Alfred Furnace.
‘What are you?’ I mouthed silently. The sculpture had been carved with such painstaking detail that it was impossible to believe it was just stone. I expected the face to swivel down towards me, the mouth to open. And I wanted it to. Because maybe that’s where the truth would be. Maybe that’s where I’d find my cure. I don’t know if I honestly believed that. I guess I did. Desperate men will believe anything.
And I was right. There were answers here. Just not in the way I’d been expecting.
‘That was a long time ago.’
The voice hadn’t come from the sculpture, but from the blood-drenched shadows to my right. The shock was so great that I actually collapsed, dropping like a brick onto my backside. I reached out with my good hand, grabbing the tree, using it to pull myself to my feet.
A shape on the far side of the room, one that had been hidden by another tree, was moving. I peered into the gloom, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, but the light was too thick, too heavy.
‘A long, long time ago,’ the voice went on, a familiar dry whisper that carried far more power than it had any right to. It was followed by a noise that was half growl, half purr. The shape seemed to curl upwards, long, jagged limbs sprouting from it.
It was the creature from my vision, I knew it. The beast that howled from the tower. It was him.
‘Furnace,’ I said, my voice unsteady but fierce. This was it, I thought, feeling the nectar begin to cloud my thoughts, knowing that this time I’d have to give myself over to it and damn the consequences.
There was a dull hiss of laughter, then two claps, and with a loud snap and an electrical whine the lights flickered on. I shielded my eyes from the glare, giving them a second to adjust before squinting at the scene ahead. The first thing I noticed was that the creature there was nothing like the one in my vision.
It was a berserker, bigger than any I’d ever seen. It stood three, maybe four metres tall, its body almost the same colour as steel, ridged and rutted like something that had been put through a shredder and then stitched back together. An enormous hand rested on the tree beside it, bird-like talons embedded in the solid stone. Its head was too big for its bladed shoulders, so heavy that it didn’t seem able to hold it upright. And the face that sat in the middle of that oversized knuckle of broken bone was a young child’s, nectar streaming from its lips and splashing on the floor. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t Furnace.
And neither was the man who stood in front of it, whose eyes were unfathomable pits that seemed to suck the light from around him, pulling everything into the black hole of his heart. It wasn’t Furnace at all.
It was the warden.
New Breed
‘You,’ I spat, fury flaring at the fact that it was the warden who stood before me and not his master.
I scanned the room, looking for Alfred Furnace, but aside from the berserker the warden was the only living thing here. He was wearing the same pristine suit as always, his shoes polished, his hair immaculately brushed. His face was still crinkled leather tight over the angular skull beneath, like a skeleton wearing a Halloween mask. And when I tried to look him in the eye I found that I couldn’t.
‘Where is he?’ I demanded, although the huge space seemed to swallow my voice. ‘Where’s Furnace?’
The warden’s thin, wet lips pulled back over the tombstone teeth beneath and he uttered a sadistic hiss of laughter. The noise slithered into my ears, burrowing into my thoughts, and all of a sudden I found myself back inside the prison, back inside Furnace Penitentiary. The memories hit me like a punch to the gut – the first time I had seen the warden, that same shark’s smile as he told us that to disobey his rules would make our lives a living hell; glaring down at us through the screen above the elevator, a constant threat of pain and punishment; his demonic face grinning as he watched the wheezers drag Donovan away.
And down in the tunnels beneath the cells, when he had tried to turn me into a blacksuit – the way he had almost become my new father, a patriarch of immense power and strength who had promised me the world.
I shook my head to try and clear the memories, feeling the room spin. I had fought the warden and I had defeated him. He was nothing, just an empty shell of what he had been in the prison, right? I hadn’t expected to face him again, not really. And I’d figured that even if our paths crossed then I’d crush him the same way I had before. But now that he stood before me, radiating that same undeniable aura of cold cruelty, his eyes black pools of hatred that swirled like vortexes in his head, I wasn’t so sure. This was a man whose ability to butcher was as natural and as effortless as his ability to breathe.
