Deeper

1

With a hiss and a clunk, the doors whisked shut, depositing the woman by the bus stop. Apparently indifferent to the whipping wind and the pelting rain, she stood watching as the vehicle rumbled into motion again, grinding the gears as it wound its way laboriously down the hill. Only when it finally vanished from sight behind the briar hedges did she turn to gaze at the grassy slopes that rose on either side of the road. Through the downpour they seemed to fade into the washed-out gray of the sky itself, so that it was difficult to tell where the one started and the other finished.

Clutching her coat tightly at the neck, she set off, stepping over the pools of rainwater in the crumbling asphalt at the edge of the road. Although the place was deserted, there was a watchfulness about her as she scanned the road ahead and occasionally glanced back over her shoulder. There was nothing particularly furtive about this — any young woman in a similarly isolated spot might have taken the same care.

Her appearance offered little clue as to who she was. The wind constantly flurried her brown hair across her wide-jawed face, obscuring her features in an ever-shifting veil, and her clothing was unremarkable. If anyone had happened by, they would most likely have taken her to be a local, perhaps on her way home to her family.

The truth couldn't have been more different.

She was Sarah Jerome, an escaped Colonist who was on the run for her life.

Walking a little farther along, she suddenly strode up the verge and hurled herself through a parting in the briar hedge-row. She alighted in a small hollow on the other side and, keeping low, spun around so she had a clear view of the road. Here she remained for a full five minutes, listening and watching and animal-alert. But other than the beat of the rain and the bluster of the wind in her ears, there was nothing.

She was truly alone.

She knotted a scarf over her head, then scrambled from the hollow. Moving quickly away from the road, she crossed the field before her in the lee of a loose stone wall. Then she climbed a steep incline, maintaining a fast pace as she reached the crest of the hill. Here, silhouetted against the sky, Sarah knew she was exposed and wasted no time in continuing down the other side, into the valley that opened out before her.

All around, the wind, channeled by the contours, was driving the rain into confused, twisting vortices, like diminutive hurricanes. And through this, something jarred, something registered in the corner of her eye. She froze, turning to catch a brief glimpse of the pale form.

A chill shot down her spine.

The movement didn't belong to the sway of the heathers or the beat of the grasses… It had a different rhythm to it.

She fixed her eyes on the spot until she saw what it was. There, on the valley side, a young lamb came fully into view, prancing a chaotic gambol between the tussocks of fescue. As she watched, it suddenly bolted behind a copse of stunted trees, as if frightened. Sarah's nerves jangled. What had driven it away? Was there somebody else close by — another human being? Sarah tensed, then relaxed as she saw the lamb emerge into the open once again, this time escorted by its mother, who chewed vacantly as the youngster began to nuzzle her flank.

It was a false alarm, but there was little hint of relief, or of amusement, in Sarah's face. Her eyes didn't stay on the lamb as it began to scamper around again, its fleece fresh as virgin cotton wool, in marked contrast to its mother's coarse, mud-streaked coat. There was no room for such diversions in Sarah's life, not now, not ever. She was already checking the opposite side of the valley, scouting it for anything that didn't fit.

Then she was off again, picking her way through the Celtic stillness of the lush green vegetation and over the smooth slabs of stone, until she came to a stream nestled in the crook of the valley. Without a moment's hesitation, she strode straight into the crystal clear waters, altering her course to that of the stream and sometimes using the moss-covered rocks as stepping stones when they afforded her a faster means through it.

As the level of the water rose, threatening to seep in over the tops of her shoes, she hopped back onto the bank, which was carpeted with a springy green pad of sheep-cropped grass. Still she maintained the same unrelenting pace and, before long, a rusted wire fence came into view, then the raised farm track that she knew ran behind it.

She spotted what she'd come for: Where the farm track intersected the stream there stood a crude stone bridge, its sides crumbling and badly in need of repair. Her course beside the stream was taking her straight toward it, and she broke into a trot in her haste to get there. Within minutes she had arrived at her destination.

Ducking under the bridge, she paused to wipe the moisture from her eyes. Then she crossed to the other side, where she held completely still as she studied the horizon. The evening was drawing in and the rose-tinged glow of newly lit streetlamps was just beginning to filter through a screen of oak trees, which hid all but the tip of the church steeple in the distant village.

She returned to a point halfway along the underside of the bridge, stooping as her hair snagged on the rough stone above. She located an irregular block of granite, which was slightly proud of the surface. With both hands, she began to pry it free. It was the size and weight of several house bricks, and she grunted with the effort as she bent to place it on the ground by her feet.

Straightening up, she peered into the void, then inserted her arm all the way to her shoulder and groped around inside. Her face pressed against the stonework, she found a chain, which she tried to pull down on. It was stuck fast. Tug as she might, she couldn’t move it. She swore and, taking a deep breath, braced herself for another attempt. This time it gave.

For a second, nothing happened as she continued to pull one-handed on the chain. Then she heard a sound like distant thunder emanating from deep within the bridge.

Before her, hitherto invisible joints broke open with a spray of mortar dust and dried lichen, and an uneven, door-sized hole opened before her as a section of the wall lifted back, then up. After a final thud that made the whole bridge quake, all was silent again except for the gurgle of the stream and the patter of rain.

Stepping into the gloomy interior, she took a small key-ring flashlight from her coat pocket and switched it on. The dim circle of light revealed she was in a chamber some fifty feet square, with a ceiling that was sufficiently high to allow her to stand upright. She glanced around, registering the dust motes as they drifted lazily through the air, and the cobwebs, as thick as rotted tapestries, which festooned the tops of the walls.

It had been built by Sarah's great-great-grandfather in the year before he'd taken his family underground for a new life in the Colony. A master stonemason by trade, he'd drawn on all his skills to conceal the chamber within the crumbling and dilapidated bridge, intentionally choosing a site miles from anywhere on the seldom-used farm track. And as to why exactly he'd gone to all this trouble, neither of Sarah's parents had been able to provide any answers. But whatever its original purpose, this was one of the very few places she felt truly safe. Nobody, she believed, would ever find her here. She pulled off her scarf and shook her hair free.

Her feet on the grit-covered floor broke the tomblike silence as she moved to a narrow stone shelf on the wall opposite the entrance. At either end of the shelf were two rusty, vertical iron prongs, with sheaths of thick hide covering their tips.

"Let there be light," she said softly. She reached out and simultaneously tugged off both the sheaths to expose a pair of luminescent orbs, which were held in place on top of each prong by flaking red iron claws.

From these glass spheres no larger than nectarines, an eerie green light burst forth with such intensity that Sarah was forced to shield her eyes. It was as if their energy had been building and building under the leather covers and they now reveled in their newfound freedom. She brushed one of the spheres with her fingertips, feeling its ice-cold surface and shuddering slightly, as if its touch conferred some sort of connection with the hidden city where such orbs were commonplace.

The pain and suffering she had endured under this very light.

She dropped her hand to the top of the shelf, sifting through the thick layer of silt covering it.

Just as she'd hoped, her hand closed on a small polyethylene bag. She smiled, snatching it up and shaking it to remove the grime. The bag was sealed with a knot, which she quickly unpicked with her cold fingers. Removing the neatly folded piece of paper from inside, she lifted it to her nose to sniff at it. It was damp and fusty. The message must have been there for several months.

She kicked herself for not coming sooner. But she rarely allowed herself to check at fewer than six-month intervals, as this "dead mailbox" procedure held its dangers for all concerned. These were the only times that she came into contact, indirect as it was, with anyone from her former life. There was always a risk, however small, that the courier could have been shadowed as he'd broken out of the Colony and emerged on the surface in Highfield. She also couldn't ignore the possibility that he might have been spotted on the journey up from London itself. Nothing could be taken for granted. The enemy was patient, sublimely patient, and calculating, and Sarah knew they would never cease in their efforts to capture and kill her. She had to beat them at their own game.

She glanced at her watch. She always varied her routes to and from the bridge, and she hadn't allowed much time for the cross-country hike to the neighboring village where she would catch the bus for the journey home. She should have been on her way, but her craving for news of her family was just too great. This piece of paper was her only connection with her mother, brother, and two sons — it was like a lifeline.

She had to know what was in it.

She smelled the note again.

It was as if there was a distinctive and unwelcome smell to the paper, rising above the mingled odors of mold and mildew in the dank chamber. It was sharp and unpleasant — it was the reek of bad news.

With a mounting sense of dread, she stared deep into the light of the nearest orb, fidgeting with the piece of paper while she fought the urge to read it. Then, appalled with herself for being so weak, she grimaced and opened it up. Standing before the stone shelf, she examined it under the green-tinged illumination.

She frowned. The first surprise was that the message wasn't in her brother's hand. The childish writing was unfamiliar to her. Tam always wrote the notes. Her premonition had been right — she knew at once that something was amiss. She flipped the page over and scanned to the end to check the signature. "Joe Waites," she spoke aloud, feeling more and more uneasy. That wasn't right; Joe occasionally acted as the courier, but the message should have been from Tam.

She bit her lip in trepidation and began to read, darting through the first lines.

"Oh, no!" she gasped, shaking her head.

She read the first side of the letter again, unable to accept what was there, telling herself that she must have misunderstood it, that it had to be some sort of mistake. But it was as clear as day; the simplistically formed words left no room for confusion. And she had no reason to doubt what it was saying — these messages were the one thing she relied on, a constant in her shifting and restless life. They gave her a reason to go on.

"No, not Tam… not Tam! " she howled.

As surely as if she had been struck, she sagged against the stone shelf, leaning heavily on it to support herself.

She took a deep, tremulous breath and forced herself to turn over the letter and read the rest, shaking her head vehemently and mumbling, "No, no, no, no… it can't be…"

As if the first page hadn't been bad enough, what was on the reverse was just too much for her to take in. With a whimper, she pushed away from the shelf and into the center of the chamber. Swaying on her feet and hugging herself, she raised her head to look unseeingly at the ceiling.

All of a sudden she had to get out. She tore through the doorway in a frantic haste. Leaving the bridge behind her, she didn't stop. As she stumbled blindly by the side of the stream, the darkness was gathering rapidly and the rain was still falling in a persistent drizzle. Not knowing or caring where she was going, she slid and slipped over the wet grass.

She hadn't gone very far when she blundered straight off the bank and into the stream, landing with a splash. She lowered to her knees, the clear waters closing around her waist. But her grief was so all-consuming, she didn't feel their icy chill. Her head swiveled on her shoulders as if she was gripped by the most intense agony.

She did something she hadn't done since the day she'd escaped Topsoil, the day she'd abandoned her two young children and husband. She began to cry, a few tears at first, and then she was unable to control herself and they gushed down her cheeks in floods, as if a dam had been broken.

She wept and wept until there was nothing left. Her face was set in a mask of stone-cold anger as she rose slowly to her feet, bracing herself against the surging flow of the stream. Her dripping hands tightened into fists and she threw them at the sky as she screamed a the top of her lungs, the raw, primeval sound rolling through the empty valley.

2

"No school tomorrow, then!" Will shouted to Chester as the Miners' Train bore them away from the Colony, hurtling deeper into the bowels of the earth.

They erupted into hysterical laughter, but this was short-lived and they soon fell silent, happy just to be reunited. As the steam engine hammered along the rails, they didn't move from the bed of the massive, open-topped train car where Will had discovered Chester hiding under a tarpaulin.

After several minutes, Will drew his legs up in front of him and rubbed his knee, which still hurt from the rather haphazard landing on the train some miles back. Noticing this, Chester shot him a questioning look, to which Will gave his friend the thumbs-up and nodded enthusiastically.

"How did you get here?" Chester shouted, trying to make himself heard over the din of the train.

"Cal and me," Will yelled back, pointing over his shoulder to indicate the front of the train, where he'd left his brother. Then Will waved upward to the tunnel roof flashing over them, "…jumped… Imago helped us."

"Huh?"

"Imago helped us!" Will repeated.

"Imago? What's that?" Chester shouted even louder, cupping his hand over his ear.

"Doesn't matter," Will mouthed, shaking his head slowly and wishing that they could both lip-read. He gave his friend a grin and shouted, "Just brilliant you're OK!"

He wanted to give Chester the impression there was nothing to be worried about, although his mind was clouded with concern for the future. He wondered if his friend was even aware that they were headed for the Deeps, a place the people of the Colony spoke of with dread.

Will swiveled his head around to peer at the end panel behind him. From what he'd seen so far, the train and each of the freight cars it was pulling were on a scale several times larger than anything he'd ever encountered on the surface. He wasn't looking forward to the journey back to where his brother was waiting. Getting here had been no mean feat: Will knew that even the smallest misjudgment might have meant that he'd have slipped onto the track below and most probably been mashed by the giant wheels that ground and sparked on the thick rails. The thought alone was terrifying. He took a deep breath.

"Ready to go?" he shouted to Chester.

His friend nodded and rose uncertainly to his feet. Clinging to the end of the car, he braced himself against the incessant seesawing as the train wove around several bends in the tunnel.

He was dressed in the short coat and thick pants that were the usual garb in the Colony, but as the coat flapped open, Will was dismayed by what he saw.

Chester had been nicknamed Chester Drawers at school for his imposing physique, but, looking at him now, he seemed to have wasted away. His face was gaunter and his body had lost much of its bulk. Incredible as it seemed to Will right then, his formerly hefty friend now appeared to be almost frail. Will labored under no illusions as to how appalling the conditions in the Hold were. It wasn't long after he and Chester had first stumbled onto the subterranean world that they'd been caught by a Colonist policeman and thrust into one of the dark, airless prison cells. But Will had only been held there for about a fortnight — Chester had suffered a considerably longer ordeal. Months of it.

Will caught himself staring at his friend and quickly averted his eyes. He was racked with guilt, knowing that he was to blame for everything Chester had endured. He, and only he, had been responsible for dragging Chester into all this, driven by his impulsiveness and his single-minded determination to find his missing father.

Chester said something, but Will didn't catch a word of it, studying his friend under the illumination cast by the light orb in his hand as he tried to read his thoughts. Every exposed inch of Chester's face was pasted with a layer of filth from the sulfurous smoke constantly streaming past them. It was so thick that it looked like one big smudge broken only by the whites of his eyes.

From what little Will could see, Chester certainly wasn't a picture of health. In among the dirt mask were raised purple blotches, some with a hint of redness where the skin appeared to be broken. His hair, grown so long it was beginning to curl at the ends, was greasy and stuck to the sides of his head. And from the way Chester was looking back at him, Will assumed that his own appearance was equally shocking.

He self-consciously ran a hand through his white, dirt-streaked hair, which hadn't been cut for many months.

But there were more important things to attend to right now. Moving to the end of the car, Will was about to hoist himself up when he stopped and turned to his friend. Chester was extremely unsteady on his feet, although it was difficult to tell how much of this was due to the irregular swaying of the train.

"You up for this?" Will shouted.

Chester nodded halfheartedly.

"Sure?" Will shouted again.

"Yes!" Chester yelled back, nodding a little more vigorously this time.

But the process of crossing from car to car was a fraught undertaking, and after each one Chester needed to recover for longer and longer periods. Making the maneuver that much more difficult, the train seemed to be picking up speed. It was as if the boys were battling a force ten gale, their faces pulled back and their lungs filling with the putrid smoke whenever they drew breath. Added to this was the hazard of burning ash, pieces of which flared just over their heads like supercharged fireflies. Indeed, as the train continued to accelerate, there seemed to be so much of this carried in the slipstream that an orange glow pervaded the murky gloom around them. At least it meant Will didn't need to use his light orb.

As the two boys moved up the line of train cars, their progress was slow. Chester was finding it a challenge to keep on his feet, despite using the sides of the car to steady himself as he went. Before very long there was no hiding the fact that he couldn't cope. He dropped to all fours and it was all he could do to crawl sluggishly behind Will, his head hung low. Not about to stand by and let his friend struggle along like this, Will brushed aside Chester's protestations, forced an arm around his waist, and helped him up.

It took an enormous effort to manhandle Chester over the remaining end sections, and Will had to help him every inch of the way. Any miscalculation would have one or both of them falling under the massive wheels.

When he saw that they had one more car to go, Will was beyond relieved — he sincerely doubted he had it left in him to lug his friend very much farther. As he held on to Chester, they both reached across to the end panel of the last car, grabbing hold of it.

Will took several deep breaths, preparing himself. Chester was moving his limbs feebly, as if he hardly had any control over them. By now Will was supporting Chester's full weight and barely managing. The maneuver was difficult enough in itself, but attempting it with the equivalent of a giant sack of potatoes slung under one arm risked trying too much. Will mustered all his remaining strength and hauled his friend along with him. With much grunting and straining, they eventually made it over, collapsing in a heap on the bed of the next car.

They were immediately bathed in copious light. Numerous orbs the size of large marbles rolled loosely around the floor. They had spilled out of a flimsy crate that had cushioned Will's landing when he'd first dropped into the train. Will had already tucked a number of these into his pockets.

But at present he had his hands full as he heaved his ailing friend to his feet. With his arm hooked around Chester, Will kicked at any orbs in his path so that he wouldn't lose his footing. These zipped around chaotically, leaving streaks of light in their wake and colliding with other spheres, which themselves were then set into motion, as if a chain reaction had been started.

Will heaved for breath, feeling the effects of the exertion as they covered the short distance they had yet to go. Even if Chester had lost a lot of weight, he was by no means an easy burden. Stumbling and tripping, and enveloped by the intense swirling light, Will looked for all the world like a soldier helping his wounded comrade back to the lines as an enemy flare caught them out in no-man's land.

Chester seemed to barely register what was around him. The sweat poured from his forehead in rivulets, washing streaks into the grime coating his face. Will could feel his friend's body trembling violently against his as he panted short, shallow breaths.

"Not far now," he said into Chester's ear, urging him to keep going as they came to a section of the car where wooden crates were stacked. "Cal's just up here."

The boy was sitting with his back to them as they approached. He hadn't moved from between the splintered crates where Will had left him. Several years younger than Will, his newfound brother bore an uncanny resemblance to him. Cal was also an albino and had the same white hair and wide cheekbones they'd both inherited from the mother neither of them had ever known. But now Cal's head was hunched over and his features hidden as he tenderly rubbed the nape of his neck. He hadn't been quite as fortunate as Will when he'd fallen into the moving train.

Will helped Chester over to a crate, where his friend slumped down heavily. Approaching his brother, Will tapped him lightly on the shoulder, hoping he wasn't going to give him too much of a shock. They had been told by Imago to keep their wits about them, as there were Colonists on the train. But Will needn't have been concerned about alarming his brother; Cal was so preoccupied by his aches and pains that he barely reacted at all. It was only after some seconds, and a few inaudible grumbles, that he finally turned around, still kneading his neck.

"Cal, I found him! I found Chester!" Will yelled, his words all but drowned out by the noise of the train. Cal's and Chester's eyes met, but neither spoke, being too far apart for any sort of exchange. Although they had been introduced very briefly before, it had been under the worst of circumstances, with the Styx snapping at their heels. There had been no time for any niceties.

They looked away from each other and Chester lowered himself from the crate onto the freight bed, where he cradled his head in his hands. The trek he and Will had just made down the train had sapped all his remaining strength. Cal went back to massaging his neck. He didn’t appear to be the least bit surprised that Chester was on the train. Or perhaps he simply didn't care.

Will shrugged. "What a pair of wrecks!" he said in a normal voice, so that neither of them would hear him above the mechanical roar. But as he began to think about the future again, his anxiety returned, as if something were gnawing away at his insides.

From all accounts, they were destined for a place that even the Colonists spoke of with a hushed reverence. Indeed, it was one of the worst punishments imaginable for a Colonist to be "Banished" and expelled there, into the savage wasteland known as the Deeps. And the Colonists were a phenomenally hardy race, who had endured the toughest living conditions for centuries in their subterranean world. So how were they going to fare? Will had no doubt that they were going to be put to the test again, all three of them. And there was no escaping the fact that neither his brother nor his friend was up to facing any challenges. Not right now.

Flexing his arm and feeling the stiffness in it, Will put his hand under his jacket to probe the bite on his shoulder. He'd been mauled by a stalker, one of the ferocious attack dogs used by the Styx, and even though the injuries had been tended to, he wasn't in great shape, either. He automatically glanced at the crates of fresh fruit around them. At least they had ample food to keep up their strength. But other than that, they were hardly well prepared.

The responsibility was immense, as if large weights had been placed on his shoulders and there was no way to shake free of them. He'd involved Chester and Cal in this wild goose chase to search for his father, who even now was somewhere in the unknown lands they were nearing with every twist and turn of these winding tunnels. That was, if Dr. Burrows was still alive… Will shook his head.

No!

He couldn't let himself think like that. He had to go on believing he'd be reunited with his father, and then everything would be all right, just as he dreamed it would. The four of them — Dr. Burrows, Chester, Cal and him — working as a team, discovering unimaginable and wondrous things… lost civilizations… maybe new life forms… and then… then what?

He hadn't the foggiest idea.

Will couldn't see that far ahead, see how all this would pan out. He just knew that somehow, there would be a happy outcome, and finding his father was the key.

It had to be.

3

From different points around the floor, the sewing machines rattled and the steam hissed back their responses, as if they were trying to communicate with each other.

Where Sarah was sitting, the piping tones of a radio station, forever present in the background, were trying vainly to break through the mechanical din. Depressing the pedal with her foot, she whirred her machine into life, and it threw a thread into the fabric. Everyone on the floor was working flat out, as there was a rush on to get the clothes ready for the next day.

Sarah heard someone shouting and looked up — a woman was winding her way between the workbenches toward her companions, who were waiting by the exit. As she joined them, they chatted noisily, like a gaggle of overexcited geese, then pushed their way through the swinging doors.

As the doors flapped shut behind them, Sarah peered up at the dirty panes of the tall factory windows. She could see clouds gathering, making it as dark as early evening although it was only midday. There were still quite a number of other women on the factory floor, each of them isolated under a cone of illumination from their overhead light as they doggedly toiled away.

Sarah punched the button under her bench to turn off her machine and, snatching up her coat and bag, tore toward the doorway. She slipped through the swinging doors, then swept down the corridor. Through the window to his office, she could see the floor manager's plump back as he sat hunched over his desk, engrossed in his newspaper. Sarah should have told him she was leaving, but she had a train to catch and, besides, the fewer people who knew she'd left, the better.

Once outside, she scanned the sidewalks for anyone who didn't fit. It was an automatic gesture; she wasn't even aware she was doing it. Her instincts told her it was safe, and she forged down the hill, branching off the main road to take a far more circuitous route.

After so many years of moving from job to job every few months and varying her accommodation with similar regularity, she lived like a ghost, among the invisible people, the illegal immigrants and petty criminals. But although she was an immigrant of sorts, too, she was no criminal. Other than the several false identities she'd acquired over the years, she would have never dreamed of breaking the law, not even if she was desperate for money. No, that brought with it the risk of arrest and of being caught up in the system. Of leaving a trace that could be detected. And that was not an option, because the first thirty years of Sarah's life were not what would have been expected.

She'd been born underground, in the Colony. Her great-great-grandfather, along with several hundred other men, had been handpicked to work on the hidden city, swearing allegiance to Sir Gabriel Martineau, a man they believed was their savior.

Sir Gabriel had told his willing followers that, on an unspecified day in the future, the corrupt world would be wiped clean by an angry and vengeful god. All the people who inhabited the surface, the Topsoilers, would be exterminated, and then his flock, the pure people, would return to their rightful home.

And Sarah feared what her ancestors feared — the Styx. These religious police enforced order in the Colony with a brutal, single-minded efficiency. Years ago, against all odds, Sarah had escaped from the Colony, and the Styx would stop at nothing to capture and make an example of her.

She entered a square and walked a full circuit of it, checking that she hadn't been followed. Before she made her way back to the main road, she ducked behind a parked van.

It was a very different-looking person who stepped out from behind the van moments later. She had reversed her coat to change it from the green check to a dull gray fabric and had knotted a black scarf around her head. She covered the remaining distance to the train station, her clothes almost rendering her invisible against the grimy faзades of the shops and office buildings she was passing, as if she were a human chameleon.

She looked up as she caught the first sounds of an approaching train. She smiled — her timing was perfect.

4

As Chester and Cal slept, Will took stock of their situation.

Glancing around the train car, he realized that their first priority was concealment. He thought it highly unlikely that any of the Colonists would conduct any sort of search while the train was moving. However, if it did happen to stop, then he, Chester, and Cal had to be prepared. But what could he do? There wasn't much to work with; he decided that rearranging the undamaged crates would be their best bet. He set about dragging them around the slumbering forms of Cal and Chester, stacking them one upon the other, to build a makeshift blind with enough room for the three of them in the middle.

As he was doing this, Will observed that the car in front had higher sides to it than theirs — indeed, than any of the other cars he'd clambered over on his earlier expedition when he'd found Chester. Imago, whether by luck or design, had dropped them into a relatively sheltered spot where they had a degree of protection from the smoke and soot flung out by the engine up ahead.

Will hefted the last crate into place and stood back to admire his handiwork, his mind already moving on to their next priority: water. They could get by on the fruit, but they would really need something to drink before long, and it would also be good to have the provisions he and Cal had bought Topsoil. That meant someone was going to have to venture forward to retrieve their rucksacks from the cars up ahead where Imago had dropped them. And Will knew that someone would be him.

Balancing himself with his arms outstretched, as if he were on the deck of a ship in choppy water, he stared at the wall of iron he was going to have to climb. He raised his eyes to the very top of it, which was clearly silhouetted by the orange glow from the little pieces of burning ash racing overhead. He estimated it was about fifteen feet high — almost twice the height of the end sections he'd clambered over before.

"Come on, you wimp, just do it," he said, and then ran at full speed, hopping up onto the panel of the car he was in and catching hold of the higher wall of the next.

For a moment he thought he'd misjudged it and was going to slip off. With his hands gripping the car in front for all they were worth, he shuffled his feet until they were better positioned.

He allowed himself a split second of self-congratulation; it wasn't the safest of places to hang around for long. Both cars were rocking violently and jostling him about, threatening to dislodge him from his precarious position. And he didn't dare look down at the rails zipping beneath him, in case he lost his nerve altogether.

