Hero Rising

by Shane Hegarty

  The toilet was along a narrow corridor that would take Greyson past the countertop, behind which Emmie and Finn were still hiding. Mario had no choice but to point the assistant in that direction.

  Realising this, Finn and Emmie scuttled low through the kitchen, past the dishwasher, around a couple of large blue plastic tubs of peeled, cut potatoes, and out the back door. It brought them to the yard, and through a door into an alleyway. Once safely away, they pressed tightly against the high stone wall to stay out of sight.

  “What was all that about?” Emmie asked.

  Finn was thinking through what he had heard. “They’re opening gateways,” he said. “I think they’re using crystals or dust or whatever from the cave to try and open them anyway. And they’re experimenting with sherbet and stuff because, I don’t know, they might help activate the crystals?”

  “So, that would explain the flashes,” said Emmie. “And all those poor birds stuck in the trees. It sounds like they think their experiments are causing that. Bad water too.”

  “And who knows what other problems they might be creating,” said Finn.

  “There’s the Gantrua thing as well,” said Emmie. “They’re taking him out of Darkmouth. That could be dangerous, couldn’t it? What’s going on?”

  “At least we know where to find some answers,” said Finn. “The Dead House. It’s a bit of a ruin on the edge of Darkmouth that my family used to use for storage of desiccated Legends. I haven’t been in it for years. No one has. Or they hadn’t.”

  He started to walk away.

  “You’re going there now?” Emmie asked him.

  “I’ll go on my own,” said Finn. “I don’t want to get you into trouble.”

  Emmie walked after him without hesitation. “Just promise me that if we find anything we’ll tell your dad and not do anything crazy.”

  “OK,” said Finn.

  “Besides,” added Emmie, “how can I resist going to a place called the Dead House?”

  Finn waited, crouched among brambles, finger pushing in his earphone. He could see the front of the house, with its scuzz-covered windows and remnants of the boards that had run across them, the moss creeping up from the base of its walls. This was the very edge of Darkmouth, a few fields stretching between the Dead House and the rest of the town. Behind it, the Black Hills sloped up steeply, a barrier protecting the world beyond from the Blighted Village.

  They had watched from a distance, observed the two assistants guarding the supposedly empty house. They were doing rounds of the exterior, and had separated four minutes ago. He checked the time. They would pass again soon.

  “Five seconds,” said Emmie in his earpiece.

  “OK,” he whispered into his phone.

  The guards met and loitered at the front of the house.

  One was so bald the skin of his scalp gleamed in the daylight, while the other had a lush beard that spread across his whole neck. Instead of suit jackets, they wore awkward-fitting armour over their shirts to indicate their new role as security guards. Each was armed with a Desiccator.

  “Why do we have to walk around in circles like this anyway?” said the bearded one. Finn couldn’t place the accent. Hungarian maybe. Or Welsh.

  “We’re walking around in circles because those are our orders,” said the bald guard, his accent definitely Australian. Or possibly Dutch.

  “If you were ordered to put your head in a bag of custard, would you do it?” asked the beard.

  The bald guard just stared back.

  “Great,” said the beard. “I’m on duty with someone who’d happily turn his scalp into dessert if there was the chance of a promotion.”

  They turned and walked away from each other, resuming their rounds of the house’s perimeter.

  “I’m going for it,” whispered Finn into the phone.

  “Roger,” said Emmie. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  As the two guards rounded opposite corners, Finn broke from cover, running stealthily through the drooping weeds and uncut grass at the front of the Dead House, and straight for the front door.

  It was locked.

  He fished for his dad’s spare keys, a bunch of which he’d grabbed on the way over, held it up, and had a flush of panic as he realised he had no idea if any of these was the right one.

  He tried a key. It didn’t fit. Another, this time with the keys jingling too loudly for his liking.

  “Finn,” said Emmie in his ear, with alarm. “The guards will be back around in thirty seconds.”

