First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollins Children’s Books in 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

Text copyright © John McNally 2017

Cover illustration © Paul Young

Cover design © HarperCollins Children’s Books 2017

John McNally asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this 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: 9780007521692

Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780007521685

Version: 2017-06-24

For my wife, Louise.

Thanks for winning me in that raffle

Epigraph

Then the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Take handfuls of soot from a furnace and have Moses toss it into the air in the presence of Pharaoh. It will become fine dust over the whole land of Egypt, and festering boils will break out on people and animals throughout the land.”

Exodus 9:8–9

It’s far more important to know what person the disease has, than what disease the person has.

Hippocrates

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Two

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Three

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Part Four

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Part Five

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Footnotes

Keep Reading …

Books by John McNally

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
FEBRUARY 19 10:54 (GMT+1). La première table de roulette, Casino de Monte-Carlo, French Riviera

“Place your bets! Mesdames et messieurs – faites vos jeux!” The croupier’s voice rang out.

The roulette wheel spun, numbers flashed past, and for a few moments all possibilities existed at once.

An agent of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee (commonly known as the G&T) prepared to place a five-hundred-euro bet on number 35 black.

The agent, beneath a heavy disguise, was Dr Al Allenby, six foot two inches of angular, eccentric cool; a scientist trapped in the soul of an artist.

His nephew, Infinity Drake – aka Finn – thought him the best uncle in the world. Al thought himself the worst. It was all his fault Finn had been shrunk, all his fault he’d subsequently been captured, all his fault for creating the Boldklub reduction process in the first place, something the world’s greatest terrorist, David Anthony Pytor Kaparis, wanted so badly.

Twice Kaparis had tried to blackmail the world into handing over the Boldklub secret; once by releasing the apocalyptic Scarlatti Wasp, more recently by creating a swarm of deadly nano-bots in Shanghai. Twice he had been thwarted, by a 9mm high Infinity Drake.

Infinity Drake: missing, presumed dead.

Until now.

“Place your bets! Mesdames et messieurs …”

The silver ball began to lose momentum as it orbited the spinning wheel.

After months of silence – of endless searching, with no result – the G&T had at last received some grainy video footage of what appeared to be Finn, together with a message from Kaparis proposing a deal: a handover of the boy in exchange for the key Boldklub fractal equations¹. To consent to the deal, a five-hundred-euro bet would be placed on 35 black at the casino in Monte Carlo at a specified time. An exchange would then take place in the smoking area on the street outside. The equations would be on a memory stick. The 9mm hostage, Infinity Drake, would be inside the aluminium tube of a Cohiba Espléndido fine cigar.

It was a fool’s gambit, but Al was desperate.

“Last chance, faites vos jeux! Place your bets, mesdames et messieurs …” called the croupier.

The rich, mainly elderly players placed safe bets.

Al placed a blue five-hundred-euro chip on number 35 black. The deal was on.

The ball cracked against the spinning wheel then bounced like Al’s heart around his chest.

“No more bets! Mesdames et messieurs – rien ne va plus!”

This was it. The culmination of five months of heartache and uncertainty. Al could not wait to see Finn, to bring him back to size at Hook Hall. He could not wait to hold him, to hang out with him, to eat junk food and play Xbox for nine hours straight. He could not wait to see his late sister, Finn’s mother, in his eyes, or for Al’s own mother – Finn’s epic grandma – to find peace again.

Al could not wait.

He was already on his way out, heading for the smokers of fat cigars on the street outside. As he burst through the swing doors to join them, precisely as planned, a motorbike drew up. A rider with a passenger on the back – both Tyros².

The passenger, a girl of fifteen or so, withdrew a Cohiba Espléndido cigar cylinder from a bag round her waist.

Al took out a small blue memory stick. The equations it contained were fake. Booby traps. If you ran them through any Boldklub machine it would blow up.

The Tyro thrust out the cigar tube. Al handed over the stick.

Then everything happened in a blur.

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

The motorbike roared straight off across the Place du Casino.

Al tried to twist the top off the cigar tube, hands shaking. It was stuck. One of the other smokers, another agent, ran to help. As they struggled, Al’s microphone picked up his desperate incantation, “Finn … Finn … Finn …”

Then the top finally twisted off and – POP! – the tube emitted a spray of confetti.

FEBRUARY 19 10:59 (GMT+1). Hull of the Shieldmaiden, Mediterranean Sea

“Haaarrrurglurgl!” Kaparis gurgled in delight.

Heywood, his ever-faithful butler, leant over to suction excess saliva from the back of his mouth.

Kaparis had loved the casino since he was a spoilt boy holidaying on Cap Ferrat. It was where he first acquired a taste for cheating. Now, all these years later, he lay paralysed in a steel sarcophagus, a great iron lung ensconced within the steel skin of a 30,000-tonne oil tanker. Around his head was a whizzing optical array that allowed him 360-degree vision, and above that, a domed screen array feeding him news, images and data from a vast criminal network, as well as real-time video of events 160 miles away in Monte Carlo.

He knew Allenby and the G&T would never willingly hand over the real Boldklub equations, so he had decided that he would taunt them instead, play games and bully them, wear them down until they got so mad that they did something stupid, or – better – got fired and replaced by someone who would cut a deal.

Over the course of the unfortunate Scarlatti episode, and the more recent disaster in China, Kaparis had managed to capture a great deal of video footage of Infinity Drake, and with it his engineers and animators had managed to construct a perfect hologram of the boy. And the G&T had fallen for it!

“FOOLS!” he roared.

Letting Allenby take on the mission himself showed how desperate they already were.

He had them in the palm of his hand.

RRRRRRRRRRRRR!

A second motorbike shot across the square in pursuit of the first. The rider was an athletic young woman, Delta Salazar. She was the finest pilot in the USAF and she jived her Ducati Multistrada through the traffic as the Tyro bike ahead of her took a sharp left up a side street.

Like Finn, Delta had been shrunk for Operation Scarlatti; but unlike Finn, she had not been captured in the Forbidden City. Her little sister had though. Carla. She was still missing and Delta was going to find her or die trying.

She rounded the corner. The Tyro bike was forty metres ahead, roaring up a narrow street of boutiques.

BANG! The passenger fired back. Delta felt a bullet rip past. In a whip’s beat she drew her own SIG Sauer P226 service pistol and returned fire – BANG!

The bullet punched through one Tyro’s shoulder and into the other’s neck. SMASH went the bike through a boutique window.

Delta powered up, but by the time she reached them, both Tyros had detonated suicide capsules.

Back at the casino, as the last of the confetti settled, a great stone of despair sank through Al’s chest and he fell to his knees.

His fellow agent kicked over a table in frustration.

“HAAAAAHAHA!” Kaparis laughed to see such fun – and then choked as he saw something that spoiled … everything—

“Huuu … hgaah!”

For as Al and his fellow agent tore off their false beards and prosthetic faces, Kaparis instantly recognised the second agent.

Captain Kelly of the SAS.

Missing, presumed dead … Or if not, presumed to be just 11mm tall.

It could mean only one thing.

“NNNMMMMARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!”

It was to be a day of highs – and lows.

ONE
FEBRUARY 19 15:11 (GMT+2). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border. Alt. 1,995m/6,545ft

He drank her blood.

They were, after all, in vampire country. Thick forest, thicker snow, a picture-book landscape of peaks and abandoned castles.

Finn was no vampire, of course, nor even a flea, but he had to eat to stay alive, and Carla’s scalp was pockmarked with tiny wounds where he had broken the skin to feed³, using a spike of metal he’d picked up in Shanghai as a sword. Carla’s once-luxuriant hair had been his sanctuary on the never-ending death march, a jungle thatch that had given him cover, warmth and sustenance.

For five months, mostly at night, Baptiste – their captor, and one of Kaparis’s worst Tyros – had dragged them across the ancient spine of the world: up through the Taklamakan Desert, through icebound mountain kingdoms, then across an endless frozen plain, until mountains rose once more, thick forests full of bears and wolves. The only clue to how far they’d come in the faces of the few peasants they saw; even at a distance and wrapped up against the cold, they had grown pale and round-eyed.

Baptiste, bearded and unholy, had no other function but to go on in dumb, endless flight, driven by an urge he could make no sense of. His brain had been so damaged as he escaped Shanghai with the girl that he could barely remember who or what he was. All he had left was a brute sense of purpose, a homing instinct, and a capacity for violence. He knew the girl was his prisoner, but little else. And he had no idea, nor could he conceive, that she carried a thirteen-year-old boy in her hair called Infinity Drake, who was just 9mm tall …

Finn finished his drop of blood and wiped his mouth. “It’s less sugary. You’re getting weaker.”

“Between you and the fleas, I’m surprised I haven’t run dry,” Carla complained, resisting the urge to scratch.

The thuggish form ahead of her grunted and yanked the cable that shackled them together and bound her wrists. She staggered on.

They were traversing the tree line below a steep ridge, Baptiste and Carla high-stepping through deep snow. Finn climbed through her hair to take him in.

How do you kill a giant?

How do you kill someone two hundred times your size? Finn had been trying to figure it out for three thousand miles. Even in this zombie state, Baptiste was still many times faster and stronger than them, many times the murderer.

Finn’s plan was always to attack, but Carla knew better – if they could just hold on long enough, they would eventually get close enough to civilisation to summon help.

Right from the start (when Carla had thought Finn was just a kid on an army base in England who hung out with her older sister), they had enjoyed seeing the world in entirely different ways – America versus Europe, art versus science, girl versus boy. Sometimes she thought it was only the pointless circular arguments that kept them alive, as she slogged on through the real world and Finn ran around her head, full of crazy ideas—

“Hit him with a rock!”

“Build a signal fire!”

“Steal his knife!”

It was a strategy that had lost ground since Yo-yo had gone missing – Finn’s faithful idiot of a dog, who’d trailed them every step of the way from Shanghai. If Carla attacked, Finn had assured her, Yo-yo would join in. Trouble was, since wolves had closed in a few nights before, Yo-yo had kept his distance.

Was he even still alive? The further they’d gone, the weaker they’d all become.

