City of the Falling Sky

by Joseph Evans

  Eiya insisted on heading to the sanctuary alone, which would give Seckry enough time to gather up all the people they would need to help them hack away at the earth.

  As they were leaving, Seckry spotted the wall again which was tacked with hundreds of pieces of paper bearing different sixteen digit numbers.

  “They are attempts at a combination for a lock,” Sanfarrow explained. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box with a panel of numbers on it. “This was given to me by Kevan,” he said. “He wouldn’t tell me what it was or what was inside. He just told me that I would be able to open it when the time was right. It’s been driving me insane trying to work out the combination, because if Darklight has murdered Kevan, I will never know.”

  They backtracked through Sanfarrow’s tunnel and hauled themselves out into the fresh air. A young couple who were walking hand in hand across the road gave them a peculiar glance as they emerged from the out-of-bounds, disused reactor, but Seckry had no time to worry about such trivial things any more.

  As Eiya headed for Estergate, Seckry flipped open his mobile and called Tippian. He realised that if he wanted help from Tenk, Tippian and Loca he was going to have to get them all together and explain everything. He needed Vance too. If anyone was going to be a help in storming the Divinita chamber from below, it would be him. The only person he wouldn’t be able to get on board would be Kimmy, because he knew that Kimmy had gone on holiday.

  “Tipps,” Seckry said hurriedly. “Can I call at your place? You live fairly close to the school, right?”

  “What? Er . . . yeah sure . . . you okay?”

  “I’ll explain everything soon. I need your help, and we gotta get Tenk and Loca here too. And Mr Vance from school.”

  “Loca? Here? Why?”

  “I need her help too.”

  “Oh man . . . I’d better tidy up,” Tippian said nervously.

  “And Tipps,” Seckry said before taking a deep breath. “I think I’ve found a use for your Glove of Destruction.”

  Loca agreed to meet them at Tippian’s, sounding concerned and eager to find out what was going on, and Tenk, despite initially pointing out that he was in the midst of watching the entire season three of Battle of the Bots, agreed to join them too. As soon as Vance heard that they’d found Sanfarrow, he jumped in the car, asking for Seckry’s location.

  Seckry just needed to get to Tippian’s himself now. He had taken directions over the phone, and it didn’t sound too far away. In fact, it wasn’t far from where he had been brought by Natania on the trick date back at the start of term.

  When he emerged into Ferry Road, he recognised it straight away. He approached the alley where he had been beaten up by Snibble and glanced down there as he passed.

  But a single glance turned into a double take, because the alley wasn’t empty.

  “Fippin heck!” came Snibble’s nasal voice through a thick plume of crazydust smoke. “After all this time you’ve come back for more!”

  Seckry couldn’t believe it. Snibble was down here right now? Did he spend all his free time here?

  Seckry shook his head in disbelief and continued walking away from the alley. He had no time for Snibble right now. But Snibble jogged out of the smoke and overtook Seckry, jumping about in front of him and slapping a crowbar over and over into the palm of his hand.

  “Get out of my way, Snibble,” Seckry said through gritted teeth, keeping his head low and his eyes turned towards the floor.

  “What the fip? I can go wherever I like, you fippin freak. I can knock you out right now if I want, too.”

  Snibble stopped moving and stood directly in Seckry’s path. As Seckry tried to maneuver around him, Snibble shuffled to the side, blocking him once more.

  Seckry stopped. “Snibble, you better move out of my way right now,” he said, breathing deeply.

  “Why? Where you going? Off to bang that little bitch of yours?”

  Seckry’s next movements seemed completely out of his control. He ripped the crowbar out of Snibble’s hands and swung it at his head, smashing into his skull with a dull crack and knocking him to the pavement.

  Snibble was still and silent for a moment, before groaning in pain and coughing out a mouthful of blood.

  “You’re dead,” he said, as a dribble of sticky, red saliva seeped onto the gritty ground. “You’re life is over, you psycho.”

  A girl came running out of the alley to see what was happening and screamed at the sight of Snibble on the floor.

