Книга - Worlds Explode

Worlds Explode
Shane Hegarty


The second book in the monstrously funny and action-packed new series: Darkmouth. It’s going to be legendary.The adventures of the most unfortunate Legend Hunter ever to don fighting armour and pick up a Dessicator continue…On a list of things Finn never thought he'd wish for, a gateway bursting open in Darkmouth was right up there. But that's about his only hope for finding his missing father. He's searched for a map, he's followed Steve into dead ends, but found nothing. And he's still got homework to do.But soon Finn and Emmie must face bizarre Legends, a ravenous world and a face from the past as they go where no Legend Hunter has gone before. Or, at least, where no legend Hunter has gone before and returned with their limbs in the correct order.























Copyright (#ulink_b15fdfce-36e7-5fe3-b1a8-bd89ba2e2261)







First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

Published in this edition 2017

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is:

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Text copyright © Shane Hegarty 2015

Illustrations copyright © James de la Rue 2015

Design by HarperCollinsPublishers © 2017

Character illustration © James de la Rue; claw mark illustration © Peter Crowther

Shane Hegarty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

James de la Rue asserts the moral right to be identified as the illustrator of the work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007545674

Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780007545759

Version: 2017-02-14


For Oisín


Contents

Cover (#u4c437c12-11f8-5c45-887c-ea38ab119f3f)

Title Page (#ue58e3cd2-5277-5930-9535-98d4c7cb1b1c)

Copyright (#u25f1f904-4922-52ff-bea6-d262c873e3af)

Dedication (#u388c783d-a7f3-5e28-b214-13c08b1ac568)

Maps (#uf84e20f8-efc3-5834-869b-d04443acf632)

Previously in Darkmouth (#ua82c30c7-24f3-5147-8429-4da449aa1bed)

‘The Arrival of the Human’: From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse, as told by inhabitants of the Infested Side (#u68cdf4a4-bfd1-5ef9-9e5f-87c4e820cd24)

Chapter 1: Thirty-Two Years Later (#u97b8ee25-6991-5ede-8811-fa18ba86a3b9)

Chapter 2 (#uc4d00ded-170b-5644-b86e-e95859df5460)

Chapter 3 (#u9f4554c7-cf88-5826-ab1e-a72a4edfa113)

Chapter 4 (#u026b1a6f-4c80-51bc-837f-fe0b8ee9ffda)

Chapter 5 (#u0031d6b3-b7eb-5d53-afd0-277c95e1f370)

Chapter 6 (#ufd3ed4ff-fa55-51ba-a984-6c1178733074)

Chapter 7 (#ud4a2dd4a-922d-5f46-aede-9f15513e8e44)

Chapter 8 (#uc6353d7d-68d4-5f05-ac48-15355ec0d1be)

‘The Arrival of the Human’: From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse, as told by inhabitants of the Infested Side (#u976f3563-7ebe-5da7-b1d3-558d1769faf5)

Chapter 9 (#ue3e90b4a-3bc9-5f2c-91c1-bf8aa09061c9)

Chapter 10 (#ua4ccf849-1ef1-5346-aec2-3dc9a9ef8473)

Chapter 11 (#ufca4373d-a268-5fc0-8a08-06ed5595ba96)

Chapter 12 (#ue8385272-dc27-5b54-8f7e-0a98687d8df5)

Chapter 13 (#u9b3b532d-8361-54f7-8e8e-848f21608f38)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘The Execution of the Human’: From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse, as told by inhabitants of the Infested Side (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘The Three Explodings of Niall Blacktongue’: From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse, as told by the inhabitants of the Infested Side (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘The Purge’: From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse, as told by the inhabitants of the Infested Side (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘Hugo’s Rescue’: From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse, as told by the inhabitants of the Infested Side (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘The Leaving of Niall Blacktongue’: From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse, as told by the inhabitants of the Infested Side (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)

Thank Yous (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Books by Shane Hegarty (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Maps (#ulink_d7efbaab-4af7-57ce-b86d-18e6462bb1fb)















PREVIOUSLY IN DARKMOUTH (#ulink_95b5a5be-9f36-5747-a970-5b7417e39954)

(AND THE MESS THINGS WERE LEFT IN)


It was, everyone on the Council of Twelve agreed, a bit of a mess.

Actually, it was a lot of a mess. In fact, ‘mess’ understated things a little. It was more of a disaster really. A catastrophe. A complete catastrophe.

It was, everyone on the Council of Twelve eventually agreed, a complete catastrophe.

What was the worst part of the catastrophe? There was so much to choose from.

Darkmouth was the last town left on Earth where Legends of myth still invaded, but Hugo the Great, the only active Legend Hunter left to fight them off, was lost on the Infested Side.

As if that wasn’t bad enough – and it was very, very bad – Darkmouth had been left in the hands of his son Finn, a boy still almost eleven months away from his thirteenth birthday when he would become Complete as a Legend Hunter.

Worse yet, this boy was not exactly top of his Legend Hunter class. Which was some achievement given he was the only boy in his Legend Hunter class.

Somehow, that wasn’t even the end of the mess.

The Twelve had managed to plant a spy in the town. Steve, a Half-Hunter from a long line of Legend Hunters, had never properly hunted until he arrived in Darkmouth. It turned out he had never properly spied either, as his cover was blown by Finn, the very boy he was supposed to be keeping a close eye on.

There should have been a positive in the form of Steve’s daughter, Emmie, who not only befriended Finn, but also showed a desire and heart for fighting Legends that the boy lacked. Except it was increasingly clear that her enthusiasm would cause trouble someday – and that day came when she helped a Legend, Broonie the Hogboon, escape back to the Infested Side from which all Legends come.

And then, just to add icing to the whole cake of catastrophe, Darkmouth turned out to be harbouring a traitor. Mr Ernest Glad was supposed to be a Fixer, a helper, a lifelong friend to Hugo. Instead, he was collaborating with the Legends and helped them invade. And he ended up opening a gateway to the Infested Side and pushing Finn’s mother, Clara, through it. Eventually, Clara was rescued by Hugo, but he became trapped in the world of the Legends.

Yes, Finn did shove Mr Glad into the gateway, trapping him and turning him into a million points of light. And yes, he did admittedly defeat a Minotaur and stop an all-out invasion of Legends.

But buildings were destroyed. People were hurt. Every goldfish in Darkmouth disappeared. Hugo the Legend Hunter was gone.

And it would not help matters at all if the boy tried to get him back. No, that would only end in further, final catastrophe.

Or something far worse.


‘The Arrival of the Human’ (#ulink_929eead5-f145-562c-a87e-96bec0a63445) From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse, (#ulink_929eead5-f145-562c-a87e-96bec0a63445) as told by inhabitants of the Infested Side (#ulink_929eead5-f145-562c-a87e-96bec0a63445)


































(#ulink_3ad85045-60ee-51fb-96b2-a6b1d16554a0)

THIRTY-TWO YEARS LATER (#ulink_3ad85045-60ee-51fb-96b2-a6b1d16554a0)


Finn’s father had told him to go to room S3 in the house.

Then he’d pushed Finn out of the Infested Side, back through the buckling gateway to their own world and safety. Finn’s dad had gone to the Infested Side to rescue Finn’s mam, and Finn had gone there to rescue both of them. The last time he saw his dad, he was stepping towards the onrushing Legends and the human who led the charge – Hugo’s own father, Niall Blacktongue.

So, once the gateway had closed, trapping his father on the other side, Finn ran straight to room S3 in the Long Hall. All he found there was a plain box. Inside it was a handwritten note with a simple instruction: Light up the house.

So Finn did. He switched on every lamp and light bulb from the library to the bedrooms, from the bathrooms to the storerooms. He replaced spent light bulbs. He filled empty sockets. He lit up rooms he’d spent hours training in. Rooms he’d never been in. Rooms he’d hardly even noticed.

By the time he’d finished, the house must have been visible from the moon.

“Find the map,” his father had also said.

So Finn found maps.

Lots of maps. Two weeks of hard searching later, he hadn’t found his father, but he was still finding maps.

They were now stacked in piles the length of the Long Hall, under his ancestors’ portraits lining the wall. One mound of maps was overseen by the painting of a meek, almost shameful Niall Blacktongue that Finn could hardly bring himself to look at since losing his father.

Pages were heaped up across the circular floor of the high-ceilinged library, scattered about the device in the centre of the room that his father had built to desiccate Legends, but which Mr Glad had used to awaken them for the invasion. And, at the very spot where Glad had been trapped by a collapsing gateway and scattered into light, there was a small mountain of maps, sorted, discarded, ruled out or held on to for further investigation. Finn sat on one of its slopes.

But he wasn’t alone.

“I’m guessing we can ignore The 1956 Guide to Norway’s Best Pudding Restaurants?” he asked Emmie.

“The Great Scourge of 1886: A Map of Missing Legends,” she read from where she stood by a half-ransacked section of the vast shelves that ringed the room. “How many Legends went missing? And how can there be a map of them if no one knows where they are in the first place?”

They had spent a fortnight leafing through books of maps, fold-out maps, laminated maps, two braille maps, even a jigsaw map of Ireland that Finn used to play with as a child. That very afternoon, they had put the jigsaw together and become very excited when they discovered the piece for County Tipperary was missing.

“It must mean something,” Emmie had said excitedly, until Finn remembered that he’d almost choked on Tipperary when he was very young and the piece had been thrown away as a safety precaution.

He and Emmie continued sifting through the maps in the hope that something might jump out at them. Although, given that they were surrounded by the desiccated husks of Legends, shrunken and frozen but not at all dead, they quietly hoped that nothing would literally jump out at them.