"Here goes nothing!" he shouted and, drawing on all the strength in his legs and arms, he hoisted himself over the edge. He slid down the inside of the car and landed in a crumpled heap. He'd done it.

Taking out a light orb for a proper look around, he was disappointed to find that the car appeared to be empty except for small heaps of coal. He continued farther along, and offered up silent thanks when he spied the two backpacks lying at the opposite end. He picked up the rucksacks and carried them back. Then, with as much precision as he could muster, he hurled each of them over into the car behind.

As he returned to Chester and Cal, he found they were still soundly asleep. They hadn't even noticed the two backpacks that had miraculously appeared just outside their enclave. Knowing how weak Chester had become, Will wasted no time in organizing a sandwich for him.

When, after much shaking, Will managed to rouse Chester sufficiently to take in what was being offered to him, he fell upon the sandwich. He grinned at Will between mouthfuls, wolfing it down with some water from one of the canteens, then promptly went back to sleep.

And in the ensuing hours, that was how they occupied themselves — sleeping and eating. They put together bizarre sandwiches of chunky white bread with dried strips of rat jerky and coleslaw as filler. They even helped themselves to the rather unappetizing slabs of mushroom (the Colonists' staple diet — giant fungi known as "pennybuns"), which they stacked atop heavily buttered waffles. And to finish off each meal, they ate so much fruit that they'd very soon plundered everything from the shattered crates and were forced to pry open some new ones.

All the time the train roared along, sinking them deeper into the earth's mantle. Will realized that trying to communicate with the others was futile and instead lay back and studied the tunnel. It was a constant source of fascination for him as the train penetrated through the strata. He peered at the various layers of metamorphic rock they were passing through, studiously documenting his observations in his notebook in wobbly handwriting. This would be a geography report to end all geography reports. It certainly dwarfed his own excavations back in his Topsoil hometown of Highfield, where he'd barely scratched the surface of the earth's crust.

He also noted that the gradient of the tunnel itself varied considerably — there were stretches several miles long that were clearly man-made, where the train would descend more gently. Then, every so often, the track would level out and they would pass through naturally formed caverns, where they could see towering palisades of flowstone. The sheer scale of these structures took Will's breath away — he couldn’t get over how much they resembled melted cathedrals. Sometimes these were surrounded by moats of dark water, which lapped over the railway track itself. Then there came the roller-coaster sections of tunnel that were so sheer that the boys, if sleeping, were rolled violently against each other and shaken awake.

Suddenly, as if the train had dropped off a ledge, there was a jarring crash. The boys all sat up and were looking around with startled faces when showers of water gushed from above. It was warm, flooding the car and drenching them as effectively as if they had been thrust under a waterfall. They waved their arms and laughed at each other through the torrents until, as abruptly as it had begun, the deluge ended, and they fell silent.

A light steam rose from the freight bed, then was immediately whisked away in the slipstream. Will had noticed how it was growing appreciably warmer as the train rocketed on its way. This was barely perceptible at first, but more recently the temperature had soared alarmingly.

After a while all three of them loosened their shirts and took off their boots and socks. The air was so fierce and dry that they took turns clambering onto the tops of the undamaged fruit crates in an effort to catch a little more of the breeze. Will wondered if this was how it was going to be from now on. Would the Deeps be unbearably hot, like blasts from an open furnace door? It was as though they were on the main line to hell itself.

His thoughts were soon interrupted as the brakes squealed with such intensity that the boys were forced to cover their ears. The train slowed, then jerked to a complete halt. Several minutes later, from somewhere up ahead, they heard a clanking, and then the resounding crash of metal upon rock. Will quickly pulled himself up to peek over the top and see what was going on.

It was useless — farther down the tunnel there was a dull red glow, but everything else was masked by lazy shrouds of smoke. Chester and Cal joined Will, craning their necks to see over the tops of the cars. With the engine ticking over, the noise level had now fallen off to almost nothing, and every sound they made, every cough or shuffle of a boot, seemed so remote and tiny. Although it was an opportunity for them to talk, they just glanced at each other, none of them really knowing what to say. In the end, Chester was the first to speak up.

"See anything?" he asked

"You look better!" Will said to him. His friend was moving with more confidence and had hoisted himself up next to Will without any difficulty at all.

"I was just hungry," Chester muttered dismissively, pressing the palm of his hand against an ear as if he was trying to relieve the pressure in it from the unfamiliar quietness.

There was a shout, a man's deep voice booming from somewhere ahead, and they all froze. It was a salient reminder that they weren't alone on the train. There was, of course, a conductor — possibly accompanied by an assistant driver, as Imago had warned them — and a further Colonist in the guard's car at the rear. These men knew Chester was on board and it would be their job to send him on his way when they arrived at the Miners' Station, but Cal and Will were stowaways and most probably had prices on their heads. They couldn't be discovered, not at any cost.

The boys exchanged nervous glances, and then Cal pulled himself higher up on the end of the car.

"Can't see a thing," he said.

"I'll try over here," Will suggested, and, passing hand over hand, he moved himself to the corner of the car to try to get a better vantage point. Here he squinted down the side of the train, but he couldn't make out anything more through the smoke and darkness. He returned to where the two other boys were perched. "Do you think they're doing a search?" he asked Cal, who merely shrugged and looked anxiously behind them.

Without the slipstream to cool them, the heat was almost unbearable. "Man, it's sweltering," Chester whispered, blowing through his lips.

"That's the least of our problems," Will murmured back.

Then the engine juddered to life again, lurching forward in a series of fits and starts until it was once more under way. The boys remained where they were, hanging doggedly on to the side of the high car, and were soon resubmerged in the thrashing tumult of noise and the soot-heavy smoke.

Deciding they'd had enough, they jumped down and returned to their blind, although they continued to keep watch from over the tops of the crates. It was Will who spotted the reason why the train had stopped.

"There!" he shouted, pointing as the train chugged along. Two huge iron doors were opened back against the tunnel walls. They all stood up to see.

"Storm gates!" Cal yelled at him. "They'll be shut again after us. You'll see."

Before he'd finished speaking, the brakes squealed and the train began to decelerate. It came to another juddering halt. There was a pause, then they heard the cranking noise again, this time from behind them. It culminated in a percussive thud that made their teeth rattle together and the whole tunnel quake as if there had been a small explosion.

"Told you, didn't I?" Cal declared smugly in the lull. "They're storm gates."

"But what are they for?" Chester asked him.

"To stop the full force of the Levant Wind from reaching the Colony."

Chester looked at him blankly.

"You know, the windstorms blowing up from the Interior," Cal answered, adding, "kind of obvious, isn't it?" He rolled his eyes as if he thought Chester's question was absurd.

"He probably hasn't seen one yet," Will intervened quickly. "Chester, it's like a thick dust that blows up from where we're going, from the Deeps."

"Oh, right," his friend replied, and turned away.

Will couldn't help but notice the look of irritation that flickered across his face.

As the train began to move at speed again, the boys resumed their positions among the crates. Over the next twelve hours, they went through many more sets of these storm gates. Each time, they kept on the lookout in case one of the Colonists got it into his mind to come back and check on Chester. But no one came, and after each interruption the boys settled back into their routines of eating and sleeping. Aware that sometime soon they would reach the end of the line, Will began to get ready. On top of all the loose light orbs he'd already squirreled away in the two rucksacks, he packed in as much fruit as he could. He had no idea where or when they'd find food once they were in the Deeps, and was determined they'd take all they could with them.

He'd been in a deep sleep when he was rudely awoken by the sound of a clanging bell. In a state of groggy confusion, his first thought was that it was his alarm clock waking him to get ready for school. He automatically groped over to where his bedside table should have been, but instead of the alarm clock, his fingertips encountered the grit-covered floor of the freight bed. The mechanical urgency of the bell hammered him fully awake, and he jumped to his feet, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The first thing he saw was Cal frantically putting on his socks and boots as Chester watched him bemusedly. The harsh ringing kept going, echoing off the walls and down the tunnel behind them.

"C'mon, you two!" Cal bawled at the top of his lungs.

"Why?" Chester mouthed to Will, who could see the haunted look on his friend's face.

"This is it! Get ready!" Cal said, securing the flap on his backpack.

Chester looked at him questioningly.

"We've got to bail out!" the younger boy yelled at him, gesturing at the front of the train. "Before the station."

5

On a train very different from the one carrying her two sons, Sarah was on her way to London. She didn't allow herself to sleep, but for much of the time feigned it, half closing her eyes in order to avoid any contact with the other passengers. The car became increasingly crowded as the train made frequent stops on the final stretch. She felt distinctly uneasy. A man with a mangy beard had boarded at the last of these stops, a wretch in a tartan overcoat, clutching a motley collection of plastic bags.

She had to be careful. They sometimes passed themselves off as tramps and down-and-outs. All the hollow-cheeked countenance of the average Styx required was several months' growth of facial hair and a generous pasting of filth and it became indistinguishable from those poor unfortunates that can be found in the corners of any city.

It was a clever ruse, allowing them to man surveillance posts around the busier train stations for days on end, monitoring the passengers passing through. Sarah had lost count of how many times she'd seen vagrants loitering in doorways, and how, from under matted hair, their glassy eyes would probe her with all-seeing black pupils.

But was this tramp one of them? She watched his reflection in the windows as he produced a can of beer from a grubby shopping bag. He popped it open and began to drink, slopping a good measure of it down his beard. She caught him looking directly at her, and she didn't like his eyes — they were jet-black, and he squinted as if he wasn't quite used to day-light. All ominous signs. But she didn't move to another seat on the train. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention to herself.

So she gritted her teeth and sat still until the train finally drew into St. Pancras station. She was among the first passengers to disembark and, once through the turnstile, she strolled unhurriedly over to where the kiosks were located. She kept her head bowed to avoid the security cameras dotted around the place, holding a handkerchief to her face when she thought she might be in range of any of them. She stopped and hovered by a shop window, observing the tramp as he crossed the main concourse.

If he was a Styx, or even one of their agents, far better she remain in a crowd. She weighed her options for escape. She was debating whether she should jump on an outgoing train when, just a few feet away from her, he stopped to fumble with his bags. Then, swearing incoherently at a man who happened to brush against him, he started toward the main doors of the station in a stumbling gait, his arms outstretched as if he were pushing an invisible shopping cart with a bum wheel. He left through the main entrance of the station.

By now Sarah was almost certain he was a genuine tramp, and she was eager to be on her way. She picked a direction at random, headed off through the crowd, and then slipped out of the station by a side exit.

Outside, the weather was fine and the London streets were full. Just the way she liked it. It was better to have a healthy throng of people milling around her — safety in numbers. The Styx were less likely to pull anything in front of multiple witnesses.

She set off at a fair pace, heading north toward Highfield. The rumble of the busy traffic seemed to coalesce into a single continuous beat, which was conducted through the pavement to the soles of her feet, until she could almost feel it resonating in the pit of her stomach. Strangely enough, it put her at ease. It was a comforting and constant vibration, as if the city itself were alive.

She looked at the new buildings as she went, turning her head away whenever she spotted one of the many security cameras mounted on them. She was astounded by how much had changed even since her first time in London. What was it, almost twelve years ago?

It is said that time heals. But that depends on what has happened since.

For so long, Sarah's life had been a featureless and forlorn plain: She felt she hadn't been really alive. Her flight from the Colony was still painfully vivid in her mind.

Walking the Topsoil city streets now, she found that she couldn’t stem the rush of memories as they flooded back. She began to relive the crushing self-doubt that she'd escaped from one nightmare only to be cast into another, into this alien land where the glare of the sunlight was agonizing and everything was so unfamiliar. Worst of all, she'd been torn apart by the guilt at leaving her children, her two sons, behind.

But I had no choice. I had to go…

Her baby, barely a week old, had developed a fever, a horrible, consuming fever that racked the tiny thing with violent shivering fits as it succumbed to the illness. Even now, Sarah could hear its interminable crying and remember how she and her husband had felt so helpless. They'd pleaded with the doctor for some medicine, but he said he didn't have anything he could five them from his black valise. She'd become hysterical, but the doctor merely shook his head dourly, avoiding her eyes. She knew what that shake of his head meant. She knew the truth. In the Colony, medicines such as antibiotics were in permanent short supply. The little that had been stockpiled was for the sole use of the ruling classes, the Styx and maybe a very select band of elite within the Board of Governors.

There had been another alternative: She'd suggested buying some penicillin on the black market and wanted to ask her brother, Tam, to get hold of some for her. But Sarah's husband was adamant. "I cannot condone such actions" were his words as he stared bleakly at the hapless infant that was growing weaker with every hour. Then he had blathered on about his position in the community and how it was their duty to uphold its values. None of this mattered one jot to Sarah; she just wanted her baby to be well again.

There was nothing else to do but continually swab the shining red face of the howling infant in an attempt to lower its temperature, and pray. Over the next twenty-four hours, the baby's crying quieted to pathetic little gasps, as if it was all it could do to breathe. It was useless trying to feed it; it made no effort to draw milk. The baby was slipping away from her and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, she could do.

She thought she might go mad.

She went into fits of barely suppressed fury and, backing away from the crib into a corner of the room, she would try to hurt herself by frenziedly scratching at her forearms, biting her tongue lest she cry out and disturb the semiconscious child. At other times, she slumped to the floor, overcome by such a deep despair that she prayed she might also die with her child.

In the final hour, its pale little eyes became glazed and listless. Then, sitting by the crib in the darkened room, Sarah had been roused from her desolation by a sound. It was like a tiny whisper, as if someone were trying to remind her of something. She leaned over the cot. She knew instinctively that she'd heard the final breath leak from the baby's dry lips. It was still. It was over. She'd lifted the child's tiny arm and let it fall back against the mattress. It was like touching some exquisitely made doll.

But she didn't cry then. Her eyes were dry and resolute. At that very instant, any loyalty she had felt for the Colony, her husband, and the society in which she'd lived her whole life evaporated. And in that instant, she saw everything so clearly, as if a spotlight had been switched on in her head. She knew what she must do, with such conviction that nothing was going to get in her way. She must spare her other two children from the same fate, whatever the cost.

That same evening, as the body of the dead baby, the child that had no name, lay cooling in its cot, she had thrown a few things into a shoulder bag and grabbed her two sons. While her husband was out making arrangements for the funeral, she left the house with both her boys, heading toward one of the escape routes her brother had once described to her.

As if the Styx knew her every move, it had very quickly gone wrong and become a game of cat and mouse. While she'd struggled through the warren of ventilation tunnels, they were never far behind. She recalled how she'd stopped for a moment to catch her breath. Leaning against the wall, she cowered in the darkness with a child held under each arm. In her heart of hearts, she knew she had no choice but to leave one of them behind. She wasn't going to make it not with both of them. She recalled her tortured decision at the time.

But shortly afterward, a Colonist, one of her own people, had stumbled across her. In the frantic tussle that ensued, she had fought the man off, stunning him with a wild blow. Her arm had been badly hurt in the struggle, and there was no question about it anymore.

She knew what she had to do.

She left Cal behind. He was barely a year old. She'd gently laid the twitching bundle between two rocks on the grit floor of the tunnel. Etched indelibly into her memory was the image of the child's cocoonlike swaddling, smeared with her own blood. And the noise he was making, the gurgling. She knew it wouldn't be long before he was discovered and returned to her husband, and that he would care for him. A scant consolation. She had resumed her flight with the other son and, more by luck than skill, had somehow eluded the Styx and broken out onto the surface.

In the small hours of the morning, they had walked down Highfield's Main Street, her son on the pavement beside her, a toddler still unsteady on his legs. He was her eldest child and he was called Seth. He was nearly three years old. He had turned this way and that as he gaped at the strange surroundings with wide, frightened eyes.

She had no money, nowhere to go, and before long the realization hit her that it was going to be a struggle to look after even the one child.

Hearing people in the distance, she led Seth away from the main thoroughfare and down several streets until she spied a church. Seeking refuge in its overgrown graveyard, mother and son sat on a mossy grave, smelling the night air for the very first time in their lives and looking with awe at the sodium-soaked sky above. Sarah just wanted to shut her eyes for a few minutes, but she feared if she rested for too long, she might not ever get up again. With her head spinning, she summoned all her remaining strength and got to her feet with the aim of finding some food, some water, somewhere they could hide.

She had tried to explain to her son what she intended to do, how soon she'd be back, but he just wanted to come with her. Poor little confused Seth. The expression on his face, the pure, heartrending incomprehension, was all she could bear as she hastily walked away from him. He clung to the railings around the most commanding tomb in the graveyard, which, strangely enough, had two small stone figures at its apex wielding a pickax and a shovel. Seth called out to her as she went, but she couldn’t turn to look back, her every instinct raking at her, telling her not to go.

She left the churchyard, heading she knew not where, all the while fighting the dizziness that, with each step, made her feel as though she was walking on rolling pins.

Sarah didn't remember much after that.

She'd regained consciousness as something prodded her awake. When she opened her eyes, the light was unbearable. It was so blindingly bright, she could barely make out the face of the concerned woman who stood over her, asking her what was wrong. Sarah found she'd passed out between two parked cars. Shielding her eyes with her hands, she pulled herself to her feet and ran.

She'd eventually found her way back to Seth, but stopped as she saw figures milling around him, dressed in black. Her first thought had been that they were Styx, but then, through her watering eyes, she had been able to read the word POLICE on the car. She'd slunk away.

Since that day, she had tried to tell herself a million times that it had been for the best, that she'd been in no condition to care for a young child, let alone go on the run from the Styx with one in tow. But that did nothing to dispel the image of the small boy's tear-filled eyes as he reached out a tiny hand and called for her over and over and over again as she'd slipped into the night.

The tiny hand wavering in the light of the streetlamps, reaching for her…

Something hurt recoiled in her head, like a badly injured animal rolling itself into a ball.

Her thoughts were so vivid that, as a passerby on the pavement threw a glance at her, she wondered if she'd been talking out loud.

"Pull yourself together," she urged herself. She had to stay focused. She shook her head to dispel the image of the little face from her mind. Anyway, it was so long ago now and, like the buildings around her, everything had changed, changed irreparably. If the message for he in the dead mailbox was true — something she couldn’t yet bring herself to believe — then Seth had become Will.

He had become someone else altogether.

After several miles, Sarah came to a busy street, with shops and a brick-built monolith of a supermarket. She grumbled beneath her breath as she was forced to stop at a crosswalk in the midst of a small crowd, waiting for the lights to change. She was uncomfortable, and huddled tightly inside her coat. Then, with a beeping, the green man lit up and she crossed the road, forging ahead of the people burdened by their shopping bags.

It began to rain, and people scurried for cover or back to their cars, leaving the streets less busy. Sarah carried on, unnoticed. She heard Tam's voice, as clearly as if he was walking beside her.

"See, but don't be seen."

It was something he had taught her. As young children, in brazen disregard of their parents' instructions, they had often sneaked out of the house. Disguising themselves by donning rags and wiping burnt cork on their faces, they had taken their lives in their hands and gone deep into one of the roughest, most dangerous places you could find in the whole of the Colony — the Rookeries. Even now she could picture Tam as he was then, his grinning, youthful visage streaked with black and his eyes shining with excitement as the two of them hared away after yet another close scrape. She missed him so much.

She was pulled once more from her thoughts. A loud exchange in a language she couldn't understand had caught her attention. Several shops down, two workmen were leaving a cafй, its steamy windows illuminated by the striplights inside. She made a beeline for it.

She ordered a big cup of coffee, paid for it at the counter, then took it over to a table by the window. Sipping the thin, tasteless liquid, she slipped the creased note from her pocket and slowly reread the artless handwriting. She still couldn't bring herself to accept what it said. How could Tam be dead? How could that be? As bad as things were in this Topsoil world, she'd always been able to draw small comfort from the knowledge that her brother was still alive and well in the Colony. It was like a flickering candle at the end of an incredibly long tunnel, the hope that one day she might see him again. And now even that had been taken away from her; now he was dead.

She flipped over the note and read the other side, then read the entire letter again, shaking her head.

The note must be wrong; Joe Waites must have been mistaken when he wrote it. How could her own son, Seth, her firstborn, who was once her pride and joy, have betrayed Tam to the Styx? Her own flesh and blood had effectively murdered her brother. And if it really was true, how could Seth have been corrupted like that? What could have driven him to do it? There was equally shocking news in the final paragraph. She read the lines over and over again, about how Seth had abducted her youngest son, forcing Cal to go with him.

"No," she said out loud, shaking her head, refusing to accept that Seth was responsible. And there it was again: Her son was Seth, and not Will, and he couldn't be capable of any of this. Perhaps someone had tampered with the note. Perhaps someone knew about the dead mailbox. But how, and why? None of it made any sense.

She realized her hands were trembling. She rested them hard against the table, crumpling the letter in her palms. Then she cleared a small circle in the condensation on the inside of the cafй window and peered through. It was still too early, too light, so she decided to bide her time a while longer, drawing with the corner of a paper napkin in some coffee slopped on the scratched red melamine of the tabletop. As the coffee evaporated, she simply stared down at her front, as if she'd fallen into a trance. When, several moments later, she came to with a small start, she noticed a button on her coat hanging by a thread. She tugged at it and it came away in her hand. Without thinking, she dropped it into her empty cup and then just gazed blankly at the steamed-up windows, at the vague shapes of people hurrying by.

Finally the owner ambled over, giving the empty tables a casual swipe with his grimy dishcloth and straightening the chairs on the way. He stopped by the window and joined Sarah in looking out, then, in an offhand tone, asked if he could get her anything else. Without acknowledging him, she simply got up and made straight for the door. Angered, he snatched up her empty coffee cup and spotted the discarded button sitting in the bottom of it.

That did it. She wasn't a regular, and she'd hogged his table, spending next to nothing.

"Ch…!' he started to yell, but only managed the first letters of "Cheapskate" before the word shriveled on his lips.

He'd happened to glance down at the tabletop. He blinked and shifted his head, as if the light were playing tricks on his eyes. There, staring back at him from the red melamine, was a surprisingly accomplished image.

It was a face, some five inches square and built up from layer upon layer of dried-out coffee, as if it had been painted with tempera. But it wasn't the artistry that stopped him cold, it was the fact that the face had its mouth wrenched open in a jaw-breaking rictus of a scream. He blinked again; it was so unnerving that for several seconds he didn't move, simply stared at the image. He found it impossible to associate the quiet, mousy woman who had just left his cafй with this shocking portrayal of anguish. Quickly he covered it with his dishcloth as he set about wiping it away.

Back out on the street, Sarah tried not to walk too quickly. Before she entered Highfield, she broke her journey to book a room in a bed-and-breakfast. There were several on the same street, but she chose one, a shabby Victorian terraced house, at random. That is how she had to be if she wanted to survive.

Never the same twice.

Never twice the same.

If she fell into any sort of routine or pattern, the Styx would be on her in a flash.

Giving a false name and address, she paid cash in advance for a single night. She took her key from the manager, a wrinkled old man, and on the way to her room checked the location of the fire escape. Just in case. Once in her room, she locked the door, wedging a chair under the handle. Then she pulled the sun-faded curtains closed and perched on the end of the bed while she attempted to gather her thoughts.

She opened the Highfield Bugle, a newspaper she'd taken from the reception desk. As she always did, she took out a pen and went straight to the classifieds, circling the advertisements for short-term employment that might suit her. Then she flicked her way back through the rest of the paper, perusing the articles without much interest. But one item caught her eye:

With aggressive jabs, Sarah began to doodle in the margin by the article. Although she was only using an old ballpoint, before long she had drawn an intricately detailed picture of a moonlit cemetery, not that different from the one in Highfield where she had taken refuge when she'd first escaped to the surface. But there the similarity ended, as she sketched a large, blank headstone in the foreground. She stared at it for a while before, using his Topsoiler name, she eventually wrote:

Sarah frowned. The anger welling up inside her from her brother's death was so powerful, she felt as if she were being swept along on a wave. And when she arrived wherever it was taking her, she needed someone to blame. Of course, at the root of it there were the Styx, but now she allowed herself to think the unthinkable: If it really was true about Seth, then he was going to pay, and pay dearly.

Still staring at the sketch, she tensed her hand and the pen snapped, sending slivers of clear plastic shooting over the hotel bed.

6

With grim faces, the boys clung to the side of the railroad car, the tunnel wall flashing past them in a terrifying blur even though the train was decelerating as it negotiated a sharp bend.

They had already thrown the backpacks out, and Chester had been the last to hoist himself over the side and join the other two. He let his feet scrabble down until they found a ledge, then held on for all he was worth. Will was just about to shout to the other two boys when his brother beat him to the punch.

"JUMP!" Cal yelled, and let loose a howl as he thrust himself off. Will watched as he vanished into the darkness.

Will had no option but to follow his brother. He gritted his teeth and then pushed himself off, twisting around as he did so. For a split second he seemed to hang in the wind. Then he landed on his feet with a bone-jarring jolt and pitched forward into a helter-skelter sprint, running at a crazy speed with his arms outspread as he tried to keep his balance.

Everything was a confusion of acrid smoke as the enormous wheels ground just feet away from him. But he was going impossibly fast and had hardly covered any distance when his own feet tripped him up. He went flying, falling first onto one knee, and the next instant flipping onto his chest. He skid along, his body plowing up dust in its wake. Coming to a halt, he slowly rolled over onto his back and then sat up, coughing out a mouthful of dirt. The huge train wheels continued to trundle past, and he thanked his lucky stars that he hadn't fallen under them. He pulled a light orb from his pocket and began to look for any sign of the others.

After a while he heard a loud groaning coming from farther up the track. As he watched, Chester emerged from the smoke-ridden darkness, crawling on all fours. He raised his head like an ill-tempered tortoise and, spying Will, sped up.

"All right?" Will shouted at him.

"Oh, just brilliant!" Chester shouted as he plunked himself next to Will.

Will shrugged, rubbing the leg that had taken all the impact of his fall.

"Cal?" Chester asked.

"Dunno. Better wait for him here." Will couldn’t tell if Chester had heard him, but his friend didn't seem inclined to go and look for the boy, anyway.

Some minutes later, as the train continued its relentless passage past them, Will's brother emerged through the smoky gloom with a rucksack on each shoulder, strolling jauntily, as if he didn't have a care in the world. He squatted next to Will.

