by Nick Cook
We headed back to the concourse, the people rushing past us unaware of the invisible group of Awoken in their midst.
‘So what are we looking for?’ Gem asked.
‘Hopefully we’ll know when we see it,’ I replied.
I tried to think this through. Carl and Professor Jackson had been standing here and the next they’d simply vanished. But where to exactly?
‘Let’s split up so we can cover more ground,’ I said.
The other two nodded and soon we were all scouring the rest of the station.
I headed back to the spot where the Shade pavement artist had been. There was no sign of the runic circle he’d drawn, but I dialled in some X-ray to see if that could reveal any clues. With my shifted vision, the commuters became a group of moving skeletons.
I glanced down, expecting to see tunnels and train tracks, along with the usual mix of underground pipework. All that was there of course, but so was something else. A huge room lurked far beneath the station – at least as large as Grand Central itself.
I tapped my eBud. ‘Sentinel, I’m seeing a large underground room below the station. Do you what it is?’
‘I do actually, and it’s something rather interesting,’ he replied. ‘During the Second World War, a secret power station called M42 was constructed in a basement beneath Grand Central. It supplied electricity for the subway system. Even to this day, most people don’t know it’s down there.’
‘Why was it a secret? Gem asked as she approached, slipping through the crowd to join me with her finger in her ear.
‘It was an insurance policy in case the Nazis ever reached the US and began bombing New York.’
Ethan shook his head as he walked across too. ‘That’s quite the story, Sentinel.’
‘It is,’ the AI replied. ‘M42 is no longer used, although most of the original turbine equipment is still down there.’
‘You don’t suppose that’s the location of the Shade’s Dark Sunset project, do you?’ Gem asked.
‘Maybe. But I also think Jackson’s abduction has to be significant. It could be linked to his work at Brookhaven, which could be another possible location,’ I replied. ‘After all, the Shade have form with this regarding my dad. But I think it’s best to be on the safe side and check this out. Sentinel, how can we get down there?’
‘I’ll direct you, although I’ll need your TK ability to deal with a few locks as you go, Jake,’ Sentinel replied.
‘Just lead the way,’ I said.
After going through a nondescript door, we’d climbed down a concrete stairwell, heading deeper and deeper underground. The air was humid, our footsteps echoey, as if we were in some sort of crypt. A good five minutes after we’d started, we finally reached the bottom of the stairwell, and stood before a locked metal door.
‘Time to do your stuff, Jake,’ Ethan said.
Gem gave me an encouraging smile as I reached out with my mind, probing the lock’s mechanism. I gradually built up a mental picture until I was reasonably certain about how it worked. I pushed a sprung lever inside the door with my mind, and a snick came from the lock.
‘You are such a useful guy to know in a tight situation,’ Ethan said. He reached out to try the door handle.
I grabbed his arm. ‘Hold up a minute. Let’s see what’s on the other side before we go charging in.’
Together with the others, I shifted into X-ray vision. At once the huge room beyond revealed itself. It contained a number of large machines, presumably the old power turbines.
At first I thought no one was in there, but then I spotted a skeleton chained between two posts, their arms outstretched and head hung down.
Gem shook her head. ‘Looks as if someone is being held prisoner in there.’
‘Carl?’ Ethan asked.
‘Could be, but there’s only one way to know for sure,’ I said.
Ethan extended his palm and a spark burned into existence.
Gem and I lit our own plasma spheres and I licked my dry lips. If Archios was in there, maybe this was our chance stop Dark Sunset before the Shade had a chance to unleash it. The destruction in London had been bad enough, and the prospect of New York being torn from our world and into the Void was just as frightening.
Adrenaline hummed through my body as I nodded to Ethan. He grabbed hold of the door handle with his other hand and slowly pulled it open. The stench of something rotten swept up my nostrils and made us all gag. Instinct told me that something terrible had happened in here.
I placed my finger to my lips and had to fight my nausea as we crept through the doorway.
