Blue Dome (The Blue Dome Series)

by Gill, J. G.

  “Help, we’re in here!” a voice cried.

  “Where?” said Min, scanning the empty room.

  “Up there,” said Thomas, moving towards a further small passage that had been carved into the left wall of the rocks.

  “Wait…” said Min, but it was too late. Thomas had already disappeared. She followed him into the narrow, rocky chasm, catching up just as he was coming face to face with a dead end.

  “That’s strange, I was sure they were down here,” said Thomas, frowning. He peered around the walls, searching for something he might have missed.

  “We need to leave, Thomas, right now. Something’s not right,” said Min, reaching for his arm and pulling him back. They had barely taken two steps when they heard someone approaching rapidly behind them. The passageway had suddenly darkened and a streak of green now marked the entrance. The light drained instantly from Min’s face.

  “Morana! I might have known,” she said.

  Morana smiled with thin, sharp lips.

  “Min-Isis, Thomas, so glad you could join me.”

  Thomas glared at her. “Where have you put them?” he said.

  “Put who?”

  “You know exactly who we mean. The Shards. Where are they?”

  Morana shrugged and raised her eyebrows dramatically. “I’m sorry, I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “We know they’re here, we heard their voices,” said Thomas.

  Morana met his gaze. “Oh! Those voices! My apologies, that was actually me,” she said, laughing in mock sheepishness. “Call me paranoid, but I wasn’t sure you’d accept an invitation into a mine full of heavy tungsten if there wasn’t a very good reason.” Her eyes swivelled away from him dismissively to focus on her glossy red fingernails.

  “Stop playing games. Where are they?” said Min.

  “You’ll have to take it up with Demarge.” Morana glanced up abruptly, her metallic voice slicing away any last traces of humour.

  “And where’s he?” said Min coldly.

  “Demarge? Back at the Cathedral of course.”

  “Let us pass,” said Thomas.

  “I don’t think so. You two aren’t going anywhere.” Morana returned to the business of her fingernails.

  “We’ve had enough, Morana,” said Min. “You heard Thomas, let us pass.”

  “No.” Morana’s eyes flicked up like a switchblade as she began to walk towards them.

  Min held her ground. “Come any closer and you’ll have both of us to deal with,” she said.

  “Both of you? In a tungsten mine?” Morana’s eyes narrowed and her face hardened into a cruel sneer. “Six of you would be no match for me in here. Of course, we could have a quick round of ‘death-by-lightning’ for old time’s sake, but you know as well as I do that it would take every last bit of your energy.” She glanced at her hands, turning them this way and that in the light. “Besides, I’d rather not risk breaking a nail over either of you.”

  Min and Thomas exchanged glances. They knew Morana was right. If they got into any sort of skirmish they’d have no energy left to find to find the true location of the Shards.

  “So are you simply going to stand there and watch us then?” said Min.

  “I will, but only for a little while. I actually have better things to do, like kill a couple of Shards for instance.”

  “You don’t have to do this Morana,” said Min.

  Morana smiled. “No. But I’d like to.”

  Thomas quietly reached down and felt for Min’s hand, lacing his fingers in hers. By the time Morana realised what was happening it was too late. She was now staring at a bluish-green ball of soft, fuzzy light. The ball hovered for a moment, before hurling itself at the entrance.

  “So, it’s a game of tennis you want is it?” Morana flicked her fingers and a bolt of muddy-green light snaked towards Min and Thomas. They darted sideways, the missile ricocheting off the wall behind them. The sound of cracking rock was deafening as the side of the passageway crashed to the floor, disintegrating into large, misshapen chunks.

  Quick, she’s going to bring the whole place down, thought Min.

  The ball of light flew up and double-backed on itself, circling for another attempt at the door. Before they reach it, Morana fired a further ragged streak of light. It missed the ball narrowly and struck the opposite wall, sheering off another huge slab of rock. Morana stepped backwards neatly, just outside the mouth of the entrance.