"I got the bags. You all in one piece?" he yelled. There was a large scrape on his forehead, and little droplets of blood were collecting and running down the bridge of his nose.

Will nodded and looked past Cal. "Get down! The guard's car!" he warned, pulling his brother close to him.

Tucked into the tunnel wall, they watched the light looming toward them. It was streaming from the windows of the guard's train car, forming broad rectangles on the walls as it went. It shot past them, blasting them with a split second of illumination. As the train sped into the tunnel ahead and the light receded, growing smaller and smaller until there was nothing of it still visible, Will had an overpowering sense of finality.

In the unaccustomed silence, he got up and stretched his legs. He'd grown so used to the rocking of the train that it was a novelty to be back on terra firma again.

Will sniffed and was just about to say something to the other two boys when the train whistle blew in the distance.

"What does that mean?" he said eventually.

"It's coming up to the station," Cal answered, his eyes still on the darkness where they had last seen the train.

"How do you know that?" Chester asked him.

"My… our uncle told me."

"Your uncle? Can he help us? Where is he?" Chester fired the questions at Cal in rapid succession, his face filled with anticipation at the thought that there might be someone who could come to their rescue.

"No," Cal snapped, frowning at Chester.

"Why not? I don't understand—"

"No, Chester," Will interjected, shaking his head urgently. His friend could tell he needed to keep his mouth buttoned.

Will turned to his brother. "So what happens now? They'll find out Chester's gone when they unload the train. What then?"

"Then nothing." Cal shrugged. "Job done. They'll just think he's bailed out. They know he won't survive for long on his own… After all, he's only a Topsoiler." He laughed humorlessly and kept on talking, as if Chester weren't there. "They won't send a search party or anything."

"How can you be so sure about that?" Will quizzed his brother. "Wouldn't they assume he'd head straight back to the Colony again?"

"Nice idea, and even if he did happen to make it all the way — on foot — the Blackheads would just pick him off as soon as he showed up," Cal said.

"Blackheads?" Chester asked.

"Styx — that's one of the names the Colonists call them behind their backs," Will explained.

"Oh, right," Chester said. "Well, anyway, I'm never going back to that foul place again. Not on your life!" he added firmly to Cal.

Cal didn't respond, instead putting on his backpack as Will picked up the other one by its straps, testing its weight. It was heavy, stuffed to the brim with their equipment and the extra food and light orbs. He lifted it onto his back, wincing as the strap dug into his injured shoulder. The poultice Imago had applied to the wound had done wonders, but any pressure was still incredibly painful. Will tried to adjust the rucksack so that most of the weight was on his good shoulder, and they set off.

Before long, Cal sped onward at a fast trot, leaving Will and Chester to watch his bobbing silhouette advance into the murky gloom. The two of them strolled between the enormous metal girders of the train tracks. There was so much they wanted to say to each other, but now that they were alone, it was as if neither knew where to begin. Finally Will cleared his throat.

"We've got some catching up to do," he said awkwardly. "Stuff happened — crazy stuff — while you were in the Hold."

Will began to speak about his family, his biological family, whom he had met for the first time in the Colony, and what life had been like with them. Then he recounted how he and Uncle Tam had planned Chester's escape. "It was awful when it went wrong. I just couldn't believe it when I saw Rebecca was with the St—"

"That little brat!" Chester exploded. "Didn't you ever think there was something seriously wrong with her? All those years you were growing up together?"

"Well, I thought she was a bit strange, but then I thought all sisters were like that," Will said.

"A bit strange?" Chester repeated. "She's a certifiable nut-case. You must have known she wasn't your real sister."

"No, how could I? I… I didn’t even know I was adopted or where I'd come from."

"Don't you remember when your parents first brought you home?" Chester said, sounding a little amazed.

"No," Will replied thoughtfully. "I would have been about four, I suppose. Do you remember much from when you were that old?

Chester made a noise as if he wasn't wholly convinced, but Will went on with the chain of events. Trudging along beside him, Chester listened intently. Will finally came to the discussion with Imago, when he and Cal had had to decide whether they were going to return Topsoil or travel down into the Deeps.

Chester nodded.

"And that's how we came to be on the Miners' Train with you," Will finished, reaching the end of the story.

"Well, I'm glad you did." His friend smiled.

"I couldn't leave you behind," Will said. "I had to make sure you were OK. That's the least I—

Will's voice broke. He was attempting to articulate his emotions, his remorse, for everything Chester had been put through.

"They beat me, you know," Chester said abruptly.

"Huh?"

"After they caught me again," he said, so quietly that Will could hardly hear him. "They threw me back in the Hold and whacked me with clubs… tons of times," he continued. "Rebecca would come to watch."

"Oh, no," Will mumbled.

They were both silent for a few paces as they picked their way over the massive railroad ties.

"Did they hurt you badly?" Will eventually asked, dreading the answer.

Chester didn't reply right away. "They were really angry with us… with you mostly. They were shouting about you a lot as they hit me, saying you'd made them look like fools." Chester cleared his throat weakly and swallowed. His speech became confused. "It was… I… they…" He took in a sharp breath. "The beatings never went that far, and all I could think was that there was something much worse in store for me." He paused as he wiped his nose. "Then this old Styx sentenced me to Banishment, which was even more frightening. I was so scared, I completely fell apart." Chester's gaze dropped to the ground, as if he'd done something to be ashamed of.

He continued, a tone of the coldest controlled fury creeping into his voice. "You know, Will, if I could have, I would have killed them… the Styx. I wanted to, so much. They're evil… all of them. I would have killed them, even Rebecca." He stared at Will with such intensity that Will shivered — he was seeing a side of Chester he hadn't known existed.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Chester."

But something equally important occurred to Chester, deflecting his thoughts. He stopped short, teetering on the spot, as if he'd been slapped in the face. "What you were saying about the Styx and their… what are they called… their people on the surface?"

"Agents," Will helped him.

"Yes… their agents…" He narrowed his eyes. "Even if I could get back above ground again, I couldn't go home, could I?"

Will stood before him, not knowing what to say.

"If I did, my mum and dad would be abducted, like that family you mentioned, the Watkinses. The dirty, rotten Styx wouldn't just be after me. They'd grab my parents and turn them into slaves, or murder them, wouldn't they?"

Will could only return Chester's stare, but that was enough.

"And what could I do? If I tried to warn Mum and Dad, or even the police, do you think they'd believe me? They'd think I'd lost my mind or something." His head sagged forward and he sighed. "All the time I was locked up in the Hold, all I thought about was you and me getting home. I just wanted to go home. It kept me going for all those months." He broke into a cough, which might have masked a sob — Will couldn't tell. Chester grasped Will's arm and stared straight into his eyes. His expression was one of the deepest despair. "I'm never going to see daylight again, am I?"

Will remained silent.

"One way or another, we're stuck down here for good, aren't we? There's nowhere for us to go, not now. Will, what are we going to do?" Chester said.

"I'm so sorry," Will said again in a strangled voice.

Cal's excited cries echoed from up ahead. "Hey!" he was calling repeatedly.

"No!" Will yelled back in frustration. "Not now!" He waved his light in a gesture of irritation. He needed more time with his friend. "Just wait!"

"Found something!" Cal hollered even more loudly, either not hearing Will's response or choosing to ignore it.

Chester glanced to where the younger boy was and declared, "It'd better not be the station. I am not going to get caught again." He took a step forward along the tracks.

"Hold up, Chester," Will started, "hang on a second. I want to say something."

Chester's eyes were still red-rimmed with fatigue. As they stood there, Will fidgeted with the light orb in his hands, and from its illumination Chester could easily read the turmoil in his friend's filth-covered face.

"I know exactly what you're going to say," he said. "It's not your fault."

"But it is!" Will cried. "It is my fault… I didn't mean to get you into all this. You've got a real family, but… I've… I've got no one to go back to. I've got nothing to lose."

Chester tried to reply, reaching a hand forward, but his friend went on, growing more incoherent as he attempted to give voice to the emotions and regrets that had been knocking around in his head for the past months.

"I never should have gotten you into this… you were just helping me…"

"Look… " Chester said, trying to calm his friend.

"My dad will be able to fix everything, but if we don't find him… I —"

"Will —" Chester tried to interrupt once again, then allowed him to continue.

"I don't know what we're going to do, or what's going to happen to us… we might never… we might die…"

"Just forget it," Chester said softly as Will's voice fell to a whisper. "Neither of us knew it would turn out like this, and besides" — Will saw a broad grin ease itself into place on his friend's face — "it really can't get any worse, can it?" Chester punched Will playfully on the shoulder, unknowingly hitting the precise spot that had been so horribly injured by the stalker dog in the Eternal City.

"Thanks, Chester," Will gasped, clenching his teeth to stop himself from crying out form the fresh wave of pain.

"Hurry up!" Cal's shouts came again. "I've found a way through here. Come on!"

"What's he ranting about?" Chester asked.

Will tried to pull himself together. "He's always doing this, running off," he said, rolling his eyes.

"Oh, really? Remind you of anyone?" Chester said, arching an eyebrow.

Slightly abashed, Will nodded. "Yeah… a little." He managed to return Chester's smile.

They caught up with Cal, who was positively vibrating with excitement, babbling something about a light.

"Told you! Look down there!" He was jumping up and down, pointing to a large passage that led away from the train tunnel. Will peered down it and saw a soft blue glow, flickering as if it was quite some distance away.

"Keep up with me," Cal ordered and, without waiting for either Will or Chester to react, raced off at a furious pace.

Will tried to shout after him, but Cal didn't stop.

"Who does he think he is?" Chester said, looking at Will, who just shrugged as they both followed Cal's lead. "Can't believe I'm being told what to do by a pesky midget," Chester complained under his breath.

The temperature suddenly seemed to soar, making them pant. The air was so searingly dry and arid that their sweat was whisked off their skin the moment it appeared.

"Man, it is sweltering down here. It's like Spain or something," Chester complained, undoing several shirt buttons and scratching his chest.

"Well, if you believe the geologists, the temperature should rise one degree for every seventy feet you get closer to the earth's core," Will said.

"What does that mean?" Chester asked.

"It means we should be toast by now."

As Will and Chester followed Cal, wondering what exactly they were getting themselves into now, the light grew in intensity. It seemed to pulse, sometimes bathing the jagged walls around them, and then gradually diminishing so that there was only a bluish haze ahead.

They caught up with Cal just as he reached the end of the passage. A large space opened up before them.

A single flame, about six feet high, sprouted from the central point in the space. With a loud hissing, the flame grew, the blue plume elongating until it had quadrupled in height, spearing up and licking into a circular opening in the roof above it. The heat from the flame was too much to bear, and they were forced to back away and cover their faces with their arms.

"What is it?" Will asked, but neither Cal nor Chester answered, all three boys bewitched by its sheer beauty. For at the base of the flame, as it emerged from the blackened rock, it was almost transparent, but it transformed through a spectrum of colors, into shimmering yellows and reds, to a staggering range of greens, until it became the deepest magenta at its apex. But the overall light, the summation of these colors, was the blue that it cast around them, and which had led them here. They stood together, their eyes reflecting the iridescent display, until the hissing subsided and the flame shrank back down again.

As if they had all snapped out of a spell at the same instant, they turned to see what lay around them. They could make out a number of shadowy openings in the walls of the chamber.

Will and Chester made for the nearest of these. As they cautiously entered it, the light from the orbs in their hands mingled with the blue of the residual flame to reveal man-sized bundles leaning against the walls, two or three deep in places.

Wrapped in dusty cloth, each was bound several times around its girth with some type of twine. A few of the bundles appeared to be more recent than others, encased in a less soiled and stained cloth. But the older ones were so dirty as to be almost indistinguishable from the rock behind them. Closely followed by Chester, Will went over to one of these and held up his light to it. Strips of material had rotted and fallen away, allowing the boys to see what was inside.

"Ohmygosh," Chester said, so quickly it sounded like a single word.

Desiccated skin was drawn tightly across a skeletal face, which stared back at them from its empty eye sockets. Here and there the dull ivory of clean bone poked through the cracks in the dark skin. As Will moved his light, they could see other parts of the skeleton: Ribs protruded through the fabric, and a spiderlike hand rested against a hip covered with skin as tightly stretched as a piece of ancient parchment.

"I suppose these must be dead Coprolites," Will mumbled as he and Chester followed the wall around, surveying the other bundles.

"Oh. My. God," Chester repeated, slowly this time. "There are hundreds of them."

"This has to be some sort of burial ground," Will spoke in a subdued voice, as if showing these amassed bodies respect. "Just like the American Indians. They left their dead on wooden platforms, on mountainsides, rather than bury them."

"So, if this is some type of holy place, shouldn't we get the heck out of here? We don't want to upset these people, the Cupcakes or whatever they're called," Chester said urgently.

"Coprolites," Will corrected him.

"Coprolites." Chester pronounced the word carefully. "Right."

"And another thing," Will said.

"What?" Chester asked, turning to him.

"The name Coprolites," Will continued, barely suppressing a grin. "That's just what the Colonists call them. If you ever meet a Coprolite, don't use that name, OK?"

"Why?"

"It's not very flattering. It's dinosaur droppings. It means fossilized dinosaur poo." Will smirked as he walked a little farther along the wall of mummified bodies, until his attention was caught by one whose shroud had all but disintegrated.

He played his light on the corpse, passing the beam slowly down it length to its feet and then back up to its head again. Although the body was taller than either Will or Chester, it was so shrunken that it looked very small, and nothing at all like the cadaver of a fully grown adult. It had a thick golden bracelet around its bony wrist, in which were inset chunky rectangular gemstones of red, green, dark blue, and a few with no color at all. Their matte surfaces glinted dully, like old cough drops.

"I bet that's gold, and I reckon those stones could be rubies, emeralds, and sapphires… and even diamonds," Will said with bated breath. "Isn't this just incredible?"

"Yeah," Chester replied, without conviction.

"I must take a picture of this."

"Can't we just get out of here?" Chester urged as Will shrugged off his rucksack and extricated his camera from it. Then Chester noticed Will was extending a hand toward the braceleted wrist.

"Just what do you think you're doing, Will"

"I need to move this slightly," Will said, "for a better shot."

"Will!"

But Will wasn't listening. He had taken hold of the bracelet between his thumb and forefinger and was gently rotating it.

"Don't, Will! Will, c'mon! You know you shouldn't…"

The whole body quaked and then simply collapsed to the floor, throwing up a plume of dust.

"Oops!" Will said.

"Yeah, oops! That's great! Just great!" Chester gulped as they both took a hasty step backward. "Look at what you've done!"

As the cloud settled, Will peered shamefacedly at the small mound of bones and grayish ash before him — it resembled a pile of old branches and twigs left over from a bonfire. The body had simply disintegrated.

"Sorry," he said to it. With a shiver, he realized he still had the bracelet in his fingers; he dropped it on top of the heap.

Any thoughts of taking pictures now abandoned, Will squatted down by his pack to put away his camera. He had just secured the side pocket when he noticed he'd picked up some dust on his hands in the process. Right away he began to inspect the ground on which he and Chester now stood. Making a face, Will quickly stood up and wiped his hands on his pants.

They were treading on several inches of dust and bone fragments from decomposed cadavers.

They were tramping in the remains of many dead bodies.

"Let's go back a bit," Will suggested, not wanting to upset Chester even more. "Away from these."

"Works for me," Chester answered gratefully, without inquiring why. "This is all way creepy."

They both stepped back a distance, pausing as Will regarded the silent ranks against the walls.

"Thousands of them must be buried here. Generations," he said thoughtfully.

"We should really—"

Chester stopped in mid-sentence, and Will reluctantly tore his eyes from the mummified corpses to focus on his friend's anxious face.

"Did you see where Cal went?" Chester asked.

"No," Will said, immediately concerned.

They raced back into the central chamber, paused to peer into its corners, then edged around so they could see the far end, past the flame, which once again was beginning to hiss loudly and stretch its wispy apex toward the roof.

"There he is!" Will exclaimed in relief as he spotted the lone figure making its way determinedly into a distant corner. "Why does he never stay put?"

"You know, I've only known your brother for… what… forty-eight hours, and I have to tell you I've already had enough of him," Chester complained, watching Will's reaction carefully to see if he was offended.

But Will didn't seem to mind in the slightest.

"Maybe we could tether him to something?" Chester smiled wryly.

Will hesitated for a second. "Look, we'd better go after him. He must have found something… maybe another way out," he said, starting after his brother. Chester glanced sidelong into the chamber containing the massed ranks of bodies. "Good idea," he muttered and, giving an involuntary groan, took off after Will.

They ran at a trot, giving the flame a wide berth as it peaked at its full height again and radiated its intense heat. They could just about see Cal as he left the farthermost reaches of the central chamber and passed under a large, roughly hewn archway. They followed him through this and found themselves on an area of ground the size of a soccer field, with a high canopy above it. Cal had his back to them and was clearly looking at something.

"You can't keep running off by yourself," Will reprimanded him.

"It's a river," Cal said, oblivious to his brother's irritation.

Before them was a broad channel, the water sweeping quickly past and throwing up a fine, warm spray. They could feel it on their faces even from the bank.

"Hey! Look there!" Cal directed Will and Chester.

Jutting out over the water was a pier some sixty feet in length. It was constructed from rusting metal girders, which looked irregular and handmade. Although it didn't appear to be well built, the pier felt solid enough underfoot. They didn't hesitate to go to the very end, where a circular platform edged with a railing fashioned from odd pieces of metal was suspended.

As their lights, which barely reached across to the opposite side of the river, picked out the white flecks of spume in the otherwise unbroken sheet of speeding black water, their minds played tricks on them and they felt as if they were racing along. Occasional splashes drenched them as the fast-flowing water dashed against the stanchions on the platform's underside.

Cal leaned forward over the railing as he spoke.

"Can't see the bank, or…" he began.

"Careful," Will warned him. "Don't fall in."

"…or anywhere to cross it," he finished.

"No!" Chester immediately spoke out. "I, for one, am not putting a foot anywhere near that. The current looks really strong."

Nobody disagreed, and the three of them stood there for a moment, welcoming the warm spray on their faces.

Will shut his eyes and listened to the sound of the water. Behind his calm exterior, he was grappling with his emotions. A part of him said he should be insisting that they cross the river, even though they had no idea how deep it was or what lay on the other side, just to keep forging ahead.

But what was the point? They had no idea where they were going, and there was nowhere they had to be. At this very moment he was deep in the earth's mantle, farther down than anyone from the surface had probably ever been, and why? Because of his father, who, for all he knew, was already dead. Difficult as it was for him, he had to consider the possibility that he might be wasting everyone's time chasing a ghost.

Will felt a light breeze ruffle his hair and opened his eyes. He looked at his friend, Chester, and his brother, Cal, and saw their bright eyes gleaming in their grubby faces, entranced by the vision of the underground river before them. He hadn't ever seen either of them look more alive. Despite all the hardships they had suffered, they appeared to be happy. The doubts fell from his mind, and he felt in control of himself again. He knew it all had to be worth it.

"We're not going to cross this river," he announced. "Let's just go back to the railway track."

"Yes," Chester and Cal both immediately answered.

"Fine. That's decided, then," Will said, nodding to himself as the threesome turned together and walked side by side by side back down the pier.

7

Sarah strolled casually down Main Street, in no particular hurry. She couldn't explain it to herself, but there was something deeply reassuring about returning to the place where she had first broken out to the surface.

It was as if by coming back, she was reaffirming that the specter she'd been running from for so very long now, the Colony hidden down below, really did exist. There'd been occasions in the past when she'd actually wondered if she wasn't just imagining the entire thing, if the whole basis of her life wasn't just some elaborate self-delusion.

It was just after seven in the evening and the interior of the rather uninspiring Victorian building that proclaimed itself to be the Highfield Museum was in darkness. Farther along from the museum, she noticed with some surprise that Clarke Brothers, the greengrocers, appeared to have closed up shop. The shutters, painted with many coats of a treacly pea-green gloss, were firmly sealed. They must have been that way for some time, since a thick crust of fliers covered them, the most prominent advertising some recently reunited boy band and a New Year's used car sale.

Sarah drew to a halt and stared at the shop. For generations, the population of the Colony had relied on the Clarkes for regular consignments of fresh fruit and vegetables. There were other Topsoil suppliers, but the brothers and their forebears had been trusted allies for as long as anyone could remember. Short of the possibility that they had both died, she knew they would have never closed shop, not voluntarily.

She contemplated the sealed shutters of the storefront one last time, then moved on. The closing of Clarke Brothers bore out what the note from the dead mailbox had said: The Colony was subject to a lockdown, and the majority of the above-ground supply links had been severed. It underlined just how far things must have gone down below.

Several miles later, Sarah rounded the corner onto Broadlands Avenue. As she approached the Burrowses' house, she saw that its curtains were drawn and there was no sign of life anywhere in the place, either. Quite the opposite: A discarded packing crate under the lean-to, and the unkempt front garden, spoke to her of months of neglect. She didn’t slow as she walked past it, glimpsing in the corner of her eye an uprooted real estate agent's sign in the long grass behind the chain-link fence. She continued along the row of identical houses to the end of the avenue, where an alleyway took her through to the Common.

Sarah put her head back and flared her nostrils, drawing the air into her lungs, a mix of the city and the countryside smells. Exhaust fumes and the slightly sour scent of massed people fought with the wet grass and fresh vegetation around her.

Sarah kept to the perimeter path for several hundred yards and then ducked into the foliage, pushing her way through the trees and shrubs until she could see the backs of the houses on Broadlands Avenue. Moving stealthily from one to another, she observed the occupants from the ends of their gardens. In one, an elderly couple sat stiffly at a dining table, drinking soup. In another, an obese man in a vest and underpants was smoking while he read the paper.

The inhabitants of the subsequent two houses were lost to her, as both had their curtains pulled, but in the next, a young woman was standing by the windows and playing with a baby, bouncing it up and down. Sarah stopped, compelled to watch the woman's face. Feeling her emotions and her sense of loss begin to rise within her again, Sarah tore her eyes away from the mother and child and moved on.

Finally she reached her destination. Sarah stood on the very same spot behind the Burrowses' house where she'd stood so many times before, hoping to catch the smallest glimpse of her son as he grew up, and away, from her.

After she'd been forced to leave him behind in the church graveyard, she'd searched high and low for him all over Highfield. For the following two and a half years, wearing sunglasses until she became acclimatized to the painful daylight, she'd combed the streets and hovered outside the local schools at the end of classes. But there was absolutely no sign of Seth anywhere. She'd widened her search radius, venturing farther and farther afield until she was wandering around the neighboring London boroughs.

Then, on a day shortly after her son's fifth birthday, she happened to be back in Highfield again when she caught sight of him outside the main post office. He was steady on his feet, running around wildly with a toy dinosaur. Already he was quite different from the child she'd left behind. Nevertheless, she had recognized him immediately; he was unmistakable with his unruly shock of white hair, precisely the same as hers, although she was now forced to use dyes to mask it.

She'd followed Seth and his new mother home from the shops to find out where they lived. Her first impulse had been to snatch him back. But it was just too dangerous with the Styx still after her. So, season after season, Sarah came back to Highfield, even if just for part of a day, desperate for the briefest sighting of her son. She'd stare at him over the length of the garden, which was like some untraversable abyss. He grew taller and his face filled out, becoming so much like hers that sometimes she thought it was her own reflection she was seeing in the glass of the French doors.

And on those occasions she yearned to call out over the tantalizingly short distance, but she never did. She couldn't. She'd often wondered how he would have reacted if she'd walked across the garden and into the house and, there, had clasped him to her. She felt her throat close up as the imagined scene unfurled before her like a preview of some television melodrama, their eyes filling with tears as they looked upon each other with startled mutual recognition. He would be mouthing the words Mother, Mother, over and over again.

But all that was history now.

And if the message from Joe Waites was to be believed, the child was now a murderer, and he had to pay for his crimes.

As if she were on a rack, Sarah was torn between the love that she had known for her son and the hollow hatred that simmered at its borders, the two extremes pulling remorselessly at her. They were both so powerful that, caught in the middle, she was plunged into a state of confusion and an utter, overpowering numbness.

Stop it! For the sake of all that's holy, snap out of it! What was happening to her? Her life, for years so controlled and disciplined, was slipping into disarray. She had to get hold of herself. She raked the nails of one hand over the back of the other, then did it again, and yet again, each time pressing harder, until she broke the skin, the stinging pain bringing a bitter relief of distraction.

Her son had been christened Seth in the Colony, but Topsoil somebody had renamed him Will. He had been adopted by a local couple called Burrows. While the mother, Mrs. Burrows, was a mere shadow of a woman, who spent her life ensconced in front of the television, Will had evidently fallen under the spell of his adoptive father, who worked as the curator of the local museum.

Sarah had followed Will on numerous occasions, trailing behind as he went off on his bicycle, a gleaming shovel strapped across his back. She would watch as the lonely figure, a baseball cap pulled low over his distinctive white locks, toiled in the rough ground at the edges of town or by the local dump. She observed him digging some surprisingly deep holes with guidance and encouragement, she assumed, from Dr. Burrows. How very, very ironic, she thought. Having eluded the tyranny of the Colony, it was as though her son was trying to return to it, like a salmon swimming upstream to its spawning ground.

But though his name had been changed, what had happened to Will? Like her and her brother, Tam, he had Macaulay blood in him; he was from one of the oldest founding families in the Colony. How could he have changed so much for the worse in those years on the surface? What could have done that to him? If the message in the dead mailbox was correct, then it was as though Will had gone insane, like some insubordinate cur that turns on its master.

A bird screeched somewhere above her and Sarah flinched, crouching defensively behind the low branches of a conifer. She listened, but there was just the wind sifting through the trees and a car alarm sounding intermittently several streets away. With a last check of the Common behind her, she edged cautiously along the end of the Burrowses' garden. She stopped abruptly, thinking she'd seen light coming from between the closed curtains of the living room. Satisfied that it was just a stray beam of early moonlight poking its way through the clouds, she peered at the upstairs windows, one of which she knew had been Will's bedroom. She was pretty sure the place was deserted.