And the worst thing was he could sense my growing panic.
He laughed, taking a step forward. The berserker started to follow him but jarred to a halt. I noticed that its hands and feet were bound with massive manacles. It let loose another guttural snarl which tailed up at the end into a whine, like a leashed dog calling for its owner. But its childlike face was staring down at those bonds with a heartbreakingly human expression of sadness and confusion.
‘You will never meet Furnace,’ the warden answered, advancing at a leisurely prowl. ‘Why would a man as great as he deign to meet a cowardly, half-turned failure like you? He is nowhere near this place, he hasn’t been for many years. No, he led you here for one reason, so that I could end your miserable life once and for all.’
I felt my heart drum, the nectar powering up inside me. The warden glanced at the stone tree I was trying not to cower against, and for a second the expression on his face morphed from anger to awe.
‘Did you recognise him, the boy in the carving?’ the warden said, nodding at the sculpture by my side. ‘That was where it all began, so many years ago. A boy left to die in an orchard. A boy who didn’t die. A boy who became a man called Alfred Furnace.’
‘Tell me where he is,’ I said, the nectar turning my words into the low, dangerous rumble of an approaching storm. The warden stopped walking, holding his ground midway between me and the berserker. I couldn’t read his expression but there was emotion there, visible in the way he ground his teeth, in the way his tendons stretched like wire beneath the skin of his neck.
‘I was just a boy, too, when Dr Furnace saved me,’ the warden went on. ‘When he pulled me from the mud and the blood of battle. But he saw something in me. He saw greatness. That is why he made me his general. Everything that we have done we have done together. I needed him, yes, but he needed me too. He still needs me. He will always need me.’
The warden was spitting now. That mask of flesh was slipping, and I could see the rage beneath, red hot and lethal. He stretched out a long, bony finger, jabbing it towards me.
‘We were going to declare this war together. I was going to be his right-hand man, we were going to trample this world as one. We were going to be gods.’
‘So what changed?’ I said.
The warden took another jarring step forward, his anger growing by the second.
‘You! You ruined it!’ he almost screamed, that finger still aimed at my heart, not quite close enough to grab. ‘I offered you salvation, but you decided to stab me in the back in a pathetic attempt at freedom. Now he thinks I’m a failure. You know what he told me? That a man who can’t keep his house in order doesn’t deserve a roof over his head. A man who can’t keep his house in order? I watched over that prison for years. I designed that place, I had it built. It was my project. Without it, Furnace wouldn’t even have his army.’
‘That’s not what I heard,’ I replied, remembering what the blacksuit had told us. ‘I heard you got stuck down there with the rest of us because he knew you were useless. I heard he gave you the prison because he wanted to get rid of you. Up here, that’s where the real army was made. Down in Furnace,’ I looked at myself, my lopsided body, ‘you couldn’t even make me a blacksuit. You couldn’t even do that right.’
The warden’s jaw dropped, flecks of white foam resting o
n his lips. The darkness around his eyes seemed to dissipate for a moment, draining away like dirty bathwater, and those two weak, blue eyes just blinked at me, utterly flabbergasted. I don’t know how old the warden was, how many years the nectar had kept him alive, but right then he looked like a child, like the boy pulled from the dirt.
‘How dare you,’ he said eventually. His voice was quiet now, little more than a tremor. ‘You have no idea who I am, and what I can do.’
‘I know exactly who you are,’ I replied, as calmly as I was able. ‘You’re a boy who made the mistake of thinking he was a man, a bully stupid enough to believe he was in charge, a coward whose army has deserted him. You’re nothing, Cross. You’re nobody. Alfred Furnace isn’t here to help you; he’s forgotten all about you.’ I lifted my arm, the blade of my fingers pointing right at him. ‘And you’re going to die, right now.’