  “We’ll see,” Seckry said, and threw the crowbar on top of him. “Call an ambulance,” he called to the girl, and continued walking to Tippian’s at a slightly brisker pace.

  When Seckry reached Tippian’s house, he thought he’d be feeling some kind of emotion about Snibble right now, some kind of guilt or regret for lashing out so violently, but he didn’t. He was so completely consumed with a fear of losing Eiya that nothing else in the world mattered. Snibble had been in his way, and he’d had to get past him. He’d consider the consequences later.

  Vance answered the door and beckoned Seckry inside.

  “There’s a lot to tell you,” Seckry said.

  “Eiya isn’t . . . real?” Loca said softly. Out of all four of them, she was finding the information the hardest to digest.

  “No, she’s certainly real,” Vance corrected. “But if Ropart Sanfarrow is right, then she is made up of constantly evolving helitonic counter-particles. It’s incredible. I mean, I knew that helitonium had the ability to distort matter around it, but . . . actually creating something as complex as a human being?” Vance shook his head slightly. “And Darklight . . . how couldn’t I have worked it out? The symbol from Seckraman’s robes . . . the stealing of Hindglubber’s theories. It all makes sense.”

  When Eiya arrived with a test tube full of Bubble’s blood, Seckry said, “This is it. Does anyone want to back out? This could be really dangerous.”

  “Give up my chance to use my Glove of Destruction?” Tippian laughed. “Are you kidding me?”

  Loca shook her head and her eyes met Eiya’s. “You deserve to be here, Eiya,” she said. “You deserve to live. I’m not letting anyone take your life, or the lives of these innoya, as you call them.”

  “Yeah, Eiya . . . I’d . . . kind of miss you, y’know,” said Tenk, looking away from the group and swallowing a large lump in his throat.

  “Let’s not waste any more time,” said Vance.

  After they had all followed Seckry and Eiya into the disused reactor and down into the depths of Sanfarrow’s refuge, they were all fitted with protective clothing which Sanfarrow had retained from his days at Endrin.

  The clothes were white lab jackets emblazoned with the Divinita Project symbol.

  “These jackets are made of a special substance that will keep you safe from the radiation of the Divinita machine,” Sanfarrow explained.

  Seckry exchanged glances with Vance.

  “They even made their jackets look like Seckraman’s robe from that painting,” he said.

  Once they were all fitted up they took the rope elevator in groups and emerged into what seemed to be another cavernous tunnel, lit by a few scattered gas lamps, this time leading upwards at a steep diagonal.

  “If my coordinates are right,” Sanfarrow said, “the angle of my digging will lead us directly to the left side of the Divinita chamber, where the flooring is weakest.”

  “Weakest?” questioned Vance.

  Sanfarrow gave a wry nod. “For the last two months that I had access to the place, I would drop a splash of acid onto a small patch of the metal flooring every time I passed it. I knew that I’d have to return to the chamber one day, and I knew that without a key, there was no way of getting through its titanium walls. The only way back in would be from below, through its fairly weak, steel ground. Everyone ready?”

  Sanfarrow didn’t wait for anyone to respond. He threw each of them a shovel and they all began hacking away at the solid earth.
r />   Tippian used his glove at sporadic intervals to send a shockwave through the rock, which loosened the material for a few yards, though nowhere near enough to make the task of digging an easy one. Sanfarrow took the job of wheeling all of the broken earth away in a wheelbarrow, taking it down in the lift, and dumping it in a designated dumping area that he had built adjacent to his living quarters.

  After twenty five minutes of frantic digging, Seckry was sweating profusely, Tenk had already collapsed onto the ground in exhaustion and Loca was breathing fast, short gasps of air. Eiya was trying her best to dig away as much earth as she could, but her tender arms just weren’t strong enough, and she was visibly shaking with every movement. Even Vance was taking deep, heavy breaths.

  “This isn’t going to happen, is it?” Eiya said.

  Seckry plunged his shovel into the earth and ripped out a heavy clump with a heave.

  “We’re going to do it, Eiya,” he said sternly.

  “Seck, look,” she said. “We’ve barely moved forward. We’ll be here for weeks.”

