‘Martha!’ Will said with surprise.
‘Yes. She turned up with a bevy of Brights as her personal escort-cum-hit squad. Seems Chester and Martha went off together, but then had a falling-out. You should ask Danforth or Stephanie about it – they were both there when it happened.’
‘That’s just terrible. Poor Chester,’ Will said. He could hardly bring himself to think about the loss of his friend. ‘It was because of me that he got into all this in the first place,’ Will added, almost in a whisper.
‘Don’t do that to yourself,’ Jiggs said firmly. ‘You can’t beat yourself up over him. The way it played out with the Styx, not one of us was safe. Nobody knows yet precisely how many casualties this country has suffered, but it runs into the millions.’
A twin-bladed helicopter thundered past the building, so close that the windows vibrated. Jiggs was grateful for the opportunity to change the subject as he turned to see the large palette of crates strung below the aircraft on ropes. ‘Good – that looks like more medical supplies for us. The Americans are here in force now, and bending over backwards to be helpful,’ he said. ‘Considering they were seconds away from blowing us all to kingdom come with a nuclear strike, I suppose it’s the least they can do.’
‘Nuclear strike? Really?’ Will echoed. ‘I missed so much,’ he said again. ‘After the Armagi got me.’
‘Only to be expected,’ Jiggs said. ‘They wouldn’t exactly have handled you with kid gloves. And, besides, Hermione needed you out of it when she shoved those Armagi larvae down your gullet.’
‘So I really had those things in me?’ Will said with a shiver, glancing down at his stomach.
‘Yes, and I was first on the scene. I had no option but to …’ Jiggs hesitated.
‘Please. I want to know,’ Will urged him.
Jiggs was still hesitant. ‘Maybe it would be insensitive of me to tell you anything more. Are you really sure you want all the gory details?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Will said, trying to smile but achieving something more akin to a grimace. ‘After what I’ve been put through over the last couple of years, I’m not sure anything much can get to me now.’
‘Righty ho,’ Jiggs said. ‘Well, I figured I had to take immediate action after Bug Lady impregnated you outside St Paul’s, and I was the nearest person with any sort of medical training.’
‘I was choking a lot, wasn’t I?’ Will whispered, putting a hand to his throat.
‘You were,’ Jiggs confirmed. ‘And after the grubs were deposited inside you, your body quickly began to shut down, so I filled you up with morphine. The golden rule with any major trauma like that is to medicate immediately against the shock.’
‘I think I sort of remember … it was beginning to hurt like hell, and Elliott was with me too, wasn’t she?’ Will said.
Jiggs nodded. ‘For a while. Anyway, we had to operate on you, there and then, in a tent on the forecourt of St Paul’s. We had no option but to act quickly because we had no way of knowing if the grubs had hatched out of the egg sac or not, or even if they were still in you.’
Jiggs held his hand sideways to Will to emphasise the point he was about to make. ‘You see, there seems to have been a dividing line between the Styx, who magically did a disappearing act, and the Armagi, who degraded into a rather foul-smelling, fishy mass.’
Will pulled a face.
‘Anyway, I opened you up pretty sharpish, and found that the grubs had all died, but not before they’d begun to feed. So I located and removed each of them, stopped the bleeding and patched you up the best I could. Then you were evac-ed here in a chopper, where a doctor opened you up again. You see, the dead grubs had degraded in you, leaving behind not just organic matter but other chemicals – enzymes, I suppose – which had to be painstakingly swabbed out, because we didn’t know what effect they might have.’
‘So I’m okay now?’ Will asked.
‘The doctor believes so. Although you’re not quite out of the woods yet. There’s always a risk of infection, which is why you’re dosed to the gills with antibiotics, and he’s left some drains in place.’
Jiggs pointed at the clear plastic tubes that hung over the side of Will’s mattress.
‘They come from me? Can I see?’ the boy asked, peering down at his front.
Jiggs blew through his lips. ‘Are you sure you want to?’
Will nodded.
