The Midnight Mercenary (8 page)

Lady Naomi stopped walking and drummed her fingers against her thigh. She padded from one glass room to the next, peering inside. Amelia followed behind, still dragging Grawk in his containment field, and Charlie by her side. So they were all together when Lady Naomi found Len trapped inside a pulsating bubble behind one of the pillars.

He was hunched into a ball, his antennae retracted, and the space inside the bubble was gradually filling up with foaming green mucus as he tried desperately to protect himself.

When Lady Naomi spoke, her voice jarred after so much silence. ‘It's a trap, isn't it?'

There was no noise anywhere. No movement. No sign or clue to suggest why Lady Naomi would say such a thing.

Amelia looked around the chamber wildly. Nothing! But Len was still bubbling away with that vicious, frightened slime …

‘What –?' Charlie started.

‘Run,' said Lady Naomi very quietly.

Before Amelia could even register the word, a jet of black tar hit Lady Naomi in the face and knocked her backward. As she hit the ground, there was another flash of movement – but so fast, Amelia couldn't tell from what direction – and Lady Naomi began slowly drifting upwards, her entire body enclosed in a transparent containment sphere, just like Grawk's and Len's.

Charlie darted forward to grab the guiding string dangling from the bottom of the bubble. Half a second later, he was floating helplessly next to Lady Naomi in a bubble of his own. He screamed in rage, but Amelia heard only the faintest muffled noise.

Amelia stood frozen, her mind blank with terror, as Grawk leapt inside his bubble. Amelia could hear only the dim echo of his bark. He glared at something behind her, his ears flat against his head. On pure instinct, she dived in the opposite direction, finding cover behind one of the great stone pillars.

Panting, she looked back. The place she had been the instant before was now occupied by a huge, empty bubble.

What do I do?
she screamed silently.

She couldn't see Lady Naomi or Charlie from here, not without sticking her head out from behind the pillar. Looking one way, she could see the very edge of Len's containment field. The other way, nothing. She looked up.

Her heart almost stopped beating. Tucked behind one of the sloping arches in the ceiling was another containment field. It bobbed like a balloon, and inside was –

Mum.
Amelia wanted to cry, but pinched herself hard on the leg instead.
Think!

She scanned the rest of the ceiling. It was a mass of shadows and hiding places, each archway in the vault creating another deep hollow. Each one, for all she knew, housed another containment field, keeping another person prisoner. Maybe her dad was up there by now …

Then, like something oily and impossible from a nightmare, she saw a body slip out of the shadows and slither weightlessly across the ceiling. Long black legs swivelled in their hips at angles that should have dislocated them. A tail moved sinuously in time with a long neck. A narrow head kept its eyes fixed continuously on Amelia.

Krskn,
Amelia thought.

He seemed to
flow
toward her, as though gravity couldn't touch him. She watched him walk lazily down a pillar, the claws of his back legs gripping to the stone, his body upright as though standing on the flat ground. He reached the floor, and walked over to Amelia without so much as blinking.

She stared at his lizard-like body. The black rippling skin wasn't scaly, but matte like velvet, and very soft-looking.
Like a salamander.
His eyes were deep red, wide open, and snake-ish. From nose to tail, he was long and elegant, but he had broad shoulders, a deep chest, and both his hands and feet were clawed. He opened his mouth and a tongue flickered out between sharp, white teeth.

He's gorgeous,
Amelia thought. Terrifying, vicious and evil, obviously, but who knew he would also be so … magnificent?

Krskn looked down at her cringing at the foot of the pillar, and sneered, ‘So good of you to come to me, Amelia. All of you! I was almost ready to leave with just the human female and this one repulsive Lellum.' He touched a button on the back of his wrist cuff, and all the containment fields wafted gently down to float in a line between him and Amelia. Even Grawk's string pulled out of her hand and obediently drifted over to Krskn. Five shimmering bubbles in a row.

Krskn smirked, took a small silver tube from his belt and toyed with it as he spoke. ‘Now look at all my prizes! The Lellum specimen I was contracted to acquire, but also an infant grawk – honestly, I'm doing you a favour taking him off your hands, I really am. You have no idea what you'd be dealing with when he's full-grown – '

He walked along the row and peered at Charlie and Mum. ‘Two humans – the small one might be sold as a pet once I remove his tongue; the adult, though … is this your mother, Amelia? I thought so. She's very clever, isn't she? She caught me going down one of the other access tunnels and followed me nearly the whole way here before I realised. Marvellous. In fact, a pity she wasn't properly armed to deal with my containment gun – I might have actually had a decent fight on my hands.' He sighed and smiled at Amelia. ‘Oh, don't worry – I would have
won
…'

Amelia shifted into a crouch. When Krskn's blow finally landed, she wanted to be ready. She half-wished he'd hurry up and end it, but he was having too much fun gloating.

‘And you …' Krskn reached Lady Naomi's bubble and tapped it curiously. ‘What might you be, my dear?'

Lady Naomi refused to look at him. The tar covered her mouth and one eye, but she didn't try to shift it. She balanced on the curved floor of her containment field with perfect composure and gazed at Amelia.

Krskn flipped the silver tube in his hand and laughed. ‘Do you know, I was almost going to let you go, Amelia. Leave you here to wonder for the rest of your life what I did with your family. But,' he grinned charmingly, ‘then I remembered I'd left good old Dad in the shed! He looks the type whose heart would break over losing all of you, doesn't he? So …' He leaned down, stretched out his neck, put his mouth to Amelia's ear and murmured, ‘I'm going to trap you and sell you as the pathetic, hairless Earth monkey you really are.'