Since his father’s disappearance, no alarms had wailed. No gateway had opened. No Legends had come through. Instead, it had been all about the maps, with the problem being that even if they found one that looked right they didn’t have a clue what it would lead them to.

A weapon? A person? A Legend with its mouth wide and teeth sharpened? Maybe it would be a convenient path to the Infested Side, and they would skip their way along it to find Hugo sitting in a room somewhere, grinning at them.

With the way things had gone so far, that seemed unlikely.

“We’ll know it when we see it, I guess,” Emmie said, apparently sensing Finn’s despair. “I’m sure that at some stage the map we’re looking for will just drop out of something like …” she looked at the book she was holding, “… An Illustrated Atlas of the Last Stands of Slain Legend Hunters. OK, bad choice.”

Finn was flicking robotically through another book, The Happy Rowers’ Guide to the Inlets of Southern Sweden, 1974 edition (Now with Added Coves).






“Dad wouldn’t have told me about it if he didn’t think we could find it,” he said, trying to convince himself as much as Emmie. “And he told me he knew I wouldn’t give up. So I won’t. Except …” From the book he was holding, a small, red, frayed hardback notebook dropped to the floor. “… we’ve been doing this for weeks now, looking for something we mightn’t even recognise.”

“We’ll find it soon, Finn,” said Emmie.

“I’m not saying we won’t,” Finn replied, picking up the notebook. On the inside cover were the initials NB, and he scanned its pages of hand-drawn mathematical symbols, diagrams and shapes, the writing so small it was like a spider had fallen in an inkpot before scampering across the page. NB, he thought. Niall Blacktongue? Was it possible this notebook belonged to—?

A crumpled-up bit of paper bounced off the side of his head. “Earth to Finn?” said Emmie, with a sympathetic grin.

Finn blinked. “Oh. I’m not saying we won’t find it, I’m just afraid we’re looking for the wrong thing in the wrong places.”

Which was the exact moment he found a map.







(#ulink_3c60c0d2-d74e-550d-98ef-d6ee5785ac98)


Low evening sunlight flooded the small Darkmouth alley, forcing Finn to pull his visor down to block its glare. He crept low along the narrow laneway, brushing the high walls on either side, the butt of his Desiccator pressed into his armoured shoulder, ready to protect him against whatever he might find. Whenever he found it. Whatever it was he was looking for.

He backed along a wall, the armour of his clattering fighting suit screeching across the stone. Keeping out of sight, he took a hard right into another alleyway of high glass and nail-rimmed walls in a town built for defence. Gouges and missing chunks in the brickwork were a reminder of the invasion only two weeks before, of the chaos and near catastrophe wrought by multiple Manticores, a Minotaur and those trying to hunt them down.

He scuttled down the laneway where Mr Glad’s burnt-out shop stood behind a criss-cross of police tape warning trespassers to keep out, a blackened reminder of the traitor who had opened a hole in Darkmouth through which Finn’s father and mother had gone and only one had come back.

Where the lane bisected another, Finn stuck his head round the corner. From a parallel alley, the barrel of a weapon emerged, followed by a helmet and a flurry of exaggerated hand signals.

Palm out flat. Knuckles curled. A swirling motion.

Finn flipped open his visor, squinting against the sun as he tried to properly convey his bemusement. “What?” he mouthed.

Steve pushed his visor open and repeated the gestures, this time adding some kind of pumping fist motion.

“Lie down?” asked Finn. “Hop?”

Steve gritted his teeth with obvious frustration. From behind his back, another head appeared.

Emmie, her helmet propped on her head, tight red hair avalanching from it, waved at Finn. He waved back.

Her father gently but firmly pushed her behind him and then, pressed against the wall, crab-walked towards Finn. Emmie followed, no Desiccator in her hand. She wasn’t allowed one. Her sole weapon was an eagerness that almost burst from her.

The three crouched at the wall. Finn’s fighting suit was pushed up uncomfortably at his neck; his kneepads dug into the top of his shins. He shifted awkwardly and loudly as Steve spoke.

“We’re to follow that lane north for another forty metres,” said Emmie’s father, pointing ahead, “then west for twenty metres. That’s where we’ll find our target.”

Finn narrowed his eyes to see. “But that’s the wrong way,” he said.

“No, it’s the right way.”

“It’s not,” Finn insisted, pointing instead at the sliver of alleyway directly ahead of them. “I’m sure that’s what the map tells us.”

An old man cycled towards them, whistling a tune that he left hanging in the air as he saw them, crouched, in armour, and wielding their fat silver Desiccators. He stopped, turned his bike clumsily in the narrow alley, climbed back on to the saddle and cycled away in the direction he’d come from, mumbling curses as he went.

They watched him go, then resumed their planning. “It’s the correct way, Finn. It’s the only possibility.”

“I know these streets. My dad made me memorise them.”

“Look, Finn, I am in charge here. Those are the orders, so that’s just the way it is, whether we like it or not.”

Steve didn’t just like it, he loved it. That was obvious. Since the Council of Twelve had ordered him to stay on in Darkmouth and act as temporary Legend Hunter, he’d been practically giddy with authority, and even more disappointed than Finn that a gateway hadn’t opened since.

“Finn does know them, Dad,” said Emmie, pushing open her visor to reveal her face. “Trust me.”

“Do you want to go back to the car?” Steve asked her.

“No,” she answered.

“Then let me deal with this. We almost got killed in this town because of invading Legends. This is serious stuff.”

“But you said I could do a bit more, Dad.”

“Yes, you can observe more.”

“Come on, Dad. I just want to help.”

Steve rooted through a pocket of his fighting suit, pulled out a set of car keys and held them out to her.

Emmie let out a deep sigh.

Content he’d made his point, Steve pushed the keys back into his pocket and again turned his attention to Finn, who had already stood up to cross the road in the direction he knew they needed to go. Steve pulled him back down by the shoulder and eyeballed him. A shudder went through Finn’s fighting suit. It was tough to exude ferocity when sounding like a wind chime.

“This is the right alley,” insisted Steve, rising to move forward. “So, follow me and let’s see what’s down here.”

It was the wrong alley.

A dead end.

“They must have put this in after making the map,” said Steve, coughing to hide his embarrassment. Finn and Emmie’s silent response said it all. Steve eventually cracked.

“OK, let’s go the way Finn thinks we should,” said Emmie’s dad and the three of them moved back towards the other laneway. “And let’s hope he’s not wrong.”

Finn felt his frustration rise sharply, but kept it to himself.

They moved through the jagged shadows of the laneway’s cobbled defences, past houses of chipped paint and gouged windowsills. They ducked past old, dirtied walls dotted with fresh brick, like fillings in a tooth.

It eventually led them to a wooden door, the entrance to a backyard. As was standard in Darkmouth, its wall was ringed by broken glass, nails, tacks, sharp stones, anything that might keep a Legend out. Softened by decades of rain, though, the splintered door pushed open easily, revealing a yard half filled with blue plastic barrels and large bins.

Finn felt a jolt of uncertainty: this wasn’t right at all.

Before he could speak, Steve held up his hand and began counting down with his fingers. Finn drew his Desiccator to his shoulder and followed him. Emmie stood behind them and tried to look as tough as she could before remembering to snap shut her helmet’s visor.

They edged forward, between bins and barrels and the occasional waft of something rotting, until they reached the back door.

Steve placed his hand on the handle.

“This is ridiculous,” Finn’s mother, Clara, said from the yard behind them, causing each of them to almost jump clean out of their fighting suits. They spun round. “What do you think you’re going to find here?” she asked.

“We were just about to discover that before you interrupted,” answered Steve, deeply frustrated by this disturbance.

“Give me the map,” demanded Clara, hand out.

“Keep your voice down,” Steve hissed.

Finn snatched the map from where it was tucked into the utility belt on Steve’s fighting suit and, despite the man’s protests, handed it quickly to his mother.

Clara held it up. “Do you really think it would be on a beer mat? You don’t think that just maybe Hugo would have told Finn to ‘look for the map on the beer mat’ if he wanted you to find it on an actual beer mat?”

She turned it over in her fingers. On one side was an image of a full and frothy glass (Widow Maker – as refreshing as a kick from an eight-hooved Sleipnir). On the other, the print had been picked clean off and on the soft white cardboard a pen had been used to scribble what seemed to be a criss-cross of laneways, with an X at one corner.

“It’s the best map we’ve come up with,” said Steve, his Desiccator wilting somewhat.

“Better than when you thought you’d found the right one, but ended up bursting into Mrs Kelly’s crèche at nap time?”

“The mark on that map seemed legitimate,” said Steve, flipping open his visor.

“It was a coffee stain. And you set a dozen toddlers’ toilet training back a month.”

“We’re trying our best, Mam,” said Finn.

“I know you are, Finn. This isn’t your fault. I just don’t like to see you being led around blindly while carrying a dangerous weapon.”

“Oh, that thing’s not even loaded,” said Steve, motioning at Finn’s Desiccator. Registering the shock crossing Finn’s face, he added, “Come on now, if you had to use it, you’d probably do more damage to yourself than anything else. But it kept you quiet to think it was working.”

The door behind them swung open with a clang.

Finn and Steve spun round, their raised Desiccators almost scratching the nose of the man who stood in the doorway, wearing a white apron and holding an open-topped blue barrel. He thrust his hands in the air, dropping the barrel so that everyone had to leap out of the way while water and slices of potato washed across the concrete.

As he turned and stumbled back into the building, Clara crouched down and picked up one of the raw chips. “It didn’t occur to you that maybe Hugo had just doodled a map to the nearest takeaway on a beer mat?”

“But our files say Hugo doesn’t drink alcohol,” said Steve.

“No, but he eats food,” she said sternly. “Especially fish and chips. He loves fish and chips.”