Just as I’d seen with my X-ray vision, metal turbines filled the concrete-walled room. A secret underground power station right in the heart of New York. I was half surprised they hadn’t thrown it open as a tourist attraction.
Through the murk, my eyes sought out the person I’d seen from the other side of the door.
In the dim light, I spotted the guy straight ahead – chained to metal support struts of the turbines.
Gem was staring at him too. ‘That’s definitely Carl and he’s surrounded by shadow crows,’ she whispered. ‘That looks like another Lodestone too.’
I quickly overlaid a thermal image on top of the Real to peer through the gloom. She was right: a dark box was on the floor near Carl’s feet and at least a dozen Shade shadow crows were swooping around him. One of the crows landed on his shoulder and its dark talons tore a strip of flesh from his chest.
Carl, his eyes shut, moaned.
‘On my mark,’ I said quietly.
Gem and Ethan extended their hands as their sparks strengthened.
‘Fire!’ I shouted.
Our three fireballs swept through the turbine room, light blazing out, glinting off the machinery and illuminating the cobwebbed darkness. They shot straight at the shadow crows, dissolving them to flickering embers.
We sprinted towards Carl, whose body was a lattice of bleeding scars. The stench of death strengthened.
Carl slumped from the two chains binding his wrists over his head. I locked on to the metal and shattered the chains with a burst of TK power.
He began to topple, but Ethan caught him. ‘Easy, mate.’ Ethan gently him lowered to the ground.
Gem knelt by him and bit her lip. ‘His energy field is dimming – this is too much for his self-healing ability.’
‘Can you help him?’ I asked.
‘I’ll try my best, but it’s going to be a close call,’ she replied. She pressed a hand onto the deepest cuts on Carl’s chest. Blood bubbled up between Gem’s fingers as she applied light pressure to the wounds.
Carl moaned again, spittle foaming on his lips.
‘You just hang in there,’ I said.
Gem dipped her head, her breath steaming in the chill air. Her forehead furrowed, her breathing accelerating as Carl’s wounds began to close up.
I overlaid the Light Web over the Real to see the broken lines of his energy field weaving themselves back together, the lines connecting in complex spiderwebs of patterns.
‘This is going to take some time and it will be safer not to move him,’ Gem said as she kept her eyes closed.
I nodded. ‘While you do that, we should go through this place to see what the Shade have been up to in here.’
‘Going by that stench, nothing good,’ Ethan said.
The turbines towered over us as we crept towards the end of the room, our sparks lit and ready deal with any other shadow crows that might appear. I tried shifting through every frequency, but I couldn’t find anything else out of the ordinary.
‘At least there’s no sign of any doomsday device in here,’ Ethan said.
‘Which would suggest we really do need to check out Brookhaven.’
Ethan didn’t reply. Instead, he gestured towards the far corner of the room. ‘Hey, what’s that, Jake?’
I turned to where he was pointing. A pile of old shoes and discarded clothes had been piled up in one corner. Every nerve
in my body tingled as we drew closer. The stench of death was growing overwhelming.
Ethan held his arm across his mouth and nose. ‘Sweet lord, what have those monsters been doing down here?’
‘God knows,’ I replied.
A man’s scream came from behind us.
We whirled round to see Carl struggling under Gem’s hands as she tried to hold him down.
‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ Gem said as we rushed back to them. Carl bucked under her hands, his eyes darting around the room.
Ethan squatted by Carl to pin his shoulders down. ‘Relax, we’re here to help you.’
Carl’s eyes snapped open. ‘Those creatures…where have they gone?’
‘We took those shadow crows out, if that’s what you mean,’ I said.
‘But there were thousands of them! You managed to kill the whole lot?’ he asked.
‘We only saw three,’ Ethan replied.
Carl shook his head and coughed, sending a trickle of blood pouring down from the corner of his mouth. ‘This place was crammed full of them. And all those people…’ A sob broke from him.
Gem cradled his face with her hand and turned it to look at her. ‘What people?’