One thing was certain – the brutal trek might never end, but one of them surely would, unless something happened soon.

How do you kill a giant?

Finn, lulled by Baptiste’s pace through the snow, suddenly got a flash of inspiration.

“Hey! We could hypnotise him!”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” said Carla sarcastically.

“No, listen. We went to this show once,” said Finn, trying to remember the night in a theatre with Uncle Al and Grandma. “Next time we stop, stare at him, tell him he’s feeling sleepy, then – click your fingers!”

“Click. Right,” said Carla.

“Then loop the cable around his neck and pull like hel—”

“You know what I’m going to do if I ever get out of this?” Carla interrupted.

“What?” said Finn.

“Shave my head. I’m going for the totally bald look. That way no one will ever climb into my hair agai—”

“AAAAAAA!!!”

Baptiste stopped dead and his sudden cry echoed around the valley like a rifle shot.

“What is it?” said Finn.

Carla followed the thug’s gaze. There, peeping just over the top of the ridgeline ahead … was a cross of stone.

Saliva dripped from Baptiste’s open jaw and he fell to his knees, gasping, overcome. Whatever he was looking for, he’d found.

“UUUUH!!”

Carla couldn’t believe it. Finn couldn’t believe it. There he was, a metre away, his neck exposed. Helpless in shock. For the first time. Helpless …

How do you kill a giant?

“NOW CARLA!!!” Finn screamed, but her instinct beat him to it.

Adrenalin surged and with her best softball hitter’s cry, Carla jabbed her bound wrists forward to loop her shackle round Baptiste’s exposed throat, then she yanked back – hard – with every ounce of her weight and being.

Baptiste gasped, reeled and rose.

“YES!” screamed Finn, nearly pulling a clump of Carla’s hair out in excitement as she rode the back of the raging, exploding form, clinging on like a rodeo champ as they fell back – SPLASH! – like a great whale in the snow, turning and careering down the slope in a snowball fury, Carla hanging on for dear life, Finn confused, crushed, the mad frozen world tumbling and … THUMP!

They hit something, stopped dead. A boulder?

“GAHH!” – with his free hand, Baptiste forced the shackle from his throat to take desperate rasping breaths – “GAHH! GAHH! GAHH!”

Carla pulled harder, every cell of muscle stretched to breaking point, every sinew hard as nails. “GAHH! GAHH!” cried Baptiste, as they lay locked in the snow, moments stretching to eternity … He was dying … he was dying …

Until the wolves came.

OWWOWWWOOWWW!

Finn saw them first, charging down the slope, leaving powder trails like missiles.

“INCOMING! CARLA!”

OWWOWWWOOWWW!

Carla looked up and in that split second – “GHAUH!” – Baptiste flipped like a salmon, slipped the noose and grabbed the back of her scrawny neck, and before she knew it she was thrown onto her back in the snow – SLAM – and Baptiste was above her, drawing back his fist—

RRRRAAW! The first wolf hit him all claws and teeth.

Baptiste, furious, beat it away as if it was a fly, then roared caveman-like at the rest of the incoming pack.

“AARRRRRRRRRGHGHGH!”

Fear ran through the wolves and they scrambled to avoid him, sudden cowards. From the snow, Carla saw high above the mayhem an eagle break its glide, disturbed, and at the same time … she felt the earth explode.

BRBRBRRBRRBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR …

Thunder rose from the mountain. She saw Baptiste’s momentary confusion, then – WHAM! – the mountain hit him as a wall of white, a wall of energy, of cascading snow.

“Avalanche!” Finn yelled in her hair. “Hang on!”

But nothing could be heard, nothing could be sensed in the all-encompassing chaos, the liquid totality of it …

BRBRBRRBRRBRRRRRRRRRRRBRBRRBRRBRRRRRRRRRRR …

FEBRUARY 19 15:22 (GMT+2). OBS post South, Carpathian Mountains, Romania

The Tyro lookout sharpened the focus on the Zeiss T-star image-stabilising binoculars. Her pulse quickened.

She zeroed in on the white scree slope on the Kalamatov Ridge. The avalanche was obscuring her view, but she could see at least one figure in the snow. Immediately she hit the hard comms link back to the monastery.

“Trespass alarm! Seven kilometres south-east on Kalamatov!”

BRBRBRRBRRBRRRRRRRRRRRBRBRRBRRBRRRRRRRRRRR …

Carla felt only pain – the shackles biting into her wrists as her unseen captor twisted and turned, then a SNAP of sudden release as the avalanche ran itself out, fading from a roar to a sigh …

She came to a halt, daylight leaking through the snow crystals.

She must be near the surface. For a few moments she lay in the profound silence and whiteness. She was still alive, but …

“You still there?” Carla whispered. Her greatest fear was to lose him. He was annoying, but he was in every sense her blood brother.

Finn opened his eyes in the curled sanctuary of her hair.

“Are you kidding? This stuff is like a bulletproof duvet.”

She let out a “Ha!” in relief.

“Is he still there?” said Finn in turn, hardly daring to hope.

Carla tried to move and got a shock. She still felt the pain of the shackles, but her wrists moved freely through the powder … Nothing at all binding them. She opened her arms … Smooth, delicious nothing. She felt like a princess waking in a fairy tale.

“HA!” Finn yelled when she brought her hands to her face in disbelief. “GET AWAY!”

Powered by euphoria and panic, Carla began to swim up to the surface.

“Careful!” Finn called out as the sun hit her face and she took a deep lungful of free, freezing air.

“Careful …” Finn warned again.

“OK …” Carla whispered. Slowly she wriggled and worked her head above the surface.

Baptiste …

Three feet away.

Head and shoulders out of the snow, stock-still like an Easter Island statue. Except this statue was bleeding and wisps of cloudy breath leaked from its mouth …

Carla held her own.

“Slow, slow, slow …” Finn urged.

Staring intently at the statue, Carla began to inch her way out. First her shoulders, then her arms, her knees … until she was able to take a first high step, a second …

She turned to wade down the slope, heart thumping. Three steps, four, five … She’d not been this far from him in months. The invisible chains that bound her to her captor seemed to be breaking one by one, until—

His eyes snapped open.

“AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!” screamed Carla.

“RUN!” Finn yelled.

Carla ran, kneeing through the deep powder, stumbling as Baptiste exploded from the bank – “WAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!” – avalanching after her, reborn in rage.

Finn shot to the top of her hair and grabbed his favourite long curl, flying free at its end like a mad bungie jumper able to bounce around and see all ways at once.

“RUN RUN RUN!”

Baptiste had pulled a knife from his belt and was closing fast.

Finn had to do something. Finn had to kill the giant. How?

“Arrrggghhhhh!” – Carla cried out suddenly as she ran onto nothingness and dropped a dozen feet before a rocky outcrop, coming to land – WHUMP – in a snowdrift at its base.

Baptiste followed – WHUMP – thumping further down the slope.

Carla instinctively rose to run again, but as she did so she heard Finn warn – “DON’T MOVE!”

She had fallen at the mouth of a cave, smashing aside the snow that concealed it. Now its contents were exposed. She sensed stink and stored heat. She saw fur. A pair of black eyes zooming in. A mother roused from a hibernating huddle.

“BEAR!” yelled Finn unnecessarily. “BROWN BEAR!” Always the naturalist.

Its massive salivating jaws opened – “ROOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAA-RRRRRRRRRRR!”

Carla screamed. The huge female swung round to check its pile of young, then swung back.

Finn, from the flying curl, saw Baptiste rising up the slope with the knife.

“KICK THE BEAR!”

“What?!” said Carla.

“KICK IT AND RUN!” screamed Finn.

Carla kicked at the dirt and ice before her, sending a spray of filth and grit into the bear’s face, enraging her and flipping her from defence mode into attack.

“ROOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!”

“GO!” screamed Finn.

As claws and jaws flashed towards Carla, she rose like a rocket and threw herself as far down the slope as she could, straight past the rising Baptiste …

“ARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!” Man met mammal.

Carla sensed the force of the blow and heard a gasp of air as the claws of the bear ripped Baptiste clean open. She felt hot blood spray against her, felt life end – and thanked God she couldn’t see it – as the bear’s jaws snapped home round Baptiste’s neck, breaking his spine like a dry stick.

Finn caught a glimpse of it. Saw the crimson arc whiplash across the snow and sky. A final obscenity. But not final for long …

“ROOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!”

“RUN!” This was one mad bear.

Carla fell and tumbled and ran and staggered down through the forest as the bear pounded after her.

Carla had seconds.

Moments.

She would be obliterated.

Finn braced himself for the incoming final hit and yelled, uselessly, finally, “NOOOOOOO!”

YAP!

Hope.

Yo-yo galloped through the undergrowth and gave it everything, put every ounce of jelly energy into his spring and sank his teeth into the bear’s hind leg.

ROOOOOAAAAAARARARARARARR!

Yo-yo let go and – using the momentum of the bear’s reeling body – flew like a stone from a slingshot down the steep slope.

ROOOOOAAAAAARARARARARARR!

The bear roared again as it barrelled after the pelting, yelping mongrel, splintering the forest and exploding the snow.

“Run …” Finn managed to say through his astonishment.

TWO
FEBRUARY 19 16:37 (GMT+1). Hull of the Shieldmaiden, Mediterranean Sea

Kaparis reviewed the tapes of the Monte Carlo sting.

He saw Captain Kelly. He saw Delta Salazar. Both were full-sized.

The last time he’d seen them, they were just 11mm tall.

He ground this new information round in his massive mind.

Like Allenby, Kaparis had been able to create a subatomic vortex within which all matter could be reduced, but his was crude, only capable of shrinking machines. Allenby could not only reduce living humans to nano-scale, he had now worked out how to reverse the process and restore them to normal size without killing them … Allenby was not just ahead in the race, he had made a great leap forward. It was like being in an old propeller biplane and watching a jet fighter shoot past.

Given an infinite amount of time, Kaparis could and would deduce the four elusive fractal equations at the heart of the Boldklub process. But he did not have for ever. Yet.

Now everything had changed. There was no contest. The game was up.