‘Okay,’ Jiggs said, lifting the sheet aside. He peeled back a large rectangle of bandage-like material that was across Will’s body. There was a massive incision all the way from the boy’s breastbone to his midriff, held together with monstrous black stitches that looked as though if you cut them he would simply burst open. And then there were the tubes running from inside the incision.
‘Oh,’ Will said. He hadn’t expected it to be so dramatic.
‘Yes, and I apologise that the incision isn’t neater, but I only had my old pocket knife on me at the time,’ Jiggs said.
Will looked up at him, but the man was smiling.
‘Only kidding,’ Jiggs laughed. ‘You’re going to have one blinder of a scar there to show the girls wh—,’ he added, catching himself as he realised how Will must be feeling about Elliott.
Jiggs put the bandage back in place, then laid the sheet over Will again. ‘Actually, old man, you’re a bit of a rarity, because as far as we know, nobody else who’s been impregnated by the Styx has ever survived.’
‘Why doesn’t that make me feel any better?’ Will said.
Chapter Twenty-one
‘There she is! Kill the little bitch!’ Hermione screeched, trying to get up at the same time as jabbing one of her pincers in Elliott’s direction.
The combination of the ever-burning sun and the incredibly fertile soil at the centre of the world meant that the bare earth in the fields around the tower hadn’t remained bare for long. It was covered with a green baize of grass, new shoots and tiny unfurling fronds. And dotted over this, like so many black skittles, the Styx had suddenly appeared when they’d been transported from the surface.
‘Get her!’ Hermione yelled. Most of the Styx were completely disoriented and in the same state as she was, falling onto all fours as they’d materialised in a blur of crimson. But it didn’t take the resilient and toughened Limiters more than a few seconds to pull themselves together. Many already had their rifles to their shoulders.
They opened fire, the rounds striking the tower around Elliott. She was only too aware that Eddie and his former Limiters would be out there somewhere in the field too. They were hopelessly outnumbered by the other Styx, and obvious targets.
By bringing the trident down on the ground outside St Paul’s, not only had Elliott thwarted Hermione’s plan to send out the Armagi into the rest of the world, but she’d also passed an effective death sentence on her father. Elliott told herself that she’d had no alternative. And wherever he was in that plain of green, there was absolutely nothing she could do for him right now – she didn’t even have her rifle with her.
But it wasn’t the only death sentence that Elliott had dished out. Hermione and Rebecca Two, along with every other member of the Styx race, were all going to be dead in a matter of days. None of them had been inoculated against the supervirus that was still present in the inner world.
Straining her eyes as she tried to find her father, Elliott remained in the entrance to the tower, standing there in a shepherd-like pose, the trident resting on the ground by her side.
Although she showed no fear as more rifle shots began to land around her, she wasn’t going to push her luck, not while she still had a task she needed to complete.
‘Kill that half-breed!’ Hermione wailed again, falling as she tried to run towards the girl.
Elliott merely gave the Styx woman a small bow of the head, then took a step back into the tower. As the door whisked shut, the pile of rocks that Will had thought were a safeguard against it doing precisely that were immediately pulverised.
; As Elliott began towards the lift, she took a moment to look around the entrance chamber. After she and Will had gone, the bushman had evidently lingered on in the tower for a while, from the remains of all the fires he’d lit inside it. There were small piles of burnt roots beside which Elliott could see the husks of locusts and a couple of bird skulls. And some of the New Germanian brothers’ equipment was still stacked against the walls, but there was nothing to show that they themselves had been there recently.
The lift took her up the tower, but she had to climb the stairs to reach the very top level. She immediately went to the podium in the middle of the space and stepped up onto it, moving towards the largest plinth in the centre. Taking a quick breath, she held the trident at arm’s length, directly over it.