Ethan gave me a tight look and jutted his chin towards the pile of clothes in the corner. My insides hollowed out.
Carl grabbed Gem’s wrists. ‘They brought down hundreds of homeless people and then…’ Tears streamed from his eyes.
‘Oh god,’ Ethan whispered.
‘The hatchery we heard Archios talking about…’ Gem said.
Nausea rose through me as my mind raced ahead. All those people butchered in order to breed more shadow crows…
‘There was this monster who tortured me – a guy made from shadows,’ Carl continued. ‘He was in charge.’
‘Archios, it has to be,’ I said.
‘So is this Dark Sunset after all?’ Gem asked.
‘I’m not sure, but there has to be a good chance it’s linked to whatever Archios is up to in New York. We need to check out the Brookhaven Laboratory.’
‘But with what Carl has told us about the number of shadow crows, and if that is the key location, there’s a good chance we’ll be going up against a serious amount of opposition there,’ Ethan said.
‘Maybe we should pull together an equally serious number of Awoken squads to go in,’ Gem said.
‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘But let’s teleport there straight away to find out what we’re dealing with first. It would be just like the Shade to be preparing some sort of elaborate trap.’
‘But Carl is too badly injured for me to come,’ Gem said. ‘I need to keep working on him, Jake.’
‘In that case, can you teleport him back to Ellis Island and warn Chloe? Take the Lodestone with you, and ask the others to put together an attack group.’
‘Will do, Jake. But please be careful, because…’
‘Yeah…’ My eyes slid away from her face to the floor.
Ethan looked between us and gave a slight shake of his head. ‘OK, Jake, let’s go and find out what those bastards have been up to.’
I nodded. ‘Sentinel, can you load up a picture of the RHIC?’ I asked.
‘Coming right up,’ Sentinel replied.
My phone buzzed and an image of a circular road in a wood with a building by it popped up.
‘So let’s find out exactly what this Dark Sunset is,’ Ethan said.
With two flashes of light, the turbine room around us faded.
Chapter Sixteen
Ethan and I materialised in a car park in front of a road that curved away through a pine woodland. Ahead of us stood a nondescript glass and metal building.
‘This looks like an office,’ I said. ‘I was expecting something bigger and more imposing.’
‘It’s more impressive than you first realise,’ came Sentinel’s voice in my eBud. ‘You see, Brookhaven’s facility is like its bigger brother at CERN on the Swiss–French border. Both accelerators share a common design feature – they’re built underground. Buried beneath the road you’re standing on is a huge tunnel that curves round in a loop – that’s where the particles are fired along.’
‘OK, that’s a bit more like what I was expecting. But what use is a particle accelerator to the Shade?’
‘It doesn’t make sense to me either,’ Sentinel said through our eBuds. ‘This particular accelerator speeds up ionised gold before smashing it into each other to create exotic particles such as gluons, which can then be studied. How the Shade can make use of that is beyond even my probability-processing abilities.’
‘Maybe we’ll get a definitive answer when we get inside?’ Ethan suggested.
‘Just remember this is a reconnaissance mission,’ I replied. ‘Once we know what we’re dealing with, we can come back with thousands of Awoken to shut down whatever it is Archios is up to in there.’
Ethan nodded and together we strode towards the building. The closer we drew to it, the more it struck me that we hadn’t seen a single other person around – or any vehicles driving along the road.
‘So where is everybody?’
‘Just what I was thinking,’ Ethan replied. ‘We should have been challenged by now – something’s definitely up. Have you also noticed the lack of birdsong?’
For the first time I noticed how quiet it was. Not a murmur of life anywhere.
‘OK, that can’t be a good sign either.’
‘I’m also not detecting any form of electronic communication activity across the entire Brookhaven site,’ Sentinel said. ‘Maybe you should try shifting into the Shadowlands to see if there are any clues about the Shade activity here.’
I nodded to Ethan, then tuned my senses into the infrared spectrum. I immediately saw tendrils of dark smoke weaving round the building.