She slipped through the gap in the hedges where a garden gate had once hung and crossed the lawn to the back door. She paused again to listen, then kicked over a brick at the side of the doormat. She wasn't in the least bit surprised to find the spare key still there — Dr. and Mrs. were a careless couple. She used it to enter the house.

Closing the door behind her, she raised her head and sampled the air, which was fusty and undisturbed. No, nobody had been living there for months. She didn’t turn on the lights, even though her sensitive eyes were struggling to make out anything in the shadowy interior. Lights were just too risky.

She stole down the hall to the front of the house and entered the kitchen. Feeling around with her hands, she discovered the work surfaces were clear and the cupboards emptied. Then she backtracked into the hall again and went into the living room. Her foot knocked against something: a roll of Bubble Wrap. Everything had been removed. The house was completely empty.

So it was true: The family had been broken up. She'd read how Dr. Burrows had stumbled upon the Colony under Highfield and been transported to the Deeps by the Styx. Most likely he would have perished by now. Nobody penetrated very far into the Interior and survived. Sarah had no idea where Mrs. Burrows or her daughter, Rebecca, had gone, and she didn't much care. Will was her concern, very much her concern.

Something caught her eye on the floor by the front door, and she crouched down to feel around. She found a pile of letters scattered on the doormat and immediately began to gather them up and cram them into her shoulder bag. Halfway through doing so, she thought she heard noises… a car door slamming… a muted footfall… and then the faintest suggestion of a low voice.

Her nerves fired like electrical short circuits. She held absolutely still. The sounds had been muffled — she couldn’t tell how far away they'd been. She strained to hear anything more, but now there was only silence. Telling herself that it must have been somebody passing the front of the house or maybe just one of the neighbors, she finished collecting the last of the letters. It was high time she left.

She hurried back through the dark hall and, stepping through the back door, had just turned to pull it shut when a man's voice sounded not inches from her ear. It was confident and accusatory.

"Gotcha!" it announced.

A large hand clamped on her left shoulder and heaved her away from the door. She jerked her head around to catch a glimpse of her assailant. In the scant light, she saw a triangle of lean, well-muscled cheek and a flash of white collar.

Styx!

He was strong and had the advantage of surprise, but her reaction was near-instantaneous. She swung her arm against his, sweeping his hand from her shoulder, then looped her arm around his in one skillful move that put him in a painful lock. She heard his sharp intake of breath: This wasn't going the way he thought it would.

As she arched her body to intensify the hold on him, he tried to push himself forward to relieve the pressure on his elbow joint. This brought his head within easy reach, and he'd just opened his mouth to cry out for help when Sarah silenced him with a single blow to the temple. He slumped unconscious onto the patio tiles.

She had disabled her attacker with savage precision and blistering speed, but she wasn't about to stick around to admire her handiwork; there was more than an even chance of other Styx in the area. She had to get away.

She tore across the garden, delving in her shoulder bag for her knife. As she arrived at the opening in the hedges, she thought she was in the clear and was already planning her escape across the Common.

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM?" came a furious shout, and a large shadow loomed in her path.

She pulled the knife out of her bag, and the letters that she'd taken from the house came with it, flying through the air in a hail. But something whipped across her hand, sending the knife spinning from her grip.

In the moonlight she saw the silver glint of the insignia, the numbers and letters on the man's uniform, and realized far too late that these weren't Styx. They were policemen — Topsoil policemen. And she'd already knocked one out for the count. Too bad. He had gotten in her way, and her self-preservation was paramount. She probably wouldn't have done anything differently, even if she'd known.

She tried to dodge away from the man, but he moved quickly to block her. She immediately lashed out with her fist, but he was ready.

"Resisting arrest," he growled as he swung something at her again. A billy club! She saw it the instant before it made contact. It struck her a glancing blow to the forehead, filling her vision with cascading pebbles of bright light. She didn't fall, but the club was quick to come again, swiping across her mouth. This time she folded to the ground.

"Had enough yet, you crazy hag?" he seethed, his contorted mouth spitting the words into her face as he leaned over her. She did her best to throw another punch at him. It was pathetically weak, and he fended it off with ease.

"Is that all you've got left?" He laughed caustically, then fell on her, pinning her down with his knee on her chest. It felt as if an elephant were using her as a footrest.

She tried to worm her way out from under him, but it was no use. She felt a numbness descending over her as she teetered on the edge of consciousness. Everything was going into a lopsided kaleidoscope: the trace of the club against the indigo sky, the hazy circle of the moon eclipsed by the officer's face, a ghastly pantomime mask. She thought she was going to pass out.

No!

She couldn't give up. Not now.

From the patio, the injured policeman moaned, and Sarah's attacker was momentarily distracted. His arm poised above him for the next blow, he glanced quickly over at his partner. The crushing weight shifted for the briefest instant, enabling her to swallow a mouthful of air and regroup her senses.

Her hands scrambled over the ground for her knife, a rock, a stick, anything she could use as a weapon. All she found was the long grass. The policeman's attention was back on her again; he was shouting and cursing, raising the club even higher. She braced herself, prepared for the inevitable, knowing it was all over.

She was beaten.

All of a sudden, something formless and blurred with speed attached itself to the man's arm. Sarah blinked, and the next instant his arm was gone, his weight lifted. There was the oddest silence; he didn't seem to be shouting anymore.

It was as if time had ground to a halt.

She couldn’t understand it. She wondered if she'd lost consciousness. The she glimpsed two massive eyes and a blaze of teeth like a stockade of sharpened stakes. She blinked again.

Time restarted. The policeman let out a piercing scream and slid off her. He struggled clumsily to his feet, one arm hanging uselessly at his side as he tried to defend himself with the other. She couldn't see his face. Whatever was attacking him had wrapped itself around his head and shoulders in a storm of claws and hairless limbs. She saw long, sinewy hind legs raking furiously. The policeman fell flat on his back like a bowling pin as the onslaught continued.

Fighting her dizziness, Sarah sat up. She pushed her bloodsoaked bangs from her eyes and squinted, trying to see, trying to make out what was happening.

The clouds parted, allowing the weak moon to cast its light on the scene. She caught an outline.

No, it couldn't be!

She looked again, not believing what she was seeing.

It was a Hunter, a type of large cat specially bred in the Colony.

What in the world was it doing here?

With the most immense effort, she crawled over to a nearby gatepost and used it to drag herself up. Once on her feet, she felt so groggy and confused, she waited for several moments as she tried to collect her wits.

"No time for this," she chastised herself as the reality of the situation came back to her. "Pull yourself together."

Ignoring the groans and stifled pleas of the policeman as he continued to roll with the Hunter on top of him, she tottered unsteadily up the garden to where she thought her knife had landed. Retrieving it, she also gathered up the letters. She was determined not to leave anything behind. Feeling a little steadier on her feet, she turned to check on the first policeman. He lay unmoving on the patio tiles where she'd dropped him, clearly not posing any sort of threat.

Back at the end of the garden, the second policeman was on his side, his hands pressed to his face as he moaned horribly. The Hunter had detached itself and was sitting next to him, licking a paw. It stopped as Sarah approached, coiling its tail neatly around its legs, and regarded her intently. It flicked its massive eyes across to the groaning man, as if it had had nothing to do with his condition.

The fact that both policemen were injured and needed help was neither here nor there to Sarah. She felt no pity or regret at what had happened to them; they were a casualty of her own survival, nothing more, nothing less. She went over to the conscious policeman, stooping to unhook the radio from his jacket.

With a speed that took her by surprise, he grabbed her wrist. But he was weak. She broke his grip without much effort and then tore off the radio — he made no move to stop her. She threw the radio down and stamped her heel into it with a crunch of broken plastic.

With some nervousness, she took a step toward the Hunter. Although they were born killers, it was rare for them to attack people. There had been stories of them going rogue, turning on their masters and anyone else who happened to cross their paths. She had no way of knowing if this Hunter could be trusted after what it had done to the policeman. From the appearance of its bare skin stretched over its ribs, it was badly malnourished and hardly in the best condition. She wondered how long it had been fending for itself up here.

"Where did you come from?" she asked it softly, keeping a safe distance.

The animal angled its head toward her, as if trying to understand, and blinked once. She ventured closer, tentatively reaching out her hand, and it leaned forward to sniff at her fingertips. The top of its head was almost on a level with her hips — she'd forgotten just how big these animals were. Then it suddenly leaned toward her. She tensed, but it merely rubbed its head affectionately against her palm. She heard the deep rumble of a purr kick in, as loud as an outboard engine on a dinghy. That was uncharacteristically friendly behavior for a Hunter. Either it had been slightly unhinged by its Topsoil life or it thought, for some reason, that it knew her. But she didn’t have time to ponder that now — she needed to decide her next move.

She had to get as far away as she could and, as she rubbed the rather flaky and scabbed skin under the cat's incredibly wide muzzle, she recognized that she owed the animal a debt of honor. She would have almost certainly been caught if it hadn't come to her rescue. She couldn't leave it behind.

"Come on," she said to the cat, and made for the Common. Her bruised head began to clear slightly as she saw the open path ahead. They ran together toward the metal arch that marked the entrance.

Sarah was crossing the road in the direction of Main Street, but drew to a halt once she happened to glance back to make sure the cat was still with her. It was sitting on the pavement by the gate, looking down the road that branched to the right, as if it was trying to tell her something.

"Come on! This way!" she said impatiently, thrusting a finger in the direction of the town center and her hotel. "We don't have time for this…" she trailed off, realizing just how difficult it was going to be to get the animal through the streets and into her room without being noticed.

The Hunter remained steadfastly facing off to the right, just as it would have done when alerting its handler that it had scented quarry. "What is it? What's there?" Sarah said, jogging back toward it and feeling a little ridiculous attempting to converse with a cat.

She looked at her watch, weighing her options. It wouldn't be long before someone discovered the scene back at the Burrowses' house, and then the Common and the whole town of Highfield would be bristling with police. But she took consolation from the fact that nightfall had only just begun. She was in her element; she could use the darkness to her advantage. She had to put as much distance between her and the house as she could, and taking the busier streets might prove to be a mistake. Not to mention that her battered face would make her stick out like a sore thumb.

She tried to see what lay in the direction the cat was pointing: Perhaps it wouldn't do any harm to set down a false trail and, if necessary, take a more roundabout route back to the hotel. As she debated with herself, the Hunter pawed the pavement, eager to be on the move again.

"All right — have it your way," she said, suddenly making up her mind. She could have sworn the cat grinned at her before it bounded off so quickly that she struggled to keep up.

Twenty minutes later, they entered a street she didn't know and, from a signpost, she saw that they were heading toward the municipal dump. The cat hung back briefly by an entrance at the end of a long line of billboards, then turned into it. As Sarah followed, she could dimly make out an area of rough ground, overrun with weeds.

The cat galloped past a derelict car and toward one of the corners. It seemed to know precisely where it was going. It skidded to a halt and stuck its nose into the air to sniff as Sarah fought to catch up.

She wasn't far behind it when caution urged her to swing around and make sure nobody was following them. But when she turned again to where the cat had been, it was nowhere to be seen. As good as her night vision was, she had absolutely no idea where the animal had gone. All she could see were small clumps of bushes sprouting from the muddy soil. She took her key-ring flashlight from her bag and played it before her. Several yards away from where she was searching, she spotted the cat's head as it popped rather comically from out of the ground.

It ducked down again, disappearing from view. She went over to investigate and found there was some kind of trench there, much of which was covered by a sheet of plywood. She stuck a hand in to try to feel what lay below — there seemed to be a sizable hollow there. She heaved the sheet aside, groaning from her aching ribs as she made the opening just large enough for her to get in.

Stretching a leg tentatively into the darkness, she completely lost her footing on the loose soil. Her arms flailed helplessly as she tried to grab something to stop her rapid descent, but nothing presented itself. She fell almost twenty-five feet and landed in a sitting position with a loud crunch. Cursing quietly, she waited for the pain to subside, then switched on her flashlight again.

To her astonishment, she found she'd fallen into a pit filled with what appeared to be a mass of bones. The floor was thick with them, all picked clean of flesh and shiny white under her light. Scooping up a handful, she selected a tiny femur and examined it. And as she looked around her, she spotted several small skulls. All bore teeth marks and, from their size, could have been rabbit or squirrel. Then she noticed a much larger skull with pronounced canines.

"Dog," she said, identifying it immediately. Stuck to the skull was a chunky leather collar, darkened with dried blood.

She was in the cat's lair!

The newspaper article she'd read in the hotel suddenly came back to her.

"So you're the one who's been snatching dogs!" she said. "You're the beast of Highfield Common," she added with an amazed chuckle, addressing the darkness where she could hear the cat's regular breathing.

She got herself up, the skeletons cracking and splintering beneath her feet, and began down the gallery that led off the bone pit. Its sides were battened with timbers that to her practiced eye didn't look too sound — there were signs of wet rot and the green of excessive dampness on them. Worse still, there weren't enough of these props to brace the roof, as if someone had been randomly removing them without any thought for what effect it might have. She shook her aching head. She certainly wasn't in the safest of places, but she needed somewhere to recover from her injuries.

The gallery took her lower, and then she emerged from it into a larger area. She glimpsed some duckboarding on the ground, its surface covered with spreading tendrils of white rot. On this was a pair of dilapidated armchairs positioned side by side. In one of these, the cat was sitting perfectly still, as if it had been waiting for her for some time.

She shone the light around her and gasped with surprise. At its widest point, the earthen chamber was approximately fifty feet across, but at the back end the wall had evidently collapsed, a drift of soil reaching almost as far as the armchairs. Water dripped steadily from the roof and, as she edged around the wall, she stepped straight into a puddle. It was deceptively deep, and she lost her balance.

Cursing, her foot drenched in muddy water, she grabbed at the nearest thing she could to steady herself, one of the roof props. Her hand came away with a clutch of soggy splinters and she fell against the wall, her leg slipping even deeper into the pool. Worse still, as the prop she'd grabbed shifted, a gap opened in the bowed timber planks supporting the roof. A torrent of soil cascaded over her.

"For heaven's sake!" Sarah fumed. "What stupid fool built this place?"

She stepped out of the pool, wiping the soil from her eyes. At least she'd managed not to drop her flashlight, which she now used for a more detailed examination of her surroundings. She made her way carefully around the excavation, assessing the props, all of which appeared to be in various stages of decay.

Pursing her lips, and asking herself what had possessed her to come down here, she turned to the cat, which hadn't as much as moved a muscle while she'd been flailing around. It was sitting patiently in the armchair, its head held high as it studied her. She could have sworn that there was something about its expression — as if it was quietly amused by her antics.

"Next time you try to take me anywhere, I'll think twice about it!" she said angrily.

Careful! She held her tongue, reminding herself what she was dealing with. Although the cat looked placid enough, Hunters, especially if they turned feral, could be volatile, and she shouldn't do anything that might alarm it. She edged closer to the empty armchair, taking care not to make any sudden movements.

"Mind if I sit down?" she asked in a gentle voice, holding up her muddy palms to the cat as if to show she meant it no harm.

As she lowered herself into the seat, a thought began to nag at her. She was looking around the excavation, trying to work out exactly what it was that was bothering her, when the cat made a small lunge toward her. Sarah drew back, then relaxed as she saw it was merely rubbing its muzzle against her armchair.

Sarah noticed something draped there, and slowly reached across to take it in her hands. It looked like a piece of damp fabric. Sitting in the armchair, she spread it open. It was a mud-soaked rugby shirt of black and yellow stripes. She sniffed at it.

Despite the heavy odor of rot and damp that pervaded the air, a single smell could be perceived. Just the faintest trace. She sniffed it again to make sure she wasn't mistaken, and then looked intently at the cat. Her brow furrowed as a bubble rising to the surface of water, it suddenly burst into the open.

"This was his, wasn't it?" she said, holding the shirt in front of the cat's scarred muzzle. "My son, Seth, wore this… and so he… he must have dug this place! Goodness, I never knew he'd gotten quite this far down!"

For a few seconds, she peered around the excavation with renewed interest. But then she was thrown once more into a tumult of conflicting emotions. Before the note, she'd have been in raptures about being here in her son's excavation, as if it brought her closer to him. But now, she couldn't enjoy the discovery — indeed, she felt uneasy in the place, uneasy about the hands that had created it.

Another thought exploded in her mind. She turned to the animal, which hadn't once averted its unwinking eyes from her. "Cal? Were you Cal's Hunter?"

At the mention of the name, the cat twitched a cheek, drops of moisture on its long whiskers sparkling in her light.

She raised her eyebrows at the animal. "You were, weren't you?" she spluttered.

With a frown, she sank deeper into thought for a few seconds. If this cat was indeed Cal's, then it might substantiate what Joe Waites had written in his note: that Seth had forced Cal to go with him Topsoil before dragging him down to the Deeps. That would explain the cat's presence here — it had accompanied Cal when he had escaped to the surface.

"So, somehow, you got out of the Colony with… with Seth?" she said, thinking out loud. "But you know him as Will, don't you?" She carefully enunciated the name again, watching for a reaction from the cat. But this time there was no sign of recognition.

She fell silent. If it was true that Cal had been on the surface, then was everything else true about Seth? The implications were too much for her. It was as if all her love for her eldest son was slowly being sucked out of her to make room for something ugly and vengeful.

"Cal," she said, wanting to see the animal's reaction again. It cocked its head toward her, then slid its eyes back to the entrance of the excavation.

Wishing the cat were able to answer all the hundreds of questions knocking around her confused mind, she let her head sink back against the chair. She found herself gradually succumbing to sheer fatigue. Hearing the shifting and groaning of the timbers around her and the occasional patter of falling soil, she briefly took in the various roots dangling from the roof above, before her eyelids grew too heavy. As her finger slipped from the button on her flashlight, the chamber was plunged into darkness, and she was almost at once asleep.

8

The boys retraced their steps past the flickering blue flame and back into the railway tunnel. In a little more than twenty minutes, they reached where the train had come to a stop.

Crouched by the guard's car, its dust-filmed windows now dark, they looked down the locomotive's lone line to where the engine sat. But nobody was in evidence — it seemed the train was completely unattended.

Then they moved their attention to the rest of the space. From what they could see, the cavern before them was at least several hundred feet from side to side.

"So this is the Miners' Station," Will said under his breath, focusing on the area to the left of the cavern, which was dotted with a line of lights. It didn't look like much, consisting of a row of rather ordinary, single-story shacks.

"Not exactly platform nine and three-quarters, is it?" Chester muttered.

"No… I thought it would be far bigger," Will said in a disappointed voice. "Hardly remarkable," he added, using the phrase his father would utter when unimpressed by something.

"Nobody sticks around here for long," Cal said.

Chester looked distinctly uncomfortable. "I don't think we should, either," he whispered nervously. "Where is everybody? The guard and the train driver?"

"Inside the buildings, probably," Cal told him.

There was a noise, a muted rumbling like distant thunder, and then a huge clattering began.

"What's that?" Chester exclaimed with alarm as they all shrank back into the tunnel.

Cal was pointing above the train. "No, look, they're just loading up for the return journey."

They saw large chutes poised above the higher-sided train cars. At least the diameter of an average trash can, they were cylindrical and appeared to be made from sections of sheet metal riveted together. Something was gushing from their mouths at great speed and hitting the metal beds of the freight cars with a massive clamor.

"Now's our chance!" Cal urged the others. He got up and, swooping around the back of the guard's car, belted down by the side of the train before Will could object.

"There he goes again," Chester moaned, but just the same he and Will took off after the younger boy, keeping to the lee of the train like Cal was doing.

They ran down the line of lower cars, passing the one in which they had spent the journey, then continued beside their higher-sided counterparts. Dust and debris sprayed over their heads, and they had to pause several times to wipe it from their eyes. It took the boys a full minute to travel the length of the train, enough time for the loading to be completed. A few remaining scatters of whatever the material was fell from the row of chutes, and the air was laced with a gritty dust.

Uncoupled from the train, the steam engine was farther along the track, but Cal had tucked down beside the last of the higher cars. As soon as Will and Chester caught up with him, Will lashed out, cuffing his brother around the head.

"Oi!" Cal yelped, raising his fists as if about to retaliate. "What was that for?"

"That was for running off again, you stupid little spud," Will chided him in a low, furious voice. "If you keep doing things like that, we're going to get caught."

"Well, they didn't catch us… and how else could we get through here?" his brother defended himself vehemently.

Will didn't answer.

Cal blinked slowly, as if to say his brother was being tedious, and simply turned his head away to look into the distance. "We need to go down th—"

"No way," Will said. "Chester and I are going to check first before any of us does anything. You just stay put!"

Cal obeyed reluctantly, flopping onto the ground with a bad-tempered groan.

"You all right?" Will asked Chester as he heard a loud snuffling noise behind him. He twisted around to look.

"This stuff gets everywhere," Chester complained, then proceeded to blow his nose by clamping each nostril in turn with his fingers to clear them of the dust.

"That's disgusting," Will said under his breath as Chester pinched a dangling skein of snot and flicked it to the ground. "Do you have to do that?"

Taking no heed of his friend's distaste, Chester squinted at Will's face, then examined his own hands and arms. "We're certainly well camouflaged," he observed. If their faces and clothes had been filthy before from the continuous stream of carbon-black smoke on the train, they were even filthier now after being showered during the loading of the freight cars.

"Yeah, well, if you're quite finished," Will said, "let's recce the station."

On their elbows, he and Chester edged around the front of the car until they had an uninterrupted view of the buildings. There was absolutely no sign of any activity.

Making not the slightest effort to keep his head down, Cal disobeyed Will's orders and joined them. He couldn't seem to stay still, positively vibrating with impatience. "Listen, the railwaymen are in the station, but they're going to come out soon. We have to get out of this place before they do," he insisted.

Will considered the station buildings again. "Well, OK, but we all stick together and only go as far as the engine. Got that, Cal?"

They moved swiftly from the cover of the car, running half crouched until they came alongside the massive engine. Every so often it vented hissing jets of steam, as if it were a dragon in deep slumber. They could feel the warmth that still emanated from its giant boiler. Chester foolishly placed his hand on one of the massive plates of pitted steel that formed its slab-sided base and retracted it quickly. "Ow!" he said. "It's still really hot."

"You don't say," Cal muttered sarcastically as they skirted around to the front of the massively proportioned machine.

"It's awesome! Looks exactly like a tank," Chester said in schoolboy wonder. With its huge interlocking armor plates and giant cowcatcher, it certainly did resemble a military vehicle of some kind, an old battle tank.

"Chester, we really don't have time to admire the choo-choo!" Will said.

"I wasn't," he mumbled in response, still ogling the engine.

They began to debate their next move.

"We should go down there," Cal said forcefully, indicating the direction with his thumb.

"Blah, blah, blah," Chester mocked under his breath, giving Cal a disdainful stare. "Here we go again."

Will studied the area of the cavern his brother had pointed to. Across a stretch of about fifty yards of open ground was what could have been an opening in the cavern wall, metal ramps descending on either side of it from some structure above. Will couldn't see enough in the murkiness to be sure if it was a way out.

"I can't tell what's there," he said to Cal. "Too dark."

"That's exactly why we should go there," his brother replied.

"But what if the Colonists come out before we reach it?" Will asked. "There's no way they can miss us."

"They're on a break," Cal replied, shaking his head at Will. "We'll be OK if we go right now."

Chester chimed in. "We could always back off… into the tunnel again and wait until the train's gone."

"That could be hours. We've got to go now," Cal said, his voice brimming with irritation. "While we've still got the chance."

"Hang back," Chester immediately countered, turning to Cal.

"Go now," Cal insisted tetchily.

"No, we—" Chester came back at him, but Cal raised his voice and didn't let him finish.

"You don't know anything," he sneered.

"Who died and made you boss?" Chester swiveled around to his friend, looking for support. "You're not going to listen to this, are you, Will? He' just a stupid brat."

"Shut up," Will hissed through gritted teeth, his eyes on the station.

"I saw we—" Cal declaimed loudly.

Will shot out his hand and clapped it roughly over his brother's mouth. "I said shut it, Cal. Two of them. Over there," he whispered urgently into Cal's ear, then slowly took his hand away.

Cal and Chester sought out the two railwaymen, who were standing under a portico that ran along the front of several of the station buildings. They had just emerged from one of the shacks, and strains of bizarre music filtered across to the boys through the open door.

They were wearing bulky blue uniforms and some type of breathing apparatus over their heads, and as the boys watched they lifted these up so they could drink from the large tankards each of them had in his hands. Even from where the boys were positioned, they could hear the men's grumbling tones as they stepped a few paces forward and stopped, idly perusing the train, and then turned to point out something in the gantry high above it.

After several minutes, they turned on their heels and went back inside the shack, slamming the door behind them.

"Right! Let's go!" Cal said. He chose to look only at Will, studiously avoiding Chester.

"Cut it out," Will growled. "We go when we all decide. We're in this together."

Cal started to reply, his upper lip lifted in an aggressive snarl.

"This isn't some children's game, you know," Will shot at him before he could speak.

The younger boy huffed loudly and, rather than continue to challenge Will, turned on Chester, glowering fiercely.

"You… you Topsoiler!" Cal spat.

Chester was completely unfazed by this and, raising an eyebrow, gave Will a small shrug.

So they remained there, Will and Chester carefully watching the frontage of the station while Cal drew pictures in the dirt that had a remarkable resemblance to Chester, with squarish bodies and blocky heads. Every so often he chuckled evilly to himself and wiped them over, only to begin drawing again.

After five minutes with no further sign of the railwaymen, Will spoke. "Right, I reckon they've settled in. I say we should go now. Happy, Chester?"

Chester gave a single nod, looking distinctly unhappy.

"At last," Cal said, leaping to his feet and rubbing his hands together to shake off the dust. In an instant he was in the full glare of the lights on the open ground, striding cockily away.

"What's his problem?" Chester said to Will. "He's going to get us all killed."

In the darkness by the cavern wall, they stepped between the pair of ramps and discovered that there was indeed a way through, a sizable cleft in the rock. Cal had struck it lucky with his suggestion and wasn't going to let this go unnoticed.

"I was r—" he started.

"Yeah, I know, I know," Will interrupted. "This time."

