Hero Rising

by Shane Hegarty

  “You mean this?” said Lucien, pointing at an assistant holding the bag Finn had thought was tucked away safely up a chimney.

  Finn felt the hope drain away again.

  “I have another theory,” said Lucien, “which is that while we did scientific experiments with the crystals to make sure we knew how they worked, and to be sure they wouldn’t open any gateways again, you were off working with the Legends on how to bring that giant into our world and kill us all.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Finn asked softly, peering at the rubble in the hope of finding something to eat. He was so hungry.

  Lucien appeared troubled, looked at his children, then back again to the bruised and beaten assistants behind him, their suit trousers ragged, ties askew, shirts blood-specked. He lifted his chin. “What I believe is that there are two theories. One blames me. One blames you.”

  Smiling, Finn lifted a small purple bag from the ground. A packet of chocolatey Smoofy Snacks.

  “Oh, finally,” he said, relieved.

  As he lifted it, all the sweets fell out of the burst bottom of the bag. He groaned.

  “And for all you’ve said about me, you have no proof,” concluded Lucien. “This is finally the end for you. The last paragraph in your entry in The Most Great Lives of the Legend Hunters. The last line before the black page is lowered over your place among the traitors.”

  Finn slumped again, slid down the wall, exhausted.

  “I don’t know,” said Emmie. “I mean, what if there was something else? A few more words for the writer of The Most Great Lives to hear before it goes to print? Something really juicy?”

  From the speakers along the park came a scratchy sound, the squeak of them being turned on, and a voice.

  “Is this thing on?” asked Estravon over the tannoy, triggering a painful whistle of feedback broadcast to the entire park.

  “What’s going on?” Lucien asked.

  “Just wait,” said Emmie, as much to Finn as to Lucien and everyone watching. “This is really, really good.”

  “OK,” said Estravon’s echoing voice. “Let’s press ‘play’.”

  A sound carried over the whole of Smoofyland, so loud it was like a tear in the cosmos.

  But it was not a tear in the cosmos. It was the noise of a zip. A humble, ordinary zip, amplified to almost deafening levels.

  “That’s the bag being opened,” Emmie explained to them.

  “What bag?” asked Finn.

  “Wait,” she said, smiling.

  A thud.

  “The apple dropped on the table,” Emmie said.

  Lucien tried to give the impression that this was all some kind of charade he must endure before getting on with the pressing business of wrecking Finn’s life for good. But as he tried to smooth his hair, his palms were clearly sweating.

  “Is anything going to happen?” Lucien asked. “Or are we just going to stand here waiting for the noise to drive us all crazy?”

  “Just wait,” said Emmie.

  “The crystals are not working,” a recorded voice said, loud enough to scatter birds from a nearby fake plastic tree.

  The final word echoed across the theme park. The voice was Axel’s. Everyone listening turned to him where he stood, jacket torn in two, among the throng. He rubbed and dropped his head.

  “We’ve made so many of these using the dust from that Darkmouth cave, but we haven’t opened any proper gateways yet,” his voice continued.

  Lucien’s eyes had widened, but he attempted, still, to maintain an outward calm that Emmie and Finn could see was false.

  “Why isn’t it working?” asked another voice.

  This one really grabbed Lucien’s attention: it was his own.

  “We don’t know. We’ve tried everything. Every combination of sherbet. We’ve tried different flavours. Different colours. We’ve used jam, marmalade, peanut butter. You name it. We’ve done everything we can, but all it’s doing is opening gateways for maybe a second or two. Small ones at that.”

  “It has to work, Axel,” Lucien said. “I’m not sitting behind a desk all my life. And I doubt you want to go back to your exciting role in the Office of Snacks.”

  “Turn it off now,” Lucien said to Emmie.

  “No way. This is my favourite part,” Emmie said. Finn saw she was smiling now.

  “We’ve used this dust on seven continents, every Blighted Village we can, trying to open gateways,” Lucien’s voice said. “If it is to work anywhere, it should be here, in this claustrophobic, scared little town.”