  He fumbled through the keys, found one that looked right and tried it. It wasn’t right.

  “I can see them coming back. The baldy one is almost there.”

  Finn hesitated, tried to decide if he should run for cover again or try another key.

  “Don’t run – they’ll see you,” Emmie told him.

  Seeing a foot appear around the corner to his left, Finn threw himself flat against the door.

  The bald guard appeared. Finn sucked in his belly in order to not be seen. There was a plonking noise in the grass, something solid hitting the ground. The guard stopped, looked to his right, away from Finn, and wandered off towards the source of the disturbance. From the grass, he picked up a can of fizzy orange, looked around and up in search of its origin.

  While he was distracted, Finn tried another key in the lock.

  Please, please, please.

  The guard popped open the can while he turned back around towards the Dead House. The bearded man appeared from the side he had been patrolling.

  They met at the front door.

  “Where’d you get that, Olaf?” the bearded assistant asked.

  “Not sure, Ricardo,” said Olaf, and swigged from the can.

  The beard reached out in anticipation of having a sip.

  “Uh-uh, Ricardo. I found it on the ground,” said Olaf, pulling back and slugging from the can, a dribble of orange running down his chin. “It’s probably riddled with disease.”

  He took a final, long, satisfying gulp from the can before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and walking away from his unimpressed colleague.

  On the other side of the door from them, inside the Dead House, Finn was pressed against the wall, not daring to move a muscle.

  He had just opened the door in time, but felt anything but calm. He waited until he heard the second guard walk away, muttering complaints, before allowing himself to breathe again.

  “I’m inside,” Finn whispered down the phone to Emmie.

  “I distracted the guards by throwing a can of orange drink,” she said, pleased with herself. “I’m thirsty now, though.”

  “Thanks,” Finn said, stepping forward carefully.

  The floorboard creaked, so he stopped again in the near dark, waiting for Emmie to give him a warning should the guards be on their way back. No warning came so he moved through the hall again.

  Even though he hadn’t been in the Dead House for some years, it was still familiar to him. He had played in it as a kid, running from room to room, pretending to hide from spies, roaring like a Legend, acting the Legend Hunter, all the things he thought were fun once but which turned out to be very different when there were real spies, Legends and Legend Hunters involved.

  The Dead House was pretty much the same now, its floors scattered with papers, abandoned tools, some collapsing chairs and a couple of picnic tables brought in years ago as a temporary measure but which had never left. There was graffiti on the walls: some of it blobs of artistic swirls; some, names scrawled on plaster by passing Legend Hunters long dead (Timothy the Strong, Emrid Latecomer, Ingrid of Boneford).

  Finn used his phone for extra light in the dim hallway, careful to avoid the curtained and boarded windows. A shadow crossed a gap in the window. He paused. Let the guard pass outside.

  He leaned his head into a small room, in which there was nothing but a warped wooden floor, dust and a few rusted bolts left over from some device or other. Moved on towards the largest r
oom of the house.

  “The guards are on the far side of the building,” said Emmie in his ear.

  The door to the largest room didn’t open at first, but Finn remembered it used to require a bit of help. He lifted it at the handle, turning it and pushing the door with his shoulder. It swung stiffly inwards, revealing a room with a sense of life that was absent from the rest of the Dead House. It was clean, swept and polished so that even in the low light the old surfaces gleamed.

  The first thing he saw was a bell-shaped cage standing empty, its door unlocked. A couple of heads taller than him, he recognised it as having come from the library in his house.

  At the centre of the room was a large modern table on which sat four heavy, transparent cylinders, with thick metal handles at the top. Housed within each of them was something Finn knew all too well.

  Crystals.

  “The guards are turning around now,” said Emmie over the phone. “Be careful.”

  The crystals in the canisters didn’t have the clarity of those from the Infested Side, nor the blood-red colour of those that had been found in Darkmouth. They were yellowish, bordering on orange, and uneven as if dust had been squashed and glued into an unnatural shape. They looked unwell, impure. But he knew for sure they were using these to try and open gateways in Darkmouth. Why would they do something so reckless?

