by Nick Cook
‘Thanks. I’ve been getting the feel for this time thing, tuning into different moments as they appeared in my mind. Just give me a moment and I’ll fast-forward again.’
He closed his eyes tight shut once more and the manor leapt into existence around us, with workers landscaping the grounds at high speed. People blurred past, too fast to make out, and then everything stopped dead. I took in a solitary Jag parked outside and Reece Johnson walking towards the house.
‘Nearly there, I just need to follow this particular thread in my mind,’ Ethan said.
The scene started to skip forward and I recognised former members of the Cabinet coming and going from the building. Then it jumped – the manor gone and a huge crater beneath us.
‘Right, just need to ease back up a little now,’ Ethan explained.
The house rippled back into existence and twelve ghosts appeared round the table in the meeting room.
‘Fantastic work, Ethan – you nailed it,’ I said.
‘Not bad, if I say so myself,’ he replied with a smile.
Johnson placed the Lodestone in the middle of the table, moved his hand to the top of the cube and tapped his palm on it seven times. At once, glowing runes appeared on each face of the cube. He placed his forefinger on the left-hand symbol of a star, which flared with brightness at his touch. Next, he pressed the opposite symbol, a crescent moon, followed by a flame-shaped icon on the front face. Finally, he moved his hand round to the rear and touched a shadow crow within a circle.
Light erupted from the cube’s edges as an aperture opened at its top to reveal a lens. From that, a column of light rose upwards and the ghostly head of Archios rippled into existence to hover over the device.
‘Bloody fantastic, Ethan – you’re a star,’ Chloe said, squeezing his shoulder.
‘I aim to impress, but we should get back to Eaglehurst fast, and try this sequence out for ourselves.’
‘Yes, but there’s something else I need to see first,’ I replied.
Chloe’s gaze tightened on me immediately. ‘Jake, don’t do this to yourself.’
‘I have to, Chloe. Somebody needs to be able to tell Daniel exactly what happened to his sister.’
‘I don’t mean this to sounds harsh, but Melissa’s dead,’ Ethan said. ‘That’s all he needs to know.’
‘It’s not enough for me. I don’t know why she didn’t make it. She was always brilliant at casting fireballs in her training. Even if she hung back to deal with Gavin, he shouldn’t have stood a chance against her. Something went badly wrong.’
‘It’s going to eat you up not knowing?’ Ethan replied.
‘Yes, yes, it is.’
Ethan glanced at Chloe, who nodded.
‘OK, this is your show…’ he said. He slowly closed his fingers and time leapt forward again. The figures in room disappeared and I saw the battle raging again through the outside walls, Gem’s angel carving through flocks of shadow crows in the sky overhead.
I drifted us away from the meeting room and towards the heart of the building where we’d found Johnson in his secret room with the scrawled Shade spell.
As we approached, I watched the ghosts of Melissa and myself clamber out through a broken hole in a wall – the one I’d just blasted into it. The sequence jumped forward a few minutes and debris tumbled past us into the gravity bomb pinprick of darkness as we crawled our way back out into the corridor. A moment later, Gavin’s shadow wolf raced round the corner to confront the phantom versions of Melissa and me.
Melissa stepped in front of me as I staggered under the weight of the Lodestone I was carrying. She raised her hands, her spark already lit. There was no way she could have missed Gavin – not at such short range. I saw my ghost say something to her and she nodded. And then I vanished, the Lodestone clutched to my chest, while Melissa stayed behind and turned to confront Gavin.
I mentally braced myself for what was about to happen next. As Gavin’s shadow wolf leapt, Melissa flicked her wrist forward to fire a plasma ball at it. But at that exact same moment, the floorboards buckled beneath, presumably dragged backwards by the gravity bomb, and she was thrown off balance. Gavin cannoned into her and she could do nothing but slide backwards towards the tiny black pinprick of darkness.
My fingers bit into Ethan’s shoulder as we all watched what happened next.
