by Piers Torday
Then the General is scampering ahead, and I’m clambering up boulders behind him, some of them slipping, hardly even noticing when they bounce against my shins or catch my feet as they fall.
I deserve to suffer. After what I did.
Then, where there was a crack, there is a hole, a hole with bars across it, the cockroach easily sliding between them. A hole through which pale blue twilight floods, along with warm air which I gulp down. Then I’m banging the bars, not caring about cutting my hands or even smashing my knuckles, until, with a clang, they topple free.
I haul myself out of the hole, on to tarmac, soaking and gasping for air. My eyes adjusting to the light, I look around – the patch of grass, the brick walls, the iron railings – and can barely believe where we are.
Our Culdee Sack. A drain right in front of our house.
*I told you a cockroach knows his tunnels,* says the General.
Slowly sitting up, the first thing I do is feel the ground. It’s wet. Only spotted with rain, but rain all the same.
I feel my heart lurch. Animals believe rain is the tears of the sky, the tears the sky weeps every time an animal dies.
*Kester! You have to come now!* hisses the cockroach.
I haul myself up and – barefoot, my soaking clothes ripped to rags – I hobble after the General towards the house.
It’s very quiet. Too quiet.
I have to hope that Stone didn’t return.
The front door is still smashed open, after Aida’s gang broke in. I’m surprised Dad hasn’t replaced it already, or even put a temporary door across.
But it isn’t only the door that is smashed.
My heart rises in my mouth as I follow the cockroach down our hallway, spattered with muddy boot-prints and scratches, tracing smears and scrapes along the walls.
There is a noise in our kitchen.
A man talking.
I slide along our scuffed walls, to listen more closely. ‘The Amsguard is completed,’ says the man.
The voice is familiar but I can’t work out where from.
‘The Amsguard is completed,’ he says again, like he’s talking to himself.
‘The Amsguard The Amsguard The Amsguard.’
I walk into the room, and switch off the juddering picture of Coby Cott and the giant white towers. The ultrascreen is lopsided and the projector broken, dangling from the ceiling on a single wire. Our formula bowls lie in shattered fragments all over the floor.
*Dad?* I say in the voice I know he can hear, but I am not surprised to get nothing in reply.
I’m too late. I never should have left them. I tread softly as I head down to the lab, just in case.
I say lab, but all I can actually see is what’s left of Dad’s laboratory. Worse than when we discovered him imprisoned inside it. Then it was just filthy, but now it has been destroyed. Every computer smashed to pieces, papers torn to shreds, chairs and desks overturned and … the cure.
I run to the fridge where we kept it. Empty. The metal cabinets where we stored the ingredients, cleared out. Every last vial, every test tube gone. There is nothing left to prove to the dark wild that I am not a liar. There is also nothing left to keep the wild in our garden healthy.
And in the garden beyond, through the shattered doors dragged wide open, shards of glass lying scattered across the ground, which I gingerly step between, as fast as I can –
There is no wild either. No stag, not a single creature. They have been cleared out. The lawn is a mud bath. Apple trees uprooted, bushes hacked. There is only one kind of person who would cause so much damage and destruction to get their hands on an animal.
Cullers.
The General perches on a lab step, for once stunned into silence, his antennae drooping. At least there are no bodies here. I can only hope that means they have been taken alive.
It hardly makes me feel better. Stone has kept his promise and taken his revenge.
This is looking worse by the minute.
The second that helicopter left, we should have moved. We should have run somewhere. I should have made them safe. I should have paid more attention to what Polly told me about her secret, and persuaded her to tell me more. I should never have followed that crazy dog. I should have listened to what my wild said about dark calls.
I should have listened more.
*General, stay here,* I say. He flicks his antennae without a word, still in shock.
Tearing a strip off my shredded T-shirt and stooping as I pass back inside the smashed doors, I wrap it round a dagger of glass from the floor.
As quietly as you can walk barefoot between shattered glass and piles of scattered paper, I make my way back through the house, up the stairs.
I glance into my room as I pass – totalled. Comics ripped to pieces, the stuffing pulled out of every toy from my shelf. The iris Polly gave me only a day ago is lying shrivelled in a pool of broken vase and water by my upturned bed. Dad’s room is the same. (Although, to be fair, his room always looks like it’s been turned over.)
The noise is coming from Polly’s room. Scuffling, dragging, like someone is still going through stuff. A culler they left behind.
I slide my back against the wall, the shard of glass gripped tight in my swaddled hand.
The scuffling continues.
I count to ten and leap into the room, the shard held out in front of me.
But there is no culler. There is no one in the room.
Polly’s window is still open, like the night she left, the billowing curtain now limp with rain. Toppled plants, pots and soil still cover the whole windowsill. Her cupboards are like in the other rooms, gutted, their contents spilling out in heaps over the carpet.
And underneath the bed, the mattress half slumped to one side, exposing the slatted boards, something is moving.
A bag.
Polly’s battered rucksack, that she first packed when we set off from Wind’s Edge. A bag that survived being nearly dragged over a freezing waterfall, and that is now moving round and round in circles under the bed.
