face was a distortion, twisted into a crazed, determined mask. All the resentment and fury from his imprisonment in the Colony had found a release and was pouring out in one unstoppable torrent. He kept pounding the soldier, pausing only to fend off the Limiter's fist when he tried to retaliate.

The four of them writhed in the deadly struggle, swearing in breathless desperation as the man grunted stertorously like a wild boar, trying anything and everything to get free. Chester was still hammering away at the soldier, but it seemed to be having little effect. The boys' combined weight constricted his movements, but he was still able to use the elbow of his free arm to deliver the occasional weak counterstrike. And he tried to gouge at their faces with his clawed fingers, again unsuccessfully.

"KILL HIM!" Cal yelled from lower down the Limiter's body.

The boys fought on, knowing only that they had to restrain the soldier by whatever means necessary. There was simply no alternative. It was him or them.

As their bodies strained and pumped against each other, there was an obscene intimacy to the struggle. Chester could smell the sourness of the man's sweat and his vinegary breath in his face. Will felt the man's thick muscles knotting underneath him as he used all his strength to try to free his arm.

"NO. YOU. DON'T!" Will shouted, doubling and redoubling his efforts to restrain the man's bucking form.

The Limiter changed his tactics, perhaps as a last resort. He raised his head as far as he could and spat and snapped, attempting to bite them while making noises not unlike the stalker that had mauled Will so horrifically in the Eternal City.

But these small acts of savagery were only a distraction: He'd identified a chink in their combined onslaught. He screeched victoriously as he brought up his knees and dislodged Cal just enough to be able to wrest free a leg. He drew it back and drove his heel hard against Cal's stomach. The kick sent Cal sprawling across the glass gravel, his breath knocked out of him. He curled up, gasping air back into his lungs.

Now the Limiter had more leverage. He swung his legs and began to twist and thrash with such force that Chester was finding it impossible to hang on. As Chester fought back, the Limiter caught him with a resounding clout to the head. Stunned, he slumped to the ground.

Will had no idea of the others' plights. He didn't dare look up for fear of being beaten or gouged, stubbornly clinging to the Limiter's arm and spreading his body weight the best he could to keep the man down. Will was going to do his utmost to stop the soldier from using his scythe, even if it was the last thing he did — and he knew it might well be.

Less constricted now, the Limiter repeatedly drove his fist into Will's head and neck. Will cried out with pain. He couldn't withstand much more of this punishment.

Fortunately Chester had regained consciousness. Snatching up a large shard of obsidian, he began to slam it against the Limiter's skull.

The Limiter cursed Chester in the nasal Styx language, then reached up and clapped his hand around Chester's jaw. He hooked his thumb into the corner of Chester's mouth and used the painful hold to yank the hapless boy aside.

His legs scrabbling, Chester had absolutely no alternative but to follow where the Limiter was pulling him. Once Chester was on the ground and in easy reach, the Limiter gave him a tremendous blow on the cranium. This time, there would be no quick recovery. Chester lay in a groggy confusion, a Milky Way of spinning stars interlacing with the matrix of reflected light beams all around him.

With both Cal and Chester out of contention, only Will remained. The Limiter got a grip on Will's neck and was digging his fingers into it, closing off his windpipe. The soldier babble something exultantly in the Styx tongue. He thought he'd won.

Choking from pain and lack of air, Will saw that the end was near. Somehow it didn't come as a great surprise. After all, this was a trained soldier they'd taken on. They were just three kids. What chance had they ever had?

Click! As if the Limiter had snapped his fingers, a second scythe materialized from nowhere in his free hand. The blade flickered in the light of a nearby lantern as, in one fluid and easy movement, the Limiter switched his grip on the weapon.

"No!" Will croaked in alarm, his stomach sinking as he caught sight of the scythe. The killer had him cold. The blade glinted as the Limiter sucked in a breath through his battered lips and began to lower the weapon. Will's neck was now totally exposed. Will clenched his teeth, all hope deserting him as he waited for the knife to find its mark.

There was an earsplitting bang.

The bullet passed so close to Will, he felt its heat on his skin. The Limiter's raised hand hovered for what seemed to be an eternity, then opened. The knife slipped from its grasp.

Will stayed exactly where he was, numb with bewilderment, the sound of the shot still ringing in his ears. He wouldn't look at the soldier directly, but could see enough to know he was a grisly mess. He heard a long exhalation as the man's lungs emptied. Then came a wracking paroxysm, the whole of the man's body tightening, and a wet gurgle as a pink mist filled the air. Will felt droplets on his face. That was enough to snap him out of his paralysis. In a mad rush, he scrambled back, away from the Limiter, and leaped to his feet, spewing out a stream of unintelligible words and horrified gasps.

Panting rapidly, wiping his face over and over again with his sleeves, he stopped and turned. Cal stood stock-still, holding Chester's rifle. He stared at the dead man.

"I got him," he said quietly, not lowering the rifle, or his gaze.

Will went to him, as did Chester.

"I got him in the face," he said again, even more faintly. His eyes were empty and his expression blank.

"It's OK, Cal," Will said, easing the rifle from his brother's rigid hands and passing it to Chester. He put his arm around Cal's shoulders and slowly guided him sway from the grim sight of the dead Limiter. Will was still shaken, but his concern for Cal outweighed any he had for himself. The boy dumbly complied when Will told him they should both sit down. He felt Cal tremble against him. This was not the moment for his brother to go into shock.

"You got him good! You bagged him! You bagged yourself a Limiter!" Chester was babbling excitedly and laughing, his words slurred and poorly formed because of his swollen face. "Got him smack in the kisser! Bull's-eye! Serves him right! Hahahaha!"

"For goodness' sake, shut up, Chester," Will growled at him. His brother began to gag, then was violently sick. He was crying and mumbling something about the Limiter.

"It's OK, it's OK," Will said, not letting go of him. "It's over."

Elliott rushed in.

"Idiots! Do you think you could make any more noise?"

She saw the dead Limiter and gave a single approving nod. Then she looked over at the boys. Still twitchy from the adrenaline, Chester jigged from foot to foot, while Will and Cal sat comatose.

She scanned the glass columns.

"The White Necks are even closer than I thought."

"You can say that again," Will muttered.

She turned to Chester, who was now dabbing at his nose, trying to stem the flow of blood from it. She smiled. "You shot him. Nice work."

"Um… I… no…" Chester stammered. "I couldn't get…"

"Cal did it," Will cut in.

"But you had the rifle?" she said to Chester, looking perplexed and a little disappointed. Chester didn't offer any further explanation, glowering sullenly at Will. Then Elliott twisted to Will and Cal. "Get up. We have to go now… right now. Anyone hurt?"

"My jaw… my nose…" Chester began.

"Cal needs a second. Look at him," Will interrupted urgently, leaning back so Elliott had a view of his brother's dazed, out-of-focus eyes.

"Not a chance. Not after all that racket," she said.

"Can't he—?" Will begged.

"No," she growled. "Listen!"

They did as she said, and heard a baying in the distance.

"Stalkers!" Will exclaimed, the hairs on the back of his bruised neck standing up.

"Yes, a pack of them," Elliott nodded. She looked at the boys with a small smile. "There's another reason I think now would be a good time to hit the road," she said.

"What's that?" Will asked quickly.

"I've lit a fuse in the cache. The whole arsenal's going to blow sky-high in sixty seconds."

This last piece of information galvanized Cal into action. Elliott scooped up the Limiter's rifle as they thundered past his body, and then they ran like they'd never run before. Will stayed close to Cal, who started off the best he could on the glass shards with his weak leg. But once Bartleby rejoined the crew, the boy raced along as fast as the rest of them.

Like firecrackers going off, there was a volley of gunfire. A hail of lead peppered the columns around them, the impacts sometimes sending plate-sized fragments gyrating into the air. Will instinctively bent his head and began to slow down.

"No! Keep going!" Elliott yelled.

Bullets ricocheted and whined from the mirror surfaces as they fled. Will felt tugs on his pants legs, but couldn't stop to see the cause.