Melissa’s eyes widened as she tried and failed to grab a pillar.
Bile stung my throat as we saw her body near the gravity bomb begin to stretch out, her limbs snapping backwards at impossible angles. Melissa’s silent scream was unbearably loud in my imagination, the cry of someone who knew they were about to die, as she was pulled into the point of nothingness.
The ghostly view vanished and Chloe was sobbing.
Ethan shook his head at me. ‘We don’t need to see any more, Jake.’
‘Yes, we bloody do! I need to know everything, see every terrible moment.’
‘Why, Jake?’
‘Because we owe that to Melissa. She was an amazing person who died because of the stupidity of General Hammond rushing in like always and thinking he knows best, despite the fact we’re the ones with the powers to deal with the Shade.’
Chloe turned to look at me. ‘Jake, I know you’re hurting, especially after what you’ve just seen, but you’re taking this too far. Yes, I’ll give you that Hammond was overconfident in this mission, but he’s still a good man and means well.’
Heat erupted through me. ‘You bloody think? It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that Normals aren’t equipped to deal with the Shade, whatever weapons they come up with. They need to let us get on and do our job rather than get in our way.’
‘But what about your dad, Kelly, Claire…all the others who’ve helped us? Think of the sacrifice that Clarke and Alan made—’
My anger exploded and I hurtled Chloe away through the air, still linked by my TK supporting us all. She smacked into the lip of the crater and rolled over, groaning, as the soldiers rushed across to help her.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Jake?’ Ethan shouted at me. He twisted round to face me and grabbed me by the shoulders.
But my anger burned hotter. Fury and guilt spun together inside the furnace of my mind. My fist lashed out and I struck him hard in the face. My focus destroyed, we both dropped ten metres into the soft mud at the bottom of the crater and the air exploded out of my lungs with the impact.
Ethan hauled himself back to his feet, fists clenched, eyes daggers.
‘Leave it!’ Chloe shouted to Ethan as the soldiers helped her out of the crater.
Ethan glowered down at me, his whole body shaking. ‘You little shit, how could you do that to her – someone who’s meant to be your best friend?’ He turned round, and, breathing hard, scrambled up the crater to the soldiers’ outstretched hands. They helped him up and a moment later he was cradling Chloe to him. Then they both vanished in a flash of light.
As the blinding afterglow faded in my retinas, the soldiers watched me with uncertainty, gripping their Voletar rifles hard.
Something crumbled inside me as raw acidic grief burned in my gut. Then the world blurred through my tears.
I tipped back my head. ‘Melissa!’ I screamed into the sky.
Chapter Ten
I sat in the kitchen, pushing cold baked beans over my soggy toast with a fork as Kelly’s cat, Midnight, watched me from the windowsill. The door opened and Kelly walked in with a tray filled with jars of honey.
She raised her chin towards me. ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding yourself away.’
‘I’m not hiding; I just need time out to think some things through.’
‘You really don’t make things easy on yourself, do you, Jake?’
‘I’ve had better days.’
She started to stack the honey pots into a cupboard. ‘And I’m here for you whenever you need a friendly ear.’
‘I might well take you up on that at some point.’
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��Glad to hear it. Anyway, I think I may know of a way to lighten your mood a fraction – Daniel has turned up.’
‘Oh, thank god. Is he OK?’
‘As well as can be expected, but the one good thing is I managed to get him to eat a decent breakfast.’
‘Then I should go and talk to him.’
‘I’d give him a bit more time, Jake. He’s hurting.’
‘He’s not the only one.’
Kelly sat down next to me, her forehead creasing. ‘So how about having that talk right now? The rumour is that you lost the plot a bit yesterday.’
‘Yeah, I did…’ I doodled an abstract shape beneath the notes on my pad.
‘So what’s that then – spilling your heart out in your diary?’
‘Actually, I’m working on a speech that I want to give to everybody.’
‘What sort of speech?’