As she lowered the trident and the tip of the shaft made contact with the plinth, she saw concentric ripples spread out across its smooth and very solid surface. The effect was identical to what happens when a stone hits calm water. Elliott blinked, not believing her eyes, but in the next instant something even more outlandish happened. She was forced to let go of the trident altogether, because it was being pulled into the plinth and absorbed back into the fabric of the tower itself. A few moments later, only the prongs of the trident remained, then they too dipped below the surface of the plinth. Elliott touched the plinth, feeling where the trident had vanished, and how the surface was completely solid again.
For a while she stood looking at the plinth and the rest of the level around her, but nothing seemed to be different.
The very first time Elliott had been there, she’d told Will something was wrong, something was missing. Now that the sceptre was finally back where it should be, all her pent-up fatigue hit her. She tried to take a step but her legs buckled and she sagged against the plinth, grabbing it for support.
Elliott had completed the quest that she hadn’t understood in the beginning, and that she’d had no option but to complete. From the moment that she’d initiated the chain of events after touching the trident symbol in the pyramid, the blood she shared with the ancestors of the Styx had seen to that. She’d been under the spell of a genetic behavioural pattern that had removed her free will as surely as if she’d been a robot following its programming.
Programming to find and restore the trident to its rightful place.
Although nothing appeared to have changed inside the tower, there was a change outside it of which Elliott was only too aware. In the huge voids deep in the mantle of the planet – not just the zero-gravity belt that she and her friends had travelled across, but numerous others – the crystal belts had sprung into life. As the spheres in them rotated faster and faster, they gave off an intense light, far brighter than the triboluminescence Dr Burrows had correctly identified.
And they also began to generate enormous amounts of energy.
For these spheres were the source of propulsion that had brought the Earth into orbit around the sun.
Finally, after so very long, they had been activated again.
The insides of the cavities around the spheres glowed with grids of blue light in patterns that only one person in the whole world – Jiggs – had noticed after the nuclear explosion in the pore.
But as if sleeping giants had been roused from their deep slumbers, no human could do anything to stop the spheres’ immense power.
And this power was being put to use.
Chapter Twenty-two
There were periods of intense activity at the hospital as fleets of vehicles arrived with survivors, most of whom – one of the nurses had told Will – were being treated for malnutrition or exposure. He heard them being wheeled along the corridor outside at all hours of the day, and caught glimpses of the soldiers who seemed to be running everything.
As he recovered from his operation, Will had been quite happy to lie in bed and rest. But during one of the lulls in which there was complete quiet in the place and he’d been staring absently up at the ceiling, he was roused from his torpor. The door to his room nudged open a few inches as if a breeze had swept down the corridor. He kept watching just in case someone was about to come in to visit him. ‘Jiggs – is that you?’ he asked, wondering if it was the man with the ability to render himself almost invisible.
But there was no one there, and Will mumbled, ‘I’m going doolally,’ feeling rather foolish.
Then the strangest thing happened.
With a scrabbling noise on the lino, a cat’s head poked up over Will’s feet at the end of the bed.
‘Bartleby!’ Will exclaimed, truly believing he was seeing a ghost. The Hunter sniffed inquisitively at him, then put his snout down and began to scamper around the room. The animal was clearly detecting all sorts of new and interesting Topsoil smells that he hadn’t encountered before.
‘Not quite,’ Mrs Burrows said, as she entered the room with the First Officer in tow. ‘But it is one of his kittens.’
‘Kitten? He’s huge!’ Will said, beaming at his mother. He was delighted to see her after what felt so long.
‘And how’s my son doing?’ Mrs Burrows came over to Will and gave him a hug. ‘Jiggs said you’re mending well after your op.’
‘Yes, we hear you’ve had the battle of your lives up here,’ the First Officer said, taking Will’s hand in his huge ham of a fist and shaking it.
Bartleby Kitten, or just Bartleby, as the First Officer called him because it was easier, immediately took to Will and climbed up on his bed. The Hunter obviously wanted to play, as he rolled on his back and began to cuff Will with his oversized paws.
‘God, it really could be Bartleby,’ Will said. ‘He looks identical.’ The cat had noticed the translucent tubes poking out from under Will’s blanket and was chewing on one of them. ‘No, not that!’ Will told the cat quickly, trying to push him away.