"Get ready!" Elliott shouted above the barrage.

It came.

The explosion was huge. A blinding light scorched around them, sent in a thousand different directions b the reflective surfaces, and then, as soon as the reverberations of the initial blast subsided, a tremendous crashing began.

Broken columns came toppling down, colliding one into the other, like dominoes in a chain reaction. A goliath section of fractured column slammed into the ground directly behind them, sending up a dust storm of powdered glass that sparkled like black diamonds in their lights. It clogged their throats and stung their eyes. The ground itself rocked with each impact.

The bedlam and crashing continued unabated, and before any of them knew it they were speeding after Elliott into a tunnel. Will jerked his head around just in time to see a column collapse against the entrance and completely seal it off. They were submerged in a miasma of glass sleet for several hundred feet. Then the air cleared and Elliott brought them to an abrupt halt.

"We have to go, we have to go," Chester urged her.

"No, we have a few minutes' grace. They can't follow us in here," she said, picking fragments of glass from her face. "Drink some water and get your breath back." After taking a large swig from her canteen to rinse out her mouth, she swallowed several gulps and then passed it around. "Anyone hurt?" she asked as she set about checking each of them over in turn.

Chester couldn't breathe through his nose, but Elliott told him she didn't think it was broken. His mouth was also badly swollen and split at the corner where the Limiter had crooked it, and his head tender from the catalog of punches. As Elliott used her lantern to examine him, he saw his knuckles were red and bruised, and his forearms soaked through with blood. She examined them carefully.

"It's all right. It's not yours," she said after a quick inspection.

"The Limiter?" Chester said, giving her a wide-eyed look and shivering as he recalled how he'd pummeled the soldier with the chunk of obsidian. "That's terrible… how could I have done that… done that to another person?" he whispered.

"Because he would have done worse to you," she said curtly, before moving on to Cal.

The boy appeared unhurt except for some very tender ribs. But he was slow to respond when Elliott spoke to him, still shocked that he'd shot the Limiter.

She took him by both shoulders, her voice sympathetic.

"Cal, listen. Drake gave me some advice once, after a horrible thing happened to me."

The boy looked vaguely at her.

"He said that our skin has a dead layer on it."

She had his attention now — he frowned quizzically at her.

"It's the cleverest thing. It dies and the top layers flake off, to protect us from infection." Straightening up, she lifted her hands from his shoulders and brushed one over the back of the other to illustrate what she was saying. "The bacteria — or germules, as you call them — they settle, but can't get a hold."

"So?" Cal said, intrigued.

"So right now, part of you is dying, just like your skin. It might take a while — it did with me — but it will die to save you. And next time you'll be tougher and stronger."

Cal nodded.

"So let it go and just move on."

Cal nodded again. "I think I see," he said, his face losing its rigidity and his eyes regaining a measure of their vitality. "Yes, I see."

Will had been listening and was impressed with the way Elliott had been able to comfort the boy. Cal already seemed to be back to his old self, chatting enthusiastically to his beloved cat.

Elliott checked Will next. Considering what he'd been through, he was relatively unscathed except for some angry red bruises and grazes on his neck, a number of abrasions on his face, and a mountain range of bumps on the back of his head. As he gingerly touched them, he thought of the tugs he'd felt when they'd been running and, probing his calf with his fingers, discovered a couple of small tears in the fabric of his pants legs.

"What's this?" he said to Elliott. He knew they hadn't been there before.

Elliott inspected them.

"They're bullet holes. You should count yourself lucky."

The shots had punched straight through the material, and he could stick a finger in the holes to show where they'd landed. Relieved that he hadn't been hit, that he'd indeed dodged another bullet, he broke into laughter. Cal gave him a curious look, while Chester just clicked his teeth dismissively. Elliott regarded him with quiet disapproval.

"Keep it together, Will," she rebuked him.

"Oh, I'm together all right," he came back at her, breaking into a fresh peal of laughter. "Against all odds."

"OK, to the Pore!" she announced. "Then the Wetlands."

"Where we'll be home and dry?" Will asked with a chuckle.

49

"Is that you, Will?" Sarah moaned as she felt someone gripping her wrist. Then she remembered that he, Cal, and the others had long gone, just as she'd urged them to do.

She opened her eyes to darkness and the most excruciating agony she'd ever experienced in her life.

Every single pain and ache, every single toothache and headache and discomfort that comes during a lifetime, all accumulated together into a single moment of unendurable agony: This was how it felt. A thousand times worse even than childbirth.

She cried out, battling to stay conscious. Her eyes remained open despite the fact that she couldn't see who was there. She didn't know how long she'd been out for — it was as if she'd pushed her way between a pair of heavy curtains and something ineluctable was pulling her back through them so they could draw together again. It was the most tremendous struggle, because the pain was forcing her back behind the curtains, a place so tranquil and warm and welcoming. It was all she could do to resist the temptation to go there. But she wasn't going to allow herself that final bow, and with each labored breath she fought against it.

The grip on her wrist tightened, and as she heard the rasping sound of the Styx language, her heart fell. A light appeared somewhere in the very periphery of her vision, and there were more Styx voices as she saw shadowy forms flitting around her.

"Limiter," she said, recognizing the camouflage on the arm that was now checking over her body.

In confirmation, a harsh voice snapped at her.

"Stand up!"

"I can't," she said, forcing herself to focus in the dim light.

There were four Limiters there. She'd been found by a patrol. Two of them hauled her to her feet. She felt the crippling pain in her hip and screamed — it reverberated through the tunnel, but it was as though someone else was crying out. She came close to losing consciousness again, the curtains parting a little to allow her through.

The Limiters forced her to walk, suspended between them. The pain was unbearable. She felt her hip grinding, fractured bone upon fractured bone, and nearly blacked out. Sweat trickled down her forehead and into her eyes, making her blink, making her close her eyes.

She was dying and she knew it.

But she wasn't going to die yet.

As long as she was breathing there was still a chance she could help Will and Cal.

Drake slipped through the tunnel as fleetly as the winds that swept around him. He paused every so often to search the path for any sign that it had been used recently. The constant gale ensured the sand and grit didn't lie undisturbed for long, so he knew he was unlikely to be confused by any old tracks along the way.

Without stopping, he touched the tip of his shoulder, which had been clipped by a bullet. It was only a flesh wound — he'd had worse. He dropped his hand to the knife at his hip, and then to the pad of stove guns on his thigh. He felt distinctly vulnerable without his rifle and rucksack full of munitions, which he'd lost back at the entrance to the Bunker. And his hearing was slightly impaired from the blast of the stove mortar, an unremitting whistling present in his ears.

Still, all that was a small price to pay for getting out with his life. It had been a close call — the closest yet — and it didn't make sense to him. The Limiters had him cold, and yet they'd held back. It was as if they wanted him alive — but that wasn't their modus operandi at all. After the mortar had caused mayhem among the droves of approaching Styx, he had taken advantage of the chaos and the whirling dust to duck back into the Bunker.

From then on it was child's play. He could navigate the complex with his eyes shut, although Elliott's explosions had blocked several of the fastest routes through. And there were numerous patrols of Limiters, many with stalkers, to contend with. For a while he laid low in a dugout he'd prepared for this very eventuality. He was fortunate that the dogs were hampered by the aftermath of Elliott's handiwork; the fumes and dust still carried in the air made it impossible for them to pick up his scent trail.

He used a drainage duct to exit the Bunker, but even when he was back on the Great Plain he found he wasn't out of the woods yet. To shake off the mounted troop of Styx and the packs of stalkers snapping at his heels, he'd had to lay some false tracks. He'd used every trick in the book to finally elude them.

Now, as the sound of the wind joined with the whistling in his ears, he squatted down to study the ground. He was concerned that he hadn't found anything yet. Elliott could be taking one of several routes, but this was the most likely.

He got up and continued for another hundred feet until he came across what he'd been looking for.