‘About pushing ourselves harder with the training programme, because it doesn’t look as if General Hammond and his precious military will be able to do the heavy lifting when it comes down to the wire.’
‘Oh, great, that’s just what we all need.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Let’s put it this way. Speaking as someone who hasn’t got Awoken powers, a chest-thumping talk may be the opposite of what you need to do right now.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Jake, I get to hear quite a lot when I’m out and about in the encampment. And some of it isn’t pretty, especially when people talk about us Normals.’
‘That’s just a nickname.’
‘Maybe so, but it makes people like myself and John sound like second-class citizens around here.’
‘Kelly, that’s the last thing it means. It’s a slang phrase, nothing else.’
‘For you maybe, but unfortunately there’s a few who don’t share that view.’
‘Tell me who and I’ll straighten them out.’
Kelly held up her hands. ‘No, I can’t let you do that – it will blow things out of proportion. But please be careful about what you say in any rallying speech. Words can have dangerous consequences, especially when there are a few individuals who see themselves as superior to people who aren’t Awoken.’
‘You’re seriously telling me that some of our recruits are really that stupid?’
‘Yes, unfortunately I am. That’s why you need to get out there and listen – to get a feel for where some of the minds here are heading.’
‘As though I haven’t got enough to stress over at the moment.’
‘Which is why you also need to make your peace with Ethan and Chloe.’
‘So they’ve been sounding off about me to you, have they?’
‘Of course they haven’t. Even if you don’t realise it, they are way too loyal to do anything like that. However, although Chloe won’t tell you this, she was in a complete mess when she arrived back here. And neither of them would say what happened. But I don’t need to be a genius to see the way that you guys have been avoiding each other. It’s as clear as the nose on your face that you’ve had some sort of fight. And knowing how tightly wound you are at the moment, I suspect this has everything to do with Melissa’s death. Tell me if I’m getting any of this wrong.’
I dropped my eyes from hers. ‘I wish I could, Kelly. But my head is a car crash and all I can concentrate on is the major stuff at the moment.’
‘The major stuff being?’
‘Saving our whole world. Everything else has to take a backseat to that.’ I picked up my notepad. ‘And that’s why this speech is so important. We’ve all got to be better if we are to stand a chance in this fight, especially now we know about Dark Sunset.’
‘I see, but keep in mind what I said…’
‘Trust me, Kelly.’ I stood up as my thoughts crystallised. Now I knew what I had to do. ‘Sentinel, can you gather everybody together in the upper field? I need to talk to them.’
‘No problem, Jake.’
With my mouth already drying out at the prospect of giving a speech to so many people, I headed outside, feeling Kelly’s eyes on my back.
I stood on top of the picnic table next to the bronze stag with a microphone in my hand as thirty thousand pairs of eyes stared back at me. My heart was thumping so hard in my chest that I was seriously worried I was going to pass out. To say I felt self-conscious would be the understatement of the century.
In the crowd, I’d already spotted Chloe and Ethan not quite making eye contact with me. And I knew I deserved it because that whole argument was my fault. I’d let myself channel my anger towards them and lashed out – quite literally in Chloe’s case. It had been deeply wrong and deeply pathetic. I’d apologise when the moment was right. But right now it felt as if there was hundred-metre-high fence between us – one that I’d built. Same old me.
The person I least expected to see here was Daniel, but there he was – along with his Mongoose squad, their heads bent together in conversation. He may not have been so much as throwing a look in my direction, but at least he’d come, and that was a start.
I’d made sure that Captain Ericsson and his squad were distracted – by an alleged sighting of a journalist at the harbour. The last thing I needed was for my words to be reported straight back to General Hammond – especially anything about us capturing the Lodestone.
The one friendly face next to me was the unbelievably kind and always patient Gem. I’d approached her before the speech because part of it involved her. Being Gem, she’d been happy to help. And if she’d heard of my bust-up with Ethan and Chloe, her expression wasn’t giving anything away.