"What are those?" Chester said, noticing a number of structures as they entered a new stretch of tunnel. They were almost buried by large drifts of silt along one side of the wall. Some were like huge cubicles and others were circular in shape. Odd pieces of metal and debris lay discarded around them. The boys approached one of the structures, which, close up, looked like a giant honeycomb built of gray brick. As Will was wading through the silt to get closer, his foot flipped something over. He stooped to retrieve whatever it was. Hard, flat, and with undulating edges, it fit the palm of his hand. He kept hold of it as he went up to the honeycomb structure.

"There'll be a hatch down here," Cal said, pushing past his brother. He cleared the accumulated silt away at the base of the structure with his boot. Sure enough, there was a smallish door, about a foot and a half square, which, as he squatted down and yanked it open a little, squealed loudly on dry hinges. Dark ash spilled out.

"How did you know that?" Will asked.

Rising to his feet, Cal snatched the object from his brother's grip and rapped it hard against the rounded surface of the structure beside him. The object gave off a dull but slightly glassy sound, and fragments broke from it. "This is a piece of slag." He swung his foot at a pile of dirt, sending it flying. "And I'm willing to bet there'll be some charcoal under all this."

"So?" Chester inquired.

"So these are furnaces," Cal replied confidently.

"Really?" Will said, bending to peer in through the hatch.

"Yes, I've seen these before, in the foundries in the South Cavern of the Colony." Cal lifted his chin and regarded Chester truculently, as if he had proved his superiority over the older boy. "The Coprolites must've been smelting pig iron here."

"An age ago, by the looks of it," Will said, gazing around the place.

Cal nodded, and, there being nothing else worthy of note, they trooped along the tunnel in silence.

"He's a smart aleck," Chester said when Cal was far enough ahead to be out of earshot.

"Look, Chester," Will replied in a low voice, "he's probably scared stiff by this place, like all the Colonists are. And don't forget, he's a lot younger than either of us. He's just a kid."

"That's no excuse."

"No, it's not, but you have to make a bit of an allowance," Will suggested.

"That's no good down here, Will, and you know it!" Chester blurted. Noticing that Cal had heard his outburst and turned to look at them curiously. Chester immediately dropped his voice. "There's no room for anyone to mess up. What, do you think we can ask the Styx for a second chance, like having another life in some stupid video game? Get real, will you?"

"He won't let us down," Will said.

"Are you willing to bet your life — your one life — on that?" Chester asked him.

Will just shook his head as they continued to plod along. He knew that there was nothing he could say to change his friend's opinion, and maybe Chester was right.

Away from the furnaces and the mounds of silt, they found the floor of the tunnel compacted, as if many feet had trodden it into a firm surface. Although they kept to the main tunnel, every so often smaller passages spun off from it. Some of these were high enough to stand in, but the majority were mere crawlways. The boys had no intention of leaving the main thoroughfare, and they eventually came to a place where the tunnel split.

"So, which way now?" Chester asked as he and Will neared Cal, who had come to a stop. The boy had spotted something lying at the base of the wall and went over to it, nudging it with his toe cap. It was a signpost of bleached, splintery wood with two "hands" affixed to the top of a broken-off stake, their fingerlike extensions pointing in opposite directions. Cal picked up the stake and held it so Will could read the barely legible writing carved into each.

"This says Crevice Town, which must be the tunnel to the right. This…" he faltered, "I can't quite make it out… the end's been chewed off… I think it says The Great something or other?"

"The Great Plain," Cal volunteered immediately.

Will and Chester regarded him with not a little surprise.

"Heard my Uncle Tam's friends talk about it once," he explained.

"Well, what else did you hear? And what's this town like? Is it a Coprolite place?" Will asked him.

"I don't know."

"Come on, should we go there?" Will pressed him.

"I really don't know anything more," Call replied indifferently, letting the sign slide to the ground.

"Well, I like the sound of the town. Bet my dad would have gone there. What do you think, Chester, do we go that way?"

"Whatever," Chester answered, still staring distrustfully at Cal.

But as they ambled along, it became evident in only a few hours that the route they'd chosen wasn't a main thoroughfare like the tunnel they'd left behind. The floor was rougher and loosely packed, with large chunks of stone strewn across it, suggesting that it wasn't used very often. And, even worse, they were forced to climb over large falls of rock where the roof or walls had partially collapsed.

Just as they began to deliberate whether to turn back, they rounded a corner and their lights cut a swath through the darkness to reveal a structure barring their path. It was regular and clearly man-made.

"So there is something here after all," Will said with a gush of relief.

As they neared the obstruction, the tunnel ballooned into a larger cavity. Their lights revealed a tall, fencelike structure with two towers, each about thirty feet in height, which formed a gateway of sorts. Stretching high between the towers, a metal panel proclaimed CREVICE TOWN in crude cut-out letters.

Crunching on the cinders and gravel, they ventured cautiously forward. On either side, the tall fence ran uninterrupted, completely blocking the width of the cavern. There was nowhere else to go but under the open gateway. Nodding at one another, they crept through it.

"Looks like a ghost town," Chester said, observing the rows of huts arranged on either side of the central avenue where they were now walking. "There can't be anyone living here," he added hopefully.

If any of the boys had been nursing the illusion that the huts might be occupied, this was dispelled as soon as they saw the condition they were in. Many had simply collapsed in on themselves. Of those that were still standing, their doors were open or missing altogether, and every single window was broken.

"Just going to check inside this one," Will said. With Chester waiting nervously behind him, he negotiated his way through a pile of timber in the threshold, gripping the doorjamb to steady himself. The whole structure groaned and heaved ominously.

"Be careful, Will!" Chester warned, moving a safe distance back in case the hut came crashing down. "Looks a bit dodgy."

"Yeah," Will muttered, but he was not going to be deterred. He ventured farther inside and shone his light around as he threaded his way through the debris scattered across the floor.

"It's full of bunk beds," he reported back to the others.

"Bunk beds?" Cal echoed inquiringly from outside while Will continued to nose around the interior. There was a splintery crash as his foot went through the floor.

"Blast!" He extricated his foot, and began to carefully reverse out again. He'd seen enough, given the parlous condition of the floor. "Nothing here," he shouted, and returned outside.

They continued down the central avenue until Cal broke the silence.

"Can you smell that?" he asked Will suddenly. "It's sharp, like—"

"Ammonia. Yes," Will cut in. He played his light on the area in front of his feet. "It seems to be coming from… from the ground. It feels sort of damp," he observed, grinding the ball of his foot into the cavern floor and then squatting down. He took a pinch of the soil and held it under his nose. "Phew, it is this stuff. It stinks! Looks like dried bird droppings. Isn't it called guano?"

"Birds. That's OK," Chester said in a relieved voice, recalling the harmless flock they'd encountered in the Colony.

"No, not birds, this is different," Will immediately corrected himself. "And it's sort of fresh. It feels really squidgy."

"Oh crikey," Chester sputtered, looking frantically in all directions.

"Yuck! There are things in it," Will observed, adjusting his weight from one leg to the other as he remained squatting.

"What things?" Chester all but jumped into the air.

"Insects. See them?"

Shining their lights by their feet, Chester and Cal saw what Will was talking about. Beetles the size of well-fed cockroaches crawled ponderously over the slimy surface of the amassed droppings. They had creamy-white carapaces, and their similarly colored feelers twitched rhythmically as they went. Other, darker insects were around them, but these were harder to observe, apparently more sensitive to the light, since they scuttled rapidly away.

As the boys watched, just within their pooled circle of light a large beetle flapped open its carapace. Will chuckled with fascination as its wings hummed into life with the sound of a clockwork toy and it took to ungainly flight. Once in the air, it weaved erratically from side to side until it vanished from view, into the gloom.

"There's a complete ecosystem here," Will said, engrossed by the variety of insects he was finding. As he scratched around in the droppings, he uncovered a large, engorged, pale-colored grub as big as his thumb.

"Grab that. We might be able to eat it," Cal said.

"Ewww!" quivered Chester, stamping his feet. "Don't be gross!"

"No, no, he's being serious," Will said flatly.

"Can we just get going again?" Chester begged.

Will reluctantly pulled himself away from the insects and they resumed their walk down the central avenue. They were at the last of the huts when Will beckoned them to a halt again.

"Feel that breeze? I think it's coming from up there," Will observed. "This whole area has some type of netting over it. Look at the holes."

They peered above the tops of the huts, where they could see a layer of mesh. Weighed down with debris, in some places it sagged so much it almost touched the roofs of the huts, while in others the mesh was absent altogether. They tried to shine their lights up through one of these openings, past the torn strands of the mesh and into the void high above. But the orbs weren't strong enough, and only revealed an ominous darkness.

"So that could be the crevice this place was named after?" Will pondered aloud.

"HEY!" Cal hollered at the top his voice, making the other two start. Vague echoes of his shout reverberated across the void. "It's big," he said unnecessarily.

Then they heard a noise.

Gentle to begin with, similar to the sound when pages of a book are being fanned through, it was growing louder at an alarming rate.

Something was stirring, waking.

"More beetles?" Chester asked, hoping that was all it was.

"Uh, no, I don't think so," Will said, scanning the space above their heads. "That shout might not have been such a great idea, Cal."

Chester immediately turned on the younger boy. "What have you done now, you little jerk?" he said in an urgent whisper.

Cal made a face.

All of a sudden, from holes in the mesh up above the boys' heads, dark shapes dipped down, swooping at them. Their wingspans were huge and their screeches echoed off the walls like unearthly, high-pitched feedback, hitting the very limits of the boys' hearing.

"Bats!" Cal yelled, recognizing the sound right away. Chester howled in panic as he and Will remained rooted to the spot, mesmerized by the spectacle of the hurtling mammals.

"Run, you idiots!" Cal bawled at them, already taking to his heels.

Within seconds, the air was thick with the flying animals. They flicked past so quickly that Will couldn't keep track of any single one.

"This isn't good!" he exclaimed as leathery wings thrummed currents of dry air around their heads. The bats began to plunge at the boys, swerving aside just at the last moment.

Will and Chester raced down the avenue after Cal, not thinking, not caring, where they were going as long as they got away from the onslaught of airborne monsters. They were driven by a single thought, almost a primordial fear: to escape from these screeching, oversized beasts.

As if in answer to their plight, a house loomed out of the darkness ahead. At two stories high, its austere faзade towered over the low huts. It appeared to be constructed of a light-colored stone, and all its windows were shuttered.

"Quick! Over here!" Cal cried as he spotted that the front door was slightly ajar.

In the midst of all this nightmarish confusion, Will glanced behind just in time to see a particularly large bat hurtle straight into the back of Chester's head. He heard the soft thud as it struck. The size of a soccer ball, its body was black and solid. The collision sent Chester sprawling. Will raced over to help his friend, while trying to protect his own face with his arm.

Shouting, he pulled Chester to his feet. And with the boy slightly dazed and running unsteadily, Will guided him toward the strange house. Will was lashing out in front of himself, trying to ward off the beasts, when one careened into his rucksack. He was knocked sideways but managed to keep his balance by hanging on to the still-befuddled Chester.

Will saw that the bat had dropped to the ground, one of its wings twisted and flapping uselessly. A second one flicked down, alighting next to the first. Then yet more, until the injured animal was almost completely hidden from sight by clambering bats. As the felled creature struggled futilely to get away, trying to crawl from under the others, Will saw them snapping at it, their tiny pinlike teeth colored scarlet with blood. They attacked mercilessly, nipping at its thorax and abdomen as it began to squeal in pain.

Ducking and stumbling with Chester beside him, Will continued along the remainder of the avenue. They staggered up the front steps of the house, under the porch, then through the door. Cal slammed it shut behind them. Several bangs followed as bats dashed against it, then others brushed their winds over its surface. This fracas soon died down, leaving only their strange piping calls.

The boys found they were in an imposing hallway replete with a large chandelier, its intricate design gray and furred with dust. A pair of elegantly curving staircases, which swept up to a landing, flanked this foyer. The place appeared to be empty; there was no furniture and just the odd tatter of curling wallpaper hung on the dark walls. It looked as though it had been uninhabited for years.

Will and Cal began to wade through the dust, which was nearly as thick as driven snow. Chester, still shaken, leaned over by the front door, panting heavily.

"Are you all right?" Will called back to him, the sound of his voice quiet and muffled in the strange house.

"I think so." Chester straightened up and stretched his head back, rubbing his neck to alleviate the soreness. "Feels like I was hit with a basketball." As he inclined his head forward again, he noticed something.

"Hey, Will, you should see this."

"What's up?"

"Looks like someone broke in here before us," Chester replied nervously.

9

The small fire pirouetted on the scraps of timber, filling the earthen chamber with flickering light. Sarah was rotating a makeshift spit over the flames, on which two small carcasses were skewered. The sight and smell of the gently browning meat made her realize how hungry she was. The cat must have felt the same way, if the necklaces of milky drool dangling for its muzzle were anything to go by.

"Good work," she said with a sidelong glance at the animal, which hadn't needed any encouragement to go out and forage food for both of them. In fact, it had seemed relieved to do what it was trained for. In the Colony, its role as a Hunter would have been to trap vermin, particularly eyeless rat, which was considered a rare delicacy.

In the light of the fire, Sarah had an opportunity to inspect the cat more thoroughly. Its bald skin, like an old, partially deflated balloon, was crisscrossed with lacerations and, around its neck, a number of these were a livid purple and had clearly been recently inflicted.

Across one of its shoulders was a nasty-looking gouge, flecked with spots of sickly yellow. The injury was bothering the cat, since it kept trying to clean the wound with its forepaw. Sarah knew she'd have to attend to the injury before long — it was badly infected. That was, if she wanted the animal to live. But considering the possibility of some kind of link with her family, she felt she couldn't just desert it.

"So who did you belong to? Cal or my… my… husband? " she asked, finding it difficult to utter the word. She gently stroked the cat's cheek as it continued to stare fixedly at the roasting carcasses. It wasn't wearing a collar with any form of identification, but this didn't surprise her. It wasn't common practice in the Colony, as Hunters were expected to move through narrow passages and crawlways, and a collar might catch on rocks and hinder the animal in the chase.

Sarah coughed and rubbed her eyes. It wasn't an entirely satisfactory arrangement to have a fire burning underground; the kindling, which was too damp to begin with, had to be kept aloft from the pools of water on the chamber floor by a platform she'd fashioned from a pile of rocks. And, since there was nowhere for the smoke to go, it was filling the chamber so thickly that her eyes kept weeping.

Above all else, she hoped that they were far enough away from anybody that the smell of cooking wouldn't be detected. She consulted her watch. It was nearly twenty-four hours since the incident, and any searches, particularly using dogs, would be unlikely to extend as far as the wasteland above. The police would be concentrating their efforts of the immediate area of the crime scene and on the Common itself.

No, she didn't think it at all likely that she would be discovered here — in any case, none of the police would have the finely developed sense of smell that most Colonists possessed. It occurred to her how remarkably safe she felt down here in the excavation — and being underground again probably played no small part in this. The earthen hollow was a home away from home.

She took up her knife and dug the tip into each carcass.

"Right, dinner's ready," she announced to the cat at her side. It was rapidly switching its expectant gaze from her to the food and back again, with all the regularity of a metronome. She slipped the first carcass, the pigeon, from the spit and onto a folded newspaper in her lap.

"Careful. Hot," she warned, dangling the still-impaled squirrel in front of the cat. But she was wasting her breath: The cat lunged forward, snapping its jaws around the carcass and snatching it off. It immediately scurried away into a dark corner where she could hear it eating noisily, all the time purring furiously.

She juggled the pigeon from one hand to the other, blowing on it as if it were a hot potato. When it had cooled sufficiently, she quickly started on one of the wings, nipping at the meat with her teeth. As she moved on to the breast, tearing off slivers and devouring them appreciatively, she began to assess her situation.

Her cardinal rule for survival was never to stay put for any longer than she had to, particularly when the heat was on. Although her face was a mess from the fight with the policemen, she'd cleaned off the blood and done her best to mask the worst of the bruises. She'd used her makeup kit for this, something she carried with her wherever she went, since her lack of pigmentation, her albinism, forced her to use a blend of sunscreen and foundation cream to protect herself from the sun. So she felt confident that her appearance wouldn't attract attention if she decided to set foot outside the dugout.

Sucking thoughtfully on a tiny bone, she remembered the papers she'd taken from the doormat in the Burrowses' house. She wiped the grease from her hands with a handkerchief and pulled out the clutch of letters from her bag. These were the usual fliers for plumbing services and freelance house painters, which she examined one by one under the light from the dying fire before she fed them to the flames. Then she came across something that looked far more interesting, a manila envelope with a badly typed label. It was to the attention of Mrs. C. Burrows, and the return address was the local services agency.

Sarah wasted no time tearing it open. As she read it, somewhere in the shadows there was a sharp snapping noise: The cat cracked open the squirrel's skull between its jaws, then licked greedily at the animal's exposed brain with its rasping tongue.

Sarah looked up from the letter. Suddenly her path became clear.

10

Will and Cal waded back through the dust to the front door and directed their lights where Chester was pointing. He was right — the edge of the door had been broken off, and not so long ago, if the lighter-colored wood that had been exposed was anything to go by.

"Looks new to me," Chester noted.

"We didn’t do that, did we?" Will asked Cal, who shook his head. "Then we should give this place the once-over, just to make sure," he said.

Keeping together, they moved down the hallway until they reached a pair of large doors, which they flung open. The dust rose up in waves ahead of them, like a visual premonition of their every move. But even before it had begun to settle, they were taking in the size of the room and its impressive features. The depth of the skirting and the elaborate ceiling moldings — an intricate lattice of plasterwork interlacing above them — hinted at its former grandeur. It could have been a ballroom or a formal dining room, given its dimensions and position in the house. As they stood around in the middle of the room, they couldn't help but chuckle because the whole scenario was so unexpected and inexplicable.

Will sneezed several times, irritated by the dust. "I'll tell you something," he said, sniffing and wiping his nose.

"What?" Chester asked.

"This place is a disgrace. It's even worse than my bedroom back home."

"Yep, the maid definitely missed this room!" Chester laughed. As he made the motions of pushing a vacuum cleaner around the floor, he and Will completely cracked up, howling with laughter.

Shaking his head, Cal gave them a look as if they'd taken leave of their senses. The boys resumed their exploration, padding gently through the dust and checking the adjoining rooms. They were mostly small utility rooms, all similarly bare, so they retraced their steps to the hallway, where Will pushed open a door at the foot of one of the staircases.

"Hey! Books!" he said. "It's a library!"

Except for two large windows that had their shutters closed, the walls were covered with shelf upon shelf of books, all the way up to the high ceiling. The room was some one hundred feet square, and toward its farthest end was a table, around which a couple of chairs lay toppled over.

All three of them spotted the footprints at the same time: They were difficult to miss in the otherwise perfect carpet of dust. Cal placed his boot inside one, measuring it for size. There were a couple of inches between his toes and the front of the imprint. He and Will caught each other's eye, and Will nodded at him, then began to peer nervously into the shadowy corners of the room.

"The tracks go over there," Chester whispered. "To the table."

The footprints led from the door where the boys now stood, over to the shelves, and then circled around the table several times, disappearing into a jumbled confusion behind it.

"Whoever it was," Cal observed, they went back out again." He was stooping to examine another, less obvious set of tracks that went past a wall of shelves, then meandered back toward the door.

Will had stepped farther into the room and was holding up his light to inspect the corners. "Yeah, it's empty," he confirmed as the others joined him by the long table.

They fell silent, listening to the occasional fluttering and high-pitched call from the bats on the other side of the shutters.

"I'm not going back out there, not until those bloodsucking beasties have gone away again," Chester said as he leaned against the table. His shoulders sagged as he blew wearily through his lips.

"Yes, I think we should stop here for a while," Will agreed, heaving off his rucksack and placing it on the table next to Chester.

"So are we going to check out the rest of the house or not?" Cal pressed Will.

"Don't know about you two, but I need something to eat first," Chester cut in.

Will noticed how, quite suddenly, Chester's speech had become slurred. All the walking they'd done, and the attack of the bats, had obviously taken it out of him. Will reminded himself that his friend was probably still suffering from the aftereffects of the rough treatment he'd received in the Hold.

Making his way toward the door, Will turned to Chester. "Why don't you keep an eye on things here while Cal and I…" he said, trailing off as the books on the shelves caught his eye. "These bindings are awesome," he said, scanning his light over them. "They're pretty old."

"Really," Chester said disinterestedly. He undid the flap on Will's pack and fished out an apple.

"Yeah. This one's interesting. It's called The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul by…" He wiped away the dust and then leaned in to peer at the rest of the gilt lettering on the dark leather spine. "By Reverend Philip Doddridge."

"Sounds gripping," Chester commented through a mouthful of apple.

Will gently slid the book out from between the other grand-looking tomes and flipped it open. Fragments of the pages spewed up into his face, the rest of the paper reduced to a powdery residue that seeped onto the floor by his feet.

"Blast!" he said, holding up the empty book cover with an expression of pure disappointment on his face. "What a shame. Must be the heat."

"Looking forward to a good read, were you," Chester chuckled as he lobbed the apple core over his shoulder and then began to root around in the rucksack for more food.

"Ha-ha. Very funny," Will retorted.

"Let just get on with it, shall we?" Cal said impatiently.

Will ventured upstairs with his brother to check that the rest of the house was indeed unoccupied. Among all the empty rooms, Cal came across a small washroom. This consisted of a limescale-encrusted tap protruding from the tiled wall over an old copper bowl set into a wooden shelf. He pushed back the lever at the top of the tap. There was a knocking sound that seemed to come from the walls themselves.

As the racket continued, transforming into a low, whining vibration, will bounded out of the room he'd been investigating and down the long corridor that led back to the landing. He paused to look over the splintered balustrade to the hall below, then dashed into the corridor where Cal had gone. Calling his brother's name, he stuck his head through each doorway until he found him.

"What's going on? What have you done?" Will demanded.

Cal didn't answer. He was staring fixedly at the tap. As Will watched, a dark molasseslike fluid oozed from it, and then clear water flowed from the spout with a huge gush, much to the boys' delight.

"Do you think it's safe to drink?" Will asked.

"Ahhh, beautiful. Nothing wrong with that! Must be from a spring."

"Well, at least we've solved our water problem," Will congratulated him.

Having gorged himself on food, Chester slept for several hours atop the library table. When he finally awoke and learned of the washroom discovery from Will, he slipped out to have a look for himself and didn't reappear for some time.

When he finally did come back, the skin on his face and neck was red and blotchy where he'd evidently aggravated his eczema in an attempt to scrub off the ingrained dirt, and his hair was wet and slicked back. The way he looked now, in his cleaned-up state, reminded will of how they'd once been. It brought back memories of less troubled times before they stumbled upon the Colony, of their life back in Highfield.

"That's better," Chester mumbled self-consciously, avoiding the others' gazes. Cal, who had been taking a nap on the floor, propped himself up and, still not fully awake, regarded Chester with a kind of bleary amusement.

"Why'd you do that?" he asked wryly.

"Smelled yourself lately?" Chester fired back at him.

"No."

"I have," Chester said, wrinkling his nose. "And it's not very pleasant!"

"Well, I think washing up's a great idea," Will instantly spoke out to spare Chester any further embarrassment, but Cal's comments seemed not to bother him in the slightest. Chester was totally preoccupied by something on the end of his pinkie finger, which he'd just been using to pick away energetically at his ear.

"And I'm going to do just the same," Will proclaimed as Chester started on his other ear, ramming a finger repeatedly into it.

Will rummaged around in his rucksack for some clean clothes, then took a second to examine his shoulder, wondering whether it was time to change the dressing on the wound. Through the rends in his shirt, he gingerly probed the area around the bandage, then decided he needed to remove the shirt altogether in order to see what state it was in.

"Will, what happened to you?" Chester said, forgetting his ear for the moment and turning quite pale. He'd caught sight of the large patch of dark crimson showing through the bandage on Will's shoulder.

"From the stalker attack," Will told him. He bit his lip, then groaned as he lifted the dressing to look underneath. "Yuck!" he exclaimed. "I definitely could do with a new poultice." He turned to his pack and hunted through the side pockets for the spare bandage and the small parcels of powder that Imago had given him.

"I didn't realize it had been that bad," Chester said. "Want any help?"

"No, really… feels better now, anyway," Will replied, lying through his teeth.

"OK," Chester said, his face still displaying his squeamishness as he tried to smile but only managed a grimace.

And, despite his initial reaction at Chester's efforts to clean himself up, Cal, too, took the opportunity to slip out of the room and wash himself in the tepid water once Will had returned.

The hours seemed to pass more slowly within the house, as if it was somehow isolated from everything outside. And the absolute hush that pervaded the interior gave the impression that it was itself asleep. This stillness affected the three boys; they made not the least effort to talk and instead took catnaps on the long library table, using the backpacks as pillows.

But eventually Will began to feel restless and found that he couldn't sleep. To pass the time, he resumed his investigation of the library, wondering who had lived in the house. He went from shelf to shelf, reading the titles on the ancient hand-tooled spines, which mostly had esoteric religious themes and must have been written centuries ago. It was an exercise in frustration, because he knew all the pages inside would be nothing more than confetti and dust. Nevertheless, he was fascinated by the obscure names of the authors and the ludicrously long titles. It had almost developed into a contest to try to find a book he'd actually heard of when he came across something curious.

On a lower shelf, a set of matching books appeared to have no titles at all. After wiping off the grime, Will could see they had covers of deep burgundy, and that the tiniest gilt stars were picked out at three equidistant points on each of their spines.

He tried to take out one of the volumes, but unlike the other books, which had disappointed him with the usual avalanche of silt from their disintegrated pages, this one resisted, as if it was somehow stuck in place. Even more strange, the book itself felt solid. He tried again but it wouldn't move, so instead he selected another in the series and attempted to lever that one out, with the same result. But he noticed that the entire series, which occupied about a foot and a half of the shelf, had shifted ever so slightly as he'd applied more force. He felt a flush of elation that, at last, he'd found something he might be able to actually read and, puzzled as to why the books seemed to be glued together, used both hands to pull at them.