FEBRUARY 19 17:48 (GMT+3). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border

As she crested the Kalamatov Ridge, Carla fell to her knees. Just like Baptiste had done, just like many a pilgrim in times past, at first sight of the Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki.

Against the brilliant orange of the setting sun, perched on top of a thousand feet of sheer white cliff, was a ruined cluster of ancient buildings, a nest of towers and tiles and a once-golden dome, tipped with the Orthodox cross. It was, in its way, magnificent, a crown of thorns on a snaggletooth of limestone, and only madmen could have built such a place.

“What is that?” asked Finn from the crow’s nest of Carla’s hair. There was not a whiff of smoke or any other sign of life.

“A Holiday Inn?” breathed Carla. “I don’t know, but if we want to get through the night alive, we better check in …”

“You’re not serious! How would you even get up there?” asked Finn.

“We’ve got to get out of this wind. Baptiste may have been a psychopath, but he was heat, body heat, and when we crawled into a snow hole, that’s what kept us alive.”

Yap! Yap!

“What was that?” Finn said, and held his breath to better listen through the wind.

Yap!

Carla looked back to the ridge.

“I knew he’d make it!” said Finn.

“YO-YO! HERE! HERE, BOY!” cried Carla.

Yap!

Over the ridge shot a spray of finest pink-sunset snow, a skittering cloud – and at its centre, an effervescent black scribble: a bounding, dishevelled, filthy, injured, exhausted, idiot of a dog.

“YO-YO!” cried Carla.

“YOYOYOYOYO!” yodelled Finn.

Yo-yo danced and circled, fearful of any trace of Baptiste, but Carla laughed and called his name and finally he came to her, yapping and wagging and loving the Finn-ness of her. Where his master had disappeared to nearly a year before was a mystery beyond Yo-yo’s tiny brain, but not beyond his quite brilliant sense of smell.

Carla collapsed in the snow and submitted herself to an assault of licks and kisses. “Good dog. Smelly dog.”

“Warm dog,” Finn said. “You can snuggle up in a snow hole with him. We can make it down the valley in the morning. There must be some kind of settlement serving that place. We’re almost ho—”

He bit back the word “home”. It was too much. The thought of speaking, actually saying something, to Al and Grandma … There was an emotional avalanche banked tight in his chest and this was no time to let it sweep him away.

“…Almost there,” was all he could manage.

But Carla wasn’t listening to Finn. She had noticed something on Yo-yo’s collar.

“Wait a minute – there’s something here.”

Yo-yo’s collar was as filthy as the rest of him, but on one side of it was a lump.

“What is that?” said Finn. He crawled out of the thick of her hair to dangle from the curl at her forehead again as she rubbed away some of the muck. It was some kind of plastic cylinder attached to the collar, the size of a large battery.

“They sent him into the Forbidden City to try and find us! It’s a tracker! It must be!” said Finn.

“Why haven’t they been tracking us then?” said Carla.

She found the catch and took the whole collar off. “Maybe it ran out of power?” she said, examining it more carefully. “Or maybe it’s not a tracker. Maybe it’s some kind of comms device, or—”

But before she got any further …

YAP!

Yo-yo was off his haunches, nose high in the frozen air, stump of a tail curled like a tongue in concentration.

“Bear …?” asked Carla, fear returning.

“No,” said Finn, hearing a distant buzz. “Machines …? PEOPLE!”

Carla shoved the dog collar into her top and scrambled down the steep snowfield, Yo-yo bounding ahead of her, crossing the tree line and disappearing into the forest.

“BE CAREFUL!” yelled Finn.

“Yo-yo, come back here!” ordered Carla and the dog yapped back, already lost.

She ran into the forest after him, the last rays of the setting sun needling through the pines to light the dog’s progress through the snow. The further Carla ran, the darker it got, but the more they could hear the noise – engines, definitely the sound of engines, somewhere ahead.

Yap!

“Yo-yo!” said Carla, changing direction, heading for the bark, till …

“ARRRGGHHHH!” – the ground fell away. Nothingness. She shot out a hand and grabbed a sapling, then clung on hard and closed her eyes and felt the tiny tree take her weight, its roots clinging to the earth.

She gasped. Her eyes adjusted and she saw she’d just saved herself from running straight off a steep drop.

Yo-yo appeared and yapped at her, as if she was an idiot.

“No more short cuts,” said Finn at her ear, then before she’d had time to catch her breath, he shouted: “Look!”

There beneath them, headlamps slicing through the darkness, three snowmobiles slaloming through the trees, tacking their way up the slope.

“HERE! OVER HERE!” Carla cried.

“They’re climbing this way,” said Finn. “They must have seen us on the pass.”

Finn looked across at the silhouette of the ruined monastery through the trees. Surely it was the only spot they could have been seen from? As Carla pulled herself back up, he looked down at the snowmobiles again. It was hard to tell in the fading light, but all three carried a driver and a passenger, and slung across the back of each passenger … an automatic rifle with a distinctive curved magazine.

“AKs …” said Finn.

“UP HERE!” yelled Carla.

“OWOWOWW!” howled Yo-yo, to help her out.

“SHUT UP!” said Finn. “They’re carrying AK47s!”

“What?”

“The only place anybody could have seen us from is the monastery. Who would live there? Who would hide there? Who would send out men with guns?”

“Hunters?”

“You don’t shoot bunnies with AKs,” said Finn.

Carla looked back down at the whizzing skidoos. “That would be cruel …”

“Baptiste fell to his knees when he saw it,” said Finn. “Kaparis has headquarters all over the world …”

“You think it’s where he’s been headed all this time?”

“Want to find out?”

Carla answered by turning to run in the opposite direction down through the forest.

Finn could hear the skidoos climbing towards them, beams of light starting to flick through the trees.

“They’re coming!” said Finn, lashing himself into place in the hair just above her forehead, poking out like a tiny tank commander.

Carla slogged on, but the skidoos were cutting through the forest like a wind, engines raging, lights strobing. In a flash of white light, they were spotted—

“DA! ESTE!” went up a foreign cry. Carla dived out of the beam.

“ACOLO, ESTE!”

Again she ran, but all three were closing in. Before she could be spotted again, Finn’s yell matched her instinct: “HIDE!”

She dived forward and buried herself in the snow, clutching Yo-yo to her.

VROOM! VROOM! VROOM!

The three skidoos overshot.

“Stay down!” said Finn.

Carla hugged the panting dog closer and he licked her face.

The skidoos stopped. Finn and Carla could hear voices.

“Don’t come back … Don’t come back …” begged Finn.

Then – DRDRDRDRDDRDRTT! – muzzle flash lit the iced canopy as shots tore high through the trees in an attempt to flush them out – DRTRRTRTRT!

Yo-yo took violent fright, bursting out of Carla’s arms to bite back. YAP YAP YAP YAP!

“ACOLO!” went up the cry. Yo-yo barked and, as headlights wheeled once more, Carla launched herself into the darkness, running without hope or direction, running into …

Nothing.

Suddenly she found herself falling like Alice – but not like Alice, as she hit (and hard) a slide of ice and flew down it, a toboggan run of hellish thumps and spins and whacks that sent her winded and flying – WHAM! – into a blue-black final darkness …

THREE
FEBRUARY 20 00:00 (GMT+3). Carpathian Mountains, Romania-Ukraine border

Is she dead?

Finn woke upside down, still lashed into her hair.

Is she dead?

He struggled and turned himself round. Saw stars in a slice of night sky above, saw fast-moving clouds, heard the wind. Where the hell were they?

Is she dead?

She couldn’t die. She had carried him through hell, they had come too far … He untied himself and dropped to her scalp. At once he could feel her pulse beneath his feet, feel her warmth. Alive …

What a girl, Finn thought, and not for the first time.

How long had he been out of it? Hours? Minutes? He pushed through to examine her scalp. There seemed to be no blood, no great crush of her skull.

Had they fallen down the cliff? He looked up. The slice of night sky was sandwiched between slabs of blackness. Were they inside the mountain? Inside some kind of split in the rock?

The skidoos had gone. So had Yo-yo …

“CARLA!” Finn yelled, as much to force back his tears as to rouse her.

“WAKE UP!”

Then from above – movement – a scratch – a thump.

Chunks of dislodged snow and ice fell towards them.

Wolves? A bear?

“CARLA!”

WHAP! – with a slap, the end of a heavy wet rope nearly knocked Finn clean off his perch. He clung on and looked up as a huge leg appeared over the edge of the crevasse, then another, then a squat muscular figure slid straight down the rope.

Every hair on Finn’s tiny body stood on end as the figure blotted out the last slice of sky. He braced himself.

The figure stopped dead. Grunted. Struck a match.

Light stung the darkness and a figure from a nightmare squinted at Carla. A boy, medieval in dress and form, with a huntsman’s bow across his back, dark face scarred and twisted, a misshapen thing. His bulging eyes looked at Carla and absorbed her.

Carla, as if in response, briefly opened her own, beautiful eyes.

They widened in momentary shock then lapsed back into unconsciousness.

“Esti …?” the boy started to say, and tried to shake her a little.

When he got no response, he fed the rope around Carla’s back and secured it. “Yes!” said Finn. “Get us out of here …”

The boy braced himself against the walls and hauled on the rope.

Back out on the rock face, Finn saw no sign of skidoos. The starlit sky was clouding over and sharp flecks of snow were whipping in on the wind.

He felt himself flip upside down as Carla was picked up and slung over the shoulder of the extraordinary boy, who did not pause as he picked a treacherous mountain-goat’s path down the slope without slipping or stopping. By the time they’d reached the valley floor, a blizzard was blowing. The boy dropped them on to a toboggan and jumped on behind them, steering them through the forest. After a few minutes, the ground began to rise again. The boy hopped off and pulled the sledge along until eventually they stopped before another rock face.

The snow was wild around them.

Finn saw the boy work away at something, pulling a rope that disappeared into the darkness above. It could only lead to one place – they must be beneath the ruins, beneath the castle in the air. As the rope began to run free in his hands, the boy jumped back and – WHUMP – a great basket dropped out of the darkness.