  “Lucien, should we be doing this? It could be dangerous. Is it right to continue experimenting with the fabric between the worlds?” asked Axel. “What if it causes something terrible to go wrong? Something terrible to come through?”

  “Oh, hold on,” said Emmie, her words tinged with an edge of drama. “I meant this next bit is the best bit.”

  “Rip open the entire sky if we have to,” Lucien was saying. “Let in every Legend that wants a bite of this place. Just open those gateways.”

  “What if someone gets hurt?” Axel’s voice asked.

  “It’s a war. People get hurt. We are meant to be warriors. Bring me a war!”

  “Yep,” said Emmie, hardly able to hold back her satisfaction. “That’s my favourite part.”

  “It’s a trick,” said Lucien, as the voices were once again replaced by the roar of background noise. “It can’t be real.” But there was a crack in his demeanour. Those behind him began to shuffle, to move away. Lucien looked shocked – he had the face of someone who had been caught and had nowhere left to run.

  In the recording, there was the sound of a door opening.

  “My jacket!” said Emmie’s voice.

  “That’s really weird,” she said to Finn. “Is that what I really sound like?”

  “I left it behind, sorry.”

  “You will never become a Legend Hunter now,” Lucien told her, restrained fury twitching in his cheeks.

  “This is going to work out really well for you,” Lucien’s recorded voice said.

  The recording stopped, replaced only by the empty hiss of the speakers.

  “Should I turn it off now?” Estravon’s voice suddenly asked over the speaker, giving everyone a bit of a jump. “Oh, I can’t hear you where I am. I’ll turn it off. I’m turning it off now …”

  With a squelch, the tannoy turned off.

  “Arrest that child,” Lucien ordered his assistants. “Both of them.”

  The tannoy came back on.

  “By the way, Lucien,” said Estravon’s voice, “what you’re doing with the experiments outside Darkmouth is against the rules. All the rules. But I guess you know that already.”

  The speaker cut out again.

  “I said: arrest those traitors,” Lucien demanded again.

  His assistants didn’t move. The reality of his actions was being exposed, and theirs with it.

  “Under sanction one hundred and twenty-six of the rules on treason, I order you to …”

  Lucien didn’t finish the order. It was pointless.

  The assistants were backing away from him.

  Realising they wouldn’t do it themselves, Lucien stepped away from Elektra and Tiberius, grabbed a Desiccator from an assistant and lifted it towards Finn and Emmie, switching between the two.

  The assistants gasped, stepped back further.

  Finn flinched a little too, but Emmie remained calm under the threat.

  “I am doing this for our future,” said Lucien, cracking. “I didn’t mean to get my children mixed up in this, no matter how much they might test my patience. I just want them, us, to be able to fulfil our destiny as Legend Hunters. All of us. Elektra and Tiberius. Me.”

  He hadn’t dropped the Desiccator.

  Neither Finn nor Emmie said anything.

  “I can’t just let you take that away from me. I can still get hold of that recording and destroy it. And then what? No one will believe either of you after
all you’ve done, all your escapes to the Infested Side. You can shout and shout and shout, but no one is going to listen to you.”

  Emmie stepped forward.

  “You’re right that no one would listen to us,” she told Lucien. “But they might listen to her.”

  Emmie pointed.

  On the rise near the entrance of Smoofyland was a figure.

  It was clearly a woman, silhouetted against the flashing neon lights of the archway. She had something in her hand. In each hand, in fact. In her left was what looked like a small notepad. In her right was a pen. She jotted something down.

  “Her name,” explained Emmie, joy lifting her voice, “is Tiger-One-Twelve. She is the woman from The Most Great Lives of the Legend Hunters. She is the one sent to investigate what’s going on and to write the entry everyone has been waiting for. She is the one who can tell the truth. She has investigated everything. And she has just listened to everything.”

  All eyes were on Tiger-One-Twelve now.

  “I wouldn’t go after her either,” Emmie warned Lucien. “She didn’t come alone.”