"Here we are," he announced, evaluating the impressions in the dust. They were fresh footprints, and it was easy enough for him to tell to whom they belonged.

"Chester, and… and this must be Will! So he made it!" he said, with a shake of his head and a tight smile, relieved. He reached his hand over to the left, tracing around another print, and then lowered himself down onto his chest to assess the profile in more detail.

"Cal — your leg's acting up, isn't it?" he muttered, seeing the unevenness of one of the boy's footprints.

Another set of tracks caught his eye in the dust next to Cal's.

"Stalker?" he posed aloud, wondering if there was any evidence of a struggle, and maybe even traces of blood, in the area. He crawled closer to scrutinize the prints.

"No, this is no dog, this is feline. This must be a Hunter."

Mulling over what this could mean, he stood up and searched a wider area. "Elliott, where are you?" he was saying to himself as he attempted to locate her prints, knowing it would be more difficult due to the manner in which she moved.

A quick search yielded nothing, and he decided he couldn't afford to spend any longer checking. Every second meant that Elliott and the boys would be that much farther away. He set off again along the tunnel.

Several hundred feet farther on, he squatted down to inspect the ground again, then cried out.

"Ow! Dang it!"

He felt the Parchers burn his hand and saw the faint glow they were beginning to emit. He immediately wiped his hand on his pants to remove the bacteria before they sucked the moisture from his skin and flared fully into life. A moment too late and the reaction would have been as painful as if his hand had been immersed in acid. He'd witnessed enough stalkers yelping and bucking in agony, their noses shining as brightly as a tail light on a Topsoil bicycle, to know how it went.

But he'd removed the bacteria in time and, aware that Elliott wouldn't have used them unless she'd thought it absolutely necessary, he began to run.

That was when he heard a massive explosion from somewhere up ahead.

"That sounds suspiciously like my Sharps munitions store going off," he said to himself.

There followed a deep rumbling that could have been mistaken for rolling thunder, although it lasted for considerably longer than any Topsoil storm. The wind in the tunnel faltered, then reversed direction.

If he had been moving rapidly before, he now flew through the tunnel, terrified he was going to be too late.

50

"Got something?" Chester asked Elliott as they studied the horizon through their rifle scopes.

"Yes… activity to the left," she confirmed. "Do you see them?"

"No," Chester admitted. "Nothing."

"There are two Limiters, maybe a third," Elliott said.

They'd already had several sightings of Styx along the way, and each time had been forced to change direction. This had been the pattern since they'd emerged into a goliath space with odd-looking, dough-shaped rock formations scattered throughout it — menhirs, Will had called them.

"We'd better make ourselves scarce," Elliott said. Although the Limiters were a considerable distance away, she and Chester kept low and used the menhirs for cover as they strode back to where Will and Cal were waiting.

"What's up?" Will asked.

"More of them," Chester replied curtly, keeping his eyes averted.

"Doesn't look promising," Elliott said, shaking her head. "We can't go the way I wanted, so we're going to cut down the slope closer to the Pore, and then… then on to…"

She hesitated as the distant sound of a howl carried through the arid air, followed by barking.

Bartleby let out a small meow, and his ears pricked up like radar dishes as he spun his whole body around to where the noises were coming from.

"They've got the stalkers in here," Elliott said. "Come on."

They kept on the move, filled with a sense of urgency, but Will and the others found they weren't as panicky as they might have been. For one thing, the soldiers were far enough off that it didn't feel as if they posed an immediate threat. But more significantly, the fight with the Limiter had had a profound effect on each of them. Elliott's words of reassurance to Cal back at the Sharps resonated within all three boys; it was as though they had been partially anesthetized from the constant fear and dread that they'd been living with. Elliott was right — the experience, horrible as it was, had toughened them up.

And they'd found out their opponents weren't the invincible warriors they had once thought. The could be beaten. Besides, the boys had Elliott on their side. As they tramped down the slope, Will dreamingly began to imagine her as some new kind of superhero. The incredible exploding girl, he mused, with fingers of dynamite and nitroglycerine for blood. He chuckled to himself. She always rose to the occasion with something up her sleeve to help them out of a tight corner. Long may it continue, he thought.

So it came as a surprise when, after another stop to reconnoiter the horizon, Elliott grew increasingly agitated. She was always so calm and collected that her behavior began to infect the boys, setting them on edge. She was seeing Limiters everywhere.

"This isn't good. We've got to head even farther down," she told them, making a brisk quarter turn and lifting her rifle to her shoulder for a final check before setting off on the new course.

Will didn't grasp the importance of this change in direction until they eventually came upon the Pore itself.

Water drizzled down on them in sporadic, wind-tossed showers, as Will gazed into the seemingly infinite cavity.

He whistled in astonishment.

"That's one humongous hole!" he exclaimed, immediately going to the brink and peering down.

His vertigo affecting him, Cal maintained a wide margin between himself and the edge of the enormous drop.

Will was examining the curvature of the Pore through his headset. "Man, this is big. Really big."

"Yes," Elliott said. "You could say that."

"Can't even see to the other side," Chester muttered to no one in particular.

"It's about a mile at its widest," Elliott said, taking a swig of water. "And who knows how deep it is? Nobody who's ever fallen in has come back to tell the story — except, a long time ago, they say a man hauled himself out of it."

"I heard about him. Abraham someone," Will said, recalling that Tam had talked about him.

"Many people thought he was a fraud," Elliott went on. "Either that or his brains were cooked by fever." She stared deep into the Pore. "But there's a heap of old legends about some sort of" — she hesitated, as if what she was about to say was ludicrous — "sort of place below."

"What do you mean?" Will asked, quickly turning to her. He had to know more, regardless of how Chester might react. "What place?"

"Oh, here we go again with his twenty questions," murmured Chester, right on cue. Will ignored him.

"They say there's another world, but Drake thought it was a load of old codswallop," she said, screwing on the top of her canteen.

As they passed around the edge of the Pore, there were no further signs of any more Limiters. Within a few minutes of fast marching, Will noticed the outline of some sort of regular structure. Through his lens it became clear that it wasn't a building but a massive arch.

Although crumbled and eroded, the arch had an icon on its keystone that he recognized. Carved into it were three divergent lines: the same symbol that was on the jade pendant Uncle Tam had given him just before his final showdown with the Styx Division in the Eternal City.

While pondering this coincidence, Will was distracted by the peculiar sight of papers strewn all over the ground on the far side of the arch. Chester and Elliott had already picked up a few of these pages and were examining them.

"What's all this?" Will asked as he joined them.

Chester put some pages in his hand without comment.

One glance was all it took.

"Dad!" Will exclaimed. "My Dad!"

A number of the sheets contained pictures of stones, on which were painstakingly drafted sketches of strange and complex symbols. Densely penciled notes filled the other pages. The unmistakable handwriting of his father littered the margins.

Will scanned the ground, pushing through the loose pages with his boot. He found a rather ratty pair of brown wool socks knotted together, with large holes in the toes, and then, bizarrely, a Mickey Mouse toothbrush, well used from the looks of it.

"I wondered where that had gone!" Will smiled, pushing against the grimy and worn bristles with his thumb. "Silly old Dad… he took my toothbrush with him!"

But any cheerfulness evaporated as he came across the blue-and-purple-marbled cover of a notebook. It was clear then where all the pages he come from. He snatched it up and studied the label stuck of the front, a bookplate with a bespectacled owl at the side and Ex Libras printed in swirly copperplate lettering across the top.

"Journal Three… Dr. Roger Burrows," Will read aloud

He dashed back to the arch. Passing under it, he didn't pause as he moved out onto the platform, immediately spotting a weather-worn flight of stone steps that led off from it. Reaching the last one, he stooped to peer below. He couldn't see anything. But as he raised his eyes, blinking as the rain fell on his face, something caught his attention.

Straight in front of him was his father's blue-handled geological hammer, its tip lodged in the rock. He leaned over to retrieve it. It came loose after several tugs, and he regarded it for a few seconds before renewing his efforts to try to see farther down the walls of the Pore. Even through the lens of the headset, he saw nothing there.