  Seckry lowered his shovel and looked behind him. It was true, it seemed as though they hadn’t moved an inch since starting.

  “Guys,” Tippian said. “There is one thing we can try.”

  Everyone looked towards him and stopped what they were doing.

  “When I designed this glove I gave it an internal limiting device that controls the amount of power released to a level that’s not fatal to the human touch.”

  “Well I’m glad you thought about my wellbeing before trying to shake my hand with that thing, Tipps,” Tenk said dryly.

  “What I’m saying,” Tippian continued, “is that I can turn the limiter off. I’ll need more power than these batteries though, can we get a wire hooked up from something?”

  “The power supply for the innoya detection device,” Sanfarrow said hurriedly. “That old thing generates enough to light half the city.”

  Sanfarrow disappeared and returned moments later from the lift trailing a long cable behind him. Whilst he and Tippian connected it to the glove, Seckry joined everyone in standing back towards the lift.

  Tippian pressed the glove open palmed onto the surface of the rock in front of him.

  After a moment there were a few crackles of discharged electricity.

  “Oh man . . .” Tippian said worriedly. “My hand is really starting to bur–”

  Tippian’s words were silenced by a deep boom and a flash of ultra bright light. He yelled and shook the glove off, cradling his hand to his stomach.

  As Vance and Sanfarrow rushed to see if Tippian was okay, Seckry noticed that a giant crack was ripping its way outwards from the point at where Tippian’s hand had been.

  “Stand back!” he called.

  Everyone shuffled backwards and watched in anticipation and fear as the crack spread like a spider web. As it reached all the corners of the tunnel, it came to a standstill. But just as Seckry was about to take a step forward, the earth began to do something nobody expected. It began to wobble.

  “Oh my . . .” said Sanfarrow, in horror.

  The earth then collapsed like some kind of muddy, giant jelly and spewed across their feet, knocking Tippian over, and making everyone else grip the sides of the tunnel to steady themselves.

  As the movement stopped, Tippian crawled to his feet, spat out a few little stones, and shook the soil out of the bristles of his hair before readjusting his glasses and putting his hands on his hips.

  “Well, that seems to have done the trick,” he said triumphantly.

  “Oh, look!” said Loca, pointing and shining her torch.

  The earth had crumbled in more directions than one, but one of those directions was forward, and above them, about a hundred yards ahead, was a small patch of metal.

  Seckry threw down his shovel.

  “This is it,” he said. “Have you got the gimmypug blood, Eiya?”

  Eiya held up the test tube to show him.

  It took them all a little while to scramble through the now spongy earth, but when they reached the metal, they could see that it was bubbled with rust and acid erosion. Tippian gave it a short blast with the glove (which was now back in battery powered mode), and it melted away like silver lava.

  Vance helped hoist each one of them up into the chamber before pulling himself through. As Seckry stood up, he saw Eiya’s eyes close in distress.

  As he scanned the room around him, he saw why.

  Around the circumference of the circular chamber were about twenty or so tubular water tanks, each lit from underneath with blue neon and each containing a floating, naked human being. Seckry resisted the urge to look away and focused on the tank closest to him.

  A man of about forty years old was suspended in the water, his eyes closed and his arms drifting either side of him. His body was covered in wires and at one end of the thickest wire was a huge needle, impaled into the base of the man’s spine.

  Each tank had a large pipe trailing from the bottom, and every pipe headed towards the centre of the room, into a large, monstrous looking mess of metal and circuitry which Seckry could only imagine was the Divinita machine.

  Beside the machine was a huge, steel circle, like an empty gateway that led nowhere.

  “We have to act fast,” Sanfarrow said. “Darklight’s probably got this place alarmed. He could be on his way here right now. First we need to–”

  Sanfarrow was cut off by the sound of the large titanium entrance hissing into action and sliding open.

  “No!” Sanfarrow said, in anguish.

  Seckry had seen Darklight numerous times on television, but seeing him in the flesh made his skin crawl.

  “That was quite an entrance, Ropart,” Darklight said smoothly.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Through the Gateway