  “The guards are on their way back,” said Emmie in his ear.

  On the desk was a small neat pile of papers. Scanning through them he found that most held little but sequences of words and numbers, some crossed out in red pen, others circled in green. None of it made any sense to him until, buried further down the pile, he found a note.

  Attached to the note was a black-and-white printout of a map, with parts of it numbered by hand. In the veiled light, Finn couldn’t quite read the small print on it, but he folded the letter and map and put them in his jacket anyway, opposite a pocket containing the Gatemaker he’d brought with him.

  The documents confirmed that the assistants were not only trying to open gateways in Darkmouth, but that they planned to do the same elsewhere. But given how it was doing strange things to the trees, turning the water sludgy and attracting Legends’ attention on the Infested Side, Finn knew it was a bad idea.

  Now he had the vital proof to bring back to his father. He would share it with the rest of the Half-Hunter world. He would stop the assistants before it was too late.

  Putting his hand on the desk, Finn accidentally knocked a computer screen into action. He got a shock when he saw himself staring back from the screen.

  It was a picture taken with his father a couple of years ago, in full armour, crouched and smiling in the house. This was the day he finished making his first fighting suit. The picture was on the computer because this laptop had been theirs at home. They had stolen his memories.

  Anger swelled inside him, hardened his determination to stop Lucien and the assistants getting what they wanted.

  Finn hovered a moment, trying to decide what to do next. It couldn’t be stealing if it was yours in the first place, could it? Besides, the computer would have evidence in it, surely. Everything he needed to reveal the conspiracy against his family.

  A bag sat on the floor, square and rigid with a drawstring at the top. He shut the computer’s screen, placed the device in the bag.

  A shadow passed the window, the guard circling.

  Finn then noticed a narrow rectangle of light forming a long strip along the base of a wide cupboard taking up the far wall of the room. It was a drawer of some sort. He opened it, felt the sting of the light on his eyes. Inside was a long white container; a faint wisp of blue smoke rose from it.

  It held a row of five spaces for desiccated Legends, in jars nestled in foam hollows, ordered in size, from one hardly bigger than a walnut to the largest, about the size of a football.

  Through the glass jar, he recognised the middle Legend as Broonie; knew it by his green and rough-skinned exterior. Finn had seen his Hogboon friend in this form a few times before. The poor guy had been desiccated more often than he had eaten hot scaldgrubs. It broke Finn’s heart a little to see him there, all wrapped up in a drawer like this. He considered lifting him, hesitated.

  Further along was a Legend in the largest jar. A dark sphere about the size of a football, its surface was broken by what seemed to be the shrunken, petrified veins of wings.

  Gantrua had been sporting wings when Finn desiccated him. They weren’t actually his wings, but shrunken up like this, who could tell? Was this Gantrua?

  Finn reached out his hand, hesitated. He hadn’t come to steal this. He hadn’t agreed to the Legends’ request. Although, if the assistants were going to take Gantrua away for good, then this might be his only chance.

  “The guards are about to reach the front of the house, Finn,” Emmie whispered in his ear. “Will you be much longer?”

  Finn knew he couldn’t leave yet. He would have to wait while they had their brief chat before starting their lap of the house again.

  “The guards are at the front door again,” Emmie told him.

  It could be Gantrua, ready to be brought to Slotterton and then onwards. Stealing him would look very bad, though. Still, the desiccated ball could contain the charm that would stop the Bone Creature ravaging the Infested Side. Finn just wanted to know. To be sure. A look wouldn’t do any harm.

  He reached in and carefully removed the jar containing the shrunken Legend.

  An alarm screamed.

  Wailed.

  Clanged.

  Clattered.

