Authors: Rob Boffard
It’s then that I notice how terrified Garner looks, how worn. But she nods again, gives me a final squeeze, and vanishes into the crowd.
Carver leans in. “What was that all about?” he shouts, but before I can answer, I hear the announcer ask Darnell to respond to the charges.
Darnell stands
proud, his grin wider than ever, staring around the galleries expectantly. One of the stompers, his stinger up, steps forward and holds one of the speaker devices to Darnell’s mouth. He keeps it a fair distance away, as if he’s worried Darnell might lunge forwards and bite him.
Looking directly at the council, Darnell says, very clearly, “Guilty as charged.”
The roar from the crowd is the loudest
yet, a shocked eruption of sound. Amira places her hands over her ears; mine are already gently aching from the noise, and I follow suit.
At that moment, with a sickening click, every fluorescent light in the room dies, plunging us into the darkness.
There’s a split second of stunned silence, then the shouting starts again. This time, the noise is fearful, with screams starting to slip into
the noise, like daggers through a ribcage. Behind me, I can feel the crowd on the catwalk spinning in place, hands frantically reaching out to try and grab friends, family.
The noise builds to a crescendo, and with a huge flare of light from below, a massive explosion rocks the gallery.
Prakesh’s footsteps reverberate on the metal as he walks across the labs. There are a few other techs tending to the trees; one of them is suspended from a pulley system, legs akimbo over a branch. He glances down as Prakesh walks underneath him, his face expressionless.
Prakesh ignores him. Truth be told, he hasn’t had a lot of time to talk to the other techs. Not since Oren Darnell
got caught. All those people hunting for the top spot has left a lot of work unfinished, a lot of soil untended. Prakesh doesn’t mind. The extra work means he doesn’t have to think. He can take Riley and Mr Darnell and just ignore them for a while, letting his hands get good and filthy.
He needs a fresh pH monitor – the one he and Suki were using is dead, its batteries drained. The Air Lab and
the Food Lab share a single tool-storage unit, which is just inside the Food Lab. Prakesh slips through the door connecting the two. The air changes. It’s darker in here, more humid, and he can feel the heat baking off the greenhouses. The bass rumble from the buzz box rattles the back of his skull.
Prakesh stops. He takes a deep breath, inhaling wet air, picking up a dozen different scents.
He can smell strawberries, and pumpkins, and the earthy musk of the potatoes in the far corner, hidden under dark covers. He can smell the refrigerant from the air conditioning, sharp and unpleasant.
And there’s something else. Something he can’t place.
He shakes his head, and keeps walking.
The tool storage is just ahead, a long, thin structure lit from within by glaring lights. It looks as
if the building is on fire, like it’s containing something white hot. Prakesh pays it no attention, striding up to the counter. He’ll talk to Deakin, the guy in charge of storage. Mention the weird smell. Odds are, it’s just a new fertiliser someone’s using.
But Deakin isn’t at the desk. Prakesh leans over it, twisting his head to take in the stores. There’s no one there – just the tools, hanging
from hooks and balanced precariously on rusted shelves. The seed bank is at the back, a huge walk-in freezer, its door shut tight and sealed with a keypad.
“Deakin?” Prakesh says. Then, louder: “You there?”
No answer. Just the insects in the buzz box, humming away.
Prakesh decides to vault the counter and pick out what he needs. He can see a tab screen off to one side, which means he can leave
Deakin a note. But just as he puts his hands on the countertop, he registers movement behind him.
He whirls, thinking only of Darnell, of how close he was before, but there’s no one there.
He takes another deep breath, turns back, and that’s when he catches sight of Deakin.
The store controller is standing by one of the greenhouses, his back to Prakesh. He’s looking up at the ceiling, his arms
hanging by his sides. He appears to be taking deep breaths, his shoulders rising and falling.
“Deak,” says Prakesh, not understanding the prickles of fear
scurrying across his shoulder blades and along the back of his neck. “Need to take out a pH monitor, man. Could you—”
“I never got to see her,” Deakin says.