They slid out in one block, all the volumes together, and Will placed them on the floor by his feet. They felt heavy, and the pages even appeared to be intact. But he couldn't pry away any of the individual books. He felt the tops of the pages, picking at them with a fingernail to see if they would part. Then he rapped a knuckle against them. They gave a hollow sound — and it dawned on Will that the books weren't made of paper, but of wood, carved very precisely to resemble the roughly cut leaves of old volumes. He felt around the back and found a catch, which he pushed open. With a creak, the top flipped up. It was a lid with an invisible hinge. These weren't books at all. This was a box.

With a rush of excitement, he hastily plucked out the layer of tattered cloth he found inside and peered in. The dark oak interior contained odd-looking objects. He lifted one out.

It was obviously a lamp. It had a cylindrical body, approximately five inches in length, to which was attached a circular housing with a thick glass lens inside. At the rear of the cylinder was some form of sprung arm, and there was also a switch of sorts behind the lens.

It was highly reminiscent of a bicycle light, but it was sturdily made — from brass, Will guessed, given the green patches that he observed on its surfaces. He tried the lever, to no avail, and pulled at one end of the cylinder where there were two slight indentations. With a pop, the end came off, revealing a small cavity inside. If it was indeed a light, then it would need batteries, but even so, Will couldn't work out how such a small battery could power it, or where the wires were.

Stumped, he called over to this brother. "Hey, Cal! Don't suppose you know what this is? Probably just a piece of junk."

Cal ambled groggily over, but his face lit up as soon as he saw the object. He snatched it from Will's hands.

"Hey, these are brilliant!" he said. "Got a spare orb on you?"

"Here," Chester offered, swinging his legs over the edge of the table and climbing off.

"Thanks," Cal said, taking the orb. First he removed all the dust from the device, turning it upside down and tapping it, then blowing inside.

"Watch this."

He dropped the orb into the cavity and pushed down until it clicked.

"Pass me the top."

Will handed it to him and Cal pushed the end of the cylinder back on. Then he rubbed the lens on his pants to clean it.

"You move this lever," he told Chester and Will, "to adjust the aperture and focus the rays." He held it so they could see as he tried to move what appeared to be a lever behind the lens housing. "It's a little stiff," he said, applying as much pressure as he could with both his thumbs. Then, as the small lever gave, he grinned. "Got it!"

Light leaped from the lens, an intense beam that Cal played around the walls. Although the room was already quite well illuminated from the light orbs they'd placed at various points on the bookshelves, they could see how bright the lantern's beam was in comparison.

"That's awesome," Chester said.

"Yep. They're called Styx lanterns — pretty rare, really. This is the best thing about them," Cal said, and, pulling open the spring-loaded flap of brass at the back of the light, slotted it over his shirt pocket. He took his hands away and moved his chest from Will to Chester, the lantern clamped firmly in place as its beam flashed in their faces.

"Hands free," Will observed, blinking.

"Absolutely. Very useful when you're on the move." Cal leaned over to look at the contents of the box. "More of them! I can rig up one for each of us."

"Cool," Chester said.

"So…" Will began as the thought occurred to him, "so this house — all the way down here — was for the Styx!"

"Yes," Cal answered. "I thought you knew that!" He made a face, as if it had been blindingly obvious all along. "They would have lived here. And Coprolites would have been kept in the huts outside."

Will and Chester exchanged glances.

"Kept? What for?" Will asked.

"As slaves. For a couple of centuries they were made to mine stuff the Colony needed. It's different now — they do it in exchange for food and the light orbs they need to live. The Styx don't force them to work like they used to."

"That's nice of them," Will said dryly.

11

Mrs. Burrows was in the dayroom of Humphrey House, an establishment that purported to be a haven of recuperation, or "a respite from your day-to-day worries and strife," if you believed the brochure. The dayroom was her domain. She had commandeered the largest, most comfortable chair and the only footstool in the place, and, to sustain her for the afternoon's television viewing, had stuffed a bag of hard candy down the side of the chair. One of the orderlies in the home had been persuaded to pick these up for her on a regular basis from the town, but they were rarely shared with any of the other patients.

As Oprah came to an end, she flicked through the other channels in a frantic haste. She ran through them all several times, only to find there was nothing on that remotely interested her. Thoroughly frustrated, she stabbed at the mute button to silence the television and leaned her head back against the chair. She missed her extensive video library of films and favorite shows much as a normal person might mourn the loss of a limb.

She sighed a long and forlorn sigh and the irritation receded, leaving in its place a vague sense of helplessness. She was humming the theme from Murder, She Wrote in a mournful and desperate way when the door thumped open.

"Here we go again," Mrs. Burrows muttered under her breath as the matron breezed into the room.

"What, dear?" inquired the matron, a rake-thin woman with her gray hair tightly pulled back into a bun.

"Oh, nothing," Mrs. Burrows replied innocently.

"There's someone here to see you." The matron had made a beeline for the windows and now heaved back the curtains to flood the room with daylight.

"Visitors? For me? Mrs. Burrows said unenthusiastically as she shielded her eyes from the glare. Without leaving the chair, she attempted to get her feet into her slippers, a tawdry pair of stained, fake suede moccasins with the backs trodden down. "Hardly likely to be family — not that there are many of them left, not now," she said, a little soulfully. "And I don't imagine Jean has stirred her stumps to bring my daughter all the way here… Haven't heard a squeak from either of them since before the New Year."

"It's not family, it's a lady from social services," the matron managed to make herself heard, before opening one of the casement windows with incantations of "That's better."

Mrs. Burrows gave no reaction to this piece of news. The matron rearranged the flowers in a vase on the window ledge and gathered up some fallen petals before turning to her. "And how are we today?"

"Oh, not so good," Mrs. Burrows answered, laying it on thick with a whining, despondent tone and finishing her sentence with a small groan.

"I'm not surprised. It's not healthy being cooped up indoors all day — you ought to get some fresh air. Why don't you go for a walk on the grounds after you've seen your visitor?"

The matron stopped and swiveled back to the window, scanning the garden beyond as if she was looking for something. Mrs. Burrows immediately took notice, her curiosity piqued. The matron spent her every waking hour tirelessly organizing people or things, as if her calling in life was to impose some sort of order over an imperfect world. A human dynamo, she did not stop — in fact, she was the complete antithesis to Mrs. Burrows, who had put the struggle with the last mutinous slipper on hold for the moment to watch the matron's atypical inactivity.

"Is something the matter?" Mrs. Burrows asked, not able to keep silent any longer.

"Oh, it's nothing really… just that Mrs. Perkiss swears she saw that man again. Quite beside herself, she was."

"Ah." Mrs. Burrows nodded knowingly. "And when was this?"

"This morning, first thing." The matron turned back into the room. "Can't figure it out myself. She seemed to be getting on so well, and, all of a sudden, these strange episodes started." Frowning, she looked at Mrs. Burrows. "Your room is directly under hers — you haven't spotted anyone out there, have you?"

"No, and I'm not likely to."

"Why's that?" the matron asked her.

"Bit bloomin' obvious, isn't it?" Mrs. Burrows replied bluntly, finally succeeding in ramming her foot home into her slipper. "It's the person we all fear, deep down… the final curtain… the big sleep… whatever you want to call it. That Perkiss woman has had the sword of Damocles hanging over her for a long time… poor cow."

"You mean…" the matron began, as she caught on to what Mrs. Burrows was suggesting. She gave Mrs. Burrows a gentle "pah" just to emphasize what she thought of her theory.

Mrs. Burrows wasn't deterred in the slightest by the matron's reaction. "Mark my words, that'll be it," she said with total conviction, her eyes drifting back to the silent television screen as it occurred to her that Millionaire could be about to start any moment now.

The matron exhaled skeptically.

"Since when had death been a man in a black hat?" she said, and reassumed her usual businesslike manner, glancing at her watch. "Is that the time? I must be getting on." She fixed Mrs. Burrows with a stern glance. "Don't keep your visitor waiting, and then I want to see you go for that brisk walk on the grounds."

"Of course," Mrs. Burrows agreed, nodding vigorously, but inwardly finding the whole suggestion of exercise quite distasteful. She hadn't the slightest intention of taking a "brisk walk," but would make a big show of getting ready to go out, then merely promenade once around the house before ducking into the kitchen to lie low for a while. If she was lucky, she might even get a cup of tea and some shortbread biscuits out of the cook.

"Tickety-boo," the matron said, checking the room for anything else that wasn't in its place.

Mrs. Burrows smiled sweetly at her. She'd learned very soon after arriving that if she played along with the matron and her staff, she could get her own way, well, most of the time, anyway, particularly since she wasn't much trouble in comparison with many of the other inpatients.

These were a mixed bunch, and Mrs. Burrows viewed them all with equal disdain. Humphrey House had its fair share of "Snifflers," as she called them. There was a barrel-load of these miseries who, if left to their own devices, positioned themselves all over the place like lost, lonely waifs, usually in corners where they could mope away the hours uninterrupted. But Mrs. Burrows had also witnessed the quite startling change that this breed could go through, more often than not in the evenings. Without warning, they would undergo some form of transformation after "lights out," like a caterpillar wrapping itself in a duvet cocoon only to emerge as a completely different creature, a "Screamer," in the small hours of the morning.

Then this normally nonviolent breed would howl and wail and break things in their rooms until members of the staff came to placate them or administer a pill or two. And, usually, they'd miraculously metamorphose back into Snifflers again by sunup.

Then there were the "Zombies," who shuffled around as if they were clueless extras on a film set, not knowing what they were supposed to be doing or where they were meant to be going, and certainly never remembering their lines (they were mostly incapable of any rational exchange). Mrs. Burrows largely ignored them while they stumbled around the place on their random, senseless paths.

But the very worst for her had to be the "Bagmen," horrible specimens of middle-aged, male professionals who had burned out from their overpressured careers in accountancy or banking or, as far as Mrs. Burrows was concerned, similarly inconsequential occupations.

She loathed these pinstripe casualties with a passion — sometimes, she thought, because their mannerisms and blank expressions reminded her so much of her husband, Roger Burrows. She'd seen the little danger signs that he was going that way just before he had upped and offed, disappearing who knows where.

For Mrs. Burrows hated her husband with a passion.

Even in the first years of their marriage, things hadn't gone smoothly. Their inability to have children together cast a pall over the relationship. And all the rigamarole associated with adopting meant she couldn’t concentrate on her own job and she'd been forced to pack it in: Another dream stymied. After they had been successful in their applications to adopt two young children, a boy and a girl, she had struggled to give them everything she'd had in her own childhood, all the trappings, such as nice clothes and mixing with the right people.

But it was impossible; after years of trying to make her family something it could never be — not on Dr. Burrows's fleabite salary — she gave up. Mrs. Burrows had closed her eyes to her surroundings and her situation, seeking solace in the worlds on the other side of the television screen. In this blinkered, unreal state, she'd abdicated motherhood, handing the responsibility of the house, the washing, the cooking, everything, to her daughter, Rebecca, who took it all on with surprising ease, considering she had been only seven years old at the time.

And Mrs. Burrows felt no remorse or guilt about doing this, because her husband hadn't upheld his part of the bargain when they had first married. And then, to cap it all off, Dr. Burrows, the chronic loser, had had the gall to walk out on her, taking away what little she did have.

He had ruined her ruined life.

She loathed him for this. And all this loathing fermented away inside her, never far below the surface.

"Your visitor," the matron prompted her again.

Nodding, Mrs. Burrows tore her eyes from the television and rose wearily from her chair. She shuffled out of the room, leaving the matron rearranging some boxes of puzzles on the sideboard. Mrs. Burrows didn't want to see anyone, least of all a social worker who might bring unwanted reminders of her family and the life she'd left behind her.

In no hurry to reach her destination, she slid her slippers lethargically over the highly buffed linoleum as she passed "Old Mrs. L.," who, at twenty-six, was ten years Mrs. Burrows's junior, but had shockingly little hair. She was in her habitual pose, fast asleep in a corridor chair. Her mouth was open so wide that it looked as though someone had tried to saw her head in two, her prominent larynx and tonsils displayed in their full glory for all to see.

The woman let go an almighty rush of air from her gaping mouth, with a sound somewhat akin to air escaping from a slashed truck tire. "Disgraceful!" Mrs. Burrows declared, continuing down the corridor. She came to a door with a crude plastic label in black and white proclaiming it to be The Happy Room and pushed it open.

The room was at the corner of the building and had windows on two of its walls that looked out onto the rose garden. Some bright spark on the staff had come up with the idea of encouraging patients to paint murals on the other two walls, although the final result hadn't been quite as anticipated.

A five-foot-wide rainbow composed of brown strands of varying hues arched over a strange assortment of humanoid figures. One end of the rainbow curved down into the sea, where a grinning man stood on a surfboard, his arms outstretched in some form of clownish greeting, as a large shark's fin cut a circle through the water around him. In the sky above the dun rainbow, seagulls wheeled, painted in the same naпve style as the other pictures. They had a certain charm to them, until one noticed the droppings shooting from their rear ends in broken lines, much as a child might draw gunfire in a battle scene, which strafed the heads of a group of figures with bloated human bodies and the heads of mice.

Mrs. Burrows didn't feel at ease in the room, as if the fractured, mysterious images were trying to communicate hidden messages. For the life of her, she couldn't imagine why it was used to receive guests.

She turned her attention to her unwanted visitor, staring disdainfully at the woman in nondescript clothes, who had a folder on her knees. The woman immediately got to her feet and looked at Mrs. Burrows with her very pale eyes.

"I'm Kate O'Leary," Sarah said.

"I can see that," Mrs. Burrows said, looking at the visitor's badge clipped to Sarah's sweater.

"Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Burrows," Sarah continued, unperturbed, forcing a perfunctory smile as she offered her hand.

Mrs. Burrows murmured a hello but made no move to shake it.

"Let's sit down," Sarah said as she took her seat again. Mrs. Burrows looked around at the plastic chairs and intentionally didn't pick the one closest to Sarah, but chose another by the door, as if she expected she might want to make a quick exit.

"Who are you?" Mrs. Burrows asked bluntly, sliding her eyes over Sarah. "I don't know you."

"No, I'm from social services," Sarah answered, briefly holding up the letter she had retrieved from the doormat in the Burrowses' house. Mrs. Burrows craned her neck to try to read it. "We wrote to you on the fifteenth about this meeting," Sarah said as she quickly put the creased letter on top of the folder on her lap.

"Nobody told me anything about a meeting. Let me see that," Mrs. Burrows demanded as she went to get up, one hand extended toward the letter.

"No… no, it doesn't matter now. I expect the manager here forgot to inform you, and it won't take long, anyway. I just wanted to make sure everything's OK for you and—"

"Not about the fees, is it?" Mrs. Burrows cut in as she settled back in her chair, crossing her legs. "As far as I know, the health insurance pays a top-up on the government's contribution and when the insurance runs out, the money from the house sale will cover me."

"I'm sure that's all right, but it's not my department, I'm afraid," Sarah said with another transient smile. She opened the folder on her knees, took out a pad of paper, and was just slipping the cap off her pen when she caught sight of the painting of a coffee-colored teddy bear on the wall a little way above Mrs. Burrow. Around the bear were carefully painted dice, all in bright colors such as red, orange, and royal blue, and all showing different numbers. Sarah shook her head and turned her attention to Mrs. Burrows again, her pen poised above a clean sheet of paper.

"So tell me, when were you admitted here, Celia? Do you mind if I call you Celia?"

"Sure, anything. It was November last year."

"And how have you been getting on?" Sarah asked, pretending to take notes.

"Very well, thank you," Mrs. Burrows said, and then added somewhat defensively, "but I've still got some way to go after my… er… trauma… and I'm going to need much more time here. More rest."

"Yes," Sarah agreed noncommittally. "And your family? Any news of them?"

"No, none at all. The police say they're still investigating the disappearances, but they're hopeless."

"The police?"

Mrs. Burrows answered in a forlorn monotone. "They even had the gall to come to see me yesterday. You probably heard what happened a couple of days ago… the incident at my house?" She flicked her eyes lethargically at Sarah.

"Yes, I read something about it," Sarah said. "Nasty business."

"Certainly was. Two policemen on the beat surprised a gang outside my house and there was one heck of a fight. Both officers got a bad hiding, and one of them even had a dog set on him." She coughed, then tugged a grimy handkerchief from where it was tucked inside her sleeve. "I suppose it was those horrid squatters. They're worse than animals!" Mrs. Burrows pronounced.

If only she knew, Sarah thought. She nodded her head to show she was in total agreement with Mrs. Burrows, the image of the policeman lying senseless on the patio after she'd knocked him out cold flashing through her mind.

Mrs. Burrows blew her nose at great volume and tucked the handkerchief back into her sleeve. "I really don't know what this country's coming to. Anyway, they picked the wrong place this time. Nothing left there to steal… it's all in storage while the property's being sold."

Sarah nodded her head again as Mrs. Burrows went on.

"But the police aren't much better. They just won't leave me be. My counselor tries to stop them from coming, but they insist on interviewing me, time and time again. They act as if I'm to blame for everything… my family's disappearances… even the attack on the policemen… I ask you, as if I could've had anything to do with that — I'm here under twenty-four hour watch, for heaven's sake!" She uncrossed her legs and shifted in her chair before crossing them again. "Talk about getting some rest! This is all very unsettling for me, you know."

"Yes, yes, I can quite understand that," Sarah agreed quickly. "You've been through enough already."

Mrs. Burrows gave a small nod and lifted her head to gaze through the windows.

"But the police haven't given up looking for your husband and son?" Sarah inquired softly. "Hasn't there been any news about them at all?"

"No, nobody seems to have the faintest idea where they've gone. I'm sure you're aware my husband walked out, then my son vanished from the face of the earth," she said desolately. "There've been various sightings of him — a couple right back in Highfield. There was even some security-camera footage from the tube station of someone who looked vaguely like Will, with another boy… and a large dog."

"A large dog?" Sarah put in.

"Yes, an Alsatian or something like that," Mrs. Burrows shook her head. "But the police say they can't verify any of it." She sighed self-indulgently. "And my daughter, Rebecca, is at my sister's, but I haven't had a squeak from her for months." Mrs. Burrows's voice fell to a whisper, her face blank and unreadable. "Everyone I know goes away… Maybe they all found better places to be."

"I can only say how truly sorry I am," Sarah responded in a gentle, consolatory voice. "Your son — do you think he went off to search for your husband? I read that the investigating officer considered it a possibility?"

"I wouldn't put it past Will," Mrs. Burrows said, still gazing outside, where someone had made a halfhearted effort to tie some unhealthy-looking climbing roses to the cheap plastic pergola not far from the window. "I wouldn't be surprised at all."

"So you haven't seen anything of your son since… when was it… November?"

"No, it was before then, and no, I haven't," Mrs. Burrows exhaled.

"What was he… what state of mind was he in, before he left?"

"I really can't tell you — I wasn't too good myself at the time, and I didn’t…" Mrs. Burrows stopped herself in mid-sentence and switched her gaze from the rose garden to Sarah. "Look, you must have read my case file, why are you asking me all this?" All of a sudden her whole manner transformed, as if a spark had been ignited. Her voice reverted to its usual rather impatient and snappy tone. She pulled herself up in her chair, squaring her shoulders as she regarded Sarah with a fierce intensity.

The change wasn't lost on Sarah, who immediately broke off eye contact, pretending instead to consult the meaningless notes she'd made on the pad of paper. Sarah waited a few seconds before she resumed, her voice as level and calm as she could make it.

"It's quite simple, really, I'm new to your case and it's very helpful to have some background information. I'm sorry if this is painful for you."

Sarah could feel Mrs. Burrows's eyes boring into her as they analyzed her like twin X-ray beams. Sarah slowly sat back. Her outward appearance was relaxed, but inwardly she braced herself, ready for an onslaught.

"O'Leary… Irish, hmmm? You don't have much of an accent."

"No, my family moved to London in the sixties. But I go back for the odd holiday to—"

Mrs. Burrows, her face animated and her eyes sparkling, didn't let her finish.

"That's not your natural hair color; your roots are showing," she observed. "They look white. You dye your hair, don't you?"

"Uh… I do, yes. Why?"

"And is there something wrong with your eye — is that a bruise? Also your lip — it looks a bit puffy. Someone take a pop at you?"

"No, I tripped down some stairs," Sarah replied tersely, injecting equal measures of indignation and exasperation to make her reaction sound credible.

"That old chestnut! If I'm not mistaken, you're wearing heavy makeup over what I would say is a very pale complexion?"

"Um… I suppose," Sarah flustered. She was staggered by Mrs. Burrows's powers of observation. Sarah's disguise was being slowly but surely dismantled, like petals being torn from a flower one by one to reveal what lay within.

She was just wondering how she could deflect Mrs. Burrows's interrogation, which showed no sign of abating, when she caught sight of a clump of balloons painted on the wall just above thee other woman's left shoulder. A swipe of blue sky was washed over the balloons, almost completely obscuring and swallowing them up, turning their vibrant colors into dullness. Sarah took a shallow breath and cleared her throat, then said, "I need to ask you just a few more questions, Celia." She coughed to mask her unease. "I don think you are getting a little… um… personal…"

"A little personal?" Mrs. Burrows laughed dryly. "Don't you think all your idiot questions are a little personal?"

"I need…"

"You have a very distinctive face, Kate, however hard you try to disguise it. Come to think of it, you have a very familiar face. Where might I have seen you before?" Mrs. Burrows frowned and inclined her head, as if trying to remember. There was more than a little of the theatrical about her — she was enjoying herself.

"This doesn't have anything to do with—"

"Who are you, Kate?" Mrs. Burrows cut her off sharply. "No way are you from social services. I know the type, and you're not it. So who exactly are you?"

"I think perhaps that's enough for now. I should go." Sarah had made up her mind to call a halt to the meeting and was gathering her papers and replacing them in the folder. She'd hastily gotten to her feet and was retrieving her coat from the back of the chair when Mrs. Burrows sprang up with surprising speed and stood before the door, barring Sarah's way.

"Not so fast!" Mrs. Burrows exclaimed. "I have some questions for you first."

"I can see I've made a mistake coming here, Mrs. Burrows," Sarah said decisively as she put her coat over her arm. She took a step toward Mrs. Burrows, who didn't budge an inch, and so they stood, face-to-face, like two prizefighters sizing each other up. Sarah was beginning to tire of the pretense — and Mrs. Burrows clearly didn't now anything more than she did about Will's whereabouts. Or if she did, she wasn't telling.

"We can finish this another time," Sarah told her, flashing a sour smile and turning sideways as if she meant to squeeze between Mrs. Burrows and the wall.

"Stop right where you are," Mrs. Burrows ordered. "You must think I'm gaga. You come here with your shabby clothes and your second-rate performance and expect me to swallow it?" Her eyes, narrowing to two vicious slits, flashed with the satisfaction of knowing.

"Did you really think I wouldn't figure out who you are? You have Will's face, and no amount of hair dye or stupid playacting" — she swatted the folder in Sarah's arms with the back of her hand — "is going to hide that." She nodded slyly. "You're his mother, aren't you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Sarah answered as coolly as she could.

"Will's biological mother."

"That's absurd. I…"

"What hole did you crawl out of?" Mrs. Burrows sneered sarcastically.

Sarah shook her head.

"Why did it take so long for you to come back? And why now?" Mrs. Burrows continued.

Sarah didn't say anything, staring daggers at the red-faced woman.

"You abandoned your child… You gave him up for adoption… What gives you the right to come sniffing around here?" Mrs. Burrows demanded.

Sarah let out a sharp breath. She could knock this rather flabby, lazy woman out of her way with so little effort, but chose to do nothing. They stood there, under a pounding silence, one Will's adoptive mother and the other his birth mother, inexorably liked and both instinctively knowing who the other was.

Mrs. Burrows broke the silence. "I take it that you're looking for him, or you wouldn't have shown up here," she simmered. She raised her eyebrows like a TV detective making a vital deduction in a case. "Or maybe you were responsible for his disappearance?"

"I had nothing whatsoever to do with his disappearance. You're insane."

Mrs. Burrows snorted. "Oh… insane, you say… Is that why I'm in this awful place?" she said in a hammy, melodramatic way, rolling her eyes like a terrified heroine in a silent film. "Dear me!"

"Let me through, please," Sarah asked with resolute politeness, taking a small step forward.

"Not just yet," Mrs. Burrows said. "Perhaps you decided you wanted Will back?"

"No—"

"Well, I bet you're involved in some way. You bloody keep your bloody nose out of my affairs. It's my family!" Mrs. Burrows scowled. "Look at the state of you. You're not fit to be anyone's mother!"

Sarah had had enough.

"Oh, yes?" she retorted through tightly clenched lips. "And what did you ever do for him?"

A wave of triumph swept across Mrs. Burrows's face. She'd flushed Sarah out into the open. "What did I do for him? I did my best. You were the one who dumped him," she answered angrily, unaware that Sarah was struggling with an almost irrepressible urge to kill her. "Why didn't you come to see him before? Where've you been hiding all these years?"

"You bitter, vindictive hag!" exploded Sarah, revealing the scorn and resentment she felt for the other woman, her face erupting with all the violence of which she was capable.

But Mrs. Burrows wasn't put off by this, not in the least. She stepped back from the door, not in retreat, but to place her hand over the large red panic button on the wall. Sarah now had a clear passage out of the room and went to the door, twisting the handle to open it a fraction. As she did so, the sound of a commotion echoed down the corridor — a tremendous clattering and hysterical shouts. Mrs. Burrows knew immediately that one of the Screamers' body clocks must have gone awry. That was odd — they usually saved their histrionics for the small hours.

For the briefest moment, Sarah was distracted by the noise, then she focused her full attention back on Mrs. Burrows, who remained with her hand poised over the button.

Sarah looked fiercely at her, shaking her head. "You don't want to do that," she threatened.

Mrs. Burrows laughed unpleasantly. "Oh, don't I? What I really want is for you to get out—" she said.

"Oh, I'm going all right," Sarah snarled, cutting her short.

"— and never set foot in here again. Ever!"

