‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Parry said.
‘What are you doing here?’ Danforth asked Captain Franz suspiciously as the New Germanian appeared by his side, out of breath and looking very nervous. Although he’d have rather been anywhere else but down in the pedestrian subway, Danforth had remained there in case there was anything more he could do to help. Although he couldn’t actually see for himself how events were unfolding outside the cathedral, he was picking up most of what he needed to know on the main channel of the headset. But nobody had warned him that Captain Franz was joining him.
The New Germanian had caught his breath and was about to answer when Danforth was buzzed by Parry. He listened to what he was being told for a moment, then turned to the New Germanian.
‘This is going to be fun,’ he whispered, his expression far from enthusiastic. ‘Because I’m going out there now.’ Danforth pointed at the throng of Armagi they could see at the top of the steps. ‘I’d be very grateful if you’d hang on to these for me, although I don’t know if I’ll be coming back.’ He handed the man his shortwave radio and another device he’d been using.
He readied himself, then climbed the steps, at the last moment putting on a turn of speed. As he emerged from the subway, he was shouting, ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ as if he was trying to get through a crowd in Oxford Street rather than a scrum of fearsome creatures.
Elliott and Hermione were still locked together, holding each other at bay with their insect limbs.
‘Let him through,’ Elliott shouted, as soon as she heard Danforth.
But Danforth didn’t want to come through and was looking around himself warily. One of the Armagi he’d barged out of the way opened its mouthparts and rattled them together, its inhuman eyes staring at him. ‘Oh, hello,’ Danforth said to it, taking a rapid step back. Then he quickly clambered on top of the railings by the entrance to the subway, so he could see over the heads of all the other Armagi.
‘Um … sorry to butt in,’ he said apologetically to Elliott. ‘But Parry wants you to know we’ve only got a couple of minutes before the first missile hits us here.’
As Danforth ducked from view, Will moaned loudly. He was still lying on the bonnet of the Bentley, but was obviously in the most terrible pain as he gripped his stomach and tried to roll over.
Hermione laughed. ‘My little darlings are feeding, your boyfriend’s dying, and even if you can do something about all that, there’s no way you can stop us spreading. I’ve sent the Armagi out, and it seems you’re about to be vaporised by your American friends.’ She laughed again, high and clear. ‘There’ll be no one left to recall the Armagi swarm. You’re too late.’
‘You’re wrong about that,’ Elliott said.
Still holding Hermione off, Elliott slipped out the sceptre from the small of her back that she’d been holding in readiness there.
‘What are you doing?’ Hermione asked.
Gripping the sceptre with both hands, Elliott didn’t answer as, just as she’d done before, she twisted it halfway along the shaft.
The blue light flickered, then turned red. But that wasn’t all. As Elliott held it out, the sceptre began a transformation, rapidly increasing in length. And at one end, three prongs appeared, all in the same smooth grey material.
‘What the hell is that?’ Hermione demanded.
‘This,’ Elliott said, holding the trident up, ‘puts a stop to your madness.’
‘Elliott, if you’re going to do something, you’ve got to do it now!’ Parry’s voice boomed from the rooftop through a loudhailer.
‘Got you!’ she shouted back.
Still holding Hermione off with her insect limbs, Elliott raised the trident.
‘Time we all went home,’ she said.
She brought the trident down, striking the bottom of the shaft hard on the pavement.
Red light flooded her vision. It came from inside the cathedral, where the blue hemisphere had changed colour, then burst out through the ruined roof, until the whole sky turned blood red. For several seconds everything was suffused with a rosy glow, as if the sunset of all sunsets had come, but long before the end of day.
Then, as if an earthquake had struck, the ground began to shake. Whether they were on the rooftops or on the ground, everyone around the cathedral felt it.
The tremor subsided as quickly as it had begun.
There was a beat when everyone breathed a sigh of relief that it was over, and that they hadn’t been hurt.
Then came a sound as if a million tons of fish had hit the ground, and the Armagi – every single one of them – disintegrated.