Prakesh freezes. There is something in Deak’s voice he doesn’t like at all. He takes
a step closer.
Deak turns. He’s an older man, over fifty, but in the blazing light from the stores he looks thirty years younger. His eyes are wet with tears.
And in that instant, Prakesh realises what the strange smell is. It’s the burned-plastic stench of ammonia. Specifically, ammonium nitrate, a compound created from fertiliser.
Deakin’s shirt is open. Underneath it, he’s wearing a vest
of some kind, a mess of plastic and metal and cotton pouches. His fingers are wrapped around a thin cord, leading right to the centre of his chest.
“I never got to see the Earth,” Deakin says, and pulls the cord.
The shockwave rips through the catwalk, and I feel the metal buckle as the rivets struggle to hold it in place. The world is filled with a horrible orange light. My hands over my ears saved me from the worst of it, but it’s still loud enough to shake my bones.
Someone collides with me, and I’m thrown to the right. I land on someone else, with only a moment to gasp for breath before another
body collapses right on top of me. My hands are wrenched from my ears, and the noise swells back into a dying bass note and the terrified roar of the crowd. Underneath us, the catwalk gives another sickening lurch. The overhead lights flash back on. The people around me are on the floor, bodies piling on top of each other, thrashing, yelling, scrambling for grip.
Whoever landed on top of me is
heavy, his elbow pushing painfully into my chest. Over my shoulder, I see Amira grab the railing and leap into space.
For a moment, I’m convinced she’s been thrown to her death by the twisting catwalk. I push the man off me with strength
I didn’t know I had, and scramble to the railing. Then I see her hands gripped onto it, and I realise what both she and Carver have done. To escape the crowd,
they flipped themselves onto the outside edge of the railing. Bending their legs and arms, they flexed with the catwalk and held on, away from the crush of bodies. If I hadn’t been hit, I’d have done the same thing.
Amira grabs my hand, and starts to pull herself over. As she does so, I see what’s below us, and for a moment, I just stop breathing.
The bomb detonated right in the middle of the
crowd. The black, burned ring around the centre of the blast is scattered with blood and torn clothing. Darnell is gone, the barricades knocked over, the stompers scattered and shouting. Okwembu and the rest of the council are nowhere to be seen. The Level 1 catwalk has been sheared in half, with the broken edges twisted upwards. The Level 2 catwalk just below us is intact, but only just: the metal
plates are bulging in the middle, as if a giant hand had pushed them from beneath. People lie sprawled along it; knocked senseless by the blast.
Far below, a man tries to crawl away, pulling himself along the ground with one arm. His other is gone at the shoulder, leaving nothing more than a nub of bone surrounded by pulpy wetness. Dark blood stains his side. As I watch, he reaches out his remaining
arm, as if hunting for something he can no longer see. Then he falls still. Around him lie charred bodies. Some are still smoking.
The scene before me seems too vivid. I can feel it fixing in my mind, its awful roots digging deep and refusing to let go.
I shut my eyes tight and pull, hauling Amira over the railing.
Carver flips himself over too, landing squarely on someone’s back. He hops off,
a horrified expression on his face, and turns to us. His mouth is moving, but I can’t make out the words,
and it’s only then that I notice the siren blaring from the comms. I’m shaking, and I reach up to block my ears again, but then the siren cuts off abruptly. It’s replaced by a voice, female, automated. And far too calm.
“Warning. Fire detected in Apogee sector. Fire detected in Gardens sector.
Please move calmly to your nearest evacuation point. Warning …”
And as the message repeats itself, Amira meets my eye, and the same horrifying realisation seems to dawn.
Prakesh. The Air Lab
.
He always hated the trials. He’s never been to one, always refused, said they were barbaric. He’ll still be there, in the Air Lab. And if someone let off a bomb there …
The catwalk under us groans. The
left side sags, then jerks downwards, sending shockwaves up through our feet. The shockwave from the bomb has weakened it – all that old metal, some of it a hundred years old. Around us, more panic starts to spread through the crowd: their senses heightened by fear and adrenaline, they begin to push, crushing up against the entrances on either side, a seething mass of flesh.