  “So you Aeons think you can outsmart me? Well try outsmarting this!”

  She cupped her hands and this time unleashed a rapid volley of lightning. The bolts struck the walls in diagonal criss-crosses, making the passageway look as if someone had thrown a net of jagged neon over it. The stone began to groan as angry cracks tore open the walls. Chunks of rock flew into the passageway, as Min and Thomas’s ball of light bounced around frantically, trying to avoid being crushed. Within seconds the only thing visible was a thick shroud of dust. The entire passageway had collapsed under several tonnes of tungsten, burying even the slightest glow of bluish-green. Morana stepped away from the carnage, smiling triumphantly.

  “Try rescuing the Shards now!” she said.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Fire raged in my lungs, my short, hungry gulps of air simply fanning the flames. I could feel the rolls of sweat squeezing their way down the inside of my T-shirt, squashing themselves against my skin. Worse still, I had a bad case of stitch which was stabbing me in the side. I tried to ignore it, but after a while it had become unbearable.

  “Hey, I’ve got to stop,” I said, puffing out each word to Calix. “I’m knackered.”

  Calix stopped mid-stride and gave me a relieved smile. “I’m glad you said it. Didn’t want to be the wuss.”

  “Wuss? Looks like you’ve stopped too, wuss,” I said with mock indignation.

  Calix clipped the back of my head. “Oy, enough of that. Haven’t you heard you’re supposed to respect your elders?”

  I raised my eyebrows scornfully and fixed her my best ‘how gullible do you think I am?’ stare.

  “You’re hardly what I’d call my ‘elder’,” I said.

  “Okay, fine. I’m definitely wiser though,” Calix retorted.

  “How do you figure that one?” I said.

  “See, you’ve proved my point!” said Calix gleefully. “A wise person would already know that!” She laughed at the hilarity of her own joke, while I rolled my eyes.

  “If you were so wise your jokes would be a lot funnier,” I said.

  “Cheeky cow,” said Calix.

  I laughed, just like I would’ve done if she’d been Bede. I felt a knot tie itself in my stomach as I began thinking about him again, wondering for the umpteenth time where he was and if Demarge had hurt him. I could barely allow myself to even consider the possibility.

  “Are you okay?” said Calix, suddenly breaking into my thoughts. “You’ve gone pretty quiet.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said quickly. “I was just thinking, that’s all.”

  “Don’t think too much, it can be dangerous to your health,” she said.

  I smiled. Maybe Calix had a point.

  “Hey, back there, with the snake, thanks,” I said.

  “Yeah, whatever.” Calix shrugged dismissively.

  “No, I mean it, seriously, that was pretty amazing what you did,” I said. “There’s no way I would have escaped if you hadn’t been there.”

  Calix blushed. “So, got any ideas where you want to go?” she said, promptly changing the subject.

  “No,” I shook my head. “Demarge knows everywhere there is in Wiltsdown.”

  “There is one place he might not know,” said Calix. “I used to go there with Troy sometimes, usually after we’d shoplifted stuff and needed to hide from the cops. It’s not exactly scenic and you need to have your wits about you, but it may be okay.”

  “It sounds like somewhere Demarge might recruit his scouts from,” I said. Worryingly, Calix n
odded.

  “Now you mention it, there are a few people down there who’d probably come in pretty handy on his payroll.” She turned to me. “Look, it’s your call. I’ll understand if you’d rather not risk it.”

  “It’s not like we have loads of other options, is it?” I blurted out, before realising how ungrateful I probably sounded. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that,” I said quickly. “Your place sounds great.”

  Calix smiled. “I don’t know what you’ve done girl, but whatever it is, I’m glad it’s you Demarge is after and not me.” I gave her a queasy smile. “C’mon, this way,” she said, nodding towards Gregory Street.

  “Isn’t that where Troy went missing?” I asked. “What if Stanley’s hanging around?”