A child’s bag of junk that no culler would ever bother with.
I crouch down, reach for a strap, and drag the bag towards me. Lying on the ground, I nudge the shard inside, lifting up one side of the cloth bag, to see, right at the bottom, dancing round and round like her life depended on it – the mouse.
The mouse is tired and hungry. But she is alive. I want to give her the biggest hug, only I can’t do that, so instead she hurries into my hand and stands on her rear paws, shaking her front two in the air, humming. *A Dance of Close And Real Escape,* she explains.
But all I can think of is the rat. I promised to be his friend. And I let that bully dog – without warning, I suddenly burst into tears. I’m the worst friend in the world. The room we’re in just makes it worse – full of the dead plants and scattered books belonging to my only human friend.
I miss her so much.
*Now what’s this?* says the mouse, nibbling at the palm of my hand. *This ain’t right, this ain’t right at all. We’ve all had a horrid scare today, my lad, but you seem to have had the worst of it, and no mistake.*
I can’t stop crying. It seems to come from nowhere, making my whole body shake and shake. I’m so tired.
The mouse’s paws pressed together in front of her mouth, she takes in my filthy hair, shredded clothes and bruised, bleeding hands. Humming again, she does a light dance up and down my arm, a Dance of Mousy Concern. Her fur is warm and her touch is soft.
Slowly I begin to take deep breaths and dry my eyes. Step by step, the mouse comes to a stop again, in the palm of my hand. Catching her breath, her eyes bright, she says, *Now then. Why don’t you calm yourself and tell me all about it?*
So I do. Through my tears, I tell her everything: about the mysterious secret weapon that could get the world back to the way it was, all the different human beings fighting to get it, and the animals living underground who will stop at nothing to destroy us all.
By the time I’ve finished, it has stopped raining outside. The air feels wet and warm, the curtain flapping damply against the glass. The mouse sits very still in my hand, as if what I’ve just described has robbed her of the power of speech.
I know what that’s like.
*So it’s true,* she says at last. *The dark calls we heard. They weren’t just stories.*
*Yes, the stag was right, Mouse. There is another wild, and they’re going to take over and destroy this city by the next moon if we don’t do something.*
She does half a Dance of Alarm At The Future. *Well, that doesn’t sound very good, now does it?* she says.
*What do you think we should do?*
She chuckles. *Oh, bless my heart, I don’t know, I’m sure. Don’t ask me what to do. I’m not one for clever plans. Look at me – when those horrible beast killers came, shouting and trapping everyone in nets, pulling your father along like he was one of us, I only went and hid in that blessed child’s sack which I couldn’t get out of again. And full of all her strange devices. Could I have chosen a more uncomfortable place? No, don’t ask me, laddie. I’m no use at all.*
I give the mouse a look.
But she has made me think of something. Placing her carefully down next to me, I empty the rest of the rucksack on to the floor. Polly wouldn’t be separated from her bag before, so why did she leave it behind this time?
There’s not much in it. A scattering of old leaves, and a single letter tile from her word game. A tied plastic bag with a lump of disintegrated cat biscuits in it – a bag with a hole chewed through it, spilling crumbs.
I give her a stern look.
*I was in there for such a long time,* says the mouse, doing a quick three-step Dance of Being Caught Red-Pawed. *Mice can’t live on air alone, you know.*
I untie the bag and let her crawl inside to finish the biscuits, while I sift through the rest of the bag’s contents. A smeared magnifying glass. A pair of binoculars with the strap missing. And its pages curling, the spine torn and loose, but still just together – Polly’s notebook.
She never went anywhere without her book. The book of all the plants and flowers that her parents had taught her about, each one sketched and neatly labelled. I lean back against her empty bed, knees drawn up, leafing through the pictures and remembering our adventures.
Lists of the spices and powders she made the tea from that cured my fever. A cross-section diagram of the resin-filled pine cone she used to cause an explosion at Ma’s farm. A drawing of the shining leaves I used to heal her sprained ankle.
And at the back, a picture I hadn’t noticed before – of some flowers that I recognize. The flower lying in a pool of water by my bed, and the ones wilting in a trail of soil on the windowsill to my left.
On the last page of the book, even using the back inside cover, Polly’s neat pencil sketch of the long stems and frilled petals, all ruled and labelled with words like ‘inflorescence’ and ‘sepal’.
I don’t know what any of it means. It’s not the flower everyone’s looking for. The capsule, Littleman had said. The Iris Capsule.
I look more closely at the drawing of a bulbous pod rising up out of an iris stalk and leaves. ‘The iris fruit is contained in a capsule which opens up in three sections to reveal the precious seeds inside,’ Polly has written in her tidy handwriting.
My heart leaps. It wasn’t a capsule that she was carrying with her, but this drawing of an iris capsule. A drawing in a rain-soaked, blotched and bumpy book.
And what good is that to anyone?
I fling it down on the floor in frustration. The book falls flat on its back, the iris drawings flapping in the breeze, like they’re accusing me of something. The mouse looks up at me in shock, her mouth full of old cat biscuit.