"Don't worry… I've seen all I need to," Sarah replied caustically, wrenching the door fully open so that it crashed back against the wall with the bizarre murals and rattled the window casements. She took a step, but hesitated in the doorway, realizing she hadn't said all she wanted to, now that the gloves were off. And, in the heat of the moment, she was finally able to admit to herself what she had been trying so hard to suppress — that Joe Waites's message could be true.

"Tell me what you did to Seth—"

"Seth?" Mrs. Burrows interrupted sharply.

"Call him what you want, Seth or Will — it doesn't matter. You made him into something twisted, something evil!" she screamed in Mrs. Burrows's face. "Into a filthy murderer!"

"A murderer?" Mrs. Burrows asked, looking a great deal less certain of herself. "What on earth are you saying?"

"My brother's dead! Will killed him!" Sarah howled, tears filling her eyes. It was as if this meeting with Mrs. Burrows ha provided her with a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, which, once completed, would show the vilest scene imaginable. And Sarah's outburst carried with it such complete conviction, such rawness of emotion…

Mrs. Burrows began to shake — for the first time she was completely thrown off her stride. Why was this woman accusing Will of murder? And what was this about him being called Seth? It didn't make sense. Her face was a picture of confusion as she took her hand away from the panic button and held it supplicatingly toward Sarah.

"Will… murdered… your brother? What…?" Mrs. Burrows spluttered.

But Sarah merely gave the woman a final withering glance and flew from the room. She was bolting down the corridor as two heavyset orderlies thundered past her in the opposite direction.

They were heading toward the source of the high-pitched wailing, but skidded to a halt when they saw Sarah in flight, uncertain whether they should intercept her instead.

Sarah didn't give them a chance to make up their minds. She hared around a corner in the corridor, her shoes slipping and squealing as they fought for purchase on the overwaxed linoleum. She wasn't going to stop for anyone or anything. The orderlies shrugged at each other and continued toward their original destination.

Sarah pulled open the glass door to the foyer. As she entered, she spotted a security camera on the wall — trained directly on her. Curses! She tucked her head down, knowing it was too late. There was nothing she could do about it now.

The receptionist behind the desk was the same one who had signed Sarah in. She was on the telephone but immediately dropped it as she called out.

"Are you all right? Miss O'Leary, what's wrong?"

With the receptionist still shouting after her to stop, Sarah sprinted across the parking lot and then down the driveway to the road. She didn't let up until she was on the main street. A bus drew up and she quickly boarded it. She had to get clear of the area in case the police had been called.

Sitting well away from the other passengers in the rear of the vehicle, Sarah was finding it difficult to get her breathing under control. She was in a seethe of thoughts and emotions. Never, in all her years of being Topsoil, had she revealed so much of herself to anyone, let alone to Mrs. Burrows, of all people! She should have kept her cool. It had gone so horribly wrong. What had she been thinking?

The whole incident made her heart thump in her ears as she replayed it in her mind. She was at once infuriated with herself for her lack of self-control and deeply upset at the exchange with the ridiculous, ineffectual woman who had been such a large part of her son's life… who had had the privilege of watching him grow up… and who had to take responsibility for turning him into what he'd become. She'd said things to Mrs. Burrows that before she hadn't allowed herself to believe that Will could indeed be a traitor, a turncoat, and a killer.

Once back in Highfield, she couldn't stop herself from breaking into a trot for the last stretch to the waste ground. She'd regained a measure of composure by the time she pulled aside the plywood trapdoor and jumped down into the entrance pit, with the usual comforting crunch of little bones to greet her.

She fished in her pocket for her flashlight but, having found it, didn't turn it on, choosing instead to feel her way through the enveloping darkness of the tunnel until she came to the main chamber.

"Cat, are you there?" she said, finally flicking on the light.

"Sarah Jerome, I presume," came a voice as the chamber burst into a dazzling brilliance, much more than was merited by Sarah's small beam. She shielded her eyes, half blinded and reeling at what she thought she'd glimpsed.

She desperately tried to focus on the source of the voice.

"Who…?" she said, beginning to draw back.

What was this?

A girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen reclined in one of the armchairs, her legs primly crossed and a coquettish smile on her pretty face.

The girl was dressed as a Styx.

A large white collar over a black dress.

A Styx child?

And standing beside the girl was a Colonist, a big, surly brute. He had a strangle leash around the cat's neck and was holding the straining animal back.

Instinct replaced thought as Sarah wrenched open her bag, and in an instant her knife was out and flashing in the bright light. She dropped the bag, brandishing the knife, crouching and edging farther back. Looking frantically around her, she saw where all the light was coming from. Many light orbs — how many, she didn't know — were held aloft around the chamber walls, held by other Colonists. These squat, heavily muscled men lined the space like unmoving statues, like guardians.

Hearing the scratchy and indecipherable language of the Styx, she shot a glance at the tunnel she'd come down. A rank of Styx, in their uniform of black coats and white shirts, had moved across it behind her, sealing off her only means of escape. Talk about a full house — the White Necks were here in force, too.

She was completely surrounded. She wasn't going to be able to fight her way out of this one. It was an impossible situation. She'd been in too much of a hurry — her mind had been elsewhere as she'd carelessly entered the excavation without taking the usual precautions.

You stupid, stupid fool.

And now she was going to pay for her mistake. Dearly.

Dropping her flashlight, she raised the knife and held the blade hard against her own neck. There was time. They couldn't stop her.

Then the girl spoke again in her gentle voice.

"You don't want to do that."

Sarah croaked something unintelligible, her throat constricting with fear.

"You know who I am. I'm Rebecca."

Sarah shook her head, her eyes stricken. A remote corner of her brain wondered why the Styx girl was using a Topsoiler name. Nobody ever knew their real names.

"You've seen me at Will's house."

Sarah shook her head again, then froze. There was something familiar about the child. Sarah realized she must have been passing herself off as Will's sister. But how?

"The knife," Rebecca urged, "put it down."

"No," Sarah tried to say, but it came out as a groan.

"We have so much in common. We have a common interest. You should hear what I have to say."

"There's nothing to say!" Sarah cried, finding her voice again.

"Tell her, Joe," the Styx girl said, half turning.

Someone stepped from the wall. It was the man who had written the note, Joe Waites, one of her brother Tam's gang. Joe had been like family to her and her brother, a loyal friend who would have followed Tam to the ends of the earth.

"Go on," Rebecca commanded him. "Tell her."

"Sarah, it's me," Joe Waites said. "Joe Waites," he added hastily, as she didn't show any sign that she recognized him. He inched forward, his trembling palms turned to her and his voice cracking with hysteria as he delivered a tumble of words. "Oh, Sarah," he pleaded, "please… please put it down… put the knife down… do it for your son's sake… for Cal's sake… Your must've seen my message… It's true, it's the God's own…"

Sarah pressed the blade deeper into the flesh over her jugular and he stopped dead on the spot, his hands still raised, his fingers spread out, his whole body shaking violently. "No, no, don't, don't, don't… Listen to her… you have to. Rebecca can help."

"Nobody's going to make a move on you, Sarah. You have my word," the girl said calmly. "At least hear me out." She raised her shoulders in a small shrug, setting her head at an angle. "But you go ahead if you want to… cut your throat… I can't do anything to stop you." She let out a long sigh. "It would be such a waste, such a stupid, tragic waste. And don't you want to save Cal? He needs you."

Turning one way, then the other, gasping for breath like the cornered animal she was, Sarah's wide eyes stared at Joe Waites, blinking uncomprehendingly at the old man's unmistakable face under its tight-fitting skullcap, a lone tooth protruding from its top jaw.

"Joe?" she whispered hoarsely at him, with the quiet resignation of someone who was ready to die.

She twisted the blade deeper into her throat. Joe Waites flapped his arms frantically and cried out as the first drops of blood trickled down the paleness of her neck.

"Sarah, please!" he screamed. "Don't! Don't! DON'T!"

12

Will had volunteered to take first watch so the others could get some more rest. He tried to write in his journal but found it difficult to concentrate and, after a while, put it to one side. He paced around the table, listening to Chester's steady snoring, and then resolved to use the time to explore the house more thoroughly. Besides, he was dying to try out his new lantern. He proudly hooked it over his shirt pocket as his brother had shown him, and adjusted the intensity of the beam. With a last look at his sleeping comrades, he quietly left the library.

His first stop was the room on the opposite side of the hall, which he and Cal had only investigated briefly on their earlier excursion. He tiptoed through the dust and, nudging the door open, he went in.

It had the same dimensions as the library but was completely devoid of furniture or shelves. He walked around the edge of the room, peering down at the deep skirting where there were small strips of a lime-green paper, which had obviously once adorned the walls.

He went over to the shuttered windows, fighting the impulse to open them, and instead strolled around the floor several more times, the spotlight beam slashing through the darkness before him. Seeing nothing of interest, he was just on his way out when something caught his eye. He hadn't noticed it before, when all he and Cal had were the luminescent orbs, but now, with his brighter light, it was difficult to miss.

Scratched into the wall by the door, at about head height, were the following words:

Then, following a day with a number next to it that meant nothing to Will, was:

In wonder, Will reached out and ran his hand over some of the words, which reflected his light as if they had been gouged into metal.

"Dad! Dad's been here!" he began to shout. He was so elated that he forgot they had all been trying to be quiet. "My dad has been here!"

Chester and Cal, both wakened by his shouting, came tearing into the hallway.

"Will? What is it, Will?" Chester cried from the doorway, concerned for his friend.

"Look at that! He's been here!" Will was babbling, overcome with excitement.

They began to read the inscription, but Cal didn't seem to be impressed, almost immediately slouching against the wall. He yawned, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

"I wonder how long ago he did that," Will said.

"Incredible!" Chester exclaimed as he finished reading the message. "That's just wild!" He grinned widely at Will, sharing his friend's euphoria. But then a suggestion of a frown wrinkled his brow. "So do you think they were his footprints in the library?"

"Bet they were," Will said breathlessly. "But isn't it just too weird? Talk about a coincidence — we chose exactly the same route as him."

"Like father, like son." Chester gave Will a pat on the back.

"But he's not his father," said a resentful voice from the shadows behind Chester. Cal was shaking his head. "Not his real father," he said disagreeably. "And he didn't even have the guts to tell you that, did he, Will?"

Will didn't react, not allowing his brother to take away from the moment. "Well, we cant' hang around this area for long, if Dad's right about the radioactivity" — he carefully emphasized the word without looking at Cal — "and the walls are all coated with lead. I think he was right — feel here." He touched the surface of the wall under the message, and Chester did likewise. "Must act as a shielding."

"Yeah, feels cold, like lead, all right. So I suppose the rest of the house must be the same," Chester agreed, glancing around the room.

"That's obvious. I told you the air's bad in the Deeps, you dolts," Cal said contemptuously and stamped his way back through the dust, leaving the two of them standing there.

"Just when I'm beginning to think he's not such a brat," Chester grumbled, shaking his head, "he goes and ruins everything."

"Just ignore it," Will said.

"He may look like you, but that's as far as it goes," Chester fumed. He was irked by the younger boy's behavior. "The little midget only cares about one person, and that's himself! And I know what his game is, always trying to wind me up… He eats with his mouth wide open just to…" Chester stopped in midflow as he noticed the faraway look on his friend's face. Will wasn't listening; he stared at the writing on the wall, totally absorbed by thoughts of his father.

The boys spent the next twenty-four hours taking it easy, sometimes sleeping on the library table, sometimes roving through the large house. As Will looked around the other rooms, it made him uncomfortable to think the Styx had once lived here, even though it had been a long time ago. However, despite his searching, he didn't find any further evidence of his father and was becoming impatient to get going again — fired up by the notion that Dr. Burrows might still be in the area and desperate to catch up with him. With every hour, Will grew more restless, until he could bear it no longer. He rallied Chester and Cal together, telling them to pack their things, and then left the library to wait out in the hallway.

"I don't know what it is, but there's something about this place," Will said as Chester joined him by the front door. Will had opened it a fraction, and they were shining the focused beams of their lanterns at the dismal forms of the squat huts as they waited for Cal. After his outburst about Will's father, he'd been moody and uncommunicative, and both Will and Chester had largely left him to his own devices.

"It makes me feel… feel kind of uneasy," Will continued. "It's all those little huts out there and the thought that the Styx made the Coprolites live in them, like slaves. I bet they were treated so badly."

"The Styx are the worst type of scum," Chester said, then hissed sharply through his teeth and shook his head. "No, Will, I don't like it here, either. It's strange that…" he pondered.

"What?"

"Well, it's just that this building's been empty for years, maybe centuries, until your dad broke in. Just locked up, like nobody's dared to put a foot in it."

"Yes, that's right," Will said thoughtfully.

"Do you think people stay away because things were once so awful here?" Chester asked him.

"Well, the bats are definitely carnivorous — I saw them attacking an injured one — but I don't think they're too much of a danger," Will replied.

"Huh?" Chester said apprehensively, his face draining. "We're made of meat."

"Yeah, but I would guess they're more interested in the insects," Will began. "Or animals that can't fight back." He shook his head. "You're right — I'm sure it isn't just the bats that have kept people away from this place," he agreed.

As Will had been talking, Cal had stomped sullenly through the dust, thrown down his rucksack and sat himself on top of it.

"Yeah, the bats," he butted in sulkily. "How are we going to get past them?"

"There's no sign of them at the moment," Will said.

"Wonderful," Cal snarled. "So you don't have a plan at all."

Will responded evenly, refusing to be ruffled by his brother's criticism. "Right, then: This time we dim our lights, we don't make any noise, or shout — got that, Cal? And, as a precaution, I've got some firecrackers ready if they do come. Should scare off the freaky things." Will tugged open the side pocket of his pack, in which there were a couple of Roman candles left over from the batch he'd set off in the Eternal City.

"That's it? That's the plan?" Cal demanded aggressively.

"Yes," Will said, still trying to keep his cool.

"Foolproof!" Cal grunted.

Will gave him a look that could kill and warily pulled the door farther open.

Cal and Chester both edged out, with Will bringing up the rear, a pair of firecrackers in one hand and a lighter poised in the other. Every so often they heard the screeches of the bats, but they came from far enough away not to cause any real alarm. The boys moved silently and quickly, using the minimum of light to show them the way. In the shadows around their feet the tiny scuttlings and scrabblings tested the limits of their resolve, their imaginations running riot with thoughts of what was there.

They had left the gateway behind them and then backtracked a good distance down the main tunnel when Cal stopped and pointed at a side passage. True to form, he had wandered ahead by himself, and now did not say anything as he continued to point.

"Is the midget trying to tell us something?" Chester asked Will sarcastically as they approached the resentful boy. Will stepped closer, until his face was inches from Cal's.

"For goodness' sake, grow up, will you? We're all in this together."

"A sign," Cal merely said.

"From heaven?" Chester asked.

Unspeaking, Cal moved aside to allow them to see a wooden post that rose a few feet from the ground. It was ebony-black, with the surface cracked as if it had been badly charred, and at the top it had a curved arrow pointing into the passage. They hadn't spotted it on the way down because it was tucked just inside the mouth of the passage.

"I reckon this could be a good way to get through to the Great Plain," Cal told Will, studiously avoiding Chester's belligerent glare.

"But why would we want to go there?" Will asked him. "What's so special about it?"

"It's probably where your dad went next," Cal replied.

"Then we follow it," Will said, and turned away from his brother, entering the passage without a further word.

Their journey through the passage was relatively easy — it was quite sizable, and its floor level, but the heat grew stronger with every step. Following Chester's and Cal's example, Will had removed his jacket, but he still felt the sweat soaking his back under his rucksack.

"We are going in the right direction, aren't we?" he said to Cal, who for once was not straying ahead of them.

"I hope so, don't you?" the boy replied insolently, then spat on the ground.

The change was immediate. There was a flash of illumination, far brighter than the glow issuing from the lanterns all three boys had hooked on their shirt pockets. It was as if all the faces of the rocks, and even the very ground itself, were radiating a clean yellow light. And it wasn't just limited to where they stood, but surging in pulses along the passage in both directions and illuminating everything as surely as if a switch had been flicked on, lighting the way for them.

They were stunned.

"I don't like this, Will," Chester gibbered.

Will pulled his jacket from where it was draped over the top of his rucksack and rummaged in it for his gloves.

"What are you doing?" Cal asked.

"Just a hunch," Will replied, stooping to pick up a brightly glowing rock the size of a golf ball. He closed his gloved hand over it, the creamy efflorescence shining through the gaps between his fingers. Then, balancing the rock on his open palm, he examined it carefully.

"Look at this," he said. "See that it's covered with a growth of some sort, like lichen?" Then he spat on it.

"Will?" Chester exclaimed.

The rock shone even more brightly. Will's mind was working overtime. "It feels warm. So moisture activates whatever this organism is — possibly bacteria — and it gives off light. Except for the stuff you find in some oceans, I've never heard of anything quite like this." He spat again, but this time on the wall of the passage.

Sure enough, where spots of his saliva had landed, the wall glowed that much more fiercely, as if luminous paint had been flicked at it.

"C'mon already, Will!" Chester said urgently, his voice low with fear. "It could be dangerous!"

Will ignored him. "You can see what water does to it. It's like a seed that's dormant… until it gets wet." He turned to the other two boys. "Better not get any on your skin — wouldn't like to think what it might do to it. Might suck up all the moisture…"

"Thank you, Professor Smarty-Pants. Now let's get out of here ASAP, shall we?" Chester said, exasperated.

"Yep, I'm done," Will agreed, tossing the rock aside.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, and it was many hours of monotonous trudging before they left the passage and came out into what at first Will took to be another cavern. But as they moved forward, it soon became apparent that the space was something altogether different from any of those they'd been in before.

"Hold up, Will! I think I can see lights," Cal said.

"Where?" Chester asked.

"There… and more over there. See them?"

Both Will and Chester peered into the seemingly unbroken blackness.

To catch sight of them, they had to look just off center — attempting to view the lights directly blotted the dimly blinking specks from view.

In silence, they turned their heads slowly from one side to the other as they took in the tiny points, which were spaced at random intervals across the horizon. The lights seemed so far away and vague as to be gently pulsing and shifting through a haze of colors, similar to stars on a warm summer's night.

"This'll be the Great Plain," Cal announced all of a sudden.

Will took an involuntary step backward. It had begun to sink in that the expanse ahead was truly vast. It was daunting: The darkness made his mind play tricks on him, so he couldn't tell if the lights were in the extreme distance or, indeed, much closer by.

Together, the boys edged forward. Even Cal, who had spent his life in the immense caverns of the Colony, had never before encountered anything with dimensions like this. Although the roof remained at a relatively constant height, fifty feet or so from the floor, the rest — a yawning, endless gap — wasn't visible even with their lanterns set to full beam. It stretched before them, a slice of continuous blackness unbroken by a single pillar, stalagmite, or stalactite. And, most remarkably, gentle gusts of air wafted around, cooling them down a degree or two.

"It does look massive!" Chester put into words what Will was thinking.

"Yeah, goes on forever," Cal rejoined indifferently.

Chester turned on him. "What do you mean, forever? How big is it, really?"

"About a hundred miles across," Cal answered flatly. Then he strode off, leaving the other two standing side by side.

"A hundred miles!" Will repeated.

Chester suddenly blew his top. "Why doesn't your brother just tell us everything he knows? This place doesn't go on 'forever.' He's such a jerk! He either exaggerates everything or never gives us the whole story." With the sourest of expressions, he leaned his head to one side and then the other as he mimicked Cal. "This is Crevice City… blah, blah… her is the Great Plain… blahbiddy-blah…" he spat, his words clipped through his anger. "You know, Will, I keep getting the feeling that he's holding things back just so he can get one up on me."

"On us," Will said. "But can you believe this place? Mind-blowing." Will was doing his best to change the subject and knock Chester off a course, which, it was clear, would eventually lead to a violent collision with his brother.

"Yeah, it's sure blown my mind," Chester replied sarcastically and began to probe the darkness with his lantern, as if trying to prove Cal was wrong.

But it did seem as though the space stretched on forever. Will immediately began to theorize about how it could have been formed. "If you had pressure against tow loosely bonded strata from… from a tectonic movement," he said, overlaying one hand on the other to demonstrate it to Chester, "then it could be possible for one to just ride up over the other." He arched the top hand. "And, bingo, you could get this sort of feature. Like wood grain splitting when it gets damp."

"Yes, that's all great," Chester said. "But what if it closes up again? What then?"

"I suppose it could — after many thousands of years."

"Knowing my stinking rotten luck, it'll probably be today," Chester muttered dolefully. "And I'll be squashed like an ant."

"Nah, come on, the chances of that happening right now are pretty small."

Chester grunted skeptically.

13

In a cleverly disguised entrance in the empty cellar of an old almshouse up in Highfield, not far from Main Street, Sarah stepped into an elevator. She slung her bag down by her feet and, hugging herself, made herself as small as she could. Backing into one of the corners, she looked miserably around the interior. She loathed being confined in the constricted space, with no means of escape. The sides and roof of the elevator were panels of heavy iron trelliswork, and the interior had been coated with a thick pasting of grease, the remaining traces of which were spiky with dirt and dust.

She heard a brief, muffled exchange between the Styx and Colonists hanging back in the brick-walled chamber outside the elevator, and then Rebecca entered, unaccompanied. The girl didn't give Sarah as much as a glance as she swiveled sharply around on her heels, one of the Styx ramming the gate shut behind her. Rebecca pushed and held down the brass lever by the side of the gate and, with a lurch and a low grinding noise from above, the elevator began to descend.

As it went, the heavy trellis cage creaked and rattled against the sides of the shaft, this din punctuated occasionally by the grating squeal of metal on metal.

They were being lowered to the Colony.

However much she tried to contain it, a new sensation was building in Sarah, pushing up against her fear and anxiety. It was anticipation. She was returning to the Colony! Her birthplace! It was as though she had suddenly been given the ability to go back in time. With each foot the elevator dropped, the clock was speeding in reverse, regaining hour after hour, year after year. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined she'd ever see her homeland again. She'd dismissed the possibility so irrevocably that it was hard for her to grasp what was now happening.

Taking several deep breaths, she unclenched her arms and straightened her back.

She'd heard about the existence of these elevators, but had never actually seen, let alone ridden in, one before.

Sarah rested her head against the trelliswork and, as the cage bumped its way down, watched the side of the shaft. The glow from Rebecca's light illuminated it, revealing that it was pocked with innumerable regular henpeck gouges. These were a testament to the work gangs who had dug their way down to the Colony almost three centuries ago, using only rudimentary hand tools.

As the different rock strata flashed by, giving up their brown, red and gray hues, Sarah thought about the blood and sweat that had gone into establishing the Colony. So many people, generation upon generation, had toiled for all their natural lives to build it. And she had rejected it all, fleeing to the surface.

At the top of the shaft, now several hundred feet above her, sound from the winch raised in pitch as it shifted up a gear, and the elevator accelerated in its descent.

This mechanical means in and out of the Colony was a world away from the one she had taken for her escape twelve years ago. Then, she had been forced to climb the entire way, using a stone staircase that spiraled up a huge brick-built shaft. It had been long and arduous, especially because she'd been hauling young Seth after her. The worst part had been her final emergence into the open air onto a rooftop via the inside of an age-old chimney stack. As she had scrambled to get some sort of bearing on the crumbling, soot-coated sides, all the while dragging the crying and confused boy behind her, it had taken every last drop of her strength to hold on and stop them both from slipping and tumbling down into the well below.

Don't think about that now, Sarah scolded herself, shaking her head. She realized how utterly spent she was from the day's events, but she had to get a grip. The day was far from over. Focus, she urged herself, glancing at the Styx girl traveling with her.

Facing away from Sarah, Rebecca hadn't moved from where she stood just inside the gate. Occasionally scuffing her shoe against the steel plate that formed the floor of the rattling cubicle, she was clearly impatient to reach the bottom.

I could deal with her right now. The thought suddenly forced itself into Sarah's head. As the Styx girl didn't have her escort, there would be nothing to stop Sarah. The notion gathered momentum, and Sarah knew she didn’t have much time before they arrived at the bottom.

The knife was still in Sarah's handbag — for some reason the Styx hadn't taken it away. She regarded the bag where it lay by her feet, gauging how long it would take her to retrieve the weapon. No, too risky. Much better, a blow to the head. She balled her hands into fists and then opened them again.

No!

Sarah checked herself. Allowing her to be alone with the girl was a demonstration of the Styx's trust. And everything Sarah had been told seemed to fit together, to be true, so she'd decided to go along with them for the time being. She tried to calm herself, taking some more deep breaths. She raised a hand to her neck, tentatively probing the swelling around the self-inflicted wound.

It had been a close call — she'd started to push the knife into her jugular with the desolate intent of sinking it up to the hilt. But with Joe Waites screaming and pleading like a madman, she'd stayed her hand. She'd been prepared to go through with it: She'd lived with the certainty that at some point the Styx would catch up to her. She had rehearsed her suicide in one form or another a thousand times before.

With the knife poised and the silent audience of Styx and Colonists lining the walls around her, she'd listened to what Joe and Rebecca had to say, telling herself that a few more seconds wouldn't make any difference to someone who was already dead.

But then, the story they had told her bore out what was written in the note. After all, the Styx could have executed her there and then in the excavation. So why go to all that trouble to save her?

Rebecca had recounted what had happened on the fateful day Tam lost his life. How the Eternal City had been blanketed in an impenetrable fog and the viperous Will had set off pyrotechnic devices to attract the Styx soldiers. In all the confusion, Tam was drawn into the middle of an ambush and, mistaken for a Topsoiler, had been killed. Worse still, Rebecca said there was a strong possibility that Will himself had wounded Tam with blows from a machete in order to leave him behind as a decoy for the Styx soldiers. Sarah's blood boiled at this. Whatever had happened, Will had saved his own worthless skin, forcing Cal to go with him.

Rebecca also said Imago Freebone, a childhood friend of Sarah's and Tam's, had been present at the incident. According to Rebecca, he had since gone missing, and she could only presume that Will had something to do with this as well. Sarah saw tears in Joe Waites's eyes as Rebecca spoke about this. As a member of Tam's little gang, Imago had been Joe's friend, too.

Sarah couldn't begin to comprehend Will's callous lack of regard for his own brother's life, let alone his murderous behavior. What sort of devious, conniving animal had he become?