  “I doubt Stanley knows about it. He wouldn’t be able to fit through the doorway for a start. You’ll see what I mean when we get there.”

  We turned down a dark, narrow side alley. There was just one lonely streetlight in the middle of it, sputtering as if it had a bad cough.

  “This place is pretty creepy,” I said.

  “Yeah, well it gets creepier yet,” said Calix.

  I gulped, silently.

  We had only taken few more steps when Calix beckoned me to follow her down another side alley that veered off sharply to the right. This one was so dark that the blackness of it was like oil. I paused at the entrance to the street, watching Calix’s back disappear.

  “Okay, so this is what you mean by things getting creepier?” I said.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. If you want a hiding place though, believe me, you won’t get found here in a hurry.”

  Peering into the darkness, I could barely see my own feet. I stepped carefully, paranoid about falling into a pot-hole and doing my ankle in again. The street reeked of rotten potato skins and urine and my nostrils curled in protest.

  “Stinks a bit, doesn’t it?” said Calix, her voice muffled by the sleeve she’d slapped tightly against her face. “Ahh, there it is.”

  She was now pointing to a black iron grate set into the pavement. It looked like the type of grate that might cover a drain, except that it was much bigger. Beneath it, a wooden door lay flat on its back, its handle facing towards the sky.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “The entrance to a storage cellar,” said Calix. “It’s really old. Troy used to say it went back five hundred years, but who knows? It’s been used for a whole lot of stuff, like a prison and then an underground bunker during the war. People have built tunnels leading off it. They run underneath most of the city.”

  “No way,” I breathed. I’d heard all the old stories about the tunnels, growing up, but I’d never been quite sure what to believe.

  “Here, help me up with this, it always sticks.”

  I leant down to help Calix wrench open the grate. The iron bars were thick and heavy in my hands and the chipped paint scratched my skin.

  “One, two, three…”

  We heaved on Calix’s last count, my tiny muscles popping in my arms as the grate shifted slightly. I glanced across at Calix.

  “How did you find out about this place anyway?” I said.

  “Troy knew about it. He’s was living on the streets for quite a long time before I met him.”

  “Is this the only entrance to it?” I said.

  “No, not by a long way. There are so many tunnels, the entrances are all over the place. Most of them are much easier than this one, but this is by far the most hidden.”

  We concentrated on the iron grate again, counting to three and heaving until my arms felt like there were about to drop off. Eventually, we managed to scrape the thing far enough onto the concrete, exposing the naked wooden door beneath. Calix tugged on the handle, opening up a long dark chasm that stretched into the ground.

  “See, this entrance has been forgotten for so long that no one even bothers to lock it anymore. Suits me fine.” She flashed a grinning set of white teeth.

  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could just make out a narrow flight of iron stairs. The first three steps were visible enough, but after that they disappeared into a black oblivion.

  “After you.”

  I looked at her doubtfully.

  “Are you sure this is okay?” I said.

  “It’s fine, I’ve done it loads of times before.”

  I knew from her tone that she thought I was being a complete wuss. Maybe she was right, but going underground was freaky enough, without the stairwell looking like it had come fresh out of a horror movie.

  “Look, I’ll go first if it makes you feel better,” said Calix, brushing past me. She stepped down into the hole until her chin was level with the road, turning to look up at me.

  “C’mon.”

  Reluctantly, I started climbing down into the stairwell. Calix had now stopped and was waiting for me.

  “We’re going to have to close the grate behind us. The last thing we need is the cops poking about,” she said.

  “Oh yeah, of course,” I said, turning back towards the grate as if I’d remembered all along. Truth is, I’d been so worried about getting down the stairs that I’d completely forgotten about covering up my tracks. Life as a fugitive was definitely taking some getting used to.

  “Swap places,” said Calix. “You’re taller than me.”