I lashed out, punching the tree beside me with as much power as I was able. My fingers pierced the stone with a crack that made my ears ring, the trunk exploding into dust and debris. With a groan the upper half toppled to the floor, heavy enough to blast a crater. The warden must have seen the nectar at work inside me, the murder in my eyes, because he staggered back, groping for the chains that held the berserker.
I didn’t care. The nectar was singing now, its power coursing through me, undeniable. Let the warden unleash his pet. I’d killed berserkers before. I would deal with this one, then I’d turn my wrath on him.
But the warden didn’t unfasten the creature’s chains. Instead he pulled a knife from his suit jacket, a cruel, curved blade that glinted in the crimson light from the window.
‘You were bitten, weren’t you,’ he said as he toyed with the knife, twisting it between his fingers. ‘That’s why you’re changing. One of the new breed got you.’
‘New breed?’ I said. I felt the rush of nectar inside me begin to ebb, numbed by confusion. The warden smiled at me, his eyes once again shrouded, unreadable.
‘Oh, you think you know so much, but you’re lost just like the rest of them. You’re right, Furnace was building an army outside the prison. Here, and elsewhere too. He was working on a new nectar, an improved design.’ I thought of the nectar I’d seen since escaping, the blood-red galaxies that spiralled within it and the way it could turn a human into a rat – or worse – in a matter of minutes. ‘He was using it to create the next generation of soldiers.’
He tapped the knife against the arm of the berserker, its elbow at the same level as the warden’s head. It made a clink, clink sound, like he had knocked the blade against a suit of armour.
‘They are bigger, and stronger, than the ones we already had. But that’s not what makes them special. What sets this generation apart is the fact that they spawn their own children. The new nectar, all it needs is to find its way inside a host and it will begin to work. No surgery, no endless hours of brainwashing, just a small bite and the army grows. You were bitten, Sawyer. But you weren’t chosen.’
‘Chosen?’ I repeated, feeling like an idiot but desperate to make any sense of the truth.
‘The berserker only started your transition, it only set the ball rolling. It didn’t fill you with nectar the way they are supposed to, otherwise you would already be one of them. No, it didn’t choose you, and I wonder why.’
I remembered the berserker that had feasted on the inmate, back in the underground, nectar gushing into the boy’s wound, filling him with poison. It had bitten me, too, but it hadn’t injected me with its filth, only a mouthful of tainted saliva. Yet I’d drunk a whole load of nectar afterwards, hadn’t I, from the dead, beetle-black berserker?
‘First generation,’ the warden explained, plucking my thoughts out of thin air. ‘Those berserkers were the last of the old guard, already redundant. Their veins beat with the original nectar, the same that flows in yours. Mere water compared with Dr Furnace’s new miracle.’ He stared up at the creature beside him, his face full of awe. ‘Everybody who is chosen joins the ranks of the new breed, a generation of soldiers that will grow and grow and grow until all are either members or lost.’
‘A plague,’ I said, remembering Zee’s word. The warden cocked his head as if in thought.
‘An interesting concept,’ he said, ‘but quite wrong. This isn’t disease. It’s evolution.’
‘The authorities will contain it,’ I spat back, feeling the grip of the nectar loosen even more, prised away by uncertainty. ‘It won’t spread past the city.’
The warden’s grin twisted even more tightly towards the edges of his face.
‘City? What city?’ he said. ‘You only have to look out of the window to see how far the devastation has spread, and in a matter of hours. The world is crumbling, Sawyer. Nobody but us can put the pieces back together. And when we do there will be one Fatherland, and nothing but strength. And I will stand there as his right-hand man. Nobody else. You hear me? Nobody else.’
In a flash of pure understanding I realised why the warden was afraid. He had made a mistake, he had angered Alfred Furnace by allowing the prison break. Now he was in danger of losing his role as a god of the new world, he was in danger of being replaced at his master’s right hand.