Steve and Finn both slumped, almost simultaneously. Steve rubbed his eyes with his gloved hand. Finn hung his head and sagged against the wall. Emmie hovered, toeing the ground. Clara stood between them all, arms folded, head tilted back towards the orange sky.

“I’m sorry, Mam,” said Finn.

“It’s not you who should be sorry,” she said. “Steve’s supposed to be the grown-up here. Honestly. We need to find whatever Hugo wanted us to, but this carry-on has to stop.”

“You don’t think I’d rather be anywhere else but in this place, sorting out your mess?” said Steve.

“No, I don’t. A Blighted Village of your own? It’s clearly your dream come true.”

“I’m getting out of here at the first opportunity,” insisted Steve. “It’s pretty much all I talk about at this stage. Even Finn will confirm that.”

“I …” hesitated Finn.

“You don’t need to say anything, Finn,” said Clara.

“Tell her, Finn.”

“Ignore him, Finn.”

“I …” stuttered Finn.

“Ahem,” said a strange voice.

A young man stood at the entrance to the laneway. So tall and lanky that he seemed almost to stoop in case his head bumped the sky, he was dressed in a shiny grey business suit, a crisp pink shirt and a lime-green tie that knotted tightly at his neck. A briefcase sat on the ground beside him.

Everyone looked at him and, after a few seconds, the man seemed to finally remember why he was there. “Ah yes, hello there. My name is Estravon Oakbound, Assessor to the Subcommittee on Lost Hunters, as appointed by the Council of Twelve. And, under section 41, clause 9 of the 1265 Act of Disappearance, I am here to assess and ultimately assist in the case of the missing Legend Hunter of Darkmouth, Hugo the Great.”

He held out a greasy, fat, brown paper bag. “Excuse my manners. Would anyone like a chip?”







(#ulink_29f48075-7681-5d64-8ab1-dd7562397aba)


Back across town, at the end of a nameless street lined with buildings whose doors had been unopened in decades, windows boarded up or black with grime, was Finn’s ordinary-looking house. An unassuming brick building, it was tucked in behind a low stone wall, a patch of grass and a flower bed into which daffodil stalks were slowly turning into mulch, a couple of weeks after being crushed under the foot of a very angry Minotaur.

On a sofa in the living room, the visitor loomed over Finn and the others even though he was sitting down, his suit jacket flapping loose from his bony frame, his knees rising higher than his waist.

Finn and Clara sat opposite him, separated by a low table on which her tea stood untouched and cold. Finn could see his mother’s mouth was pinched, as if she was trying to prevent rash words from escaping.

Behind them, Steve paced slowly and a little nervously. He hadn’t been given any tea and had arrived late, having been delayed persuading a stubborn Emmie that she couldn’t be part of this and would have to return to her house.

“Darkmouth’s a hard place to find,” said Estravon Oakbound, dipping a biscuit in his tea and failing to catch it as the damp half broke away and splashed into the cup. He fished it out with his fingers, gobbled it. “But I am so glad I made it here. This place is famous.”

He checked his wristwatch, licked his fingers clean of tea and crumbs, then reached into the briefcase by his feet and pulled out a clipboard and a pen. “It may be just case number 4526-dash-U, as far as the filing clerks back at Liechtenstein HQ are concerned, but to me it’s a privilege.”

Estravon looked up to see that his enthusiasm was not appreciated, so switched to a more sombre tone as he ran the tip of his pen down the page on his clipboard. “Let’s see. Let’s see. Ah yes, here we are. The map.”

He waited. Eventually, Clara responded.

“The map?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Estravon. “I believe you’ve been looking for it. As an Assessor, I work directly with the Council of Twelve to examine and, well, assess cases relating to Legend Hunters or their villages. That’s why I’m here.” He looked at his watch again. Finn noticed its hands were curved rather beautifully, like daggers. “For a precious few hours anyway.”

He sat forward, looking towards the window as if expecting someone to be eavesdropping, then spoke almost conspiratorially. “We could probably have done a lot of this over the phone, but it wouldn’t be the same at all. Now what did it smell like?”






Finn was baffled and silent until he realised the Assessor was talking to him. “Excuse me?” he said.

“The Minotaur that crossed over into Darkmouth. What did it smell like? Rotten, I’d imagine. I believe the local sergeant was lucky to survive the old …” He raised a finger in a stabbing motion while making a squelching noise. “Horrible big thing. The Minotaur, obviously, not the sergeant. And real. So very, very real …” The Assessor seemed briefly lost in a daydream. Finn, meanwhile, still felt suffocated by how Sergeant Doyle had been so badly injured two weeks ago because he’d come to help himself and Emmie.

“We need a rescue party,” interjected Steve.

“That’s why I’m here,” said Estravon.

“You’re the rescue party?” asked Clara.

“No.” He blurted a laugh, then became more serious. “But I’ll have a great say in what happens. And I think we can put a good case forward for some very positive action here.” He paused. “Do you know about the six hundred scorpions?” he added, turning to Finn.

“Scorpions?” said Finn.

“At your Completion Ceremony. Sorry, I shouldn’t be giving away any surprises. Let’s just hope it goes ahead now. The chance to become the first brand-new, true, active Legend Hunter in many years. Not a mere Half-Hunter like the rest of us. And then this happens. Shame. I’d already chosen my suit.”

The Assessor fingered his jacket, clearly hoping for a compliment. He seemed a little deflated when he didn’t get one.

“You were going to say something about the map,” prompted Clara.

“Ah yes.” He ran his pen down his list again. “The Infested Side. That’s one thing that wasn’t clear in the report.”

“I wrote everything down,” said Steve.

“And very detailed it was too, thanks, Steve. So, you were all there on the Infested Side …” He went into his daydream again. “I can’t even believe I’ve had a chance to say those words. So few have visited, never mind returned alive. I can think of only a couple, and Conrad Single-Limb’s name says everything about the condition he came back in. Of course, according to the prophecy, you will be going back there some time, Finn. But let’s not dwell on that.”

Queasiness hit Finn and he didn’t know if it was in his body or his mind. “You know about that?”

“Of course I know about that. Everyone knows about that. Any of us around the Twelve anyway. Didn’t you grow up hearing about it?”

Estravon noted the embarrassment creeping across Finn’s face and the displeasure on his mother’s. He guessed what they meant. “You really didn’t know?” he said.

“Not till recently,” said Finn.

“The Legends are rising, the boy shall fall,” recited Estravon. “Out of the dark mouth shall come the last child of the last Legend Hunter.”

“There’s no need to—” said Clara.

“He shall open end the war and open up the Promised Land. His death on the Infested Side will be greater than any other.”

“—hear it again,” she finished, irritation flushing through her cheeks.

“It’s nonsense anyway,” said Estravon, busying himself with his clipboard again. “Rubbish. Could mean anything. I wouldn’t worry about it. We don’t. Not at all.”

“You don’t?” said Finn in surprise.

“Well, more or less. Not too much. Only sometimes.” Estravon tailed off and, in the few heavy seconds of silence, Finn thought he could hear the dust falling through the air.

Finally, Estravon announced, “Anyway, to the matter at hand. How did your father get trapped on the Infested Side? It says in the report that you were the last to see him, Finn, that you were with him, and Steve and your mother came through the gateway ahead of you. Yet only your father was trapped. How?”

“He pushed me through.”

“He pushed you through?” Estravon made a note.

“And the gateway closed. Suddenly. Behind me.”

“Closed. Suddenly. Behind you.” Estravon was focused on the clipboard, writing every word down. “But he told you about the map?”

“Yes,” answered Finn as calmly as he could through a head swimming with guilt. “He shouted it at me.”

“We’ve been through all this,” said Clara. “Can we just get the help now?”

“Let me get this straight, Finn,” said Estravon, placing the pen across the clipboard and concentrating on Finn. “The gateway was closing as a swarm of Legends descended so your father pushed you through, shouting to you as you fell. And then the gateway closed. He therefore simply became stuck, Finn. Trapped there. For no other reason than bad timing?” Finn felt sweat moisten his brow. “Yes,” he said, his tongue like sandpaper. “Bad timing, I suppose.”

The Assessor stared intently at him, his face expressionless for what seemed to Finn like an age, but can only have been a few moments. Then he suddenly snapped into a grin. “Well, that’s all good then.”

He clicked the pen, pushed his clipboard back into his briefcase. Relief surged through Finn. A moment ago he’d wanted to jump out of a window and escape. Now he had to fight the urge to punch the air in delight. He wanted to ask if that was it, if they actually believed all of that, but managed to wrestle that idea away from his mouth before he said it.

Estravon checked his watch again. “I can’t believe I’ll have to go so soon after getting here. But I wouldn’t want to impose on you here in this house.” He looked at Steve. “So, I’ll stay the night in your house instead.”

Steve gawped a little.

“But what about the map?” asked Finn.

“Oh yes, the map,” said Estravon.

“Can you help us find it?”

“Well, that’s the thing, I’m afraid,” said the Assessor. “There is no map.”

“No map? Of course there’s a map,” insisted Clara. “Hugo said so.”

“I’m afraid he was mistaken, Clara. May I call you Clara?” He didn’t wait for a response. “The existence of any map, Clara, was thoroughly investigated after the death of Niall Blacktongue although no one really likes to talk about all of that. Nevertheless, what I can say, quite sincerely, is that there is no map. There never was. It was searched for. It was not found.”

That information settled in the hush of the room.

“So that’s it?” said Steve.

“Not at all,” the Assessor said as he stood up suddenly, triggering Finn and Clara into doing the same. “I will report back to the Twelve, to make a recommendation. I feel confident there’ll be some progress as a result of this.”