  It gave Finn such a fright he didn’t react for a second, was rooted to the spot when he should have been running. His brain gradually got that message through to his legs. He didn’t even think about it after that. The desiccated Legend was in the bag, along with the computer, the bag was on his back and he was leaving whichever way he could.

  And it was then, finally, that he heard Emmie shouting down his earpiece.

  “The guards are in the house, Finn! Get out!”

  He pulled open the room’s door to find the two guards pointing Desiccators at him.

  It was a competition between Finn and the guards as to who was most shocked by the encounter.

  Thankfully for Finn, the guards won.

  Taking advantage of their surprise, he barrelled between them, knocking the bearded one against the wall. He felt like he was strong and fast enough to get clear.

  Then something hit him on the back of the leg and he stumbled, looked down. A book. One of them had thrown a book at him.

  “Stop!” Olaf the bald guard shouted, raising a paperweight.

  Finn didn’t. He slammed the door shut behind him, and ran to the empty kitchen. Faded cans were scattered on the floor, with a rusted teapot, a broken chair. There was a large window jammed shut with age, so after a brief and futile attempt to open it, he picked up the three-legged chair and chucked it through the thin glass. It exploded outwards, releasing a burst of fresh air into the stale house.

  A few moments later, the guards crashed through the door into the kitchen, ran to the window, the bearded guard thrusting a head out.

  “I don’t see him,” Ricardo said.

  “Climb out of the window and see.”

  “I will not. There’s broken glass.”

  Just then, Finn dashed out of the tall, musty cupboard he’d hidden in, ran across to the kitchen door, pulled it closed and turned the lock.

  The guards slammed their shoulders against it, kicked at it, while Olaf shouted down a radio about “The boy! The boy!”

  Finn didn’t hear the rest because he was already at the door out of the house, half-falling through it, bag over his shoulder, desiccated Legend bumping around with the rest of the stolen evidence.

  “Come on!” he shouted, running in the general direction of where he thought Emmie was.

  “I hope that was worth it,” Emmie answered, appearing right in front of him. Her voice was in his ear too,
adding to the strangeness of the moment.

  He pulled the earpiece free, allowed her to help him stand properly.

  “I got … some stuff,” he said, deciding it wasn’t exactly the time or place for an argument about the rights and wrongs of what he’d grabbed.

  They started to run across a field towards the town. Finn held the new bag tight, while she had his backpack flopping around on her shoulders.

  “They’re doing things, Emmie. They’re definitely carrying out experiments elsewhere too, in Slotterton. We’ve got to get the evidence back home before they stop us. Come on, this way.”

  Several assistants appeared about fifty metres ahead, directly in their path. Lucien and Estravon were at the head of them.

  “No, not that way,” said Finn, reversing direction. They had to make for the hill behind the Dead House, the punishing climb that he used to go up as a kid just so he could slide back down.

  “We’ve got to hurry,” he said to Emmie. But she was already gaining ground.

  Finn still had the bag, and felt like dropping it to make running easier but he couldn’t let himself do it. The computer was in there, and it was his family’s. It would have evidence on it too, he was sure of it.

  Below them, the two guards had freed themselves from the Dead House and had joined Lucien, Estravon and the assistants in scrambling at a good pace up the hill after them.

  “We know too much,” Finn said to Emmie. “They won’t let us go this time.”

  Behind them, one assistant slipped on the stones littering the bank, and his tumble took out two assistants following behind him. It bought Finn and Emmie an extra few seconds as they pushed on up the slope, pain spreading in their legs, effort squeezing their lungs. They hit the brow of the hill, after which there were only fields, stretching ahead towards the world beyond.

  “Maybe we should just show them what you found in there,” Emmie panted. “Maybe they won’t be so tough on you after all.”

  A spit of Desiccator fluid arced over their heads, a fizzing ball of blue fire hardly a couple of metres off target. Landing with a sickening scrunch ahead of them, it chomped up the ground, left only a crater and a small ball of stone rolling in it.