‘It looks as if we’re on the right track,’ Ethan said.
‘In which case we need to tread really carefully until we know exactly what we’re dealing with.’
‘But after seeing what they did to all those homeless people, I’m not sure I’ll be able to hold back,’ Ethan said. ‘Someone needs to pay for that…’
‘I more than understand, but this isn’t the time, at least not quite yet.’
He scowled. ‘I know, but even so…’
I wasn’t surprised that Ethan was wound up so tight over this – he’d been homeless himself a year ago. But I didn’t need to have that same history to feel furious about the Shade destroying so many human lives to create their shadow crows. When the time came, I’d be the first to help Ethan wipe Archios and the Shade off the face of our planet for ever.
We crept up the steps, the continuing silence growing oppressive.
My pulse rising, I dialled in some Real beneath my thermal vision and pushed open a glass entrance door to enter an empty reception area.
The computer screens were still on and there was even a half-full cup of coffee on the desk. I touched the mug to find it cold.
‘It’s like the Mary bloody Celeste,’ Ethan whispered.
So what had happened to all the people that should have been operating this facility? Something similar to the homeless back at M42 under Grand Central?
The feeling of unease only increased as we moved further into the building and found more empty corridors and offices. We passed a spilled cup lying on the floor next to a water cooler, its contents long since soaked into the carpet tiles. What had happened?
I took in a deep breath, but I couldn’t smell any hint of decay – unlike in the M42 basement.
A faint buzzing sound grew louder as we headed towards a glass-panelled room filled with equipment and dials.
‘Control room?’ Ethan asked.
‘From the schematics I’m studying based on GPS beacon location, it would seem so,’ Sentinel replied through our eBuds.
We entered the room, the panels of lights blinking at us. Along one wall was a bank of monitors. We headed over to peer at their video feeds.
‘That
has to be the particle accelerator chamber,’ I said, taking in a curved tunnel with two white pipelines running along it, one with a blue stripe and one yellow.
‘You’re correct,’ Sentinel replied. ‘And from the audio feed I’m picking up through your eBuds at the moment, it would seem that the accelerator is currently running.’
Ethan gestured around us at the empty control room. ‘By whom exactly? Ghosts?’
‘That’s what’s getting me increasingly concerned,’ I said. ‘My instincts are screaming at me that Archios is lurking around here somewhere – or at least was – and is responsible for this.’
‘But why?’ Ethan asked. ‘If this is Dark Sunset, I’m still not seeing the threat yet.’
I shrugged. Then I noticed something on the walls by the accelerator pipelines. I peered closer at the monitors and realised that red runes have been scrawled along the entire surface of the curved metal tunnel.
‘That looks like Shade graffiti to me.’
Ethan leant forward and stared at one of the screens. ‘Hang on, there’s someone inside that room.’
I looked at the screen he was pointing at, which had Phoenix Detector written above the feed. A large blue circular machine was connected to the walls either side of it by two huge metal funnels. A man lay sprawled on the concrete floor beneath the machine.
‘A survivor from a Shade attack?’ Ethan asked.
‘Let’s go and find out,’ I replied.
‘Please proceed with caution,’ Sentinel said.
‘You don’t need to tell us,’ Ethan replied.
‘No, you don’t understand. As the accelerator is running, that detector room – together with the tunnel housing the accelerator pipelines – will be bathed in gamma and X-ray radiation. Your self-healing ability should repair any cell damage, but I wouldn’t risk exposure much beyond ten minutes.’
‘And that man in there?’ I asked.
‘Even if you save him, he won’t have long to live – unless Gem or one of her healers can help him.’
‘Understood. Keep an eye on the clock for us.’
‘Will do,’ Sentinel replied.
Ethan and I headed towards the heavy-duty metal door set into the far wall of the control room. I ignored the Do Not Open, Experiment in Progress sign, and spun the unlocking mechanism. Four large bolts slid out of the frame.