The boy tipped Carla unceremoniously over its side and leapt in after her. Again he hauled on ropes, and Finn felt the basket rock and sway as they began to rise. In a short time, the boy’s hauling became easier; a great falling counterweight passed them, then the rope was running through his hands as they rose relentlessly. Finn saw they were rushing up towards a perfect square of light, a trapdoor in the floor of heaven. Finn gasped as the basket thumped home into a blindingly torchlit timber wheelhouse.

As Finn’s eyes adjusted, he could see their saviour more clearly – a hunchback half-man clothed in rags. Again Carla was thrown over his shoulder and he set off on a mad rocking run, almost too fast for Finn to make sense of where they were. There was a long, narrow stone passage, lit by dim oil lamps, with many passages and doorways leading off. After a minute’s run, the boy veered off into a much broader passage, then shouldered through a large oak door, and they arrived in the peace and sanctuary of …

Books.

Candle-light.

Words.

Thousands of pages, rotting and reused, torn and shredded, lining the floors and jamming the gaps to keep out the cold. Fuelling tiny fires.

A library. Finn knew it was from the smell, the musty, trusty smell of books. But he had never seen a library as tragic or as strange as this. A huge high ceiling topped ranks of splintered shelves lining damp walls that seemed to run from earth to heaven, an illusion reinforced by the religious decoration on the smoke-blackened pillars and frescos, saints’ faces, red and gold and ruined. An ornate, crumbling wedding cake of a library transformed into a slum, its desks and furniture upturned and adapted, knocked and nailed into an encampment of shanty shacks, out of which devilish and dead-eyed children stared and shivered, dressed in grey sackcloth and buried like hamsters under the piles of yellowing pages. A dormitory of the damned. And at the far end, on a raised dais with a commanding view over the whole cavernous room, was a large desk on pillared legs, where sat, surrounded by bells and dangling tubes, a striking young man.

Their deformed saviour headed straight for him, letting Carla down off his back to offer her like a cabbage to a king.

“Draga … Primo?” said the boy.

Primo? thought Finn. He could see his face in shadow – handsome, sherry-skinned, dark eyes with a thousand-yard stare. He had seen the dangling tubes around him before, in old war films, speaking tubes used to communicate on ships and submarines.

“Ce facut?” asked the Primo, suspicious.

“Santiago find,” the boy explained in English.

He lifted Carla higher and the Primo reached out a hand. His fingers sought and gently traced the detail of Carla’s face as Finn looked again at the Primo’s black eyes … and at the same moment, Carla came round, shocked at the touch of the sculpted youth staring straight through her. She drew breath to scream—

“No! He’s blind, Carla!” shouted Finn, running to her ear.

Carla caught the scream, and flinched from the hand, turning away, only to see the mashed-up face of Santiago for the first time.

“ARRRRRRRRGGGH!”

“It’s OK, Carla! The freaky kid rescued us!” Finn insisted in her hair.

“Stop!” demanded the Primo, quelling her at once.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but we’re in the castle, I think they’re OK!” said Finn. He could feel her pulse thumping through her scalp.

“Romana? English? Deutsche? Française?” demanded the Primo.

“What’s happening?” Carla managed.

“Santiago found you. You should not be here,” said the Primo.

The deformed boy, Santiago, shuffled.

“What do you mean?” said Carla.

A bell rang on his desk. Then two bells. Distant orders began barking out of the speaking tubes.

“Hide her!”

FOUR
FEBRUARY 20 01:52 (GMT+3). Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki

Carla felt no fear – she felt warm for the first time in months.

They’d been hurried out of the library as the main doors opened to three brutal-looking adults in black, AK47s slung across their backs, “Siguri” the ragged children called them, as they were smuggled down to a cell-like storeroom, where Carla had been urged to hide in a wooden chest.

They’d heard a fair amount of crashing and yelling, then nothing for a long time.

“Finn,” Carla whispered.

“Shh!” Finn said, listening hard in her hair – then “AHH!” as he found his legs being tasted by a pair of snout-headed lice the size of fat cats, their organs visible beneath their maggoty skin. “GETAAWAYAYYYY!” Finn grabbed the spike that never left his side, but before he could swing, the lice were off through Carla’s hair, roadrunner legs whirring like outboards.

“Are you OK?” said Carla.

“Bookworms,” said Finn.

“Worms in my head?!” she hissed.

“No, not ‘worms’ – that’s just what they’re called. They’re bugs that feed off mould – and me—”

Finn stopped. He could hear something.

Footsteps.

“Someone’s coming!”

The lid of the chest lifted and candle-light revealed a scrap of a girl with a thick Slav accent. “Come! Be quick!”

Moments later, Carla was running behind the girl back along the stone passage to the library.

Some of the shacks had been kicked down, and bedding and pathetic belongings lay around in a tangled mess, but the Siguri had gone. Some of the younger children were gathered around the Primo’s dais, anxious. Carla was rushed straight up.

“Santiago has been taken by the Siguri guards. You must save him,” said the Primo, urgent. “They know he has been out now. They are searching for s stranger.”

“For me?” said Carla.

“Santiago found an injured climber last year – they killed him. So now they think, if he finds another, he’ll hide them.”

“What have we walked into?” Finn asked above Carla’s left ear.

“Why would they kill an injured climber?” asked Carla.

“Because it is the Will of the Master,” said the Primo.

“Oh great. Oh, just perfect,” said Finn, his heart sinking. “Ask him if they’re Tyros.”

“Are you Tyros?” said Carla.

“We are the Carriers. We serve,” said the Primo. “The Tyros are in their dormitories.”

“Dormitories?” said Finn.

The scrap of a girl threw a sackcloth robe over Carla’s head, and Finn had to duck in case he got dragged out.

“The Abbot has called for more fire,” said the Primo. “Go with Olga. Santiago must live. He is one of us. You are a stranger.”

“But a Tyro dragged me here from China! A monster! I only just escaped. I—”

“If Santiago is dying, you must give yourself up and save him,” ordered the Primo.

“Sacrifice myself?”

“If you do, you will become one of us,” explained the Primo solemnly. “We will try and save you too.”

“And if I refuse?” asked Carla.

“Then they will find your body at the foot of the cliff,” the Primo stated matter-of-factly.

Carla’s temper flared.

“You’re threatening to kill me?”

“I’m making you an offer – honour or death. I must protect the Carriers. If Santiago talks, he puts them all in danger,” the Primo stated.

The Carrier kids watched and waited. A curious bunch – all sizes, shapes, colours and ages, dressed in the same sackcloth as Carla.

“Keep him talking. Buy some time,” said Finn at her ear. “We need to weasel a way out of this.”

“I choose honour,” Carla answered.

“I said stall!” complained Finn.

“Santiago must live,” repeated the Primo. “Go!”

“Go!” answered Olga, and she pulled Carla in a skinny grip towards the exit.

Finn climbed through Carla’s hair, still complaining as they left the library and hurried up a main passageway that curved up through the building, its flagstone floor polished smooth by centuries of footsteps.

“We need to get out of here,” said Finn.

“And leave him to die?” said Carla.

Olga scurried through some doors ahead of them and suddenly they were in cavernous kitchens, dead at this hour, but with a great black iron furnace at its heart. Olga opened the furnace door to reveal a nest of large stones, white hot, like dragon’s eggs. She lined up a pair of iron buckets and with some huge tongs grabbed and dumped a glowing stone into each one – donk, donk. Then she handed Carla a thick glove and indicated towards a bucket.

“Go!” Olga urged and picked up her own shimmering load.

Carla followed suit and Olga led them out of the kitchen and into the black heart of the complex—

The Forum.

Carla stopped dead at the sight. For Finn with his gamer head on, it was like a new map revealing itself.

Lit by flaming torches, it was a courtyard hollowed out of a hotchpotch of buildings, a core three storeys deep. A single round opening in the centre of the roof let in curls of snow and huge filthy banners proclaimed the words Honour, Obedience and Master. Doors and entranceways, some ancient, some more recent concrete, peppered the four sides of the courtyard, and a rising irregular spiral of stairways and open walkways connected them all together. It was like something out of a painting by Escher.

“Freaky …” said Finn.

“Go!” Olga scolded and led the way, little legs rushing up the mad spiral. Carla set off after her and tried to keep up. The hot bucket swung and she could feel her gloved hand starting to burn.

Halfway up the spiral was the entrance to a great concrete space hidden beneath the ancient monastery roofs, hundreds of bunks in serried ranks, full of sleeping teenagers.

“Tyros …” said Finn at Carla’s ear. “This is some kind of hive. We need to make a phone call, now.”

“Olga! Where is there a phone?” Carla called and mimed a handset. “A telephone?”

Olga just looked perplexed. “Go!” she said, and they were off again, climbing past another dozen entranceways.

“Tell her!” yelled Finn. “We have to find a phone or a computer, or … the collar! That thing on Yo-yo, whatever it was. Have you still got it?”

Carla grabbed her pocket. Nothing. Had she taken it off Yo-yo? She could barely remember.

“I must have lost it somewhere on the mountain.”

“ARRRGGHHHH!” – the sound of screams was coming from the top floor. Olga hurried them through an arch guarded by Siguri, then on through a huge door into a church of crumbling beauty … and the screams of Santiago.

“AARRRRGGHHHHHH …”

He lay stretched out on a rack in the centre, the heart of the High Chapel, face down, his arms being pulled up behind his humped back by the Siguri chief, a thickset Turk. The screams echoed off the painted saints and gilded icons. Looking down on him was the Abbot, the leader of the monastery and the Siguri, a man in Roman robes, with a face so badly burnt it resembled the surface of a planet.

Half a dozen Siguri and a severe female secretary looked on.

The secretary flicked her head at Olga and Carla, indicating an iron stove.

“WHERE is the STRANGER?” raged the Siguri chief.

Carla wobbled the last few steps to the stove, but almost dropped her bucket as she became aware of a strange sound.

It was a sound Finn knew only too well.

Schlup-schlup-schlup – dinner time.

“Yo-yo!” said Finn, hardly believing it. “I think Yo-yo’s here.”

He could feel Carla’s heartbeat spike through the scalp beneath his feet.

“Oh no, if he gets a sniff of me …” said Finn, becoming suddenly worried.