  She stepped up as I stepped down, evening out our heights. We both reached up and grabbed hold of the grate. The screech of iron against concrete ripped through the alleyway and for a moment I wondered if we were doing more to alert the police than if we’d just left it alone. Finally the grate scraped back into place and we pulled the doors closed, listening for the catch to click back into place. We were now standing in the stairwell in total darkness. I felt Calix brush past me as she began climbing down the stairs again, her footsteps echoing off the walls as she descended further and further underground. I followed, inching my way down walls with my fingertips, as the noise from my boots filled the gaps between each of Calix’s footsteps. Suddenly Calix came to an abrupt stop.

  “Where are you?” I said. My disembodied voice echoed eerily in the darkness. I reached out to see what was in front of me. There was a loud squeal as my fingers struck something soft.

  “Oops, sorry!” I said, realising that I’d just poked Calix in the throat.

  “It’s fine,” she choked.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a light switch down here?” I asked.

  “Nah, not in the stairwell anyway,” said Calix. “They’ve rigged up a lighting system in the tunnels themselves, but I guess it didn’t make sense to bother with the entrances.”

  She turned and began twisting something that was attached to the wall. It took me a couple of seconds to realise that we were now standing next to a door and that the thing Calix was fiddling with was the handle. There was a loud click and a blinding slice of light cut around the edges of the wood. The door creaked open to reveal a large, rectangular room. Calix stepped confidently over the threshold while I followed, less confidently, behind her.

  The first thing I noticed was how old the place was. A musty smell of dust hung in the air, and the walls were dotted with clusters of exposed red brick where the cement had fallen away, making me think of islands in a cold, grey sea. To my left, silver pipes the width of my body clung to the walls, hugging the sides before curling mysteriously out of sight. A man with shaggy long hair was sitting on a moth-eaten green sofa, talking to a woman who was sitting in an old, beat-up paisley chair. The woman was bald and had a tattoo of a scorpion covering half of her head. Both were half way through a bowl of spaghetti.

  “Hey,” said Calix, nodding in their direction.

  “How’s it?” said the man before returning to his conversation.

  Calix nudged me. “So what do you reckon?”

  “It’s pretty cool,” I said, distracted by the gas cooker that was propped against the wall to my far right. It looked like it had some sort of makeshift extraction system made of aluminium foi
l. Calix seemed to read my thoughts.

  “Pretty clever that thing,” she said. “Funnels all the steam and cooking smells out into the alley.”

  Next to the cooker, a very battered gas heater was popping away quietly to itself and a generator whirred constantly. I figured that was probably what was making all the lights work. Numerous bulbs of all shapes and sizes had been scattered everywhere around the room. In the corner directly behind the spaghetti-eaters, a naked blue bulb dangled from the ceiling, dripping a shimmering pool of light onto the floor. In the corner opposite, a collection of light bulbs shone from the belly of a huge, deadly-looking white flower which had copper filaments snaking out of it. As I looked at it more closely I could see the petals had been shaped out of random pieces of plastic, meticulously glued or stitched together. To the right of the flower, on the mantelpiece above a bricked-up garret, an animal’s skull had been turned into a macabre lampshade. I shuddered, watching the bulb glow ghoulishly through the eye sockets – there was no way I was going to ask where that had come from. I glanced away quickly to the light suspended from the centre of the ceiling. A single bulb hung from beneath a large red plate that had been turned upside-down. Around the edges of the plate dangled a series of ornaments: a small plastic, palomino horse on a silver chain; a frond from a plastic fern; a ceramic pigeon; and a couple of sparkly mirror-balls.

  “Not bad for a bunch of homeless people, eh?” said Calix. “All this stuff,” she pointed to the things surrounding us, “was junk that was found out on the street, brought down here and turned into something new.”

  As I glanced around I could see that Calix was right. It was amazing how a place that might have otherwise been quite desolate had been completely transformed into something actually homely. She began walking towards the door directly opposite us glancing back at me to follow. We stepped out into a dim hallway, the naked light bulbs hissing and fizzing like over-ripe fruit with an attitude problem, hanging precariously from cables attached to the walls.