They didn’t even have time to turn back into human form. The whole place was awash with oily pieces of their transparent bodies as they slopped across the road and the paved forecourt of the cathedral.
‘Parry, what the bejesus was that?’ Bob’s anxious voice came over the radio. ‘We saw that red light all the way out here. And we also experienced some sort of seismic event. Tell me your people weren’t responsible for that.’
‘Frankly, Bob, I haven’t the faintest idea what just happened,’ Parry replied. ‘But look at the Armagi. I reckon it’s time to call off that missile strike now.’
Bob didn’t answer.
Captain Franz poked his head out from entrance of the subway.
Right away Rebecca Two spotted her New Germanian officer and called to him. He began to run frantically towards her, slipping and falling over several times in the sea of oily Armagi body parts.
‘Oh, great, that’s all I need,’ Hermione muttered, but she was more intent on Elliott’s trident.
Danforth suddenly appeared beside them, his pistol drawn. ‘I’ll keep an eye on Big Bug for you,’ he offered to Elliott.
‘Thanks,’ the girl said, releasing the Styx woman, then stretching her new insect limbs in the air. ‘I was beginning to get cramp.’
‘What is that?’ Hermione asked Elliott, still staring at the trident. ‘Some kind of weapon?’
Elliott held it up. ‘Is it beginning to come back now? Are you beginning to remember? Because it all started … and ended with this.’ She held up the trident to consider it for a moment, then shook her head. ‘We were stranded up here on the surface when this was taken from us. Who knows how it happened – maybe the humans rebelled against us or something,’ she said with a shrug. ‘And without us there to control it, our ship never continued on its journey. Over the billions of years we … we Styx … simply forgot who we were.’
‘I don’t feel …’ Hermione said, staggering slightly, but Elliott had left her, rushing over to Will’s side.
Jiggs had already crept out from where he’d been hiding and was tending to Will. He’d torn the boy’s shirt open and was examining his abdomen and chest. Then, diving into his medic’s bag, he quickly administered a phial of morphine to him. ‘That’ll help with the pain,’ he said.
‘How is he?’ Elliott asked.
Jiggs shrugged. ‘We need to open him up and get the Styx larvae out.’ He looked around at what was left of the Armagi. ‘We can’t take the risk that they’re not still alive, and even if they are dead we need to find out what damage they’ve already done.’
‘I need a moment with him,’ Elliott said.
‘I …’ Jiggs began, unwilling to leave the boy.
‘Just give me a moment,’ Elliott insisted.
There was something about her that made Jiggs obey without question.
Elliott took hold of Will, shaking him by the shoulders. ‘Will, you have to wake up.’
He coughed hard, blood and froth from his lungs speckling the sheer black of the Bentley’s bonnet.
‘Come on, Will, please. I haven’t got long,’ she begged, shaking him again.
Then his eyes flicked open. ‘God, it hurts,’ he groaned, his face tensing with the pain.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘Elliott, it’s you,’ he said, as he realised who had hold of him. ‘What happened?’ As he mana
ged to focus on her, he caught sight of one of her insect legs as it twitched over her shoulder. ‘That’s new,’ he said, then laughed as the morphine began to take effect. ‘Hey, are you in fancy dress?’
And although Will’s sight was rather blurred and he wasn’t seeing clearly, his question wasn’t that outlandish.
If Dr Burrows had been there, he too would have had something to say about Elliott’s appearance: the trident, the crimson glow it was emitting, and the insect limb poised behind her that Will had mistaken for a tail.
If all that hadn’t been symbolic enough, there was also the fact that the Styx had their origins at the centre of the Earth, where a small but fiery sun never stopped burning. Taken all together, it would more than likely have prompted Dr Burrows to spout forth about the devil meme in the human subconscious.
But Dr Burrows wasn’t there.
And his son was hardly in a condition to think rationally.
‘Is it Halloween?’ Will asked, chuckling outrageously as the morphine did its stuff.
‘No, it’s not Halloween,’ Elliott answered patiently. ‘And you have to listen to me. I want you to remember what I’m about to tell you. Concentrate, Will, because I don’t have much time.’