Mrs Burrows ushered the kitten off the bed, then began to chat to Will, telling him about how she and the First Officer were spending all their time up in Highfield, where many of the Colonists were helping with a clean-up operation, and where many of them had already chosen to relocate. ‘The ironic thing is that – in a roundabout way – the prophecies written in the Book of Catastrophes have come true,’ Mrs Burrows told Will. ‘The Colonists have got the surface to themselves again. There’s an empty town just waiting for those who want to go Topsoil. Because there’s nobody left alive in Highfield.’
‘Nobody at all? They’re all dead?’ Will asked quietly.
There was a knock at the door and Parry entered.
‘You’re looking better, my lad,’ he said, before asking Mrs Burrows and the First Officer if they would mind giving him some time to speak alone with Will.
‘They’ve set up a makeshift canteen on the ground floor,’ Parry suggested. ‘If you ask at reception, they’ll tell you where it is.’
‘Don’t worry, I think I can find it,’ Mrs Burrows replied, tapping her nose as she winked at Will. She and the First Officer shuffled out, leaving Bartleby asleep on Will’s bed, his legs in the air.
‘Jiggs told me that you’re Prime Minister now,’ Will said, giving Parry a smile. ‘Does that mean I have to call you sir or something?’
Parry raised his eyebrows. ‘Hardly – and when did you ever show me any respect anyway?’ He gave a shrug. ‘Besides, I’m only PM for just as long as it takes them to find someone from the old Cabinet to do the job.’
Parry glanced through the window as another helicopter came into land. ‘The emergency aid is starting to arrive from the international community now that the risk has been removed,’ he said.
‘Has it, though?’ Will asked. ‘Is it true that not a single Styx has been left Topsoil, or anyone who had any Styx blood in them, like Elliott?’
Parry’s expression turned sad and for a second he looked away. ‘Yes, it’s true. There’s not one of them left, so I suppose we won in the end, but we lost some good people in the process,’ he said. ‘Elliott, of course, but also Eddie and his team.’ Parry sighed. ‘An
d then there’s what happened to Chester …’
‘And Drake … I’m so sorry about Drake,’ Will said quietly, as he realised he needed to say something about Parry’s son to him. And Will also didn’t feel strong enough yet to think about the loss of his friend.
‘Thank you.’ Parry nodded, then fixed him with a stare. ‘Will, unfortunately I’m not just here to see how you are. I also need to debrief you. There are still some gaps in what we know, and I need to hear your version of events.’
‘That does sound official,’ Will said.
‘I’m afraid it is, and I’ll need a full statement from you in due course. You see there’s actually an international inquiry under way, not least because several of the world nations are accusing us of unauthorised subterranean atomic testing. They’re suggesting that’s why a tremor was felt around the world, and also where the Armagi, apparently a mutant species that was created due to the high radiation, originated. Well, that’s what the French think anyway.’ Parry chuckled, then raised an eyebrow quizzically. ‘And the Yanks don’t know whether to give the lot of us Congressional Medals of Honour –– or to convict us all of some international crime against humanity. You’re on the list too, Will, for both of them.’
Will laughed uneasily.
Parry’s expression became serious. ‘You spent more time with Elliott than anyone else,’ he said, his expression serious. ‘I need you to tell me everything you can remember about her, and what happened near the end.’
‘Sure, but my memory’s a bit patchy after the Armagi nabbed me and I was brought to St Paul’s,’ Will replied. ‘And why is Elliott so important in all this anyway?’
‘Because quite a few of us are terrified by the implications if some sort of alien force has taken control of all our destinies,’ Parry replied.
As Bartleby snored at his feet, Will recounted what had happened with Elliott during their time together in the centre of the world, about the discovery in the pyramid, and then the appearance of the tower. Parry didn’t interrupt once as Will talked about how he and Elliott had been transported back to the surface, and then had found the sceptre in an Egyptian sarcophagus.
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