Deep in thought, he rejoined the others.

"What happened here?" he said, his voice brittle with apprehension.

Elliott and Chester were silent — neither of them able to give him an answer.

"My dad…?" Will said to Chester.

Chester looked into the space between them, his face expressionless and his lips tightly clamped as if he was disinclined to say anything.

"He's probably all right," Elliott said. "If we keep going, we might…"

"Yes, we might catch up with him," Will completed her sentence, grabbing at the suggestion to give himself some comfort. "I bet he just left these things behind by accident… dropped them… He's a bit forgetful sometimes… His mind churned with explanations for his father's absence as he looked back at the arch. "But… not… careless," he added slowly. "I mean… it's not as if his rucksack's here, or…"

A terrified yelp from Cal yanked him from his thoughts. The boy had been lounging against a sizable boulder a little way back from the edge of the Pore, and leaped up as if he'd been stung by a bee.

"It moved! I swear the stinking rock moved!" he shouted.

The rock had moved, and it was still moving. Like some miracle, it had risen up on jointed legs and was rotating. As it came to a stop, they all saw the huge, vacillating antennae. The machinelike mouthparts gave a single clack.

"Ohmygosh!" Chester shrieked.

"Oh, do shut up!" Elliott rebuked him. "It's only a cave cow."

The boys watched as the insect — Dr. Burrows gargantuan "dust mite" and one-time traveling companion — clacked again, and then trundled cautiously forward. Bartleby scampered around its circumference, venturing forward to sniff at it and then retreating back again, as if he didn't quite know what to make of the creature.

"Shoot it!" Chester exhorted Elliott as he shielded himself behind her, petrified. "Kill it! It's horrific!"

"It's only a baby," Elliott said, quite unconcerned as she went up to it and slapped its thick exoskeleton with a dull thud. "They're harmless. They graze on algae, not meat. You don't need to be…"

Something speared on the cave cow's mouthparts silenced her. Patting the insect again, she leaned forward to retrieve it.

It was Dr. Burrows's backpack, badly torn and turned inside out.

Will approached her slowly and took it from her.

His eyes said it all.

"So this thing… this cave cow… you say it's harmless, but could it have hurt my father?"

"Not a chance. Even the adults wouldn't harm a hair on your head, unless one of them sat on you by accident. I told you, they don't eat flesh." She put her hand over Will's as he continued to clutch the rucksack, and pulled the bag toward her face so she could sniff at the ruined canvas. "Thought so… it had food in it. That's what the cow was after."

Will wasn't reassured as he glanced repeatedly between the stationary cave cow and the arch. His brow creased with concern.

It didn't look good and everyone knew it.

"Sorry, Will, but we can't hang around," Elliott said. "The sooner we get clear of here, the better."

"No, you're right," he agreed.

As Elliott, Chester, and Cal set off again, Will rushed around, gathering up as many of the pages as he could and stuffing them inside his jacket. Then, fearing he might be left behind, he ran to catch up with the others, the Mickey Mouse toothbrush clasped firmly in his hand.

"These… boots… are…"

Lines of the song ran through Sarah's befogged head. She was half grunting, half gasping odd snatches from it as the Limiters on either side forced her to keep walking, each step causing the most terrible pain in her hip, as if barbed wire was being slowly twisted deep in her flesh.

Little by little, Sarah was dying, and the Limiters knew it. So much for emergency medical attention. They didn't give a jot about her. They would probably get a pat on the back from Rebecca even if they delivered a dead body.

But Sarah knew she had to stay conscious and was fighting the darkness that threatened to swamp her.

"…made for walking… one of these days…"

One of the Limiters grunted something guttural at her, but she defied him, carrying on with the song.

"… these boots are gonna walk all over you…"

Sarah's blood left a broken, splattered trail behind her. Quite by chance, once or twice it spilled across patches of Parchers that Elliott had sprinkled in her wake as she and the boys had fled the very same way. Brought to life by Sarah's blood, the bacteria flared with such brilliance it was as though light was blazing directly out of the very ground itself, like flashlights from the outermost circle of hell.

But Sarah was oblivious to her shining path. She had fixed her mind, completely and absolutely, on a single, overwhelming purpose. As far as she could fathom, the Limiters were taking her in the same direction Will and Cal had gone.

That was good and bad.

It probably meant that further Styx were also on their trail, so her sons were in danger.

But it also meant that she might still be able to help them. Even if it was the last thing she did.

51

When he came up behind the Limiter patrol, Drake had to slow down. He swore silently. There was nothing he could do to get ahead of them.

Chancing his luck, he crept closer, to assess the situation. They were dragging someone with them, but he wasn't going to jump to any conclusions about the captive's identity. Maybe it was just some unfortunate renegade the soldiers had caught, he thought as he kicked his heels, impatient to get going again. He touched the stove guns strapped to his thigh — it would be pushing it to use them against four soldier in the first place, and he also didn't want to risk hitting their prisoner.

So he was forced to bide his time until finally the patrol lugged the prisoner out onto the ledge a the drop to the Sharps. From there, they took the longer ridge path down. As soon as they were out of sight, Drake rapidly descended the rusty Coprolite ladder, taking cover the instant he touched bottom. The air glittered with millions of tiny, slow-moving glass particles, which rimed his eyes and lined his throat. As he weaved between the massive glass stumps and the fractured sections of column left in the aftermath of what clearly had been a devastating explosion, he repeatedly had to stop and hide. He spotted a number of dead Limiters around the place, but it was swarming with quite a few live ones, too, conducting a search of the area.

He came to the passage he knew Elliott would have taken, but its mouth was completely blocked by a collapsed glass column. His only option was to skirt farther around the perimeter and take the next available route.

In the process, he spotted the patrol with the prisoner again as they stormed down the last section of the ridge. Two of the four Limiters immediately peeled off, probably to check in with their comrades deeper in the cavern. The remaining two allowed their captive to drop to the ground. He heard a woman's scream as the figure fell.

Whoever she was, Drake couldn't just leave her to their mercy.

He picked up a shard of obsidian and slung it fifty feet to the left of the Limiters' position. The pair of soldiers reacted immediately, raising their rifles and stalking toward where it had landed. Drake chose his moment and threw another large shard to draw them even farther away, then stole across to where the woman lay. Cupping a hand over her mouth lest she cry out, he lifted her in his arms and made for the exit tunnel.

Once he'd run far enough, he put her down.

She was wearing a Limiter's uniform, but, even stranger than this, the woman's face was somehow familiar to Drake. She tried to say something, but he told her to stay quiet as he assessed her injuries.

"These bandages… who did this?" he asked, noticing with surprise that the dressings were identical to ones he and Elliott carried.

"You're a renegade, aren't you?" Sarah threw back at him.

"Just tell me — did Elliott do this?" he pressed.

"Small girl, big rifle?" Sarah managed in reply.

Drake nodded, still trying to figure out where he knew her from.

"A friend of yours?" Sarah asked. She saw Drake raise his eyebrows. It was uncanny; for an instant it could have been Tam before her: a leaner version, maybe, but the quizzical expression was identical. At once she felt she could trust this total stranger, this grizzled man with hard blue eyes and an odd-looking device around his head.

"Well, she's a lousy shot," Sarah chuckled grimly.

Drake was taken aback; the woman was showing the most incredible bravery despite the magnitude of her wounds. But he was wasting precious seconds.

"I've got to go," he said apologetically, standing up. "My friend Elliott, she needs my help."

"And I need to help my sons, Will and Cal," Sarah said.

"Ah, so that's who you are," Drake realized with a start. "The legendary Sarah Jerome. I thought I recognized your—"

"And if you want to know what the Styx are up to," Sarah interrupted, "we can talk along the way."

Elliott led the boys to another arch, although it hadn't withstood the ravages of time as well as the first one. Only a single pillar was still standing, the rest lying in pieces across the flagged platform.