The problem was that I was finding it hard to accept the encouraging smiles she kept throwing my way. Even to acknowledge her feelings would make me vulnerable. And I wasn’t sure I really deserved her love anyway. Maybe several years of therapy would sort me out if the world survived that long… Yes, priorities.
I dismissed my chain of thought and concentrated. My throat was as dry as a desert as I waved my arms and the conversations across the massive crowd dropped to a whisper.
‘Hi, everyone. You’re probably wondering why I’ve gathered you together today,’ I said, knowing Sentinel was projecting my words to everyone’s eBuds to make sure they reached even the people at the back.
Murmurs and lots of nods.
‘As you may be aware, a number of us were called away on an unexpected mission yesterday. We lost a very valued member of our team, Melissa Warren, who was killed during a confrontation with the Shade.’
It was hard not to notice that almost every head near Daniel turned to glance at him, but he remained staring at the ground, arms crossed.
‘But as awful as her loss is, the one thing I’m certain of is that she would have wanted us all to continue with our plans here.’
This time Daniel did look up and, despite the hundred metres between us, the hatred in his eyes was unmistakable.
‘You bloody think?’ he shouted, shaking off the hands of his Mongoose squad who were trying to stop him. He stormed away through the crowd, pushing people aside.
Gem gave me a small nod, her eyes locked on to mine, almost as if she were trying to give me her own strength to get me through this speech. I paused long enough for Daniel to disappear.
‘Thanks to the efforts of Melissa and the other Awoken on that mission, we managed to secure a Shade communication device that Sentinel is now trying to crack. It’s also thanks to Melissa that we learnt that the Shade have been working on a secret mission called Dark Sunset. It turns out that the DEC they installed in St Pauls may have been an intended distraction from a much more dangerous plan that the Shade are currently working on.’
A chorus of hushed conversations and worried looks rippled through the crowd.
‘Because of this, I’ve already spoken to my dad, Martin Stevens, who as you know is overseeing the production of the next-gen medium and heavy L2 and L3 Waveriders, along with Claire Baxter. Now the first fusion reactor i
s ready, we will go ahead and start testing the first completed Waverider before beginning the roll-out of the rest of the L2s around the world.’
I glanced down at Gem and beckoned to her to join me.
She gave me an uncertain look, but then jumped up to stand next to me on the picnic table. ‘You didn’t say anything about me having to get up here,’ she whispered.
I cupped my hand over the mic. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I’m having to do everything I can to stop myself being sick in front of all these people.’
‘That really doesn’t help.’
I smiled at her before turning my attention back to the crowd. ‘Gem has agreed to take her Panda squad to Culham to test the very first heavy L3 Waverider – once they have completed their advanced training.’
The crowd whooped and cheered. Her squad chanted, ‘Go, Pandas!’
I raised my hands for quiet. ‘As you all know, Gem is one of the most highly skilled Awoken, and an incredible healer. She trains as hard as anybody – harder often – and her abilities speak for themselves. I want Gem to act as an inspiration for all of you, because in the coming months we need to accelerate our training of each and every one of you here. As of today, we’re going to have to curtail recreation breaks. When you’re awake, you’ll be training. When you’re asleep, you’ll be learning to empty your mind. You will need to dig deeper than you ever have, push yourselves further than ever before, and be the best that you can be. Because we need you. Our world needs you. And the one thing that we are sure of is that when the Shade unleash whatever Dark Sunset is, it will almost certainly be awful for our world.’
I gazed out at all of them, letting my pause build before adding, ‘The only thing standing between the Shade winning this war and destroying all life on our planet are all of you gathered in this field. Look at the person next to you, and know that –’ I raised a clenched fist and punched it into the air – ‘together we will win! So what do you say, everyone? Yay or nay?’
Thirty thousand voices shouted out in unison, ‘Yay!’
But even in the middle of that moment, as Gem beamed at me, I couldn’t help but notice Chloe giving Ethan a wide, unsure frown.