*It’s just a falling-apart old book, Mouse,* I say. *It’s not what we need. It’s just a book, no use to anyone.*
The mouse gives a quick head-shake Dance of Dispute. *What nonsense,* she says, and scurries out of the biscuit bag, treading crumbs everywhere, towards the book. *You just don’t look at things the right way. That there is going to make excellent bedding for one lucky mouse tonight.*
And she leaps on to the back cover and starts chewing chunks out of the pages.
*No!*
I yank the book away from the mouse, who tumbles off the cover with a squeal, a wad of chewed paper stuffed in her cheek pouches, no doubt storing it for later.
My hand is trembling as I hold the book in my hand.
You just don’t look at things the right way, the mouse said.
She brought another voice into my head, a memory of a girl in a kitchen far away, clutching a freshly packed rucksack with everything we could possibly need on an adventure. ‘And a magnifying glass, in case we need to examine anything more closely.’
I grab the glass off the floor and hold it above the book, moving it back and forth until I have a clear image. Looking again at the drawings of the iris capsule, looking at them in the right way.
The way that shows that it is not just a pencil sketch. I flick back through the pages and notice that every plant and flower – not just the iris – is noted and examined microscopically. Each one drawn in incredible detail, right down to the tiniest element.
Except in the iris, the tiniest elements are dots. The things you need to look so closely to see. The tiny elements that make up the bigger picture. Every line of shading, every stroke and stop of what she’s drawn, is made up out of thousands and millions of dots.
Not just any dots, but the dots we were using every day in Dad’s lab to store and record information on the cure.
Microdots.
Microdots. We’re not short of them in this house. There are thousands of them piled up in boxes in the lab, for when Polly and I tested the animals’ blood to help Dad evaluate the cure.
‘Yes, they’re clever things,’ Dad would say. ‘You can measure and read information, even store it on them, if you want.’
Back downstairs in the lab, the mouse watching from a stack of papers on Dad’s desk, I pull smashed computers and upended fridges out of the way until I find what I’m after lying on its side in one corner.
It looks like a giant pair of binoculars attached to a white metal arm. The glass plate is smashed, but otherwise the device is all in one piece.
Dad’s microscope.
I heave it on to the worktop, and the mouse peers closer as I slide the page of flower drawings under the light beneath the lens. Turning the dial at the side, the drawing of the iris capsule breaks into dots, and then the dots blur and sharpen into … numbers.
Column after column of single-digit numbers. Thousands if not millions of them, all in a seemingly random order.
Millions of numbers, secretly stored in a sketchbook. Could they be the most valuable prize, that everyone wants? These sequences of numbers, stretching on and on into infinity, do they have the power to make everything good again?
It’s not a mysterious key, an ancient curse or an asteroid with alien powers. It’s just a collection of simple numbers.
But somehow – I think this is it.
The Iris.
‘The one small thing that I managed to bring from home,’ she said. That must be how Polly’s parents gave it to her for safe keeping, concealed in what looked like just another sketch at the back of her book filled with sketches.
But I have no idea what any of it means. My shoulders sink down. I’m sure I’ve discovered something, but it might as well be in a foreign language.
*Well, don’t ask me,* says the mouse, as she watches me stare out of the smashed lab windows, wondering what to do next. She sighs and begins to nibble at a corner of Dad’s paper pile.
I peer down through the microscope again, trying to piece everything back together in my mind. Polly, Dad, the wild – gone. Facto and the Waste Mountain Gang all after the weapon that isn’t a bomb or a gun. The weapon that is in fact a notebook sketch only fully visible under a microscope.
They’ve failed to get it before, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t try again any minute. And right beneath our feet, an animal army hell bent on vengeance against the lot of us.
I know these numbers are an answer to something.
But I don’t know the question.
*What are you doing?* says a voice from the smashed lab doors.
*I wish I knew, General.*
*I mean, what are you doing still just sitting there? You have to come with me right now – quick march!*
Looking at each other, the mouse and I hurry down after him, past the few trees that still stand in our garden, past severed branches and scattered leaves, the aftermath of the helicopter’s visit and the struggle that just took place there.
And past the steps where I last saw Polly. Where she first told me about the Iris.
The cockroach darts into the Garden of the Dead, the glossy bushes that protect the shady graveyard still standing in rows across the bottom corner of the garden.
Pushing through the thick leaves, the narrow space between the bushes and the wall lost in shadow, I can just make out the soft grassy humps that mark the graves of the animals we lost.
*There,* says the General.
I don’t understand. Crouching down in the gloom, I reach out and touch the nearest and largest hump. Perhaps he thinks their memories can somehow make me strong again, clear my head of the confusion.
But to my surprise, the mound is warm.
Not to mention furry. And it moves.
The furry mound shifts slightly, with a low groan.
My stomach leaps. I slowly follow the line of the mound along, from the rump, up a back of rough fur, feeling a shaggy neck, and then finally … a crown of horns jutting out of a head I know only too well.
*Stag?* I say, barely able to get the word out of my head.
There is a half-whispered reply, nothing I can understand. My hands now trembling, I feel along the rest of his body, until I find what I was dreading. A feathered shaft, plunged deep into his side. The shaft of a culler’s dart.