“It is all quite simple,” the Abbot said, wearily looking down at Santiago. “You like it out in the woods. It’s where we found you. It’s where you belong.”

“Yes, Padre …”

“We know there was a trespasser, a stranger. We spotted him. We found his dog.”

He gestured to the far corner of the chapel. There, unmistakably, was Yo-yo’s rear end, his head buried in a pan of stew which he was transferring to his stomach in great wild gulps.

“It was very clever of you to find them.”

“No, Padre …”

“Yes. You left your toboggan out. Did you bring the stranger in? Did you hide him?”

“Santiago no bring dog!” he answered.

“No. We found the dog,” the Abbot reassured him. “In the woods. But you were in the woods too.”

“Pine cones. For the fire …”

“You were gathering aromatic fuel? In a snowstorm?”

Santiago wriggled an approximate nod, ashamed to be lying.

At the stove, Olga used some tongs to drop off their hot stones, taking her time as Carla watched Santiago on the rack. Finn could almost feel the morality rising through Carla’s scalp, but counselled – “Don’t do anything. We have to figure something out.”

“Who was it, do you think, that the lookout and the searchers saw then?” the Abbot asked Santiago, letting the question hang. Santiago could not help but fill the silence.

“An … angel, Padre?”

“An angel?” said the Abbot. “With a dog?”

Santiago shook in disagreement. “NO DOG, Padre – dog run away! Crazy dog!”

“Could it be a stray?” the Abbot asked the Siguri chief.

“No, sir. A stray would have starved by the time it got up here. This dog has been regularly beaten; its master must be the stanger.”

Olga started to lead Carla back out.

The Abbot waved, the rack wheel turned, and Santiago cried out again in excruciating pain.

“Arrrrrrrrrrgggghhh!”

The cry stopped Carla in her tracks – at the very moment Finn’s scent finally rang a big bell in Yo-yo’s tiny brain – YAP!

Yo-yo whipped round. There! There was the good girl! There was the Finn smell!

YAP YAP YAP! YAP!

The Siguri chief, the Abbot, even Santiago, turned to look.

“It has the scent of its master!” said the chief.

Yo-yo was straining at the rope that held him, pointing only one way: at Carla, halted before the great door, ready to turn and declare herself.

“Let the dog go!” ordered the Abbot.

“No, Yo-yo! PLAY DEAD!” Finn yelled uselessly from Carla’s hair.

The Siguri holding Yo-yo released him and he sprang towards Carla like an accusing finger, all skew-whiff as the stew sloshed about the wire rack of his body, until … BANG!

The doors behind Carla burst open and in came the severed head of Baptiste, ravaged by bears and dangling from a Siguri gauntlet.

HOWWWLLL! – Yo-yo cowered back in fear.

CLANG! – Carla dropped her empty bucket in shock.

“Stupido!” cried the secretary, and slapped her so hard Finn had to cling on as she fell.

The Abbot was shaken. “Bring it closer!”

Baptiste’s head was marched up and dangled before him.

There was one lidless eye, the other was missing, as was the top quarter of his skull. A wafer edge of white bone stood proud of the blood and brain on what was left of his brow. His skin was ghostly, ghastly pale, and his black mouth gaped open. A section of collarbone dangled from ligaments at his neck. Here was the master. Here was the stranger.

The Abbot recognised him at once. “Oh, my dear boy …”

FIVE

Santiago was released and led back through the labyrinth, held between Carla and Olga like a broken bird, eyes tight shut, muttering some mad, grateful, polyglot incantation (“Fo me ca Maria – fo me ca Primo – fo me ca Jesu – fo me ca Master – fo me ca Dei”) while Yo-yo strained at the end of a rope just ahead, anxious to put as much distance as possible between himself and the severed head.

They arrived back in the library to exclamations in a dozen tongues. Carriers crowded round. Excited, Yo-yo began to yap, then – just like it would in the playground – a handbell broke up the scene – Ding-a-ling!

“Quiet! Do you want the Siguri back?” demanded the Primo.

Santiago limped over to him.

“What did you tell them?” the Primo asked.

Santiago recounted what had happened in a breathless, dramatic babble.

At the end of it, the Primo asked, astonished, “Baptiste?”

“His head – just his head,” Carla confirmed. “He dragged me here from Shanghai. When I got away from him, the bears got him.”

Santiago grunted confirmation. There was murmuring among the Carriers.

“They know him … They’re impressed,” Finn said at her ear. “Make the most of it!”

“I did what you asked,” Carla told the Primo. “I brought Santiago back. Now I must make contact with the outside. I must call for help.”

“There is no means. We are not meant to exist,” the Primo said. “There are no phones, no electric. Even fires do not burn by day. We are made to live as of old.”

Finn looked at the bells and the speaking tubes hanging around the dais and started to understand. This place was undetectable.

“There are NRP machines in the infirmary, but nothing else,” said the Primo.

“What are NRP machines?” asked Carla.

“Neuroretinal programming,” explained the Primo. “A probe is put through the eye into the brain, to program Tyros with expertise, strength, character.”

“That’s what made you blind …” Carla realised, appalled.

“The Master searches care institutions across the world for children of exceptional intelligence. I am from a local orphanage, but others are from the farthest corners of the earth. If we are suitable for NRP, we become Tyros and begin our training. If NRP fails, but we are still of use, we are put to work with the Carriers – local unwanted children,” the Primo said. “If we are not of use, we die.”

Finn felt Carla give a shiver.

“Your Master is a monster,” she said.

“We are here. Nowhere else,” said the Primo, dead simple.

At Carla’s ear Finn said, “These NRP machines must use computers of some kind, they must be connected to something?”

“Primo, these machines, are they computers? Do they have electricity?”

“They are connected by wire to the Caverns, but no Carrier can go there.”

Finn’s ears pricked up.

“What caverns?” asked Carla.

“Beneath us. Great halls within the mountain.”

“What is in them?”

“We cannot know. But flying machines go there at night sometimes.”

“Flying machines?” said Carla.

“We have to get out and tell someone about this,” insisted Finn. “We have to get off this rock!”

“In the morning, I have to leave, I have to get help,” Carla told the Primo.

“You will never make it. First you have to escape the Siguri, then the peasants – who all depend on the Protectorate – then the elements themselves.”

“Santiago gets out,” said Carla. “How else did he find me?”

“They know Santiago will never leave. He was the unwanted runt of some peasant girl. As a babe he was left to die in the snow, but an old crone heard his cries, rescued him from wolves and nursed him back to health. Later, when she was dying, she brought him here. He knows nothing else.”

“I got dragged across half the world by a mad Tyro – I’ll make it,” said Carla.

The Primo, not used to being challenged, tilted his perfect chin and turned his blind eyes on her. She felt as if they were staring through her.

“For every runaway the Siguri catch, they let the Tyros kill another five Carriers for sport. To set an example.”

Finn sank back against Carla’s scalp, challenge fading in the face of such cruelty. A lump rose in Carla’s throat.

“Baptiste was the worst,” the Primo added, more conciliatory. “We are grateful he is dead. He would have killed me, but the tutors stopped him.”

“Why?”

“They need me. For the Carriers to be effective slaves, they must be led,” he said simply.

Carla looked around at the ragged Carrier kids. They were all shapes and sizes, all colours, all abilities and disabilities. They certainly needed someone.

“This place is like an evil fairy tale,” Finn said in Carla’s hair.

“We’ve got to help them,” Carla insisted. “Primo, if I can get one message to the authorities, important people – and soldiers – will come, will stop this.”

The Primo silently considered the matter and Carla stared at his face and wondered what it must be like to be without sight in such a place, a darkness within darkness, and yet be so strong.

“Nothing can be done before the spring melt.”

“Before spring?!”

“Follow Olga. Tomorrow we will make you a Carrier. Live as she lives, do as she does. As long as you work hard, you will be safe.”

FEBRUARY 20 03:17 (GMT+2). Hull of the Shieldmaiden, Mediterranean Sea

Kaparis did not by nature sleep.

He seethed.

Usually Heywood would knock him out with a powerful sedative, but Kaparis had refused, wishing instead to pickle himself in fury and self-pity. He considered that he had got everything he had in life through application, imagination and sheer hard work. But never once had he had any luck – despite having inherited his vast wealth, good looks, charm and a brain the size of a small planet.

It wasn’t fair. Other people got lucky all the time, while he had to slog his guts out. Or at least other people’s guts, which was frankly messy.

Nothing was fair …

Then Heywood interrupted his musings and said, “Sir? The Abbot is on the line.”

“At this hour?”

Moments later, coloured bars of data danced on his life-support monitor, like nymphs in spring, and Kaparis ordered: “Bring me the head of Baptiste!”

On the screen above him, the Abbot presented the gory remains of the Tyro’s head on a cushion, like some precious jewelled thing.

“We retrieved it from a bear den on the Kalamatov Ridge!”

“HAAAHH!” Kaparis laughed, baring his teeth like a hyped primate.

“And where is she? Are you keeping her back as a surprise? Oh, I can barely stand it!”

“Who, Master?”

“THE SALAZAR GIRL!” Kaparis roared.

The Abbot was clueless.

“Three of them disappeared in China,” he explained to the Abbot, as if to a fool. “Baptiste, Carla Salazar, and, very likely, Infinity Drake. If Baptiste walked all that way, do you think for one moment he would have left them behind?”

“We carried out an extensive search, Master …”

“RUBBISH!”

Fools. Morons. Scum. Could they not FOR ONCE match the scale of his intellect? He gurgled with rage, unable to speak a moment, as the Abbot whimpered …

“We scoured the mountain! We can assure you he was quite alone. All we found was a dog …”

Kaparis almost suffered a seizure.

A dog?

A dog?

A dog with a supernatural sense of smell that had successfully traced its 9mm master before? A dog idiot enough and faithful enough to follow that scent for three thousand miles?

“Get me a picture of Infinity Drake’s dog!” snapped Kaparis.

An image flashed up on the screen array. Yo-yo. A vision of joyous furry idiocy.

“Was it, by any chance … this dog?” asked Kaparis.

The Abbot gulped. It was a thousand times cleaner than the one they’d found, but it was the same dog.