He glanced once more at his watch as if in a hurry and, seeing Finn look at it again, unclasped it from his wrist and dangled it at him. “Please. Take it.”

“I can’t do that,” Finn said politely.

The Assessor insisted. “It would be an absolute privilege for me to know that it was being worn here, in Darkmouth.”

Finn looked at his mother, who nodded in encouragement while looking as if she wanted this man out of her house as soon as possible. So, Finn took the watch and strapped it on his wrist. “Thanks,” he said.

Estravon leaned into Finn and whispered, “They’re standard issue anyway. I have a drawer full of them at home.”

“I worry we’ve very little time,” said Clara pointedly.

“I do understand.” The Assessor picked up a biscuit. “But there is time at least for one more of these before I have to leave.”

Fully aware of the intense irritation now radiating from his mother, Finn distracted himself by looking at his new watch, admiring how the delicate curves of its steel hands caught the light of the fat moon flooding through the window.

Outside, the sky was clear and still. Another night falling on a world without his father.







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The next morning, sun crept into Darkmouth and an early summer breeze travelled across the sea, tickling the low waves that ran up to the raggedy shoreline and warming the fat rocks that littered the small crescent of beach at the town’s southern edge. Reaching the wide mangled cliffs that separated Darkmouth from the rest of the world, the breeze rose up until it ruffled the grass lining the top.

A basset hound scampered across the stony beach, stopping briefly to sniff a pebble, pee on it, then move on again.

“Yappy!”

The animal’s owner, Mrs Bright, scrambled after it, struggling to keep her footing on the shifting layer of stones.

“Yappy! Come back, Yappy, you stupid animal.”

She stopped for a moment and looked back along the beach. It curved away into the early morning haze, its stones kissed by the sun-sparkled sea that lapped at the long sweep of the bay. Inland, the houses of Darkmouth huddled together, as if cowering from some unseen danger, but, in this clear morning light, it looked like a normal town. You couldn’t see the shimmer of broken glass on walls, the dull glint of bars on windows, the tight squeeze of the town’s mazy alleyways. You could only see the painted house fronts, the wooden shop signs, the little playground of swings and slides. It was almost, in fact, a thing of beauty.

I really hate Darkmouth, thought Mrs Bright.

Mrs Bright wasn’t supposed to be living here at all. She had made the mistake of marrying a man from Darkmouth who had come not only with a dog she couldn’t stand, but a promise that they would live in the town for exactly one year, and no more, before moving on to any place of her choosing.

He died suddenly eleven months later.

She was left with a house she couldn’t sell and a dog she didn’t want.

“Yappy!” she shouted. “Where did you go, you useless mutt?”

She scanned the beach for the dog again. No sign. She moved towards the corner of the cliff, where rock jutted towards the water and the shore narrowed. Squeezing herself carefully round the base of the looming cliff to the beach on the other side, she could still see nothing of her tiresome pet.

“Yappy! I’ll leave you here, don’t think I won’t.”

From somewhere she heard a muffled yap.

She stopped. Listened. Heard it again.

Squinting at the black stone of the cliff, its layers of rock turned in on itself as if it might collapse at any moment, Mrs Bright realised there was an opening. It was small, a fissure not much taller than herself, and bent over as if buckling under the weight of the land above it.

She had walked this part of the beach many times and never noticed a cave before. Loose soil and stones were scattered at the entrance, apparently freshly fallen. There must, she thought, have been a rock fall, maybe caused by the heavy rains that accompanied the recent invasion of those things. Another reason why she wanted out of Darkmouth at the earliest opportunity.

There was another bark from inside the cliff.

Mrs Bright sighed, stepped carefully over the rubble at the opening, manoeuvred round a large rock and carefully made her way inside.

It was a cave, its walls narrowing as she moved deeper into it, the roof sloping down so that she needed to stoop as she called again for the dog.

“Yappy!”

Her shout echoed back at her just as she squeezed through a gap and into a chamber that stretched high into the blackness above her. The cave was so dark that Mrs Bright could hardly see the ground at her feet.

She gave one final call for the dog and heard nothing but her own breathing and the sound of trickling water.

As Mrs Bright turned to leave, she realised she could see now. A flickering crimson light crept across the hollowed-out rock. Then something else occurred to her: the light was coming from inside the cave.

From somewhere in the direction of that light, Yappy yapped.

Mrs Bright peered towards it. She made out a smudge of deep red, the soft edge of a light obscured by a fold in the cave wall. Cautiously, she edged towards it.

“Is that you, Yappy?”

It most definitely was not.

Mrs Bright’s strangled scream echoed through the high cavern.

Many dogs are intelligent, perceptive beasts with an almost supernatural sense of danger.

Yappy was not one of those dogs.

A couple of minutes later, he emerged from the cave, stopped at a large stone at its entrance, sniffed it, peed on it, sniffed again. He dropped something from his mouth, a curved pink and white object, sniffed around a bit, licked between his legs, sniffed around some more, picked up the object again and scuttled away down the beach. The sun climbed above the horizon into a sky of near unbroken blue. But, if anyone had been looking up at that moment, they would have seen the merest hint of a cloud cross the sun, dimming it almost imperceptibly before burning away again.

And they would have presumed it was just a trick of the light that the cloud briefly appeared to change, solidify and form the shape of a howling face.







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Finn waited at the front door of his house, his father’s hulking car parked outside. Black with a few old scrapes scoring the paint, its familiar sleekness had been dulled by the dust slowly settling on it as the days and weeks went by. It was becoming a spectre and a reminder of Finn’s failure to find his father.

In those last violent moments before the gateway closed and he turned to face the approaching army of Legends, Hugo had told Finn he believed in him, that he knew he’d find a way into the Infested Side. Finn the Defiant he had called him, and Finn had carried that faith with him through the first few days following his father’s disappearance. Yet each speck of dust on that car was a reminder of every day, every hour, every second of failure since. His father believed in him. But Finn was struggling to. All he knew for sure was that he’d been unable to stop Mr Glad pushing his mam through a gateway and his father had been lost while rescuing her. He felt that guilt as heavily as if a Hydra was squatting on his chest.

The morning breeze picked up for a moment, spreading goosebumps across Finn’s arms. He grabbed his backpack, a dead weight that needed to be hoisted with a grunt on to his back. An arm of his fighting suit fell loose from its open zip.

He was in the habit of carrying the armour every day, just in case it was required, and would sit in class with an eye on the weather outside the window. The merest spit of rain – it always rained when portals opened from the Infested Side – was enough to give him the jitters.

Finn twisted in an awkward effort to shove the arm back into his bag. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something move. An animal was scampering up the street. It was a dog – a basset hound – stopping occasionally to sniff a paving stone or to pee on random parts of the street.

Even from a distance, Finn could see its coat was sodden and it appeared to be carrying something in its mouth. He only half watched the dog approach, his mind still largely occupied by the awful thought that he might never find a way to his father, and partly distracted by his continued inability to stuff the fighting suit arm into his bag.

The next thing he knew the hound was sniffing at his leg. Finn looked down, the dog looked up and Finn realised it was wearing false teeth. Not false teeth for dogs, if there even were such a thing, but human false teeth. Large pink and white gnashers, crammed into its mouth so that it sported the widest, most surreal grin he had ever seen.

The dog had a tag round its neck. My name is Yappy, it read. If you find me, you can keep me.

Yappy shook his wet coat, spraying salty water and tiny stones in every direction as Finn jumped out of the way.






He recognised the dog. He had met its owner about the town, spotted her coming in and out of her house over the years, had seen her walking through the town with a headscarf and a scowl as she barked at the dog.

He had a flashback to meeting her a few weeks ago, the day the Minotaur first came through. She was huddled in a doorway on Darkmouth’s main street, Broken Road, while the Legend rampaged through the town. She hadn’t been particularly confident in Finn’s chances of stopping the creature. She’d had a point.

The dog had been in the doorway too. It didn’t have those teeth then. Finn was pretty sure he’d have noticed a thing like that.

“Your owner’s name is Mrs Bright, isn’t it?” he said to the dog. Accepting a tickle under its sodden chin, Yappy looked up at Finn. The teeth glinted in the bright morning light.

It coughed out the dentures and, following another violent shake of its hair that left Finn’s knees flecked with tiny pebbles, it trotted away, stopping only to pee at the corner before disappearing.

Finn picked up the teeth.

“What’s that you’ve got?” asked Emmie, coming down the street, schoolbag slung over her back, woollen hat forced down over her hair.

“I’m not sure,” said Finn. “I mean, they’re false teeth, but I don’t know why a dog had them.”

“A dog had them?” she said as she reached him.

“Yeah, in its mouth.”

“And you’re holding them now?” said Emmie, disgusted. “Lovely.”

Finn felt the slippery teeth in his hand and shuddered. He found a wad of tissues he had stuffed in his jacket, wrapped the teeth up and put them in his pocket.

“That’s even lovelier,” observed Emmie.

“I know who owns them,” he said.

“How? Did they write their name on the gums? ‘If found, please return to the mouth of whoever.’”

“No. I recognised the dog that just dropped them here. It belongs to Mrs Bright. We’ll call in on the way and hand them back.”

“Make sure you tell her to put them through the dishwasher first. By the way, you should brush down your trousers. You’ve got half the beach on them for some reason.”

Finn gave them a quick scrub with his thumbs, then frowned. “Do you reckon my trousers smell sort of seaweedy?”

Emmie sniffed him. “Nah, you’re OK.”

“Sure?”

“Nah. I mean, yeah. There’s no smell.”

Finn suspected Emmie was lying just to make him feel better. Which she was.







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Mrs Bright wasn’t home.

They knocked on her door, rang the doorbell, but she did not come out to reclaim her teeth.

“He likes Chocky-Flakes,” said Emmie, leaning against the wall of the house.