Once Rebecca had finished telling her the chain of events, Sarah had asked for a moment alone with Joe Waites, and the Styx girl, much to Sarah's amazement, had granted it. Rebecca and the complement of Styx and Colonists dutifully withdrew from the underground cavern, leaving them together.

Only then had Sarah lowered her knife. She sat in the empty armchair next to Joe. The two of them had talked rapidly while Rebecca and her escort waited in the tunnel leading to the bone pit. Joe retold the tale in rushed whispers, corroborating everything in the note he'd left and the version of events Rebecca had just given. Sarah needed to hear it again from start to finish, form someone she knew she could trust.

When Rebecca returned, she made Sarah a proposal. If Sarah was prepared to join forces with the Styx, she would be provided with the means to track down Will. She would be given the opportunity to right two wrongs: to avenge her brother's murder and to rescue Cal.

It was an offer Sarah couldn't ignore. Too much was left undone.

And, now, here she was, in a metal cage with her avowed enemy, the Styx! What had she been thinking?

Sarah tried to imagine what Tam would have done if faced with the same situation. But it didn't help, and she became agitated, picking at the clot on her neck, not caring in the least that it might cause the cut to open up and start bleeding again.

Rebecca half turned her head but didn't look toward Sarah, as if she could sense her turmoil. She cleared her throat and asked softly, "How are you doing, Sarah?"

Sarah stared back at the Styx girl's head, at the raven-black hair that spilled over the immaculate white collar, and spoke, her voice finding a new aggression.

"Just dandy. This sort of thing happens to me all the time."

"I know how difficult this is for you," Rebecca said soothingly. "Is there anything you want to talk about?"

"Yes," Sarah replied. "You insinuated your way into the Burrows family. You were in the house with my son for all those years."

"With Will — yes, that's right," Rebecca said without any hesitation, but ceased the constant scuffing of her shoe on the iron floor.

"Tell me about him," Sarah demanded.

"What will grow crooked, you can't make straight," the Styx girl said, letting the phrase hang in the air as they trundled downward. "There was something a little strange about him, right from the word go. He found it difficult to make friends and became even more withdrawn and distant as he grew older."

"No question he was a loner," Sarah agreed, recalling the times she had watched Will as he went about his digs.

"You don't know the half of it," Rebecca said in a slightly tremulous voice. "He could be rally scary."

"What do you mean?" Sarah asked.

"Well, he expected everything to be done for him: his laundry, his meals… everything, and he'd fly off the handle at the smallest thing that wasn't just as he wanted it. You should've seen him — one moment he was fine, and the next he'd completely flip out and go into a horrible rage, screaming like a madman and smashing up the place. He was forever getting into trouble at school. In a fight he had last year, he beat up some of his classmates really badly. They hadn't done anything to him! Will just lost it and laid into them with his shovel. Several had to be taken to the hospital, but he wasn't the slightest bit sorry for what he'd done."

Sarah remained silent, absorbing what she'd just been told.

"No, you have no idea what he was capable of," Rebecca said softly. "His adoptive mother knew he needed help, but she was too bone idle to do anything about it." Rebecca slid her hand over her forehead as if the memories were causing her pain. "Perhaps… perhaps Mrs. Burrows was the reason he was like he was. She neglected him."

"And you… what were you there for? To keep tabs on him… or to catch me?"

"Both," Rebecca answered dispassionately as she twisted at the waist to regard Sarah with a steady gaze. "But the priority was to get you back. The Governors wanted you stopped — it's been bad for the Colony to have you unaccounted for. A loose end. Messy."

"And you've managed to pull it off, haven't you? You even got me alive. They'll be delighted with you."

"It's not like that. Anyway, it was your decision to come home." There was nothing in Rebecca's manner to suggest she was gloating over her success. She turned back to the gage again. Every so often, bright illumination from the entrances to other levels flashed before her, reflecting in the lustrous sheen of her jet-black hair.

After a pause, she spoke again. "It was quite something to survive for all that time, always keeping one step ahead of us and rubbing shoulders with the Heathen day in, day out." She was silent for several seconds. "It must have been hard for you, away from everything you knew?"

"Yes, sometimes," Sarah replied. "They say freedom has its price." She knew she shouldn't be opening up to the Styx girl, but she felt a grudging respect for her. Because of Sarah, Rebecca had been thrust into the alien place that was Topsoil. And at such a tender age. Almost the whole of the girl's life had been spent on the surface as she lived in the Burrows household; to say they had something in common would be a rank understatement. "What about you?" Sarah asked her. "How did you get by?"

"It was different for me," Rebecca replied. "Living in exile was my duty. It was a bit like some sort of game, but, all through it, I never forgot where my loyalties lay."

Sarah shivered. Although it seemed to have been uttered without reproach, the comment was like a blow, striking at the very kernel of her guilt. She slumped back into the corner of the elevator and wrapped her arms across her chest again.

For a while, neither of them spoke. The creaking and rattling descent of the elevator continued.

"Not far now," Rebecca eventually announced.

"I have one last question," Sarah shot back.

"Sure," Rebecca replied distractedly as she glanced at her watch.

"When this is all over… when I've done what I have to… will you let me live?"

"Of course." Rebecca spun daintily around and turned her bright eyes on Sarah. She smiled broadly. "You'll be back in the fold again, back with Cal and your mother. You're important to us."

"But why?" Sarah frowned.

"Why? Isn't it obvious, Sarah? You're the prodigal daughter." Rebecca smiled even wider, but Sarah couldn't reciprocate. Her mind was awash with confusion. Maybe she just wanted to believe what the girl was saying a little too much. A voice of caution nagged her insistently, setting her nerves on edge. She didn't try to stifle it. She'd learned from bitter experience that if anything seemed too good to be true, then it almost certainly was.

Finally the elevator cage thumped against its stops a the bottom of the shaft, jolting its two occupants. Shadows moved outside. Sarah glimpsed a black-sleeved arm as it drew back the trellis door, and Rebecca strode purposefully out.

Is this a trap? Is this it? hammered through Sarah's mind.

Sarah remained within the car, peering down the metal-lined corridor at the two Styx who held back in the darkness. They were positioned on either side of a thick metal door, thirty or so feet away. Rebecca raised her light and beckoned for Sarah to follow, motioning toward the door. The only way out of the corridor, it was covered in glossy black paint with a large zero roughly daubed on it. Sarah knew they were at the bottom level and that on the other side of the door would be an air lock, then a final door, and then the Quarter.

This was it, the final step: If she crossed through that air lock, she was back, and well and truly in their clutches again.

His ankle-length leather coat creaking as he moved, one of the two Styx stepped into the light and took the edge of the door with his thin white fingers, pulling it back so that it clanged against the wall behind. No one spoke as the sound echoed around them. The Styx's black hair, drawn back tightly over his head, had traces of silver at the temples, and his face had a distinctly yellow hue to it and was deeply wrinkled. There were such uncomfortably deep creases on each of his cheeks that it looked as though his face were about to fold in on itself.

Rebecca was watching Sarah, waiting for her to enter the air lock.

Sarah hesitated, her instincts screaming at her not to go through the door.

The other Styx was more difficult to observe, as he remained in the shadows behind the girl. When the light did catch him, Sarah's first impression was that he was much younger than the other man, with clear skin and hair of the purest black. But as she continued to look, she could see that he was older than she'd first thought; his face was lean and drawn to the point that his cheeks were slightly hollowed, and his eyes were like mysterious caverns in the dim light.

Rebecca continued to watch her. "We'll go on. You come when you're ready," she said. "OK, Sarah?" she added softly.

The elder of the two Styx exchanged glances with Rebecca, and gave her the merest of nods as the three of them passed into the air lock. Sarah heard their feet clunk on the ridged floor of the cylindrical room, followed by a hiss as the seal on the second door was broken. She felt the gush of warm air on her face.

Then all was silent.

They had gone into the Quarter, a series of large caverns linked by tunnels, where only the most trusted of citizens were selected to live. And a handful of these were, under the supervision of the Styx, allowed to trade with Topsoilers for the basic materials that couldn't be grown or mined in the Colony or the layer below, the dreaded Deeps. The Quarter was something akin to a frontier town, and the living conditions weren't very wholesome, with the ever-present risk of cave-ins and floods of Topsoil sewage.

Sarah tilted her head to squint into the darkness of the elevator shaft above. She realized she was kidding herself if she thought she had any alternative. There was nowhere to run. Her destiny had been taken away from her and placed in the hands of the Styx the moment she'd taken the knife from her throat. At least she was still alive. And what was the worst they could do? Kill her, after they had subjected her to one of their more horrible tortures? The outcome would be the same in the end. Dead now, or dead later. She had nothing to lose.

She swept her eyes over the elevator cage for a last time, then started toward the dusky interior of the air lock. It was approximately fifteen feet long and oval in shape, with deep corrugations along its walls. Using the sides to brace herself as her feet slid on the greasy metal furrows beneath them, she slowly stepped to the open door at the other end, her apprehension mounting.

She leaned out. She caught the abhorrent language of the Styx — reedy, staccato words that ceased as soon as the trio saw her. They were waiting a little distance away on the other side of the large tunnel. As far as the light in Rebecca's hand permitted Sarah to see, the tunnel was empty, with an expanse of cobbled road and then a strip of stone pavement where Rebecca and the other Styx stood. There were no houses; it was a highway tunnel, perhaps connecting to one of the warehouse caverns that were dotted around the periphery of the Quarter.

Slowly she lifted one foot, then the other, over the lip of the air lock doorway and planted them on the shiny-damp cobblestones. She couldn't believe she was actually back in the Colony. She hesitated. Glancing over her shoulder, she looked at the wall that swept up in an elegant arc to where it would join the similarly built opposing wall, although the apex was obscured from sight in the gloom. She reached out a hand to touch the wall by the door, pressing her palm against one of the huge rectangular blocks of precisely cut sandstone. She felt the faint thrumming from the massive fans that circulated air around the tunnels. So very different from the vibrations in the Topsoil city above, it was a constant rhythm and gave her such comfort, like a mother's heartbeat.

She drew the air deep into her lungs. The scent was there, the characteristic mustiness, a distillation of all the people living in the Quarter and the larger area of the Colony beyond it. It was so distinctive, and she hadn't smelled it for so very long.

She was home.

"Ready?" Rebecca called, breaking into her thoughts.

Sarah's head jerked around to the three Styx.

She nodded.

Rebecca snapped her fingers and from the shadows a horse-drawn carriage rolled into view, its iron wheels rattling over the cobbles. Black and angular, and pulled by four horses of the purest white, these carriages were not an uncommon sight in the Colony.

It drew up next to Rebecca, the horses stamping their hooves and thrusting their noses in the air, eager to keep moving.

The austere hansom rocked as the three Styx climbed into it, and Sarah slowly made her way across. A Colonist sat in the driver's seat at the front of the cab, an old man wearing a battered trilby, who fixed his hard little eyes on Sarah. As she passed before the horses, she became self-conscious under the severity of his gaze. She knew what he'd be thinking: He probably didn't know who she was, but it was enough that she was dressed in Topsoiler clothes and had a Styx escort — she was the enemy, the hated.

As Sarah stepped onto the pavement, he cleared his throat in a coarse, exaggerated way and leaned over to spit, only just missing her. She stopped, and very purposefully stepped on the mess he'd coughed up, grinding the ball of her foot into it as if she were squashing an insect. Then she looked up at him, defiantly returning his stare. Their eyes locked together, long seconds passing. His flared with anger, but then he blinked and averted his gaze.

"OK, so let it begin," she said out loud, and climbed into the carriage.

14

"Want a drink?" Will proposed. "I'm parched."

"Good idea." Chester grinned, his mood lightening. "Let's catch up with Boy Scout over there."

They were closing in on Cal, who was still striding quickly along in the direction of one of the distant lights, when he turned to them. "Uncle Tam said that the Coprolites live in the ground… like rats in burrows. He said they have towns and food stores that are dug into—"

"Watch out!" Will cried.

Cal stopped himself short just in time, at the edge of a stretch of darkness where the ground should have been. He teetered and then fell back on the loose floor, his feet scattering dirt over the ledge in front of him. They heard splashes of water as it landed.

While Cal picked himself up, Will and Chester cautiously approached the ledge and peered over. By the light of their lanterns they could see there was a drop of ten feet or so, and then inky, rippling water that reflected their lantern beams, sending circles of light back at them. The water flowed gently along, with nothing like the speed of the rushing stream they'd encountered earlier.

"This is man-made," Will observed, pointing at the regularly cut slabs forming the ledge. He leaned out as far as he dared to examine what lay below. The side of the canal was also lined with slabs, right down to the water's surface. And as far as they could see, the opposite bank was of identical construction.

"Coprolite-made," Cal announced quietly, as if to himself.

"What did you say?" Will asked him.

"The Coprolites built this," Cal said in a louder voice. "Tam told me once that they have giant canal systems to shift the stuff they mine."

"Useful piece of information to have known… beforehand," Chester complained under his breath. "Got any more surprises for us, Cal? Any words of wisdom?"

To forestall a throw-down between the two, Will quickly intervened, suggesting they stop for a rest. They made themselves comfortable by the canal side, leaning on their rucksacks and sipping from their canteens. As they surveyed the canal that stretched on either side of them, all three were thinking the same thing: There was nowhere to cross. They'd just have to follow alongside and see where it took them.

They'd been sitting in silence for some time when a gentle creaking stirred them into activity again. They rose nervously to their feet, peering into the pitch-black and fixing their lanterns on the point from which the noise had emanated.

Like a ghost, the prow of a boat drifted into the far limits of their combined illumination. It was so eerily quiet, except for the odd gurgle of water, that they blinked, wondering if their eyes were deceiving them. As it glided into view, they could make out more of the vessel — it was a barge, rusted brown and unfeasibly wide, and sitting deep in the water. Heavily laden, its midsection was piled high with some organic matter.

Will couldn't believe how long the barge was — it just kept on coming and coming. The distance from the bank where the boys were standing to the side of the vessel — just a few feet — was such that they could have easily jumped aboard if the whim had taken them. But they were frozen to the spot by a mixture of fascination and fear.

The stern came into view, and they saw a stubby funnel from which wisps of smoke were issuing. Next they detected the deep and muted thump-thump of an engine. The noise was gentle, like an accelerated but regular heartbeat, sounding from somewhere below the waterline. Then they saw something else.

"Coprolites," Cal whispered.

Three lumbering forms stood stock still in the stern, one with the shaft of the tiller in its hand. The boys watched, mesmerized, as the unmoving forms drew nearer. Then, as they drifted past, the boys could see every detail of the bloated, grublike caricatures of men, with their round bodies and globular arms and legs. Their suits were ivory in color and absorbed the light into their dull surfaces. Their heads were the size of small beach balls, but the most remarkable thing about them was that where their eyes should have been, lights shone like twin spotlights. The direction of these eye-beams revealed precisely where the strange beings were looking.

The boys couldn't help but gawk, while the three Coprolites seemed not to take the blindest bit of notice of them. With their lanterns blazing, the boys' presence on the bank was unmistakable, so there was absolutely no way the Coprolites could have missed them.

But there was no sign whatsoever that they were paying the boys any attention. Instead, the Coprolites moved very slowly, their eye-beams creeping around the barge like lazy lighthouses, never once alighting on them. Two of the strange beings turned ponderously, their lights creeping down the port and starboard sides of the barge, then both coming to rest on the prow, where they stayed.

But suddenly the third Coprolite twisted around to face them. He moved with greater speed than either of his companions; with some urgency his eye-beams flicked backward and forward over the boys. Cal caught his breath, then murmured something as the Coprolite ran a plump hand over his eyes, the other hand raised as if in a salute or perhaps a wave. The strange being's head bobbed from side to side as though he was trying to get a better view of the boys, all the while sweeping his eye-beams over them.

This silent connection between the boys and the Coprolite was brief, the barge continuing its steady, undeviating passage into the penumbra. The Coprolite was still facing them, but the increasing distance and wisps of smoke from the funnel made the twin spots of his eyes hazier and hazier, until they were finally lost in the darkness.

"Shouldn't we get away from here?" Chester asked. "Won't they sound the alarm or something?"

Cal was dismissive. "No, no way… They don't take any notice of outsiders. They're stupid… All they do is mine and then trade it with the Colony, for things like the fruit and light orbs that were on the train with us."

"But what happens if they tell the Styx about us?" Chester pressed him.

"I told you… they're stupid, they don't talk or anything," Cal replied wearily.

"But what are they?" Will asked.

"They're men… sort of… They wear those dust suits because of the heat and bad air around here," Cal answered.

"Radioactivity," Will corrected him.

"Sure, if you want to call it that. It's in the rock in this place." Cal waved his hand expansively. "That's why none of my people hang around for long."

"Oh, this just gets better and better," Chester complained. "So we can't go back to the Colony, and now we can't stay here, either. Radioactivity! Your dad was right, Will, and we're going to fry in this forsaken place."

"I'm sure we'll be OK for a while," Will said, trying to allay his friend's fears, but without much confidence.

"Great, great, and freakin' great," Chester growled, then stomped over to where they'd left the rucksacks, still grumbling to himself.

"Something wasn't right back there," Cal said confidentially to Will, now that they were alone.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you saw the way that last Coprolite was watching us?" Cal said, shaking his head with a confused expression.

"I did, yes," Will said. "And you just told us they don't take any notice of outsiders."

"I'm telling you… they don't. I've seen them a thousand times back in the South Cavern and they never do that. They never, ever look straight at you. And he was moving strangely… too fast for a Coprolite. He didn't act normal." Cal paused to scratch his forehead. "Maybe it's different down here, because it's their land. But it's weird, all the same."

"I guess it is," Will said thoughtfully, little knowing how close he'd just come to his father.

15

Dr. Burrows stirred, thinking he'd heard the soft chiming sound, the wake-call that rang without fail every morning in the Coprolite settlement. He listened intently for a while, then frowned. There was nothing but silence.

"Must have overslept," he decided, rubbing his chin with a look of some surprise as he encountered the stubble on it. He'd grown fond of the straggling beard he'd sported for so long, and found he missed it now that he'd shaved it off. Something within his psyche had been very comfortable with the image it presented. He'd promised himself that he would regrow it for his glorious return, his eventual emergence back out on the surface again — whenever that was going to be. He'd cut an impressive figure on the front pages of all the newspapers. The imagined headlines loomed before him: "The Robinson Crusoe of the Underworld"; "The Wild Man of the Deeps"; "Dr. Hades…"

"That's quite enough," he said out loud, putting a stop to his self-indulgence.

He pulled aside his coarse blanket and sat up on the straw-stuffed mattress. It was too short for an average-sized man, as he was, and his legs hung over the edge by nearly two feet.

He put on his spectacles, scratched his head. He'd attempted to cut his hair himself and hadn't made a terribly good job of it; in some places it was almost down to the scalp, while in others there were tufts about an inch long. He scratched even more vigorously, working his way around his head and then across his chest and armpits. Scowling with displeasure, he gazed in an unfocused way at his fingertips.

"Journal!" he said suddenly. "I didn't make an entry yesterday." He'd arrived back so late that he'd completely forgotten to record the day's events. Clicking his tongue against his teeth as he retrieved his book from under his bed, he opened it at a page that was blank except for the heading:

Under this he began to write, whistling a random and disjointed tune all the while:

He paused and thoughtfully licked the end of his pencil stub, then continued:

He glanced around the small, almost circular room, some twelve feet from side to side, and up to the concave ceiling.

The texture of the walls was irregular, as if the drying plaster or mud or whatever it was constructed from had been applied by hand. As for the shape, it gave him the impression that he was inside a large jar, and it amused him that he knew now how a genie trapped in a bottle might feel. This impression was heightened by the fact that the only way in or out was below him, in the center of the floor. It was covered by a piece of beaten metal that resembled an old trash can lid.

He glanced at his dust suit, hanging from a wooden peg on the wall like the shucked-off skin of a lizard but with a light coming from the eye holes where the luminous orbs were inserted. He should be putting on the suit, but he felt duty-bound to complete the entry for the previous day first. So he continued with his journal:

He hesitated, debating whether to use the name he had devised for these people, assuming they were a distinct species from Homo Sapiens, something he hadn't been able to ascertain yet. "Homo Caves," he said, then shook his head, deciding against it. He didn't want to confuse matters before he had his facts straight. He began to write again.

He stopped whistling to allow himself a chuckle, reminiscing how at first the adults wouldn't even hold his stare when he tried, fruitlessly, to communicate with them. They would avert their rather small gray eyes, their body language one of awkward submission. Such was the difference in temperament between him and these unassuming people that at times he pictured himself as the hero from a Western, the lone gunslinger who had trekked across the prairies to a town of cowed farmers or miners or what have you. To them, Dr. Burrows was a powerful, all-conquering, he-man hero. Hah! Him!

"Get on with it, will you," he told himself, and resumed his writing:

Dr. Burrows stopped and looked up, staring into the middle distance for several moments, with the air of someone who is trying to remember something but has forgotten why he is trying to remember it in the first place.

Then he flicked back through the pages of his journal until he found his first entry on arriving in the Deeps and read it to himself.

At this point Dr. Burrows clicked his tongue against his teeth again and shook his head.

He whisked the page over as if he was still annoyed at himself, then scanned his description of the empty house that he'd discovered, and the surrounding huts.

He moved past the entry as if it didn't interest him much, to a smeary, dirty page. His handwriting, never very legible at the best of times, was even worse here, and his hastily written sentences ran across the page at an array of different angles, blissfully ignoring the ruled lines. In places, his sentences were even written on top of one another, in a kind of literary pick-up sticks. At the bottom of three successive pages, the word LOST was scrawled in large, increasingly more erratic capitals.

"Messy, messy," he admonished himself. "But I was in a bad way."

Then a passage in the entry caught his eye, and he read it out loud.

Directly below it, a subheading proudly announced THE STONE CIRCLE. On the next pages were sketch after sketch of the stones comprising the underground monument he'd stumbled across. He'd not only recorded the positions and shapes of the stones themselves, but on each page had drawn circles in the corners, like the view through a magnifying glass, recording in painstaking detail the symbols and the strange inscriptions chiseled into their faces. His spirits had soared at the discovery, despite his increasing hunger and thirst. Not knowing how long he had to make his supplies last, each day he'd been forcing himself to consume as little as he could.

A self-satisfied grin played on his face as he inspected these pages, admitting his labors.

"Perfect, perfect."

Then he stopped as he came to the next page, pursing his lips with an unuttered, "Ohhhh!" as he read the heading:

He'd written a couple of lines below this:

Dozens of pages with drawings of the tablets followed, skillful pictures of the writing carved on their faces, all meticulously copied. But, as he turned the pages, they became less carefully drafted, until it looked as if a young child had been drawing them.

I HAVE TO KEEP WORKING was written so forcibly under one of the final, slapdash sketches that the pencil lines, pressed deep into the page, had even torn the paper in places.

With a finger, he felt the impressions of his words in the journal, trying to recall his state of mind at that instant. It was hazy. The food had all gone, and he had continued to work feverishly, with scant regard for his water supplies. When he found they, too, had run out, it had taken him completely by surprise.

Still trying to remember, he looked at the note he'd scrawled in a neater, almost despairing way, in the middle of an outline of a stone tablet he had never finished drawing:

It ended there. He had no recollection of what had happened next, except that in a kind of delirium he had staggered off in search of a spring and, not finding one, had somehow managed to get himself back to the Tablet Caves.

After a blank page there was DAY? and the words:

"I digress. This is no good," he said sternly to himself, shaking his head. "Yesterday's entry! I must finish yesterday's entry." He fanned through the pages until he found the one where he'd started, and put pencil to paper once more:

Dr. Burrows reread the last paragraph, then his eyes glazed over as he began to dream again. He imagined his battered journal, open at this very page, in a glass case in the British Library or perhaps even the Smithsonian.

"History," he said to himself. "You are making history."

Finally he'd put on his suit and, moving the trash-can-lid door aside, climbed down the steps carved into the wall. At the bottom, as he stood on the well-raked dirt floor, he peered around, his breathing loud in his ears.

His hunch that change was in the air had been right.

The settlement was uncharacteristically dark.

And completely deserted.

In the center of the communal area, a single, flickering light burned. Dr. Burrows began walking toward it, keeping the wall to his side and glancing up at the roof spaces above him. The twin beams from his suit revealed that all the hatches to the other living spaces were open. The Coprolites never left them like that.

The encampment had been evacuated while he slept.

He approached the light. It was an oil lamp suspended above a tabletop of polished "snowflake" obsidian, which was set into a rusty iron frame. Like a mirror, the highly polished black surface, dappled with diffuse white patches, reflected the flame, and he could see that something was on it, eerily lit by the shifting light. Rectangular packets, neatly wrapped in what appeared to be rice paper, were arranged on the table in a row. He picked up one of these, weighing it in his hand.

"They left me some food," he said. Moved by an unexpected swell of emotion through the thick layers of the suit. He shook his head quickly, ending the moment. He was distrustful of such outpourings of sentimentalism. If he gave in to them, he knew he would begin to feel pangs of guilt about the family he'd deserted, about his wife Celia, and his children, Will and Rebecca.

No. Emotion was a luxury he couldn't afford, not now. He had his purpose and nothing was going to deflect him from it.

He began to gather up the packages. As he lifted the last of these, cradling them in his arms, he saw that a scroll of parchment had been left between them. He quickly replaced the packages on the table and opened the scroll.

It was a map, drawn up in bold lines and with stylized symbols dotted around it. He rotated the parchment first one way and then the other, trying to work out where he was. With a triumphant "Yes!" he recognized the settlement he was now in, and then traced a fingertip around the heaviest outline on the map, the border of the Great Plain. From the edge of this, tiny parallel lines ran on, evidently marking tunnels that ran off it. Next to their courses were many more symbols that he couldn't immediately understand. He frowned, totally engrossed.

These quiet, self-effacing creatures had given him what he needed. They'd shown him the way.

He clasped his hands together and held them up in front of his face, wringing them in a prayer of gratitude.

"Thank you, thank you," he said, his mind already buzzing with thoughts of his onward journey.