“We thought he must have picked it up along the way …” the Abbot tried to explain.

“WHERE IS IT?”

The Abbot’s mind was blank. He dimly remembered someone kick it aside. He scrabbled around for some consolation. “Perhaps the Carrier children have it? They have value as rat catchers. We will have the whole complex searched! If there is a dog – if there is a girl – we shall slay them!”

The Siguri chief beside the Abbot was nodding vigorously, but Kaparis slammed on the brakes—

“NO! Don’t you see what this means?”

His mind was a spinning Catherine wheel. If the dog was there, then Drake was there. If so, where? If Baptiste had brought the girl with him then was Drake somewhere on the girl? But where was the girl? On the mountain? In a bear?

“Find the bears, slice them open. The Salazar girl has to be somewhere—”

“Or Santiago found her!” exclaimed the Abbot.

“Santiago?”

“The idiot boy. The trapper.”

“The hunchback?” said Kaparis, vaguely remembering the wretch.

“Sometimes he finds lost souls. He was out late on the mountain – we questioned him. But not about a girl …”

“Brilliant!” gasped Kaparis.

“Really?” said the Abbot.

Kaparis’s voice fell to a rasping conspiratorial whisper. “If Drake is hidden somewhere in the monastery, we’ve caught him, with or without the girl.”

No one was dumb enough to ask the obvious question: how? How do you catch someone 9mm tall in a complex the size of a cathedral? Nobody asked, because they knew the Master always came up with an answer more fiendish than they could ever conceive.

Nano-radar⁴, thought Kaparis. They could scour the buildings, scour the mountain. But Drake could hide from it behind steel, behind rock. But why would he? If he didn’t know they were looking for him, he would have no reason to hide. We must do it by stealth, thought Kaparis, we must lure him out into the open.

“We must set a trap, we must bait it …” Kaparis thought aloud.

What did Infinity Drake want more than anything in the world?

His father …

With a blink, Kaparis wiped the image of Yo-yo from his screens and directed his optically controlled cursor to retrieve a file marked ARCHIV23874378KAP-ENCRYPT. The title read: “Intel. report 498090bb – Drake, E.”

It was the report Kaparis had commissioned thirteen years before into the mysterious disappearance of Ethan Drake, father of Infinity, during an experiment at a lab in Cambridge. He opened it across the screen array. Kaparis knew it almost by heart, though it had always posed more questions than answers, always deepened the mystery.

Ethan had built a machine – the forerunner of the Boldklub machines – a machine that proved his genius. It was not just a masterpiece of science and engineering, it was a work of art. It was more than the sum of its parts, more than all it was designed to be. It reached out beyond the boundaries of physical laws into the unknown. Kaparis had been furious. How could he compete? First he had lost the love of his young life to Ethan, now he had lost the future. Why? It made no sense. Kaparis considered himself the supreme applied human intelligence. Perhaps you could be too perfect?

Or did Ethan Drake simply have all the luck? If he did, it ran out the day he attempted an unwise experiment in quantum teleportation. He had thrown himself into the subatomic magnetic vortex at the heart of his machine … and disappeared without a trace. Not an atom of him remained. No one understood why.

Kaparis had taunted Infinity Drake with the existence of this report when their paths had crossed in Shanghai, taunted him too that Ethan had chosen suicide over life with his wife and newborn child. The boy had been enraged; he was clearly obsessed with his father’s disappearance.

Here was the bait.

Now for the trap. If the boy was in the monastery, then …

Then out of nowhere it finally happened.

Luck.

As Kaparis turned his rational mind from nano-radar to all the practicalities and complexities of designing a trap, and a miniature jail, his eyes and his subconscious mind drifted across Ethan Drake’s original notes. The notes were rough – fast, shorthand equations, sketches like cartoons, thoughts caught and set down as they happened. Numbers and letters and symbols that danced down the page, all the way down to the final mysterious biro scribble: L = Place? Mysterious because, in conventional physics, L represented locomotion. And “Locomotion = Place?” was an impossible and perplexing statement. But because on this occasion he wasn’t concentrating, Kaparis suddenly saw with his subconscious what the scribble really was: Ethan Drake had written the L lopsided. Because the L was actually not an L at all. The two lines of the L were in fact the crudely drawn hands of a clock—

Time! In Ethan Drake’s hand, the cockeyed L was Time.

L = Place? became Time = Place?

Kaparis convulsed. His mind overloaded. Suddenly Ethan’s notes began to come to life, growing and taking shape in three dimensions and glorious Technicolor. The whole system sprang to life in his head, the genius of Ethan Drake, dancing for him, only him …

Time = Place? The fabulous conclusion changed everything.

It had been there all along. Yet only he, Kaparis, had finally seen it.

The Boldklub fractal equations that he had so long sought, for which he had spent years terrorising and blackmailing Al Allenby and the G&T, were now blindingly obvious.

And there was more, so much more … The implications …

It was as if he had climbed out of a propeller plane and strapped himself onto a rocket.

He was about to seize control of the future.

SIX
FEBRUARY 20 08:53 (GMT). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK

SPLASH!

Six foot six and sixteen stone of pure military meat hit the muddy water at the foot of the five-metre wall, sending it in all directions at once.

Unstoppable, Captain Kelly of the SAS (seconded to the G&T’s informal military detachment) hammered every muscle in his body towards the next obstacle on the course that ran through the woodland surrounding Hook Hall, the stately home and laboratory complex in Surrey that served as the HQ of the Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee.

Thirty metres of monkey walk lay ahead. Kelly grabbed the first bar and began to swing beneath the frame, enjoying the pain, loving it, the complications of the abortive Monte Carlo mission forgotten for a few blissful moments.

And they had to forget. All who had experienced life at nano-scale had found it difficult to adjust to life back at normal size, but more than anything, life without Finn …

THUD!

A four-inch, six-ounce throwing knife, travelling at 130mph, split the surface of the target post, transmitting the concentrated intent of the young woman who threw it from the far end of the Zen-white martial arts studio in the Old Manor.

Flight Lieutenant Delta Salazar bent her body over and took up her second position. When she wasn’t on fire, chasing down Tyros on motorbikes, she was ice. Lukewarm tears were just not her thing. Except when it came to her little sister. About Carla – still missing, possibly captured, possibly dead … she was a complete mess.

Hence the yogic knife-throwing routine she indulged in every morning to try and clear her mind.

THUD!

Crinkle.

Engineer Stubbs unwrapped a boiled sweet, popped it into his mouth and began to suck. It was a twenty-two-calorie Werther’s Original, containing soya lecithin and flavouring, and it was the first solid to pass his lips in forty-eight hours.

He was in his chaotic workshop in the old stables at the back of Hook Hall. He had not taken an active role in the Monte Carlo mission as he didn’t “travel well” and just the thought of going to France caused him an upset tummy.

Also, he knew it would all go wrong. It was his default position.

He was a man not of action but of make do and mend. In his time at nano-scale he had improvised a jet-powered jeep and a hydrogen balloon on the hoof, as well as having designed the Ugly Bug experimental nano-vehicle.

Fat lot of good it had done poor Infinity though, he thought …

VVRVRRVRRRRRRROOOOOM!

The De Tomaso Mangusta had been designed to take the breath away, a beautiful piece of jet-age engineering built for speed and named Mangusta, or mongoose, to imply it would eat its 1960s rival, the AC Cobra, for breakfast. With Dr Al Allenby’s customisations, it was capable of lunch and dinner too. Al didn’t just drive it round the runway at Hook Hall – he tried to plough it into the earth, so brutal was his cornering, so crude his acceleration. The thrill ride used to take his mind off things.

Used to.

He passed the Start/Finish line for the ninth time at 145mph – VVRVRRVRRRRRRROOOOOM! – and saw the chequered flag.

The signal that the Monte Carlo post-mortem meeting was about to begin.

With a sigh, Al slowed, left the track, and drove down through the complex to the hangar-like building known as the CFAC (Central Field Analysis Chamber). The huge doors parted as he approached and he drove straight into the vast concrete space that was dominated by a ring of particle accelerators capable of whipping up an electromagnetic vortex that could shrink all matter.

His Boldklub machine. It had been used first during Operation Scarlatti, when Finn had first got caught up in the nano-world and where, somewhere, he remained. Now it stood idle, waiting for his return.

Al crushed the lump that rose in his throat and spun the Mangusta to a handbrake halt at the centre of the array.

Commander James Clayton King, the Hook Hall supremo, on his way up the steel gantry steps to the control gallery, didn’t look down, break step or in any way acknowledge him. The impeccable figure who had coordinated saving the world any number of times hated showing off of any sort.

In moments, the G&T Committee were assembled: engineers, scientists, thinkers, soldiers. There were no formalities. Commander King reviewed the Monte Carlo débâcle using video to illustrate the handover, the roar of the motorbike, the pop of the empty cigar tube, the chase and kill. When the recording finished, he concluded: “We‘re not the first to leave the casino having incurred a loss. We knew this could happen, which is why we took precautions. Kaparis duped us. We duped him.”

Pictures flashed up of the dead rider and the girl who’d made the exchange.

“Tyros, of course. Note that they’ve taken to wearing coloured contact lenses to disguise the scarring left by the brain programming.”

The last known picture of Kaparis flashed up, able-bodied and evil, standing with a group of super-rich investors in Zurich, Switzerland, sometime in the late 1990s.

Al had to look away.

“As ever, he is playing games, displaying his power.”

“What goes on in that pretty little head of yours …?” Delta wondered aloud as she imagined three separate ways she’d like to snap that pretty little head off.

“We go again,” said Kelly. “We have no choice. He knows we have no choice. We wait for him to make contact again and we start again.”

“And we look ridiculous, again,” said Stubbs gloomily.

“Shut up, Stubbs,” said Kelly automatically.

“We are prepared for every eventuality,” said King. “Except one.”

“What?” said Al.

“He may be stringing us along because he doesn’t have Infinity or Carla.”

“They are NOT dead!” cried Delta, who never welcomed this suggestion. “We have no evidence that they’re dead. I was the last to see her and at that time she was alive!”