Parry finished speaking to Bob, then turned to Eddie. ‘They’ve put a hold on the strike for the moment. All the images from the drones are indicating that the Armagi swarm is over.’ Parry briefed everyone over the radio, and there were cheers and shouts from the rooftops all around the place. But as Parry came off the radio, he was staring at Eddie. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t know,’ Eddie replied. He had his hand raised in front of him, his fingers splayed.
As Parry watched, it was as if Eddie was blurred, vibrating, like a piece of film when it’s out of the sprocket but still running through a projector. And on the roof around Parry the same thing was happening to Eddie’s men.
And to Rebecca Two.
And to Hermione.
And to Elliott.
But Elliott had been prepared for it.
Glancing up, she saw Stephanie approaching from the pedestrian subway, Martha’s knife still in her hand.
‘I think someone’s coming to see you,’ she said to Will, but not vindictively.
‘No, stay. Please,’ Will said weakly, trying to hold on to Elliott.
‘I can’t. Anyway, you wouldn’t want me like this,’ Elliott said, her insect limbs twitching behind her.
‘I don’t care. I …’ Will trailed off, barely conscious as his hands slipped from Elliott.
‘Goodbye, Will,’ she said softly to him, leaning over him to kiss him on the forehead. Then she turned from the Bentley and took a few steps across the pavement. She was peering up at the top of the building where her father and Parry were.
‘Dad!’ she shouted at the top of her voice.
‘Here,’ Danforth said, offering her his headset.
She took it from him and quickly put it on.
‘Dad, can you hear me?’ she asked.
‘Elliott,’ he acknowledged, waving from the edge of the roof.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was all or nothing,’ she said, staring up at him. ‘If I hadn’t activated the recall, it would have all been over anyway, not just for us, but for the rest of the planet too.’ She shook her head, her expression sad. ‘There wasn’t anything else I could do.’
‘Well, you did it, Elliott. You stopped it,’ Eddie said, brimming with pride for his daughter. There was a pause before he asked, ‘Recall?’
Elliott never replied.
She, her father, and every Styx on the surface of the Earth began to blur out in a haze of red.
They were simply vanishing into thin air.
‘Rebecca!’ Captain Franz shouted desperately from the back of the Bentley. Sensing that something was happening to her, the Styx twin had stepped from the car, then promptly begun to disappear. The New Germanian threw himself at where Rebecca Two had been, trying to clutch at her as the red blur faded away. But for all the good it did him, he might as well have been trying to catch smoke. As there was nothing to stop him, he fell on his face, sliding in the oily mess left by the Armagi, and then he just lay there, sobbing uncontrollably.
And other than his sobs, there was nothing but a stunned silence all around the cathedral.
Chapter Twenty
As Will came to, he found he was lying in bed. A real bed, with a mattress and a pillow, and the feel of starched sheets against his skin. And there was pain, lots of it, mostly in his stomach and chest.
He let out a groan, not because of how he felt, but because he needed to know that he was really awake. Then he groaned again, louder this time, and managed to open his eyes. He had a glimpse of sunlight through a window, and at the same time became aware of someone sitting beside him in a chair. Whoever it was, they were holding his hand. They were speaking to him, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying.
‘Elliott?’ he asked, trying to see.
And then he thought that he could make out the shadowy outline of a second person behind the first. ‘Chester … is that you, Chester?’
‘It’s just me, Steph,’ came the reply, and after a moment, ‘and …. no, Chester isn’t here.’
It took Will a few seconds to process this. Then he managed to open his eyes again and focus on her. Her red hair was clean and perfect, and she was smiling. She radiated beauty, just like she had when he’d first met her on Parry’s estate. It felt to Will as though he’d gone back in time.
‘Oh, hi,’ he said, pretending to cough so he had an excuse to pull his hand away from her. ‘Where’s Elliott?’ he asked croakily. His mouth was chronically dry, so he began to reach towards the jug and plastic cup on the bedside cabinet.