  Beside her, another person appeared, strolling forward in full armour. Strong, resolute and – even from this distance – obviously very, very angry.

  “Dad,” said Finn, relief bursting through his chest.

  Lucien finally lowered his Desiccator.

  It was a standoff.

  On one side, the assistants were still ranged in various degrees of exhaustion and confusion.

  Finn and Emmie stood opposite them. Finn felt a lightness creep across his shoulders, the crush being lifted away.

  On the far slope, Tiger-One-Twelve and Hugo waited.

  Lucien stood apart from all of them. They could almost see his mind cranking around like the Smoofyland Ferris wheel. He was doing calculations. Trying to work out his next move. He pushed the cracked glasses up his nose, smoothed down his hair, started to speak, changed his mind. Then he turned to give orders to his assistants.

  Before he even spoke they began to leave, filing away rapidly, minds made up. They had decided they were better off out of this.

  To Finn, it looked like when you lift a rock and the insects suddenly exposed beneath it run for cover.

  Lucien stuck the tip of his tongue between his teeth, clenched and unclenched his fingers, tried not to let himself look defeated. Failed utterly.

  He finally opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by shouting children.

  Elektra and Tiberius had started sword-fighting with discarded bones.

  “Ouch!” the boy screamed, and wailed about how she’d hit him too hard. He picked up a skull and flung it at his sister then ran, with Elektra belting after him, away towards the exit of Smoofyland.

  With one last deep exhalation, the visible deflation of a defeated man, Lucien turned to follow them.

  “Lucien,” Finn called after him. “Don’t go back to Liechtenstein without leaving us the keys to my house.”

  Finn sat again. Half fell to the ground, really. The tiredness just wouldn’t let go of him.

  He didn’t care that he was surrounded by the remains of so many ancient skeletons, in a half-destroyed theme park. It didn’t even bother him that when he sat, it set off a singing sparkly purple Smoofy belt he’d forgotten to take off.

  “Who’s the sparkly unicorn with magic in his mane?

  “Smoofy! That’s who …”

  Emmie laughed as she dropped down to join him.

  “So,” he said, shaking his head, “basically everyone was double-crossing everyone else. Everyone was keeping secrets from everyone else. No one was who they said they were, or doing what they said they were doing. Except for me. And no one believes me anyway.”

  Emmie sat beside him. “I believe you,” she said.

  Finn was trying to remember when he had last eaten something, and was sorry he hadn’t taken a bite of a toffee apple he spotted down the back of the rollercoaster seat. His stomach felt like it might implode with hunger.

  “Tell me the truth, Emmie. Did you always believe in me, or did you doubt me like everyone else?”

  “I didn’t doubt you like they did, Finn. No way.”

  “But you did doubt me. Even just a bit.”

  She looked at the ground. “A bit, yeah. But things kept happening. And I knew you couldn’t be a traitor … but then more stuff would happen. You’d disappear over to the Infested Side. Or you’d steal a Legend and release it on a train.”

  “That was an accident,” said Finn.

  “And you kept running, and that made you look really guilty,” said Emmie.

  “I couldn’t exactly walk back in there with my hands up, could I?” Finn said, and then thought about that. “Even though, you know, I did actually walk in with my hands up in the end. But that was different.”

  “I had to make a decision about whether to keep running or whether to find some other way,” said Emmie. “So I gave myself up because I thought it would gain Lucien’s trust and help me find out what was really going on.”

  Finn thought about that, but other priorities kept poking at his brain.

  “You don’t have any snacks, do you?” he asked her.

  Footsteps approached, and they looked up to see Hugo arriving with Tiger-One-Twelve.

  Finn raised a hand, telling his dad not to speak. “I know, I know,” he said. “You had a plan all along.”

  Hugo put a hand on his shoulder. Finn winced at the grip, landing as it did on top of the bruises left behind by Sulawan’s fingers.

  “Your mother is going to be very unhappy you got to Smoofyland before her,” Hugo said.

  “I have to admit, the rollercoaster’s pretty good,” Finn said.