It was true that Delta had lost consciousness shortly after, but (attached to Yo-yo’s collar and still at nano-scale) she had been the last person to see her sister alive. Infinity Drake was presumed to be secreted somewhere about her person.

King waited a moment.

“We have no evidence, apart from a few doubtful videos, that Kaparis is holding either Infinity or your sister.”

Delta took comfort in this and bit her lip not to show it.

Al looked at the Zurich picture again and felt his stomach twist. Whenever he thought of Kaparis, his body tensed to take a punch. Exactly what Kaparis would have wanted, Al thought. Maybe that was the problem. Al looked round at the experts at the table or on screen, perhaps the finest minds ever assembled. He had led them to disaster. All his life he had been the smartest guy in the room, the brain. He had surfed his intellect and got as far as Boldklub and nearly bust open the laws of physics, but now it seemed he was all washed up.

“Stubbs is right …” said Al (but Stubbs took no pleasure in it). “We should never have fallen for Monte Carlo. That was ridiculous. We’ve become too predictable. Too logical. We’re scientists. We want the world to be rational, but we know that most of the time it isn’t. Life is random, absurd. That scares and confuses us. That’s why most of us are so bad at personal relationships!”

Al looked around. He was right. The room was full of blinking, uncomfortable nerds.

“If we can’t logically figure a way through this, then we’ve got to embrace the irrational, the unconscious. Look for answers there. We – no, I – I’ve got to stop digging the hole we’re in, I’ve got to step back and feel it, you know?”

“May I be excused?” requested Stubbs at this point.

“It’s time to get Zen, get patient,” Al continued. “It’s time to look beneath. This is a game of chess, not noughts and crosses.” He got up and paced. “We’ve got to think forwards, think backwards, think laterally; find the gap, the clue.” He slapped the table – “Come on! Let’s think outside the box! Let’s burn the damn box! You’re the brightest and the best. The only thing that trumps facts, that trumps time, that trumps the inevitable – that breaks E=MC² – is the HUMAN IMAGINATION!”

Al climbed on to the desk and threw himself into a headstand. His legs flailed and split, but he held it, just.

He regarded them all, upside down. They looked ridiculous.

“It seems,” sighed Stubbs, “we’re back to square one.”

FEBRUARY 20 10:12 (GMT). Blue Valley Mall, Woking, Surrey, UK

There were too many variables, thought Li Jun.

There were six small children and approximately six thousand polyurethane spheres in the ball pool, featuring nine different colours with a predominance of red, blue, green and yellow. Four per cent of the spheres were misshapen or dented. Every movement caused a chaotic chain reaction through the surrounding balls that was predictable only to a low standard deviation. Too many differential calculations were required.

But what was causing Li Jun’s real distress was that the activity of the six small children in the ball pool had no point or goal. She looked out of the ball pool to where Grandmother Allenby stood with the other adults.

In an exaggerated mime, Grandma clutched her diaphragm and said, “Breathe, dear.”

Li Jun took a deep breath. She should be able to cope. She had a formidable mind. She had been Kaparis’s chief technician, after all—

“INCOMING!” Hudson cried, sprinting towards the edge of the pool while holding on to his glasses.

Grandma watched the speeding dork bellyflop in, causing an explosion of colour.

“Hudson! Really!”

“Come on, Li Jun! Get your shoulders under!” said Hudson, and he began to splash her with balls, an activity enthusiastically taken up by the little ones, so that Li Jun soon stood, uncomprehending, in the centre of a mad fountain.

“Is she … quite normal?” asked one of the other parents, looking at the slim teenage girl who seemed to be part Asian, part alien.

“She’s from another culture,” explained Grandma, biting back the urge to call Hudson and the toddlers off.

Li Jun was, in fact – thanks to Grandma – the world’s only liberated Tyro. After they had been rescued in the South China Sea, she had managed to provide vital information about Kaparis and his Tyro programme, but more lay buried in her mind and scans proved her brain had been deliberately manipulated. How could they unlock the memories within it? Grandma had a simple strategy: Li Jun had to be normalised. So Grandma had taken her home to clean sheets, fresh flowers, and fun. Finn’s best friend, Hudson, was brought in to act as a surrogate sibling and she had begun “play therapy”.

Li Jun bloomed, even if she hadn’t opened up completely yet. But most of all, it was good for Grandma, who liked Li Jun. She kept her busy and she kept her from thinking about Finn.

“INTO THE CASTLE!” cried Hudson, leading a Pied Piper charge on the coloured rope ramparts of the Maze Adventure. Li Jun stared after him like a frightened cat.

She is a jigsaw, thought Grandma with a sigh. Like any teenager. Except that with most young teenagers the edge pieces and corners were mostly in place, even some of the sky. In Li Jun’s case, the bits that were in place were few and far between and the pieces looked as if they all came from different sets …

“HELP!”

Hudson, far too big for the soft play apparatus, had managed to get himself stuck.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake …” said Grandma, and she started to wade through the coloured ball pool to rescue him.

It was while Hudson was being released – by Grandma, a four-year-old boy called Donald and a member of the security detail that followed them everywhere – that the first breakthrough occurred.

Li Jun had stepped out of the ball pool to wave goodbye to the other children. As their parents led them back through the shopping mall, the children played a game, which Li Jun instantly saw the logic of. The floor was made up of a series of tiles; the object of the game was never to step on the lines between them.

Li Jun looked down and centred her feet in the tile squares … and a thread tugged in her mind … She saw mountains … felt cold …

She moved forward, step by step, avoiding the lines. And with every step, stone slabs started to appear in her mind’s eye and fit together to form … another floor, in another place …

“Li Jun? What is it, dear?” asked Grandma as she reappeared with Hudson.

“I don’t know, Grandmother,” she whispered. Then she asked in a trance, “Hudson? Do you have your tablet?”

Hudson took his iPad out of his pack and gave it to her.

Li Jun opened the Minecraft app. She took a step. Remembered a stone. Laid it in a blank landscape. Then another. Then another …

Grandma and Hudson watched.

“‘Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’,” said Grandma.

“What?” said Hudson.

“Call Al.”

SEVEN
FEBRUARY 20 12:09 (GMT+3). Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki

Hoooowowwwoowoowowl!

Yo-yo wept as he was led through the back of the kitchens by a Carrier. He noticed nothing, cared for nothing. He was miserable. Why hadn’t Finn and the good girl tried to stop this madness? He had suffered greatly in the Carrier bathhouse as the water poured down on him and he was washed by a dozen hands. Indignity had been piled upon indignity as the Carriers then used shears to give his fur a skintight cut, then stained him dark brown with some dye – he was light brown, British tea-coloured to his bones! It was a betrayal of his roots! He was inconsolable. Not that anyone cared …

Then he smelt something, something strong and getting stronger. Instinct took hold, his ears pricked up. He heard a Yip!-Yip!-Rff!-Ackck!-Ouugh!-Puh!-Frrt!

His tail began to wag at three hundred beats per second.

They approached a door, a door into a tiny courtyard, a forsaken pit down which light seldom shone. The Carrier kicked the door open – YAP!

Dogs, dogs, dogs! Leaping and spinning – Yip!-Yip!-Rff!-Ackck!-Ouugh!-Puh!-Frrt!

The ratters. The finest line-up of unloved mongrels ever assembled to hunt down rodents. Fantastically unattractive, they bore the names the cooks had blessed them with – Needy, Weedy, Livid, Fluey, Bulky, Sulky, and – lopsided on her three good legs – Barrel-Shaped-Fart-Wagon.

With unknowable joy, Yo-yo threw himself into the fray.

Finn woke from a deep sleep and tried to remember who, where and why he was.

Carla was awake beneath him. Rising groggily, urged on by Olga—

“Come!”

“I’m coming …”

Carla staggered out of their cell and down a stone passage after Olga as it all came back to Finn.

Oh yeah: mad castle, middle of nowhere, get the hell out.

They arrived at a bathhouse where Olga tugged at Carla’s filthy clothes. “Come! Lava!” She went to open a sluice in the next room.

“You better wait here,” said Carla. “I think they’re going to clean me up.” She stuck a hand into her hair so Finn could jump on to one of her massive fingers. He clung on and she deposited him on a windowsill. Then she left and Finn found himself alone.

He listened to the stillness, felt strange. He’d lived in Carla’s hair for so long now that they’d become like Siamese twins. Through cracked and clouded glass, there was a stunning view down a snow-clad valley and a sheer drop to the valley floor. What a strange, ancient and beautiful place to be, Finn thought, a million miles from schoolwork and screens. After all they’d been through, what would ever feel real again?

Carla returned with a cup of soapy water scooped from her bath and set it on the windowsill.

“You’re not going to believe how good this feels,” she said, and dashed back out.

Finn climbed onto the window latch so he was above the steaming pool. He hauled his filthy clothes off and threw them down, then took a deep breath – SPLASH!

His body cut through the hot water. It was glorious, a well of warmth and loveliness, sunlight gilding the bubbles. He swam and splashed and the enamelled grime of the previous months seemed to lift in layers from his skin until he felt purely himself again.

He barely had time to wring out his clothes when Carla returned, transformed. The malnourished, filthy “thing” was now a glowing teenage girl. Finn was alarmed to see her great mat of mad hair now clean and cut back almost as short as Olga’s.

“Do I look like the others?” Carla asked.

Finn took her in. With her big eyes and starved frame, she looked like some French film star. He should tell her, but he was a boy and luckily – “Come!” – Olga reappeared.

Carla picked him up and transferred him to … clean hair! What had been a dense jungle was now a bouncy castle, flea-less and fine.

One new world followed another as they arrived back in the library. It was a hive of activity by day, the Primo and two half-blind assistants responding to bells and speaking tubes, and snapping out orders to Carrier kids who came and went.

Olga and Carla were ordered straight to the laundry and from there hit the monastery in full swing, pushing a cart around and filling it with discarded linen as they went.

First they passed through the kitchens, picking up filthy aprons and caps, the place a buzz of noise, steam, running Carriers and swearing cooks.

The Forum came next, teeming with Tyros and tutors as they changed lessons, traversing the skewed walkways that connected every part of the building.