‘Water?’ she anticipated. ‘Let me get you some. You must be, like, so thirsty.’
He tried to sit up to take the glass from her, but the stabbing pain in his abdomen put a stop to that.
‘No,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t try to move.’
With Stephanie’s assistance, Will drank the water greedily. ‘Where am I?’ he asked between mouthfuls.
‘Hospital. They’ve got it working again. They’ve even got the electricity back on now, but they hadn’t when they did your operation here.’
‘Operation?’ he repeated, the water going down the wrong way and making him cough, for real this time. ‘Why, what did they do to me?’
Then it started to come back to him. He remembered the Armagi and Hermione, and then – but only very vaguely – what happened on the bonnet of the black Bentley.
‘Look, I should let Parry know you’re awake. All right?’ Stephanie said. She seemed in a hurry to leave the room.
It wasn’t Parry that appeared a few moments later, but someone else. Will was rather startled as he hadn’t heard anyone come in, and all of a sudden there was a man standing at the end of the bed.
‘How are you doing, Will?’ Jiggs asked.
‘Who are you? Will asked, narrowing his eyes at the unfamiliar figure, with his unkempt beard and grubby-looking fatigues. ‘You’re not a doctor, are you? Where’s Parry?’
‘He’ll be here soon. And no, I’m not a doctor,’ Jiggs laughed. ‘I forget that you and I haven’t really met before, not formally. I’m Jiggs. You might have seen me before, but it would have been just for a moment … on the edge of the pore in the inner world.’
Will didn’t answer.
‘It’s funny – I know you so well, but you don’t know me. I came on that mission to seal the inner world off, with you and Drake and Sweeney and the rest of the team, and the time I’m talking about is when I ambushed a pair of Limiters,’ Jiggs said, trying to help Will out. ‘Don’t you remember at all? I took out the first Limiter with a …’ Jiggs made a slashing motion across his throat, ‘and carried the second one over into the pore with me.’
Will was squinting at the rather nondescript man with his darting, alert eyes. ‘Oh, yes, Jiggs. Of course
. You’re the invisible man,’ he said. ‘Hello.’
They shook hands, which was a little peculiar after all that they’d been through at the same time, but not quite together.
‘I’ve spoken to Parry and he’s on his way,’ Jiggs said. ‘He’s got his work cut out for him right now. You know he’s filling in as Prime Minister in the emergency government until they can get things back on track.’
Will was staring through the window, feeling somewhat detached from everything. ‘More of it is coming back to me … more of what happened at the end,’ he said quietly. ‘She’s gone, hasn’t she?’
‘Yes, Elliott, and all the Styx – they sort of disappeared,’ Jiggs confirmed.
‘She told me she was going away. And, unless I’ve dreamt it, she had …’ Will wasn’t sure how to put it, so he tried to indicate a pair of insect legs by pointing behind his head.
‘She did. When she was in the tank with Drake and me, she complained about pain in her neck. But it never occurred to me that …’ Jiggs trailed off.
‘And Drake?’ Will asked all of a sudden. ‘I heard his voice after that Styx woman dragged me out of the car, and then …. were there shots?’
Jiggs nodded. ‘That was it for Drakey, I’m sorry to say. But he’d been so badly irradiated when the bomb in the pore went off, he didn’t have much time left anyway.’
Shaking his head slowly, Will didn’t speak for a second. ‘And what about Chester?’ he asked, very reluctantly, because he thought he already knew the answer. Otherwise his friend would have been there at his bedside too.
Jiggs shifted uneasily as he answered. ‘No, he didn’t make it either. I’m afraid he was set on a collision course with Danforth. You see, the death of Chester’s parents was never intended and very unfortunate. But Danforth was no traitor. Far from it. In his out-there, superclever-supercrazy mind, he’d figured we were on a hiding to nothing, and had cooked up a plan so he could infiltrate the Styx. And it worked, up to a point.’
Will was silent for a moment. ‘So did Danforth kill him?’
‘No, surprisingly enough, it was Martha.’