Will and the others had just stepped off the giant flagstones when the baying of stalkers rolled toward them again. The sounded alarmingly close. Elliott had been going at full speed but came to a dead stop, spinning around to face the boys.

"How can I have been so incredibly stupid?" she burst out in a fierce whisper.

"What do you mean?" Chester asked.

"Can't you see it?" she said, her voice cracking with exasperation.

Crowding around her, Will, Chester, and Cal exchanged blank looks.

"They've been harrying us for miles… and I didn't spot it." Elliott gripped her rifle with such aggression that one of her knuckles cracked. "What a fool!"

"Spot what?" Chester said. "What are you talking about?"{

"The pattern… We've run into Limiters at every turn, and we've gone exactly where they wanted us, like hens in a roundup! They've corralled us, time after time."

Will thought she was about to break into tears, she was so livid with herself.

"I've played straight into their hands…" She let the stock of her rifle slide to the ground until it rested in the dirt, then she leaned against the barrel, her head bowed. She was visibly crestfallen, as if all her sense of purpose had suddenly left her. "After everything Drake taught me. He wouldn't—"

"Oh, don't even, we're doing just fine," Cal cut her off, trying to remain calm but sounding far from it. Spent to the point of collapse, he just wanted to get wherever and finally rest. "Can't we just go along there?" he appealed to her, pointing at the perimeter of the Pore.

"No way," Elliott replied wanly.

"Why not?" he pressed her.

She didn't answer for a moment, her eyes on Bartleby. The cat's head was up and his ears cocked alertly; as they watched he raised his head even higher and sniffed. Elliott gave a resigned nod as she finally answered Cal.

"Along there, somewhere, is a bunch of Limiters, all with rifles trained and ready." At the boys's continued refusal to accept what she was saying, she seemed to pull herself together, her eyes flashing angrily at each of them in turn. "And out there" — she jerked her thumb to the left — "will be enough White Necks to fill a stinking church. Why don't you ask your Hunter? He knows."

Cal glanced at his cat and then regarded Elliott dubiously, as Will and Chester took a few paces in the directions she had indicated to scrutinize the barren landscapes.

Pulling down his lens, Will could see a considerable distance up the slope where the menhirs lay in haphazard arrangement. "But… but there's absolutely no one there," he insisted, his voice whining with the implausibility of it all.

"Nothing this way, either," Chester added. "You're getting jumpy, Elliott, that's all. We're fine, really," he pleaded as he and Will wandered back to rejoin her.

"If fine is being shot to shreds, boy, then I'd have to agree with you," Elliott said tersely as she swung up her rifle in a single deft movement, readying it against her shoulder.

52

Drake bombarded Sarah with question after question as they went, grilling her about what she knew. She was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate and often answered disjointedly, sometimes getting the sequence of event in the wrong order as she told him about Rebecca and the Dominion plot.

Eventually they lapsed into silence, Drake because he was trying to conserve his energy to carry Sarah, and Sarah, because the spells of light-headedness were coming with greater frequency. Like a leaking bucket, she felt the lifeblood seeping form her. The odds were stacked heavily against her ever seeing her two sons again.

"These boots are gonna…" she wheezed as Drake carried her along. The pain from her shattered hip was so vast and all-consuming that at times she saw herself as a cork bobbing on the surface of a shiny red-hot ocean, which, at any moment, might fold over her and suck her into its depths. She fought and fought to stay afloat, to stay focused, but her whole head throbbed with a searing pain from the gunshot wound to her temple, as if her brain had been cleft in two.

"You keep lying when…"

And finally, Drakes chest heaving with the exertion, they came to the gradient down to the Pore.

Despite his fragile cargo, he broke into a run.

A singsong shout rolled over the expanse toward them.

"Oh, Will!"

He went rigid.

"I know you're there, Sunshine!" it called gleefully.

Will recognized the voice without a moment's hesitation. He locked eyes with Elliott.

"Rebecca," he gasped.

For an instant none of them moved.

"I think we're in trouble," Will said helplessly.

Elliott nodded. "You're so right," she agreed, her voice devoid of any intonation.

Will felt exactly like a rabbit caught in the blazing headlights of a huge juggernaut that was thundering down on it.

It was as if, deep in his bones, he'd always known this moment would come, that it had been inevitable right from the start. And yet he'd led all of them straight into it. His befuddled gaze fell on Chester, but his old friend gave him such a glare of bitter recrimination and contempt that Will had to turn away.

"Well, don't just stand there! Take cover!" Elliott barked.

They scattered, Elliott and Chester flinging themselves behind one menhir as Will and Cal took another.

"Oh, Willlllll!" the voice came again, spiked with little-girl sweetness. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

"Do nothing," Elliott mouthed at him with a rapid shake of her head.

"Hey, big brother, don't jerk me around!" Rebecca shouted. "Let's have a little chat, for old times' sake."

As Elliott had commanded, Will didn't respond. He stuck an eye around the side of the boulder, but saw only darkness.

Rebecca went on, unamused. "OK, if you're going to play silly games with me, let's get the rules straight."

There was a lull. In the ongoing absence of any reply from Will, Rebecca continued.

"Righty-o… the rules. One… as you seem a little bashful, I'll come down to you. Two… if anyone gets it into their head to take a pop at me, the gloves are off, and this is how it'll go. First I'll let slip the stalkers; my little darlings haven't been fed for days, so, trust me, you really don't want that. Or in the unlikely event the dogs don’t do you in, my squad of crack riflemen will. Last, I've got the Division with some heavy ordnance up here… their guns will smash anything in their path, you included. So, pull any stunts and you'll suffer the consequences. Got that?"

There was another pause, then her voice came, more strident and imperious this time. "Will, I want your word I've got safe passage."

Will quite trying to see up the slope and slumped back behind the huge menhir. He felt that Rebecca would be able to look right through even that, solid rock, as if nothing more than a pane of glass separated them.

A chill sweat trickled down the small of his back, and he found that his hands were shaking. He closed his eyes and, banging his head against the rock behind him, moaned, "No, no, no, no, no."

How could it have gone so wrong? They'd been making good progress toward the Wetlands, with wide open spaces before them and an abundance of routes to choose from. Now they were in this appalling predicament, hemmed in with a colossal black hole behind them. How could it have come to this.

And in Rebecca, they were up against somebody so utterly merciless and brutal; somebody who knew him like the back of his hand.

He shot a glance over to Elliott, but she was remonstrating with Chester. Will couldn't catch anything of what they were saying. As he watched, they appeared to reach agreement and their frantic exchange finished. Elliott quickly shucked off her rucksack and began to delve around in it.

"Hey, Mole-face," Rebecca called down. "I'm waiting for your answer."

"Elliott!" Will hissed urgently. "What do I do?"

"Buy some time. Talk to her," Elliott snapped, not looking up as she began to play out a length of rope.

Encouraged that Elliott seemed to have settled on a course of action, Will took several deep breaths and poked his head around the edge of the menhir. "Yes! OK!" he yelled back to Rebecca.

"That's my boy!" Rebecca answered cheerfully. "I knew you'd be up for it."

In the ensuing seconds they heard nothing more from Rebecca. Elliott and Chester each tied the rope around themselves, then Chester slung the other end of it across to Will as Elliott crouched down behind her rifle.

Will shrugged at Chester, who just shrugged back. Will could only think that, as a last resort, Elliott had decided they were going to attempt to climb down the Pore. He couldn't see any other way out. He turned to Cal. His brother was whimpering quietly to himself, his face nestled in Bartleby's neck as he clasped the agitated animal to his chest. Cal had lost it, and Will couldn't blame him. Will secured the rope around himself, then knotted it around Cal's waist. His brother passively allowed him to do so, without questioning why.

Will glanced back at the Pore. It was their only way out. But was it much of a solution? What was Elliott thinking? Will had seen for himself that the hole consisted of a sheer rock face, with nothing to cling to. It looked pretty grim for them all.

Will heard Rebecca whistling in the darkness as she approached.

"You are my sunshine," he murmured, recognizing the tune. "I really hate that song."

When she spoke again, she was much closer.