  “You owe her one very long holiday here,” his dad said, looking around. “Whenever they rebuild the place.”

  He held a hand out for Finn to take and hoisted him back to his feet. Dusted his shoulders down. Shook his head, yet looked proud all the same. It was as if Hugo was trying to decide if he should scold Finn or lift him up in triumph.

  “Finn, this woman here is Tiger-One-Twelve. We have known each other a long time. And we now owe her a big debt.”

  Tiger-One-Twelve shook Finn’s hand.

  “I come from a Legend Hunter family too,” she said. “I met your dad when I was younger and in training, but our Blighted Village went quiet long ago. I never became a Legend Hunter. Instead, I ended up working for the publishers of The Most Great Lives.”

  “This is the person writing your entry in the book,” said Hugo.

  “Well, I lead a team of us looking after your entry,” she said bashfully.

  “What’s the story with your name?” asked Finn.

  “It’s coded. Just as names always are for those writing up The Most Great Lives, to keep us anonymous. I guess I’m not so anonymous now, though,” she said, smiling. “But your father knew me back when I had a real name.”

  “And she was part of my plan, Finn,” said Hugo. “Because I did have one all along. I wasn’t planning on spending my life giving pedicures to cockatoos. I took that job at Woofy Wash so I could stay under the radar, and I’ve just quit it by the way. Although maybe I shouldn’t have thrown that snake at Mr Green as I did it. Being there meant I could steal the supplies, sure – and I hear that saved you on that train – but it was also about looking like I was doing nothing. I couldn’t leave Darkmouth or we would lose everything. So I asked for help.”

  Finn was relieved. He’d wanted to feel that his father had a real plan. But he was also feeling a bit guilty for not believing him fully.

  “Your father contacted me when he heard I was going to be writing the entry about you,” said Tiger-One-Twelve. “An entry which, I’ll be honest, was going to be a pretty dark chapter in our history. I wasn’t sure I could help Hugo. It really did look like you could be up to some bad things, Finn. And this whole escapade would have made that look even worse if it wasn’t for what I found along the way.”


  She fished something from a pocket, handed it to him.

  “A Darkmouth Pet Shop pen?” he said.

  “That and other things were found very, very far from here,” said Tiger-One-Twelve. “Where they shouldn’t be. And where certain things shouldn’t be happening. Old Blighted Villages, some of them untroubled for decades, but where I now know Lucien had ordered assistants to try and open gateways to the Infested Side.”

  “They didn’t just try their experiments here and in Darkmouth?” said Emmie.

  “Far from it,” confirmed Tiger-One-Twelve. “Lucien had all this dust from the cave in Darkmouth. All these pieces of crystal crushed into powder. And he wanted to find a way to make it work wherever he thought it was most likely.”

  “Like old Blighted Villages,” deduced Finn.

  “Gateways used to open in places like here in Slotterton so they were the natural locations to experiment in.”

  Finn became aware of a couple of other people out there among the bones scattered across the ground. He couldn’t make them out, as they were in a dark spot between Smoofyland’s gaudy lights.

  “So Lucien sent undercover teams out to dormant Blighted Villages all over the world,” Tiger-One-Twelve continued. “Anywhere they could find. Old villages swallowed by cities. Deep jungle. Deserts. Wherever.”

  “It finally worked,” said Finn. “Here, before the Bone Creature came through. They figured out how to open a gateway.”

  “Which is why it was so important you stopped them before it was too late,” said Tiger-One-Twelve. “Before this, they only managed sparks, scratches, tiny tears. But the skin between worlds can only take so much damage.”

  Hugo spoke. “Each time they try, even when it doesn’t work, it weakens the wall between the worlds, thins it. That’s what allowed the Bone Creature to come through, and … well, it could have led to even worse things. Still might, if we don’t make sure they stop.”

  “Dad,” said Finn, waving a hand at the destruction all around. “What do you mean by ‘even worse things’?”

  “If you weaken any wall too much,” said Hugo, “it will eventually collapse.”

  “Which would mean …?” asked Emmie.