“Who likes Chocky-Flakes?” asked Finn.

“The Assessor. He loves that cereal. Ate about three bowls of it last night and another three this morning. He went for a walk and came back with an ice cream and a giant grin on his face. Then he just disappeared to his room where he said he had to file his report.”

Finn tried to peer through the net curtains behind Mrs Bright’s barred front window. “She’s not home,” he said, but knocked one last time anyway.

“And he talks in his sleep. I could hear him through the bedroom door. ‘Snuggles,’ he said. ‘Come here, Snuggles.’”

“Snuggles?” wondered Finn.

“Snuggles,” Emmie confirmed. “I’d say it’s his cuddly toy.”

From the house neighbouring Mrs Bright’s, there came the sound of locks and chains being undone. Clank. Rattle. Clunk. The door opened and a man popped his head out to greet Finn with a lukewarm, “Oh, it’s you.”

“Have you seen Mrs Bright?” Finn asked.

“No. Saw her yesterday with that dog of hers. Not since then. She’s probably walking. She likes walking. Well, she does a lot of it anyway. It’s hard to tell if she actually likes it. Hard to tell if she likes anything at all really.”

Finn considered handing the teeth to the neighbour and asking him to hold on to them, then decided that troubling him with another person’s well-worn dentures probably wasn’t the right thing to do.

“If you do see Mrs Bright,” Finn said, “please let her know I have something that belongs to her.”

“What is it?” the neighbour asked.

“I think she’ll guess. She can find me at—”

“She’ll know where to find you. Everyone does. Speaking of which, any sign of your father yet?”

“Not yet, but he should be back any time soon.”

The neighbour raised an eyebrow at that. “I’m Maurice Noble by the way,” he said. “I went to school with your father as it happened. I wasn’t at your house.”

“Excuse me?” asked Finn, confused.

“That night the monsters invaded. I didn’t protest at your house with all those other people. I didn’t agree with it. There are still a lot of us here who would prefer to have you lot around to protect us.”

“Thank you.”

“Although it’s true that there have been no monsters since your father disappeared.”

“Well—”

“Not a single one.”

“That’s right, but—”

“And I’m not sure what to make of that. No one is.”

Finn stuttered again, but Maurice Noble ignored that and glanced at Emmie instead, who was hanging back on the edge of the footpath. “Still, better the devil you know, I suppose. We could do with getting him back.”

“We all could,” said Finn.

“I’ll be honest, I was hoping for something a bit more positive than that. By the way, you have a leg sticking out of your schoolbag.” He disappeared back into his house, followed by the sound of locks slamming shut.

Clunk. Rattle. Clank.

Finn turned round so that Emmie could shove the leg armour of his fighting suit back into the backpack. The other leg popped out instead.







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Finn sat in school, alongside Emmie, at a desk in a rear corner by a window, but he might as well not have been there.

His eyes and mind weren’t on the whiteboard or his teacher, Mrs McDaid, nor were they on the schoolbooks flapped open in front of him. They were instead concentrating on the slight darkening of the day. Was that rain?

Under the desk, he pulled his bag closer with his feet, feeling the weight of the fighting suit stuffed into it, ready to be worn if necessary.

From the desk beside him, Conn Savage leaned over and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Oh, looks like a couple of drops of rain out there.”

Manus Savage stuck his head out from the far side of the desk, a cruel grin on his face. “Must be time for you to steal our bikes and wreck the town again.”

Since the attack of the Manticores, and the Minotaur’s rampage, the twins had felt a little less deadly to Finn. He had survived something worse than them. A bit worse anyway. But he did still owe them a new bike each, having commandeered theirs for himself and Emmie when being chased by the Minotaur.

He had returned the old ones, even if they were missing a few spokes. And wheels. And most of the other parts that make up a bike.

Still, Finn had prepared a really smart and funny response to the twins’ jibes and was ready to slay them with it. “Well, I—”

“Quiet, Finn!” said Mrs McDaid from the other end of the room. And that was that. His teacher spared him any real anger because of what she occasionally called his “special circumstances”, but Finn’s face flushed nevertheless.

He reverted to staring out of the window until Emmie slid a doodle under his nose. It was of a cross-eyed Minotaur with knotted horns.

“… isn’t that right, Finn?” asked Mrs McDaid.

Finn looked up to see his teacher staring at him from behind her desk, and quickly hid Emmie’s notebook under his textbook as he answered. “Yes, miss.”

The class murmured.

“No, Finn, it is not right. You really need to pay attention, even though we all have great sympathy for your special circumstances …”

This turned out to be one of the better moments of Finn’s day.

Later that afternoon, Finn and Emmie wandered home again under clearing skies, through the sullen Darkmouth streets, past people with their heads down, except for when they gave accusing glances. They walked up Broken Road past its row of dusty shops. The dummies in the fashion store that looked like they’d been dragged from a skip before being dressed. The dusty bookshop with the little gathering of dead flies in the corner of the window.

They passed the damaged dental surgery where Finn’s mam should have been pulling teeth, fitting crowns, removing dead nerves, and all the other things she did that Finn loved to watch.

Except his mother wasn’t there. The rebuilding hadn’t even begun and probably wouldn’t until she had helped find a way to get Finn’s father back.

They stopped for a few moments at Darkmouth’s pet shop – Tails and Snails – where Finn stared wistfully at its window of flapping budgies and curled-up snakes. He felt he was being dragged as far away as possible from whatever hopes he had of being a vet.

They passed the police station with the now-dead flowers left at its entrance for Sergeant Doyle, grievously wounded saving Finn and Emmie, and who now lay in a city hospital, having finally got out of Darkmouth – but not in the way he would have liked.

The town had been sent a replacement, who hid out so effectively that most people were still unsure whether the new sergeant was a man or woman, bearded or clean-shaven, brave or scared.

“I should’ve stopped Mr Glad,” said Finn, idling at the front of the police station.

“You did,” said Emmie.

“Not in time to stop Sergeant Doyle getting badly hurt, though. Or half the town destroyed.”

“Seriously, you fought a Minotaur. You went to the Infested Side. You’ve really got to stop beating yourself up over the whole thing.” She jumped at him and, laughing, gave him a friendly punch on the arm. “That’s my job.”

Emmie ran on ahead and Finn followed, rubbing his arm and wondering how much more it would have stung if it had been an unfriendly punch. When they reached the corner where their streets met, Finn saw that Estravon the Assessor was parked up at the front of his house, talking to his mother.

“Maybe it’s good news,” said Emmie.

“It’s not,” said Finn as they approached slowly.

“How do you know?”

“Because he hasn’t even got out of the car,” said Finn, “and he’s kept his engine running. I think he’s ready to leave here quickly.”

They arrived to hear the Assessor methodically reading the words on a piece of paper stretched across his lap. Even with his face down, his head was crammed up against the roof of the car.

“The Council of Twelve has read the Assessor’s report and met again on this matter,” Finn heard him say as he and Emmie arrived.

“If this was something positive, you’d be inside tucking into the biscuits,” said Clara. “So, just get on with telling us whatever bad news is on that page.”

Estravon cleared his throat and continued, clearly hoping that he’d be allowed to do so without interruption so he could just make his escape. “Before this tragic occurrence in Darkmouth, Hugo the Great was due to become a member of the Twelve, a true reward for a real hero. This is our loss as much as yours.”

“You really think so?” Clara asked.

“The Council of Twelve has accepted that Hugo acted out of the highest bravery, which will be duly noted in a later, official capacity, according to section 19, clause …” The Assessor looked at them out of the corner of his eye, noted the impatience on the faces of his audience and skipped on a little.

“Nevertheless, it is with the deepest regret that we must conclude that Hugo is most likely …” Estravon cleared his throat, “… dead.”

Finn’s mouth flopped open.

Emmie’s head dropped.

Estravon paused, as if expecting a reaction or a follow-up question. All that came was a calm, stern instruction from Finn’s mam.

“Just keep reading,” she said.

“Under rule 123a, paragraph 14, it is required that an appropriate time must pass before a lost Legend Hunter is officially declared dead and a full-time replacement Legend Hunter brought in.”

“And the appropriate time is?” asked Clara.

“Forty-eight hours.”

Finn’s mouth flopped open a little more, so that his jaw felt like it might fall from its hinge.

“Two days?” exclaimed Emmie, but Clara simply put a hand up to quieten her, as if she was keeping her fury snarling behind a locked door for when she really needed it.

“A little less than two days, to be accurate,” said Estravon. “You know, with the gap between the news being passed to me and then me delivering it onwards to yourselves.”

“And what happens to us?” asked Clara.

“Reassignment,” said Estravon.

“Reassignment?” said Finn. “To another town?”

“No, no. Another house in Darkmouth. Where Steve and Emmie are at the moment.”

Steve appeared round the corner, a bounce in his step that suggested he had absolutely no idea what had just happened. “You all sunbathing?” he asked.

Clara’s glare hit him like a blastwave.

“What?” Steve asked.

“You wanted a Blighted Village to call your own and you finally got it,” Clara said to him, still remarkably calm on the surface even though her anger was so very clear.

“Actually,” said Estravon the Assessor, bumping his head on the car ceiling, “that’s not quite how it works.”

“Someone is going to have to rewind this conversation and start from the beginning,” said Steve, “because I have no idea what you’re going on about.”

“All those years of living with their rules, of living with their demands and restrictions,” added Clara, “and this is how we’re repaid. Eviction.”

“Reassignment,” clarified Estravon.

Clara ignored him. “So, congratulations, Steve; unless Hugo comes back within forty-eight hours, we’re swapping houses. I hope you like vacuuming corridors because you’re going to be doing a lot of it.”