"Right, this is as far as I'm coming.

Massive searchlights blasted on from farther up the slope.

"Whiteout!" Elliott exclaimed, raising her head from her rifle as the blazing light hit the scope. She squeezed her eye shut several times, recovering from the glare. "That's just freakin' great!" she fumed. "I can't get a fix on anything now!"

Dazzling beams of light swept back and forth over the area where Will and the others were hiding, sending solid black shadows slashing across the ground.

Will stuck his head a little farther around the edge of the boulder. He'd had to turn off the headset to protect it, and the blinding intensity of the lights made it difficult to see, but he could make out someone — it certainly looked like Rebecca. She was standing in the open ground between two menhirs. He pulled back and glanced at Elliott, who was still lying prone, an array of explosives and stove guns within easy reach on the ground. She adjusted the position of her arms, ready to fire on the figure, even without the use of the scope.

"Don't! Don't shoot her," Will begged in a whisper. "The stalkers!"

Elliott didn't reply, her focus fixed on her target.

"Will! Got a little surprise for you!" Rebecca called out. Before she'd finished speaking, her voice came again, like some ventriloquist's trick. "Quite a surprise!"

Will frowned, and couldn't stop himself from taking another look.

"Meet my twin sister," Rebecca's voice announced. Or, rather, two voices announced, in unison.

"Careful!" Elliott warned as Will got to his feet and stuck his head even farther around the side of the menhir.

As he watched, the solitary figure appeared to split into two, revealing that a second girl had been standing immediately behind the first. The two turned to face each other, and Will saw identical profiles. They were mirror images.

"No!" he choked in disbelief, pulling back a little, then leaning out again.

"How's that for a bombshell, bro?" the Rebecca on the left shouted.

"All the time, there's been two of us, completely interchangeable," the Rebecca on the right cackled.

His eyes weren't deceiving him.

There were two Rebeccas, side by side.

It had to be a trick — an illusion of some kind, or maybe a second person wearing a mask. But no. As the twins moved, as the twins talked, it seemed as though they were absolutely identical.

They continued to chatter in such a quick-fire way that he couldn't tell which of them was saying what.

"Your worst nightmare — two irksome little skin and blisters, two little sisters!"

"How else do you think we worked it when one of us had to be Topsoil at all times?"

"We took turns babysitting you a the Highfield home."

"One on, one off, one up, one down, doing tours of duty for all those years."

"We both know you so well…"

"We've both cooked your lousy food…"

"…picked up your filthy clothes…"

"…washed your soiled, stinking underpants…"

"You dirty dog!" one sneered in disgust.

"…and listened to you blubber in your sleep, crying out for Mammy…"

"…but Mammy don't care…"

Despite the dire situation he found himself in, Will squirmed with acute embarrassment. It would have been bad enough if there was only a single Rebecca saying all this, but two of them, knowing every little intimate detail there was to know about him — and discussing it between them! It was more than he could bear.

"Shut up, you foul cow!" he screamed.

"Oooh, touchy, touchy," one of the twins cooed mockingly.

Temporarily oblivious to the legion of Limiters surrounding him, Will was suddenly transported back to his home in Highfield, to how it had been for all those years before his father went missing. He and his sister continually clashing over the most trivial of things. This felt exactly like another of their outrageous spats when she would wind him up with her interminable needling and well-aimed taunts. The outcome was always the same — he would eventually blow his top, and she would stand back to gloat, a smug smirk on her face.

"And I think you mean foul cows," the Rebecca on the right suggested with a sibilant "s," while the other continued to harangue him.

"But Mammy didn't have time for her little Will… he wasn't in the program guide…"

"… he wasn't Must-See TV."

Two belly laughs.

"What a sad, sad boy," a twin cawed.

"Joe Nobody digging his stupid holes, all on his lonesome."

"Digging for Daddy's love," sneered the other, and they both cackled uproariously.

Will closed his eyes — it was as if they were poking around inside his head, picking out and cruelly exposing his innermost fears and secrets. Nothing was inviolate — the twins were putting everything on show for all to see.

Then the twin on the left spoke out, her voice deadly serious.

"What we wanted to tell you, Will, and that lumbering oaf Chester, is that very soon now there won't be any home to go back to."

"No more Topsoilers," the second twin warbled gleefully.

"Well, not quite so many," the first corrected her in a sing-song voice.

"What are they saying?" Chester demanded. He was sweating profusely, his face an ashen white under the patches of dirt.

Will had had enough.

"Lies! It's all a load of lies!" he shouted, his whole body shaking with terror and anger.

"You saw for yourself, we've been busy bees in the Eternal City," a twin said. "We've had the Division prospecting there for years."

"And they finally isolated the very bug we were looking for. Our scientists did some work on it, and her are the fruits of their labors."

Will watched as the twin on the left took something that hung around her neck and held it up into the searchlights. It glittered as the beams caught it: a small glass phial, or so it appeared.

"Choice little number, this… bottled genocide… the big daddy of all pandemics from centuries ago. We call it Dominion."

"Dominion," the other repeated.

"We're going to let it rip Topsoil and—"

"— the Colony will reclaim its rightful home."

The twin with the phial proffered it to her sister as if she was proposing a toast.

"To a new London."

"To a new world," the other one added.

"Yes, world."

"I don't believe you, you witches! It's all trash talk!" Will protested. "You're lying!"

"Why would we bother?" the twin on the right countered, waving a second phial. "See this? We've got the vaccine, old chap. You Topsoilers won't be able to produce it in time. The whole country will be crippled, and there for the taking."

"So don't flatter yourself that we're down her just on your account."

"We've been doing a spot of spring-cleaning in the Deeps, ridding it of rotten old renegades and traitors to the cause."

"As well as running some final trials on Dominion — but then, some of your new buds have seen that for themselves."

"Ask Elliott. She knows the story."

At the mention of her name, Elliott jerked her head up from behind the rifle. "The Bunker," she mouthed at Will, recalling the sealed cells she'd blundered across with Cal.

Will's mind raced. He knew in his gut that Rebecca — the Rebeccas, he had to keep reminding himself — were capable of the most abject cruelty. Did they really have a plague? His thoughts were brought to an abrupt end as the twosome started up again.

"So, to business, bro," the Rebecca on the left said. "We're going to make you a one-time offer."

"But we're going back first," added the other.

Will watched as the doppelgangers both spun daintily on their toes and began to skip their way up the slope.

"I might be able to nail one…" Elliott whispered. She was behind her rifle again.

"No, wait!" Will pleaded with her.

"…but not both," Elliott went on.

"No. You'll only make it worse. Hear what they've got to say," Will begged, the blood in his veins turning to ice as he imagined the pack of stalkers descending on their gang of four, ripping each of them limb from limb.

As he watched, both figures slipped from view among the menhirs. What were the twins up to? What was this offer going to be?

He didn't have to wait long to find out. The twins yelled down at him in quick succession.

"People have a habit of dying around you, Will, don't they?"

"Fun-loving Uncle Tam, sliced to shreds."

"And that fat fool Imago. A little fish told me he got sloppy—"

"— and now he's stone-cold dead," the other twin chimed in.

"By the way, have you bumped into your real mother yet? Sarah's down here, and she's looking for you."

"Somehow she got it into her head that you're to blame for Tam's death, and—"

"No! She knows that's not true!" Will cried, his voice cracking.

For a beat the twins were silent, as if they'd been taken by surprise.

"Well, she won't get away from us a second time," one Rebecca promised, not sounding quite so confident anymore.

"No, she won't. And while we're playing family reunions, sis, do tell him about Grandma Macaulay," the other Rebecca suggested with a harsh edge to her voice. This twin was clearly not fazed in the slightest by Will's interruption.

"Oh, yes, I forgot about her. She's dead," the first Rebecca answered bluntly. "From unnatural causes."

"We spread her on the pennybun fields." They both shrieked with laughter, and Will heard Cal murmur, his face still pressed against Bartleby.