And with that knowledge came another revelation, one infinitely terrifying:
The warden believed he was in danger of being replaced by me.
It was insane, so much so that I spat out a startled grunt of laughter, but it was true. How could it not be? That’s why I had been guided to the tower by Furnace’s visions, why the blacksuits below hadn’t stopped me, why the warden was facing me almost entirely alone, stripped of his army and his dogs. Because this was his only chance to prove that he could get his house back in order, to show Furnace that he could be trusted. He had to kill me or lose everything.
This knowledge drove me towards him, but the warden held the knife out defensively. I stopped. I don’t know why – instinct, I suppose. I’d been in prison for so long that the sight of a shank was enough to send me running. It was a survival mechanism, hard-wired into me. Maybe if I hadn’t flinched, maybe if I’d thrown myself on him, things would have worked out differently. That’s the thing about life, I guess. You never know.
‘The new nectar, it’s clever,’ the warden said, reaching down and popping the clasp of the manacles which held the berserker’s left claw. The chains fell to the floor and the creature bellowed with relief. It lashed out with its free hand, catching the nearest tree and sending a stone branch flying. The missile struck a window, cracking the thick glass and letting in a shard of brilliant golden light. This far above street level the wind was fierce, and the room was suddenly alive with its howl, as if there was an army of demons outside tearing the world to pieces.
I guess that wasn’t too far from the truth.
‘Those red flecks add almost what you’d call intelligence,’ the warden went on. ‘The nectar is not … alive, not in the sense that you or I are. But it is aware. It senses everything it needs to know about the host; it uses every resource available to it to ease the transformation. It really is quite remarkable.’
I took another step towards the warden but the berserker moved between us, those childlike eyes never leaving mine. It flexed its claws into fists, barbed talons glinting. The warden had walked to the other side of it, releasing the final manacle. I waited for the creature to charge but it stood there obediently, waiting for the order.
An order that never came.
‘If you are human then the new nectar will change you.’ The warden held up the knife, appeared to be studying his reflection in the polished steel. ‘You become feral, intent on nothing but destruction. But when you’ve already got the old nectar inside you. That’s when it gets really interesting.’ He peered over the blade at me. ‘Take you, for instance. You had old nectar in your system from the prison, and you’re changing. Slowly, yes, but inevitably. But your transformation was in its infancy. The bite you received, it carried a trace of new nectar into your system, li
ke the vanguard of an invading force. It began to prepare your cells, to change you. With more of the new nectar the change would have been faster, and much more …’ he paused, his eyes seeming to glaze over as if imagining something wondrous. ‘Much more dramatic. Yes, adding new nectar to the old is where the true power of Furnace’s creation becomes apparent. And I can tell you this for a fact, Sawyer. There is nobody in the world, Dr Furnace excluded, who has devoured more of the original nectar than me. I have consumed it since I was a boy.’
‘But you’re—’ I started.
‘Still human?’ he interrupted, his grin stretching even wider. ‘That is because I was weaned onto it in childhood. Dr Furnace raised me like a son, not as one of his soldiers, one of his pets. I never had the surgery. I never needed it. The surgery is only a necessity when the transformation is required quickly. But with me, my adoptive father had years, decades. I may look human, but I am not.’ I thought about all the times I’d tried to look the warden in the eyes, and all the times my gaze had been pushed away. What he was saying didn’t make any sense, but I knew it was true. ‘Nothing but nectar runs through me now – the original nectar – and it has been waiting for this day. All it needs is a dose of Dr Furnace’s new weapon.’
The warden reached up, grabbing the berserker’s chin and pulling its head towards him. It looked almost like a lover’s embrace, as if the warden was about to kiss it. Instead, he guided the beast’s drooling mouth towards his own neck.
With a shock, I realised what he was going to do, and what would happen when he did. This time the rush of nectar flooded my mind as if the very walls of my sanity had been breached, the poison driven there by my pounding heart, and the knowledge that I was in way over my head.