Calculating that this was his moment to escape, Estravon took his chance and put his foot down so the car lurched on to the quiet road, paused at the corner and, with a belch from the exhaust, disappeared from view. They could hear the engine fading away into the town, the fumes of its exhaust still acrid in the air.

Finn had already gone into his house and was heading straight for the library. He had less than two days to find the map. To find his father.







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It was the next morning, but Finn had no idea what time it was exactly. Neither did he notice Emmie’s arrival. He was at the door between the main house and the Long Hall. It was propped open with books, and the whole corridor to the library was strewn with pages, piles of paper arranged in haphazard order.

As Emmie approached, Finn disappeared into a side room before emerging with another armful of candidates to work through. Not able to see where he was going, he tripped over a mound of atlases, sending himself one way and paper the other.

“Have you been awake all night, Finn?”

Finn picked himself up, shaking off her helping hand, swatting a small hardback off his shoulder until he stood staring at the mess he’d created.

“No, of course not,” he said, sifting through the pages of tattered, yellowing books that had disintegrated as they hit the floor.

“Did you sleep here, though?”

“No! Well, a bit,” he admitted. “My mam forced me to bed eventually. I got up early. We’ve only three days to find something.” He stopped himself, looked at the watch given to him by the Assessor, the tiny daggers slowly working their way round an ivory face. “Actually, not much more than a full day now.”

“But you’ve been in the library pretty much since the Assessor said your dad was, you know, erm …”

“You can say it,” Finn said tersely. “You can say ‘dead’, Emmie. Go on. Because it doesn’t matter. It’s not true.”

Emmie didn’t say the word. “You must be exhausted.”

“I can’t stop,” he said, biting his lip. “Dad told me I wouldn’t. I can’t.”

Above them, a strip light flickered and died. Finn tutted and immediately headed to the narrowest door in the corridor which had S4 hand-painted on it. Emmie followed, hovering outside the door while Finn rooted around fretfully in search of a new bulb.

“We’re out. Do you have any bulbs at your house?” he asked.

“Come on, we’ll get breakfast before school,” said Emmie.

“We need to keep the place lit up, so we don’t miss anything,” he replied.

“Finn—”

“Can you get me a bulb from your house or can’t you?”

Emmie looked up at the Long Hall’s ceiling. “Doubt it. These are strip lights, like you’d have in an office or something. I live in a normal house. Not a crazy house like this.”

Silence.

They both paused for a moment to appreciate the inadvertent clumsiness of what she had said and the words that were left hanging there: she didn’t live in a crazy house like this for now.

Emmie coughed.

Finn felt his hopes sink even more.

Emmie looked at the lettering on the door and pushed her head in to find a room crammed with boxes, tools, dusty and rusting equipment. “So, what does S4 stand for anyway?”

“It’s a storage room,” explained Finn.

“Just junk and stuff?”

Finn stood with hands on hips, looking around, admitting defeat in the search for a new bulb. “Yeah, and stuff. Do you think I should just give up searching?”

“No, there must be one here somewhere,” said Emmie, squeezing past him and rooting through the overcrowded shelves. She pushed aside some boxes to see what lay behind before she belatedly realised what Finn had actually meant. “No, Finn, I don’t think you should stop searching for the map.”

“What if the Assessor’s right, though? What if there is no map?”

“They didn’t find one,” said Emmie. “There’s a big difference.” She kept rummaging through the clutter, as much to move on the conversation as in the hope of finding any light bulbs. She pawed at a couple of things as she went. A ship’s wheel with rusted wrenches taped to each handle. What might have been a satellite dish made out of a roasting dish, tinfoil and a spoon.

She knocked against something propped on a shelf and just about caught it before it hit the floor. A tin box attached to a circuit board, it had a couple of old brass light switches fixed on to it and what looked like an egg whisk protruding from one end.

“What’s this, Finn?”

“An egg whisk, I think.”

“No,” said Emmie, “what is this whole thing? What does it do?”

“Actually, my dad loves this,” said Finn, taking it from her and examining it. “It’s a Legend Spotter. It was used years ago, before they invented scanners to track Legends down. Come on, I’ll show you.”






He headed quickly to the library, pushing the door through a carpet of papers and books, and carefully picked his way to the centre of the room. Emmie followed.

“Wait there, by the wall,” Finn told her while he found a switch on the Spotter’s underside and thumbed it for a moment. “Now turn off the lights. All of them.”

Emmie flicked off each of the dozen or so switches, section by section, until the library was in total darkness. She promptly fell over a pile of maps as she tried to return to Finn.

“You OK?” asked Finn.

“This had better be good, Finn. I think I’ve broken a tooth.”

“It is. I promise.” He pressed the button and the device’s whisk glowed a weak orange, hardly enough to illuminate his chest.

“Wow, great trick,” said Emmie, her sarcasm carrying across the darkness. “Halloween must be a blast in this house.”

“Just wait.”

Then it began. It was hard to perceive at first, but across the span of the room, on its shelves, in spots along the floor, they began to make out dull smudges of orange light. Quickly, each flicker grew in intensity until the room was lit solely by the glowing balls of Legends caught over the decades and now scattered across the shelves and floor of the library. The unbroken jars, which each housed a desiccated ball of a creature caught invading Darkmouth, were like glow-worms in a cave, the still lights fostering an eerie calm.

“That is pretty cool actually,” Emmie said.

“If something’s been on the Infested Side or in a gateway, this will identify it,” Finn explained. “We use scanners now, so this hasn’t been used to track down a Legend in years, but Mam and Dad sometimes have their dinner here on Valentine’s Day. My dad calls it ‘the Planetarium’. Apparently, this is how he asked Mam to marry him. He spelled it out on the floor in glowing desiccated Legends.”

In the galaxy of orange lights, Emmie picked her way across the floor to where Finn stood and they enjoyed the silence and surprising beauty to be found in the glowing husks of savage creatures from a parallel world.

“I can see why they found it romantic,” said Emmie.

Finn moved away a step, a flush of heat running through his face. “I’ll turn the lights back on.”

He started back towards the wall and its light switches, while he looked again for the on/off button of the Spotter.

“Wait,” said Emmie, looking at him. “The orange.”

Finn looked down at himself and for the first time realised he was lit up; a radioactive glow was spreading across his skin, emanating from his chest, but pushing out of his sleeves, the neck of his sweater, the gap between his trousers and socks.

“That’s weird,” he said, holding his hands out to examine them. “But I was there, on the Infested Side, so I suppose that’s why I—”

“No,” said Emmie, “not you. What’s that beside you?”

Finn looked around, unsure for a moment what she was referring to. Then he saw his schoolbag propped up on a chair beside him, where he had left it the day before. From inside leaked a bright orange glow.

He put the Legend Spotter down, reached carefully into his bag and pulled out Mrs Bright’s false teeth. Directly under the device, their orange was deeper, more vivid than any other in the room. The colour had the newness of fresh paint.

“I don’t get it,” said Emmie. “What’s that mean? That Mrs Bright was a Legend?”

Finn thought of the grains of sand that had clung to Yappy’s paws and the damp fringes of its coat. He tried to make connections where none seemed obvious. All the while, the tiny echo of a message began to intrude on his thoughts.

Light up the house.

“Is it possible that Mrs Bright …?” he muttered. “Were her teeth …?”

Light up the house.

“Is that what the message really means?” he continued, only half audible to Emmie. The connections were forming in his mind, solidifying out of mist.

“OK, Finn, you’re going to have to make a bit more sense because I don’t—” Emmie stopped, eyes growing wide as she worked it out too. “Oh,” she said.

Finn began to wander the room, waving the Legend Spotter up, down, left, right, diagonally, sweeping across the floor.

“Light up the house,” he said as he passed Emmie, holding it above his head. “That’s what the note from my dad said. But maybe we’ve been lighting it up in the wrong way. Maybe it’s been about this all along.” He held the Legend Spotter upright.

Still, Finn couldn’t quite figure it out. “It just seems to be the usual desiccated Legends here. Mrs Bright’s teeth must have been on the Infested Side somehow or touched it in some way. Maybe she got caught up in the Manticore attack. Half the town would probably light up if we waved this at them.”

“Or she could have got caught up in a gateway,” suggested Emmie. “Except there’s been no gateway in weeks.”

Finn ran the Spotter across the curving length of a shelf, where the petrified Legends glowed a little brighter as he passed, dimmed slightly as he left them behind. “I just don’t see anything out of the ordinary,” he said.

“But this is only one room, Finn,” said Emmie. “The note in the box said to light up the house.”

“You’re right!” Finn strode past her towards the door to the Long Hall and began sweeping along the walls, the ceiling, the doors, and waving the Spotter into each room they passed.

Still, they nearly missed it. It was weak, almost imperceptible, a tiny smudge in the dark registering in the corner of their vision. But Finn noticed it first and his heart rapped on his ribs when he did. He nudged Emmie to follow him to the wall.

The closer they got, the brighter it glowed.

Squinting, unable to quite make out any detail, Finn reached out a finger and placed it on the spot. He felt the slight bend of canvas, the roughness of paint.

“Turn on the lights, Emmie.”

She palmed her way across the wall until she found the switch. The bulbs flared in a race along the corridor, Finn’s and Emmie’s eyes briefly recoiling at the sudden intrusion of bright light. As they refocused, Finn kept his finger on the painting for a moment more.






Niall Blacktongue gazed directly at Finn’s fingertip.

Finn pulled his finger away to reveal a painted table on which were scattered a few objects, including books, a magnifying glass, a compass, a small mirror.

In the mirror was the reflection of a map.

On the map was an X.

Finn looked at it, then back to his grandfather’s face. Where there had only ever seemed to be meekness, a sagging under the weight of responsibility, now he looked relieved, unburdened, free finally of a great secret kept for so many years.