"No," Will croaked, fearing for Cal. "It's not true," he said weakly. "They're lying." Then, in an anguished shout, he asked them, "Why are you doing this? Can't you just leave me alone?"

"Sorry. Not possible," one answered.

"An eye for an eye," the other added.

"Out of curiosity, why did you put a bullet in that trapper we were 'questioning' back on the Great Plain?" a twin continued. "It was you, wasn't it Elliott?"

"Did you get him mixed up with Drake?" the other said, then gave a full-bodied guffaw. "Bit trigger-happy, aren't you?"

Will and Elliott exchanged confused looks, and she mouthed "Oh no," at him.

"And as for that silly old goat, Dr. Burrows — we left him to putter around…"

Will stiffened as he heard his father's name, his heart missing several beats.

"— like bait in a trap—"

"— and we didn't even have to finish him off."

"Looks like he did the job for us."

The twins high-pitched giggles echoed around the dark stones.

"No, not Dad," Will whispered, shaking his head as he pulled back behind the menhir. He slid down its rough surface and slumped to the ground, his head hung low.

"So this is what we're putting on the table," a twin shouted, her voice deadly serious once more.

"If you want your little gang to live—"

"— then hand yourself over."

"And we'll be lenient with them," her sister piped in.

They were toying with him! Just as if they were playing some childish game, only this was sheer torture.

They went on in persuasive tones, telling him that his surrender would help his friends. Will could hear what the Rebeccas were saying, but it was all just noise. As though a dense fog had descended on him, he felt disoriented, and it was all he could do to sit upright against the menhir. He examined the ground around him, listlessly lifting a handful of dirt and crushing it in his fist. As he raised his head, his eyes alighted on Cal's face. Tears were streaming down the boy's cheeks.

Will had no idea what to say to his brother — he couldn't begin to express what he himself felt about Grandma Macaulay's death — so he just turned away. In the opposite direction, he noticed Elliott had left her position behind the menhir. She was snake-crawling through the arch by the edge of the Pore, almost at the first of the stone steps that led nowhere. Connected to her by the rope, Chester had begun the same short journey.

Trying to pull himself together, Will flung aside the fistful of dirt. He glanced again at Chester. He knew he should be following him, but he couldn't bring himself to — move. He was in a maelstrom of indecision. Should he give up the game and just hand himself over? Sacrifice himself in a bid to save the lives of his brother, Chester, and Elliott? It was the least he could do… After all, he'd gotten them into this. And if he didn't surrender, then they were probably all doomed, anyway.

"So what's it to be, big bro?" a Rebecca twin prompted him. "Going to do the right thing?"

Elliott was now completely hidden from sight down the flight of steps. "Don't, Will! It won't make any difference," she called to him.

"We're waiting!" shouted the other Rebecca, without any hint of her former humor. "Ten seconds, ready or not!"

The sisters began to count down, their alternating voices proclaiming each second.

"Ten!"

"Nine!"

"Oh, God," Will mumbled, throwing another glance at Cal.

"Eight!"

Sobs wracking his body, Cal babbled incomprehensibly at Will, who could only shake his head hopelessly in response.

"Seven!"

From behind the edge of the Pore, Elliott was urging him and Cal to get moving.

"Six!"

Chester, at the top of the steps, was jabbering at him, rapidly.

"Five!"

"Come on, Will!" Elliott snapped, her head bobbing up above the lip of the Pore.

"Four!"

Absolute confusion reigned as they each tried to speak to him at the same time, but through it all Will only heard the seconds as they twins coldly announced them, nearing the end of the countdown.

"Three!"

"Will!" Chester yelled, yanking at the rope in an attempt to pull him closer.

"Will!" Cal was screaming.

"Two!"

Will staggered to his feet.

"One!"

"Zero!" the twins said simultaneously.

"Your time's run out."

"The deal's off."

"More needless deaths you've notched u, Will!"

Will heard Cal shouting and spun around.

"NO! WAIT!" his brother was shrieking. "I WANT TO GO HOME!"

He'd jumped out from behind the menhir and was waving his arms, in plain view of the Limiters and bathed in the full beams of the spotlights.

Right in the firing line.

Cracks of multiple rifle shots came from all around the upper reaches of the slope. So many in such a short space of time, it sounded like a speeded-up drumroll.

The barrage struck Cal all over his body with a messy, deadly precision. He didn't stand a chance. As if swatted by a huge invisible hand, the bullets' impact swept him off his feet, leaving a momentary red trace airborne in his place.

Will could only watch as his brother flopped in a broken heap by the very edge of the Pore, like a puppet whose strings had all been cut. It was as if it had happened in grisly slow motion. The bounce of his brother's arm as it hit the damp ground, the fact that he was only wearing one sock — Will absorbed even the smallest details.

Then Cal's body simply tipped over the edge. The rope around Will's waist snapped tight, the sudden tension yanking on him and forcing him several steps forward.

Bartleby, who had been waiting obediently where Cal had left him, scrabbled up in a whir of long limbs and burst after his master, vanishing from sight over the lip of the Pore. The drag on Will from the rope increased, and he knew that the cat must be hanging on to Cal's body.

Shots sizzled through the light beams, which switched back and forth so rapidly that they gave a stroboscopic effect. The bullets fell around him, like a metal rain, whining and ricocheting off the menhirs and flicking up sprays of dirt at his feet.

But Will didn't make any attempt to hide. With his hands pressed against his temples, he screamed with every last drop of air in his lungs, until all that was left was a rasping croak. He swallowed down more air and screamed a second time: The word Enough! Was just discernible through it. As his howl came to an end, a deathly hush filled the place.

The Limiters had ceased firing.

Chester and Elliott were no longer yelling to get his attention.

Will swayed where he stood. He was numb, oblivious to the rope as it bit sharply into his waist.

He didn't feel a thing.

Cal was dead.

This time there was no question in Will's mind. And he might have saved his brother's life if he'd surrendered to the twins.

But he hadn't.

Once before, he'd thought Cal was gone for good, and Drake had performed a miracle and resuscitated him. But now there were no reprieves, no happy endings. No this time.

The intolerable weight of responsibility he bore crushed him. He, and he alone, had been responsible for destroying many lives. He saw their faces. Uncle Tam. Grandma Macaulay. People who had given everything for him; people he loved.

And he couldn't help but believe his father, Dr. Burrows, was lost to him, too. He would never see him again, not now. Will's dream was finished.

The lull was brought to an abrupt end as the Limiters opened fire again, the barrage even fiercer than before, and Chester and Elliott resumed their panicked shouting as they tried to get through to him.

But, as if the sound had been turned down, Will wasn't hearing anything. His glazed eyes drifted over Chester's stricken and desperate face, mere footsteps away, as his friend yelled with all his might. It had no effect — even his friendship with Chester had been taken from him.

Everything he'd relied upon — the certainties underpinning his uncertain life — had been knocked out from under him, one after another.

His brain burned with the horrific image of his brother's death. That last moment blotted out everything else.

"Enough," he said, quite steadily this time.

Cal had lost his life because of him.

There was no avoiding it, no room for excuses, no quarter.

Will knew it should be him hanging there, punched full of holes, not his brother.

It was as if something was being stretched and stretched in his mind, creaking and bellying from side to side, until it was so close to the breaking point that it would fracture into tiny, sharp fragments that might never be pieced together again.

He struggled to stay upright as Cal's deadweight pulled at him. The Limiters continued to fire, but Will was somewhere else, and none of it mattered anymore.

He took a single stride toward the Pore, allowing the weight to draw him on.

From the top of the stone steps, Chester came toward him, holding out his hand and hoarsely shrieking his name.

Will looked up and saw him as if for the first time.

"I'M SO SORRY, WILL!" Chester yelled, then his voice became strangely calm as he realized Will, at last, was listening. "Come here. It's OK."

"Is it?" Will asked.

Just for that second, it was as if they were insulated from all the horror and fear that surrounded them. Chester nodded and smiled briefly back at him. "Yes, and so are we," he replied, his words heavy with meaning. "I'm sorry."