She felt hypnotised. Even though he was threatening her and her family in the cruellest and most offensive way he could, the closer he got to her, the more dazed and helpless she felt. Once, she had been made dizzy with joy by some intoxicating alien eggs; this was like that, only worse. There was no pleasure in being mesmerised by Krskn, only the ghastly sense of being frozen to the spot. He was pointing that silver tube at her, and as soon as he fired, it would all be over, and there was nothing she could do. She closed her eyes and waited for the end.

From somewhere, a vaguely familiar voice said, ‘That's enough, Krskn.'

Krskn kept the containment tube pointed at Amelia, but his head whipped around to glare toward the far end of the chamber, where the doorway opened onto an unlit tunnel.

Amelia's mind raced. Was it possible that these tunnels led all the way out to the gateway itself? That would make sense – an aquatic alien visitor could hardly come up Tom's staircase and walk overland to the hotel. But whenever the gateway opened, there was always sound or a smell or a gust of air or a flash of light or
something
– and Amelia had neither heard nor felt anything to signal the arrival of a new connection. If the gateway were there, it must be closed.

And yet, out of the darkness stepped a tall, thin, frail-looking figure in a long black coat.

‘Leaf Man,' Amelia gasped.

Krskn glanced her way, and snorted with contempt. ‘
Leaf Man
, is it now? How delightful. Well, come on in, sir. Join our little party.'

Amelia was baffled. The last time she'd seen Leaf Man, he was walking away from the total annihilation of the cyber-rats in their kitchen.
Someone
had set off a self-destruct program that blew up their central control system, and no-one had ever found out who that someone was.

Tom trusted Leaf Man, but Amelia had serious doubts. Perhaps Leaf Man had merely been watching the Brin-Hask battle, the same as Amelia, Charlie and Lady Naomi. Perhaps he had killed the rats to help Amelia's parents avoid trouble with Gateway Control. Or perhaps Leaf Man had been the one to engineer the rats in the first place. Perhaps he was the spy – the very person who had sold Krskn the information about the trapdoor in the annexe. For all Amelia knew, Leaf Man was the one who had contracted Krskn to come here and steal Lellum kids.

She looked over at Lady Naomi, wishing she could tell Amelia what to believe.

Amelia thought harder. She remembered the first time she and Charlie had met Leaf Man – he'd told her he was ‘nobody from nowhere'. At the time, she'd thought it was a kind of annoying modesty, or a joke, but what if it had been the truth? What had Tom said about the dangers of the Gateway? That if you got sucked into the space
between
wormholes, you'd be lost forever in the Nowhere.

She stared at Leaf Man. If he came from the Nowhere, if it were his natural home, then he could probably come and go through the gateway without using wormholes at all. In fact, that's probably what he'd just done right now, slipping out of the void without a sound. And if he could do that, then perhaps that made him …

‘The Keeper!' Amelia said loudly.

Krskn snarled in disgust, and faster than Amelia could follow, he flicked the containment tube away from Amelia and shot at Leaf Man.

Leaf Man sprang up, leaping half the length of the chamber, and landed lightly in front of Krskn. ‘I want the prisoners released.'

Krskn spat. ‘And I want to leave here with seven of you for the Guild – imagine how much I'll get when I add a human girl and a failed Keeper to my auction list.'

He pounced at Leaf Man, but Leaf Man jumped again, this time straight up. He sailed up into the shadows of the ceiling and must have clung there, because he didn't come down again. Amelia peered up after him, but saw nothing. Krskn ran up the nearest pillar and sped across the underside of the vault in pursuit.

For a second Amelia was too shocked to move, but then she gathered up all five strings and dragged the containment bubbles over to the tunnel leading to the hotel. She'd just made it to the archway when a flurry of noise and movement behind made her turn. She saw a tangle of black and white fall to the ground. Krskn and Leaf Man landed with a thud on the stone floor, a small silver object rolling away from them.

Without thinking, Amelia sprinted forward and grabbed it. Krskn's containment tube! Had luck finally begun to turn her way? Straightening up, she had her answer.

No.

Where Krskn and Leaf Man had fallen from the roof, where she might have hoped to see Krskn knocked out cold, if not dead from the impact, she saw instead two identical figures pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and look at her with identical expressions on their narrow white faces.

‘Two Leaf Men,' she murmured.

‘No,' said the Leaf Man on her right. ‘Only one of us is a Keeper. The other is Krskn – the one who has imprisoned your entire family.'

‘You keep forgetting about James!' Amelia snapped. She wasn't sure why that was the point that made her lose her temper, but now she had the weapon, she wasn't going to be pushed around anymore.

If only she knew how to undo the containment fields, she could get Len to blast them both with mucus and break their holo-emitters. It would be unfair on the real Leaf Man to get burnt, but at least it would be proof.

Seeing as she couldn't do that … ‘I'm going to shoot you both. Then I can get Tom, and let him work out who's who.'

The Leaf Man on the left shook his head. ‘You wouldn't have time. If you shot me first, Krskn there would attack you before you could do so much as blink.'

‘Very convincing!' said the Leaf Man on the right. ‘You sound so sincere – yes, you're just trying to help, aren't you? Getting the girl to shoot
me
first when we both know that
you're
Krskn!'