They collected table linen from a dining hall, then made their way up the walkways, collecting uniforms from Siguri stations and white robes from the tutors’ quarters.

The whole place was a contradiction, thought Finn, a mix of medieval and modern, ancient stone and steel, oil lamps and AK47s.

They passed classrooms and a vast gymnasium, on their way up to the dormitories—

“Tyros!” shouted Finn, as a crowd of vile teenagers, steaming and dripping wet snow from some exercise on the slopes, burst into the Forum and began to pound their way up towards them. They were all ages and sizes and they piled past them into the dorms, shoving and snarling at each other, beating the warmth back into their flesh, many with swollen and bloodshot eyes. Olga and Carla pushed round their cart and picked up discarded fatigues as the Tyros stripped down, shameless, and struggled into red uniforms that made them look like inmates of some asylum.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Finn said as Carla worked the room.

“We can’t just run, if we get caught we kill Carriers,” she muttered back.

“Maybe the Primo’s bluffing? Maybe he’s on some kind of power kick?” said Finn.

“He’s proud, that’s all,” said Carla. “We have to find another way. We need help.”

“Santiago!” suggested Finn. “Maybe he can find Yo-yo’s collar!”

“Out on the mountain? That would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And he’d never go without the Primo’s say-so,” said Carla, dodging Tyros as they strode back out of the dorms.

Finn took in the reds of their eyes.

“Then we have to find the infirmary, check out these NRP machines,” said Finn.

When they did finally arrive at the infirmary, they wished they hadn’t.

A dozen Tyros were laid out on gurneys, fanned out in a circle like the petals of a flower around a large console in the centre. Wires led from the console to the heads of each Tyro. And out of each swollen eye, of each Tyro, stuck a probe that had been driven straight through the eye and deep into the brain.

The sight made Carla want to retch.

“NRP …” said Finn.

Two medics attended the stricken Tyros and made adjustments at the console (Finn could see the screen as plain as day – this place had technology, this place had electricity!) and a snake of cables led down from the console directly through an opening in the floor.

As they rolled the empty laundry cart back out, Carla said, “It will never be spring in this place.”

“There were computers back there,” said Finn. “Electricity fed from the Caverns, like the Primo said. We have to get down there. There must be something we can use to sound the alarm.”

“But I’m a Carrier, and Carriers are banned,” said Carla.

“Who said anything about Carriers?”

EIGHT
FEBRUARY 20 15:10 (GMT). Grandma’s house, Buckinghamshire, UK

The two young teenagers convulsed, dancing, as the digital beat drove home the vocal loop for the umpteenth time.

“Love dance. Love dance. Love dance dance dance dance – robot …”

Li Jun’s sharp black hair flicked and flew, her body throwing the weirdest shapes, while Hudson headbanged off the beat, holding onto his glasses.

Grandma sat and knitted and resisted the urge to yell, “Turn the bloody thing down!”

FEBRUARY 20 15:11 (GMT). Hook Hall, Surrey, UK

Via CCTV, Al and the Scarlatti crew and his technical team watched them dance.

“That girl can kick it,” observed Delta.

“Truly,” said Al.

The dance-offs with Hudson seemed to free Li Jun’s mind and send her back to the model-making refreshed. To help, Al had put together a playlist of dad-dance classics, though tragically she preferred what Al called “Hudson crap”.

Love dance robot climaxed and Hudson and Li Jun collapsed, giggling, onto the sofas.

“Time for a cup of tea, I think,” said Grandma through the kitchen hatch.

“Mum, don’t move! Let it happen naturally,” insisted Al over the comms.

“But it’s teatime?”

“Hey! No structure, no timetable.” He was convinced his new, non-rational “intuitive” theory explained Li Jun’s breakthrough. “Instinct over intellect, remember? Let’s just set the parameters and let her play.”

“They shouldn’t be stuck in front of screens all day – it’s unhealthy,” Grandma complained, ignoring him to go and put the kettle on and look for Welsh cakes.

In the living room, Li Jun turned back to her task. One wall was now full of screens linked to Hook Hall. For the last four hours, she had worked away at the Minecraft model, just as she used to sit working away for Kaparis. Hudson’s role was to lie on the sofa pretending to be in an iron lung.

The results, being pored over by Al and the technicians, were fractured 3D chunks of some extraordinary building – staircases, passages, a hall, fireplaces, a battlement – populated by hundreds of stick figures. But what did it all add up to? A prison? A castle? Architectural databases had thrown up thousands of possible matches, occupied and derelict, across the world. Way down on the list at number 2,453 was the Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki.

“Let’s ask her to work on the surrounding landscape again,” said Commander King, convinced that the floating structures would make more sense in context.

“She just does clouds,” said Stubbs.

“Let her follow her own path,” said Al firmly.

Li Jun began to work again on what they thought of as the “courtyard” structure, adding detail to the walls and the beginning of a door.

“Maybe she’s just playing Minecraft …” grumbled Kelly.

“Come on, Li Jun!” said Delta, as if she could snap her out of it by force of will.

Commander King looked again at the structures and began to wonder.

“What troubles me is it’s too big … Look at how many figures she’s drawn. Imagine having to support all those people. Every one of them is a security risk. Haven’t they got homes to go to, bars to drink in, phone calls to make …?”

Al stared at the figures too, at the stone walls, at the fireplaces and candlesticks … Then he looked around the control gallery, at its lighting and stacks of computers and glittering screens.

“She hasn’t drawn a single screen, a single phone, a single piece of hardware. There are no lights even …” said Al, thinking hard.

“So?” said Kelly.

“So they’re off-grid!” said Al.

“Off-grid?” said Delta.

“I mean, living slow – no communications, no Internet, no conventional power. Goodbye modernity – hello total isolation.”

“Total security,” added Commander King.

“Rank all the possible locations by geographical isolation,” said Al to one of the technicians.

Moments later, on the new list, the Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki had shot up – to number seventeen.

“What else have we got?” said Al, still manically pacing. “Come on, Li Jun!”

Grandma handed Li Jun a cup of tea and a Welsh cake, looking over the girl’s shoulder at the cloudscapes. “Looks heavenly, dear.”

Heaven …

Something fired in Li Jun’s brain. She thought of stained glass. She thought of a face.

She dived forward and immediately started to draw. Grandma, Al and everyone at Hook Hall watched intently as a face began to appear … A male face, a beard. It wasn’t a very good face, but then Li Jun added another detail that gave it away—

A halo …

Al turned to the technicians and shouted, “Cross-reference with religious buildings! Or a building with some kind of church or chapel in it!”

The technicians entered the filter and a new ranking list was drawn up, by age, materials, isolation and religious use. At number nine on the list was the Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki.

Then Li Jun added colour to the halo – gold … and a great fissure opened up in her mind. She said the word “Abbot” aloud and immediately started to draw an Orthodox Christian cross …

Now only one name remained on the list.

NINE

Hearing his name called and smelling Finn, Yo-yo ducked out of the rough-and-tumble in the ratters’ yard and ran up to the kitchens. He found the good girl among a forest of legs – Yap!

“Good boy! Come!” said Carla.

She took Yo-yo into the service passage, ran her fingers through her hair and deposited Finn onto Yo-yo’s head.

Finn disappeared into his fur and made his way through to a position just behind Yo-yo’s left ear. His old pilot position. Back home, he’d been able to steer Yo-yo wherever he wanted to go. But now? After so long?

There was only one way to find out.

“Up, Yo-yo! Up, boy!”

YAP!

Finn felt the whole happy mountain of Yo-yo erupt beneath him as he jumped clean into the air.

“Good boy! Through the door!”

“Don’t do anything stupid!” Carla warned, as Yo-yo pushed through the swing doors back into the kitchen.

“What’s over there, what’s on the other side?” Finn demanded, and Yo-yo yapped and ran joyously through the legs, dodging dropped pans and puddles of soup. Finn clung on happily, riding a galloping dinosaur once again, all the old feelings coming back as they broke through the far doors to hit the Forum.

Directly opposite, Finn could see the arched entrance to the catacombs, which Olga had told them led eventually down to the Caverns.

“Through there, Yo-yo,” ordered Finn, and the dog bounded ahead. “Come-by!” he yelled to steer the bounding dog the right way. No one noticed because no one cared about a dog. The ratters were even more invisible than the Carriers, given freedom to roam and licence to kill.

A little beyond the archway was the catacombs door.

“What’s in there?” Finn demanded.

He felt Yo-yo rise as he stood on his back legs and pawed at the handle till it turned, the same as he’d done at Grandma’s house all his doggy life.

The door swung open – and they were greeted by skulls, set into the walls like bricks, the remains of thousands of ancient monks. Yo-yo whimpered.

“It’s all right, boy. Go on.”

They trotted down the skull-studded passageway, claws skittering across the flagstones. Finn heard a distant hum – mechanical? – coming from somewhere beyond, and footsteps too, ahead of them. There!

“Easy, Yo-yo,” Finn urged as they closed on the figure hurrying ahead of them. Finn remembered her as the one who’d struck Carla the blow – the Abbot’s secretary. Could she be on her way to the Caverns? Where else would she be going?

“Follow the lady. Easy. Nice and slow,” ordered Finn.

Yo-yo obligingly padded after her as they wound through the catacombs, keeping at a steady distance. Eventually they emerged at the top of a steep stone staircase.

The secretary was disappearing through an archway far below and the hum was getting louder.

“Down you go, boy.”

When they reached the bottom, Finn saw the archway was the entrance to a tunnel into the bedrock. Three burly Siguri stood guard.

“Lie down!” ordered Finn, so that Yo-yo would remain hidden from view. How were they supposed to get through? Wouldn’t the Siguri just kick back a dog?

With a squeak, a solution presented itself. A few feet ahead, a brown rat emerged from a drain cover. Immediately, Yo-yo’s body twitched.

“That’s right, boy! Chase the rat! Fast, boy!”

YAP!

“Hey!” one of the Siguri called in surprise, as a dog exploded out of the darkness. He raised his gun – but just as quickly one of his comrades stayed his hand.

“Ratter! Let him do his job!”

All three stepped aside as the rat sped forth, with Yo-yo snapping at its tail – YAP YAP YAP!

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