A tiny germ of hope was born within Will.

He still had his friend — all was not lost, and they would get themselves out of this somehow.

Will took another step, reaching out his hand toward Chester.

Faster and faster, closing the distance between them, the rope pulling him forward: By the very edge of the Pore, he was just about to take hold of Chester's hand.

At the top of the slope, the Rebecca twins shouted simultaneously.

"Good riddance to him!"

"Bust out the big guns!"

The heavy artillery bucked into life. The Limiters' bank of howitzers spat massive shells that swerved like fireballs, leaving flaming red trails behind them. The whole slope was lit up with their blazing light, and the sound was deafening.

The shells struck, splitting any menhirs in their path and throwing up huge curtains of dirt, smashing into the paved platform and lifting the flagstones like a gust of wind scatters a pack of playing cards.

Will was thrown forward, knocked senseless by the blasts. He sailed straight into the pitch-black, clean over his friend's head.

If he'd been conscious, Will would have seen Chester's flailing arms and legs as he grabbed at anything he could in a last-ditch attempt to prevent himself from being dragged over by the rope that bound him to Will.

And he would have heard Elliott's screams as she, too, was yanked into the Pore after Chester.

If Will had been capable of thought, he would have felt the dark air rushing around him as he plummeted down and down, his dead brother somewhere beneath him, and the other two, still howling and screaming, up above. And he would have been terrified by the odd sections of masonry and rubble from the pulverized menhirs that were falling all around them.

But there were no thoughts, just a black nothingness in his mind, identical to what he was plunging through.

Will was in free fall, his ears popping mercilessly and his breath stolen every so often by the rush of air as he shot through it, reaching terminal velocity.

On occasion he collided with Elliott, Chester, and even Cal's limp corpse, the ropes twisting around their limbs and torsos in random arrangements to bind them together, and then untwisting as they floated apart, as if they were dancers in some macabre aerial ballet. Every so often Will's trajectory took him to the side of the seemingly endless Pore, where he either crashed against the unforgiving rock or, curiously, hit softer matter — which, had he been conscious, would have caused him a great deal of surprise.

But in his insensible state, he was unaware of any of this; in a place beyond caring.

If his mind hadn't been disconnected, he would have noticed that although he continued to fall through the black vacuum, his rate of descent was slowing.

Imperceptibly at first, but definitely slowing… slowing… slowing…

53

Once they were in sight of the Styx floodlights, Drake hadn't risked remaining on his feet for the final distance. Instead he had dragged Sarah with him to a vantage point midway between where the Limiters were concentrated and, at the bottom of the slope, where Elliott and the boys had apparently been run to ground.

As Drake crouched behind a menhir, Sarah just lay there. She was too shattered to do anything but listen. With her head propped on a boulder, and her clothes soaked through and stuck to her with her own blood, she caught some of the shouted exchange between Will and the twins. The fact that there were two Rebeccas didn't come as any great revelation. There'd long been rumors in the Colony that the Styx dabbled in eugenics — genetic manipulation for the advancement of their race — and that twins, triplets, and even quadruplets had become the norm as they multiplied their numbers. Yet another myth that had been borne out to her. She should have twigged that there were two Rebeccas when the one on the train claimed to have been at the Topsoil hospital that same morning — the Styx child had been telling the truth.

Sarah heard the twins taunting Will, then their threat to kill Topsoilers using Dominion.

"Did you get that?" Drake whispered over to her.

"Yes," she said, nodding grimly in the darkness.

The shouted exchanges came to her as if she was at the bottom of a well, echoing and swirling and often too indistinct to grasp in their entirety. But despite her deteriorating condition, some part of her brain retained enough functionality to process the snippets.

She heard her name mentioned and what the twins said about Tam's and Grandma Macaulay's deaths. Sarah's body locked up with fury. The Styx were wiping out all the members of her family, one by one. Then she heard the threats to kill Will and Cal and everyone with them.

"You've got to help them!" she said to Drake.

He looked helplessly at her. "What can I do? I'm hopelessly outnumbered and I've only got stove guns. There's a whole Styx army over there."

"But you have to do something!" she exhorted him.

"What do you suggest? I chuck rocks at them?" he said, his voice uneven with anguish.

But Sarah had to at least try to go to her sons' aid. Unnoticed by Drake as he continued to watch events from behind the menhir, she began to haul herself over the ground. She was determined to get to where Will and Cal were, even if she had to stop often to rest.

She heard the Rebecca twins counting, and the shouts of desperation down at the end of the slope.

Squinting through the glare, she glimpsed a small figure as it stepped into the light. She knew with a mother's intuition that it was Cal. Her heart pounded feebly as she extended a hand to where he stood, so far away. She watched him frantically waving his arms and heard his hopeless cries.

Then the shots came.

She saw his death. She dropped her hand to the ground.

There were terrible screams, then a cacophony of sound, and the air was filled with what appeared, to her jumbled head, to be flaming comets. The ground shook as she'd never felt it shake before, as if the whole cavern was collapsing around her. Then the noise and light were gone, and in their place an awful quietness.

She was too late, too late for all of them. She'd wanted to call out to Cal, but hadn't.

She wept dusty tears.

She realized what a fool she had been. She should never have doubted Will! The Styx had tried to trick her into making the biggest mistake of her worthless, sorry excuse of a life. They'd even convinced Grandma Macaulay that Will was to blame. The poor, deluded old lady had believed their lies.

It was so obvious to Sarah now that the Styx were purging their domain. Once she had served her purpose, she'd have been next in line for the chopping block.

Why hadn't she trusted her instincts? She should have taken her life in the excavation back in Highfield. It had felt so wrong when she'd lowered the blade from her throat and allowed that little snake to persuade her to work with the Styx. From that moment of weakness onward, Sarah had unwittingly committed to a misguided manhunt for her own sons. A dumb cog in the Styx's grand plan. For that she could never forgive herself — or them.

She closed her eyes, felling her fluttering heartbeat, as if there were a hummingbird trapped in her rib cage.

Maybe it was better this way, to let it end at last, right here and now.

She flicked her dull eyes open.

No!

She couldn't allow herself the luxury of death, not quite yet. Not while there was the faintest chance she could put some of this unholy mess right again.

She retained a sliver of hope that Will was still alive. She might be able to get to him. These thoughts pierced her brain like skewers, causing her as much pain as her injuries, and spurring her on.

Using her arms, she dragged herself toward the place where Will had been trapped, but every action became more and more labored, as if she was clawing her way through molasses. She didn't let up. She'd covered a significant distance when she blacked out again.

She came to, not knowing how long she'd been unconscious. There was no sign of Drake, but she heard voices nearby. She lifted her head and caught a glimpse of the Rebecca twins. They were issuing orders to a squad of Limiters at the very edge of the Pore.

She knew then that she was too late to save Will. But could she exact revenge for Tam, for her mother, for her sons?

Dominion!

Yes, there was something she could do. She was willing to bet that one or both of the Rebeccas still had the Dominion phials on them. And she'd seen how vitally important the virus was to their plan.

Yes!

If she could at least stymie the Styx's schemes, and maybe save some Topsoiler lives in the bargain, it would go a little way toward absolving her. She had doubted her own son. She had done so much wrong. It was time to get something right.

Using the side of a shattered menhir, she managed to get to her feet. Her irregular pulse thumped through her head, as loud as a kettledrum. The landscape swayed and pitched as she stood hunched over in the hard shadows, a different form of darkness amassing and beginning to engulf her; a darkness that light would not affect.

Pointing and looking down, the Styx girls stood at the rim of the Pore.

With a Herculean effort, Sarah dredged every remaining drop of vitality from her wrecked frame. Her arms outstretched, she flew at the twins, covering the remaining distance as fast as her broken body would propel her.

She saw the identical looks of surprise on their faces as they turned, and heard their identical screams as she swept both of them over the brink with her. It hadn't taken much to dislodge them, but it had taken all Sarah had left.

In her last moments of life, Sarah was smiling.