Finn forgot to breathe for a moment and, when he finally remembered, it came with a quiet utterance of relief.

“Found it,” he said.


‘The Arrival of the Human’ (#ulink_79ebb305-4637-52bc-aa20-8ee8a627f6a2) From The Chronicles of the Sky’s Collapse, (#ulink_79ebb305-4637-52bc-aa20-8ee8a627f6a2) as told by inhabitants of the Infested Side (#ulink_79ebb305-4637-52bc-aa20-8ee8a627f6a2)


THIRTY YEARS AGO
































(#ulink_145c74e3-b4ca-5984-bb64-b02f3b7cdce1)


Finn shaded his phone’s screen from the morning sunshine, covering it with the palm of his hand to better see the picture of the map on it. He zoomed in, moved the image around, then lifted his head again to scan the grassy cliff he and Emmie were standing on. Ahead was spread out a glistening green sea. Away to their left, the buildings and walls of Darkmouth huddled up against each other as if afraid. And, below their feet, lush but uneven ground.

Nothing else.

“There should be something here,” said Finn, disappointment tightening his voice. “The X says it’s in the centre of this area somewhere. See?” He pointed at the picture.

Emmie squinted at it. “No. Sorry.”

Since finding the clue hardly an hour ago, Finn had feared another dead end. They had been wrong so many times already. So, they had agreed they should check this clue out alone, to say they were off to school as always, an illusion of normality even when their world had been turned upside down. No worrying Finn’s mother. No raised hopes. No drama. No Assessor. No Steve. No one to disappoint but themselves.

The two searched again, Finn’s bag jolting on his back, the clatter and clash of the fighting suit stuffed inside, as he marched through clumps of grass, pushed aside weeds with his feet, carefully lifted knots of thorns.

They criss-crossed the cliff, looking for something, anything.

“Anything?” Finn shouted to Emmie.

“Nothing!” she shouted back.

The table in the painting had featured some objects that had seemed relevant and a few that didn’t. There was the mirror and its map obviously. There was also a compass pointing south-east, which happened to be the direction from the house to this crest of cliff. There were two books without titles, but one looked quite like the thin notebook Finn had found which had Niall Blacktongue’s initials on it. He had brought that notebook with him this morning, just in case it helped.

But there were other things in the painting. A magnifying glass, some coins, a feather in an ink pot. They could have meant anything or everything. Or nothing at all.

Yet the map itself, while spare in details, seemed clear. This was where they were supposed to be. Maybe.

On the cliff edge was a crumbling stone hut, which locals called the Look-out Post, but only because “Look out!” were someone’s last words before being grabbed by a Legend here a hundred years ago.






Emmie joined him, wincing at the stench of wee in the hut. Finn looked inside the simple old shelter, then outside it, where an orange life jacket and a solid buoyancy ring were placed in case someone fell into the sea.

“You sure this is the right place?” Emmie asked.

Finn wasn’t sure at all. “Yes,” he said.

Heads down, they made another sweep of the terrain. Finn could feel his breath growing laboured with stress, the nagging sense of anger that he’d fooled himself into believing this was it. He stopped at a patch of grass and weeds, darkened as if from some old campfire or splash of poison. Poking at it with his fingers, he caught himself on a thorn which scratched his right wrist and tore free a coloured rope wristband he’d once made for himself when he was supposed to be doing his homework.

He was licking at the scratch as he met up with Emmie again.

She put her hands in her pockets, glanced around so she didn’t have to catch his eye. “We could always—”

“We’re not telling your dad, Emmie.”

“OK. Then maybe—”

“Or my mam. Definitely not my mam.”

They remained on the same spot, Finn half hoping something would just come to him.

“Maybe it’s hidden,” said Emmie. “Or buried and grown over.”

“If it is, the map isn’t very precise,” said Finn, kicking at the hard ground with his heel. “We’d probably dig up half this cliff before we found anything.”

A sound drifted across the breeze and reached their ears.

Yap.

It was coming from some distance away.

Yap. Yap.

It was coming from below them.

Yap. Yap. Yap.

“Do you hear that dog?” Finn said to Emmie as he marched off towards the edge of the cliff.

He jogged to where the grass began to rise up to meet the plunging edge, then dropped on to his belly and peered over the cliff at the crescent of rock-strewn beach at its base. Emmie flopped on the grass beside him. Finn pointed at a mound of rubble. A buckle in the cliff. The glimpse of a large hole crumpling under the weight it shouldered. And a basset hound peeing at the entrance.

“That’s Yappy, the dog with the teeth,” Finn said.

“That’s why he was covered in salty water and bits of sand,” said Emmie.

The giddiness of hope rose inside Finn again. “That’s it. Whatever we’re supposed to find, it’s in there.”







(#ulink_dc78f519-42ab-58d3-ab84-52a451ac950f)


Finn and Emmie followed the sound of running water. Finn rummaged through his bag, pushing aside the miscellaneous objects stuffed in there – fighting suit, a radio, his lunchbox, fruit, books. He fished out a torch. Under its narrow light, the two of them shared a look that meant they had heard this sound before. But there had been no water then. Only the fizzing light of a gateway between this world and the other.

They squeezed through the ever-narrowing rock, ducking a little as the roof came down to meet them. The sound encouraged them to keep moving forward. It was the sound of promise, of a way to Finn’s father. To Finn, it was not just the sound of magic. It was the sound of hope.

In fact, it was just the sound of water after all. Nothing more. Nothing less. At the back of the cave, the most meagre of waterfalls was leaking through the rock and running into a small pool at the foot of the wall.

Finn threw a groan about the chamber, his deep frustration bouncing about every corner of the cave, echoing back at him for a while after he closed his mouth, as if his frustration was so intense it had become bigger than him, taken on a life of its own.

Excitement left him and weariness flooded in. Another dead end. The deadest of ends.

He sat back against the cave wall, sliding down to his haunches, the torch dropping by his side and leaving them in near-total darkness, save for the muted beam of light creeping across the floor. Catching the edge of something. A reflection. Low down and small, but sharp.

Emmie spotted it.

Without explaining, she picked the torch from the floor and pointed it towards the reflection. Light glinted back at them. A sparkle.

Finn’s expression turned from one of defeat into curiosity. He pushed himself to his feet and together they moved to a hollow low in the wall, worn away behind a large stone.

Growing in it was a small crop of crystals.

“Could they be …?” asked Emmie.

“The same crystals that make gateways?” queried Finn. “They can’t be. They only grow on the Infested Side, don’t they? These have to be just ordinary, everyday crystals.”

“Ordinary, everyday crystals in a cave marked on a map hidden for decades in a missing Legend Hunter’s painting?” she replied.

“OK, maybe not,” admitted Finn.

They lay flat on the ground to examine the crystals more closely, and saw that these didn’t have the diamond purity of the ones that had been brought to Darkmouth by Legends. Their reflections were instead dulled by the coating on each of them, a thin layer picked up from growing through what seemed to be fine dark red dust in the hollowed-out rock at their roots.

But, under the torchlight, another quality became apparent.

“It’s alive,” said Emmie, pressing her beam up to the tallest crystal. Inside was a smokiness that writhed slowly, rising to the top, falling gently again, in constant motion.

Finn reached out to pull at the crystal.

“Should you do that?” asked Emmie.

Finn shrugged. “I don’t know what more could go wrong.”

Actually, in his head, he had a lengthy list of things that could go wrong, but thought twice about sharing it.

Finn took hold of the crystal. He expected it to resist, but instead it came away easily, softly releasing itself from the cave wall as if ripe, like an apple ready to be plucked.

He stood up straight, holding the crystal high under the torchlight. Within it were tendrils of smoke, gentle in their movement. The finest coating of scarlet dust clung to the sweat of his palms. He touched the dust with a finger: it seemed dried in, more like clay than sand.

Emmie lay beside the hollow for a few seconds longer before pushing herself up from the cave floor too.

“Do you think these might open a gateway, to help us get to Dad?” asked Finn, still examining the crystal.

“It’s probably impossible,” said Emmie, pointing her torch up under Finn’s chin, so that long shadows were cast from his ridged brow. “But we should definitely try it.”

“Maybe we should bring it back to the library,” he suggested. “Dad went through a gateway there and that would open it to the same spot on the Infested Side. He might be waiting there for us. But you can’t tell anyone, Emmie. Not a soul.”

“I’m afraid that’s a bit too late,” said a voice in the darkness.







(#ulink_0550c374-5ac3-5f1f-bb67-d958911aaa36)


“Besides,” the voice went on, “I can’t begin to tell you how many rules it would violate.”

Emmie swung her torch and illuminated Estravon the Assessor.

“Well, I could tell you how many rules it would violate, but we’d be here all day,” he said. “All that matters is that you have to hand that crystal over. Now.”






Estravon stepped forward so quickly that Finn hardly had time to close his grip on the crystal, and instead found surprisingly strong fingers prising it from his grasp. Finn felt immediate shame at the struggle being so short, his prize so easily lost.

“You can’t take that,” protested Emmie.

“I have to take it,” said Estravon, indignant, “according to rule 43b of section 5 of the, oh, stop rolling your eyes, young lady. The rules matter. There’d be anarchy without the rules. There’d be people running around doing whatever they wanted without recourse to the proper procedures and, if you doubt me, then just have a look at where we’ve all been led this morning.”

“I need that crystal,” said Finn. “It might help me get to my dad.”

Estravon stood back, examining the crystal under his torch’s light. He appeared genuinely curious, as if this discovery was as much of a surprise to him as it was to Finn and Emmie. “Well, that is an odd one. Some town this, isn’t it? Full of surprises. I found that ice-cream shop on the harbour too. Tasty. They do an amazing nutty chocolate sauce.”

“How did you know we were here?” asked Emmie.

“Finn told me,” answered Estravon, still closely examining the crystal. “Well, his watch did. There’s a tracking device in it.”

Finn felt the fat watch on his wrist and then disgust ran through him at having fallen so easily for the Assessor’s camaraderie. Finn had led him right to them. He really needed to be more careful in future.

“I’ll be honest,” Estravon continued, “I wasn’t sure you would find anything, but when doing an assessment it always pays to be a couple of steps ahead just in case. I did have to sleep in my car on a country lane outside the town while I waited, though. A mission like this requires a little subterfuge, you see. And a measure of discomfort and physical sacrifice. Plus, the only hotel in Darkmouth has been closed for years so I didn’t have much choice.”

Estravon pulled a small plastic bag from his suit, placed the crystal into it, zipped the bag shut and put it back in his jacket pocket. He then looked at his hands and the blood-red residue left behind.

“Do you think it’s one of the gateway crystals?” asked Finn, feeling helpless now, and switching to a softer approach in the hope of persuading the Assessor to let him try it out. “Because there are more. We could use them to send in a rescue party.”

“More of the crystals?” said the Assessor, interest piqued.

Finn had immediately failed in treading more carefully.

The Assessor motioned them to move aside so he could stoop to examine the hollow in the rock. “There’s only one more here,” said Estravon.

Finn frowned – but Emmie shot him a look while putting a finger to her mouth.

Bending down, Estravon pushed at the crystal with his bare finger, examining the powder on the tip of his finger. “Did you ever have sherbet?” he asked them, a grin filling his face. “I doubt this tastes too good, though. There we go.”

He eased the jewel-like object from the rock with little effort. The hollow was bare of crystals now, except for a couple of tiny buds poking through the film of red dust that clung to the rock.

“So?” asked Finn. “Do you think we should use them to send a rescue party?”

“Oh, I doubt it,” Estravon said cheerily. He took the plastic bag out and added the crystal to the other, before tucking them both away again in his suit jacket. “Aside from the specific risk-assessment regulation forbidding rescue parties, I’m not sure it’s going to matter anyway. Yes, they’re crystals, but they’re probably just standard ones with nothing at all to do with gateways. After all, if crystals were to just pop up and open gateways all the time that would be a health-and-safety nightmare.”

Holding the torch under his armpit, he inspected the dust on his hands before giving them a clap in an effort to be rid of it. He didn’t appear satisfied so took out a small bottle of hand soap, squidged it on his palms, gave them a clean and then grabbed his torch again to point it towards the way out.

“We have to see what the crystals do,” insisted Finn.

“Don’t worry, we’ll run tests just to be conclusive,” said Estravon. “Although, when I say we will run tests, I obviously don’t mean you. Now it’s time to go. Your co-operation would be appreciated. For the report and all of that.”

Sulking, angry, Finn started for the exit, with Emmie and the Assessor following. They emerged into the daylight at the base of the cliff, where Yappy sniffed busily at the stones littering the entrance. Narrowing their eyes to the brightness, they made their way unsteadily across the stones, where crashing waves splashed at them, until they rounded the small rocky headland. There, Emmie walked closely alongside the Assessor.

“You know I came here to Darkmouth with my dad,” she said. “We spied on Finn’s family.”

“Yes. I appreciate that,” said Estravon. “Now we do need to get a move on.”

“I haven’t stopped spying, you know,” Emmie continued. “Actually, there are a couple of things I could tell you about what’s happening here that you really should know.”

“Watch your step,” he said, holding her elbow. “Seaweed.”

“Number one,” she said, pulling her arm away. “That dog that was sniffing about at the cave? Its owner was in contact with the Infested Side. Definitely. And she’s been missing ever since. That has to be important.”

Somewhere behind them, Yappy yapped.

“I’m not sure that’s very likely,” said Estravon.

“Number two,” Emmie said, walking on. “Has it occurred to you to ask us how we even found that cave in the first place? Surely that’s quite important for your assessment.”

Back towards the cave, out of sight, the dog was yapping incessantly. “I had fully planned to investigate that particular …” The Assessor stopped and looked around, distracted.

The dog kept barking.

“Where’s the boy gone?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” said Emmie. “Maybe there’s a third thing I should have mentioned. It’s about the crystals.”

A smile crept across her face as she held a palm up to display the red, dusty residue clinging to it. But she wasn’t holding a crystal. “There might have been three of them,” she said.

Estravon ran back towards the cave.







(#ulink_907e86cc-be33-5cb1-842b-469e1be3aeb4)


“Shush, Yappy,” Finn begged the dog as he clambered over the mound at the cave entrance.

Yap, replied Yappy. Yap. Yap. Yapyapyap.

Pushing towards the darkness, Finn wished he hadn’t given his torch to Emmie. As any natural light became choked off, he had to trust his hands, the feel of the walls as they narrowed either side. His head scraped the roof of the cave, causing him to wince in pain.

In his pocket was the crystal that Emmie had shoved into his hand as they were leaving the cave. She had distracted Estravon while rounding the headland, and Finn had dashed back, the waves drowning out the clatter of the armour in his bag, but not the drumbeat of his heart in his ears.

Finn knew he would need to make this count. It was his only chance. He was going to try and open a gateway with the crystal. At least they would know there and then if it would work.

He felt the cave wall open up in front of him, sensed the sound suddenly released to bounce round the high roof of the chamber. He gripped the crystal tight, making sure he didn’t drop it in the near-total darkness.

As his eyes tried to adjust a little, Finn recalled what he had seen when Mr Glad had opened a gateway, the day his father disappeared. He remembered how Mr Glad had searched for a snag in the air on which to attach the crystal. Broonie had done the same thing, reaching up and scraping down an invisible divide until he found one and opened a way into the Infested Side.

From outside the cave, he heard Yappy yapping and Estravon shouting.

Hurriedly, Finn pushed the crystal into his palm. It felt sleeker than the dust coating suggested it would, a little greasy compared to the clear crystals he’d held before. Yet his grip felt more secure, and the crystal stayed in his hand so that he could relax it a little, hold it out flat and run his other hand down the empty air in search of something in nothing.

The scramble of feet coming through the cave grew louder; the intrusion of torchlight began to dance in the chamber.

Finn searched for a snag. No luck. He tried again. It still wouldn’t take.

Light flared fully into the room.

“This will all go in my report—” shouted Estravon.

“Wait!” Finn shouted. “I’ve got it.”

He had caught the crystal on something. Slowly, he spread his fingers and opened his palm to let the crystal go, while keeping the other hand cupped underneath, ready to catch it should it fall. But it didn’t budge from its invisible hook.

Under the white light of two torches, Finn could see the edges of the crystal become agitated, the smokiness accelerating inside. Where his skin met the crystal, it felt almost ticklish, as if it was writhing into position.

Briefly, he laughed at the impossibility of that while turning his head to Emmie, whose eyes were wide with encouragement. Estravon stepped between them, sporting a look of deep unhappiness. “That is not good,” the Assessor said. “That is not good at all.”

The tickle turned into a crackle on Finn’s palm. He moved his hand to separate it from the crystal, but it didn’t come away. His skin felt glued to the air.

Finn stopped laughing. “Erm, Emmie …” he said.

She stepped towards him, halting as the crystal sparked a little.

Finn felt heat flow through his right hand. With his left, he pulled at the stuck wrist, but couldn’t release it.

“What’s going on, Finn?” enquired Emmie, torch lighting up his panic.

The red crystal crackled, fizzed in his palm, like a trapped firework ready to explode.

“Put that crystal down,” demanded the Assessor.

“I can’t!” shouted Finn.

“Put. It. Down. Now.”

“I’m trying to!”

A judder of energy shot up his arm, through his torso, sparked through his backpack, wracking his body, contorting him, sending a shock through him so total he couldn’t even scream. It felt like his body had been taken hold of by an injection of fire into his shoulder, his chest, into every vein, every cell of his arm.






With the crack of a detonation, Finn was fired across the chamber and into the opposite wall. For a moment, he was out. Gone. As if he’d been switched off.

Then he jolted back into consciousness, winded, gulping for air. And his vision was dominated by a pulsating glow of red.

He shook his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Emmie and Estravon standing rigid, gawping. But they weren’t looking at him.

They were looking at the great blood-red gateway Finn had opened in the cave.







(#ulink_1571412f-51cc-5726-8b6a-1878b8390fde)


This gateway was different to any Finn had seen before. It wasn’t just that its colour was red when gateways were usually golden. It was the way the energy moved at its edges, grinding rather than groaning. It didn’t sparkle and flow, but writhed. Thick jagged tendrils poured back into the opening as if the gateway was consuming itself, feeding off its own energy. It was as if the effort of staying open caused it terrible agony.

Estravon looked like he couldn’t decide if he should be annoyed or astonished by this turn of events. “That. Is. Incredible,” he said, a palm to his forehead. “And terrible. And something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. And you two are in so much trouble.”

Shading his eyes from the red light, Finn picked himself carefully off the ground and pushed away from the rock wall he had been flung against. He ached, but luckily his backpack had taken the force of the blow.

Emmie stepped forward to help him, but touching him sent a burst of static through her fingers, repelling her. “Well, that’s weird,” she said. “Are you OK?”

That was the truly strange thing. Right at that moment, Finn felt better than OK. He felt extraordinary. He felt wonderful. Amazing. Fantastic. Like nothing could ever hold him back again. It was a glimpse of perfection. Of ecstasy. Of strength he had never experienced before.

Then he felt really, really awful.

A headache hit him like a frying pan and he held his head because he felt it was about to explode. Or implode. Or both at the same time.





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