The man who fell
on me barrels past, his face twisted in a rictus of terror. The catwalk gives another terrible noise, and this time I swear I hear the sound of shearing metal. The panic rises, boils over: the crowd is screaming now, forcing up against each other, people clawing others out of the way, desperate to escape. Below us, the floor has completely emptied, the crowd streaming into the corridors surrounding
the gallery.
Free
.
Darnell’s body is stained with sweat and smoke. His ears are ringing, and he managed to twist his ankle when the explosion knocked him off his feet. It’s throbbing painfully, but he doesn’t care. He’s free.
He doesn’t know how they got out of the gallery. He doesn’t even know where they are. He’s been following the guard, ducking under pipes and threading through deserted rooms
and clambering across the monorail tracks. There’s a part of him that doesn’t want to trust the guard, that doesn’t want to trust anyone. But he keeps thinking back to the bomb, how the explosion tore the crowd apart like their bodies were made of paper. He keeps thinking back to how the guard worked quickly, undoing his restraints, pulling him along. No, he can trust his sleepers.
They stop
near a ganglia of gurgling pipes. The only light comes from two slits in the wall, no bigger than a man’s finger. They must be near one of the corridors; Darnell can hear thundering feet, the sweet sound of panicked shouting.
He collapses against the wall, amazed at how thirsty he is. The guard stays on his feet. He digs behind one of the pipes, and tosses Darnell a canteen. Darnell flips the
top off, drinking greedily.
“We did it, Sir,” says the guard. Darnell looks at him. He’s younger than he thought he was, with a mess of dirty blond hair and a face flushed with excitement. Briefly, Darnell wonders what happened in his past. Why he’s so eager. He’s not someone Darnell recruited – he’s just another node on the network, another flare point on the fuse.
Darnell gets to his feet.
“I need to get back to my office. There’s a—”
“Way ahead of you, Sir.”
The guard produces a tab screen from inside his jacket, and hands it over. Darnell has to hide his surprise; it’s the one that he had specially modified. The stubby antenna on the side gives him wireless access to Outer Earth’s comms system – with it, he can broadcast at any time. But there’s no way the guard could have known
about it.
Darnell glances at the man, then back to the screen. “You went into my office?”
“Yeah,” the guard says. “I was one of the stompers who got told to search it. Thought a tab screen might come in handy. Got this for you, too.” He passes Darnell his knife – the thick-handled wedge of steel that Darnell had previously asked the poor tech to sharpen up for him.
“Nice blade,” the guard says.
Darnell stares at him. “You’ve been busy.”
The guard returns his stare. “I’m just trying to help, Sir. We’re doing a good thing. Without human beings, the biosphere can recover. You’re saving the world, and … and I’m behind you, Sir, you know what I mean? Hundred per cent.”
Darnell ignores the rhetoric. But as the man speaks, he glances
towards the corridor, to the slits that lead to the outside
world. He doesn’t see Darnell reach up, doesn’t see the hand until it’s wrapped around his head.
Darnell slams the guard’s head into the wall, again, again. With each hit, the guard’s struggles grow weaker, and the red patch on the wall grows bigger and bigger. Blood splatters Darnell’s thin prison jumpsuit.
It’s over inside ten seconds.
Darnell lets go. He waits a few moments, looking for
any sign of life. Nothing.
There, he thinks. Now the only one who knows where he is, is him.
Working quickly, he strips the guard of his hard body armour, then his shirt, jacket and pants. The shirt is long-sleeved, made of a stretchy, artificial fabric, slightly loose on the guard’s body but fitting tightly across Darnell’s chest and shoulders. The jacket is too small for him, unable to zip
closed, and the pants don’t quite reach his ankles, but they’ll be warmer than a prison jumpsuit. He’ll need that where he’s going. He tucks the knife in his waistband, behind his back.
He looks down at the tab screen. In a moment, he’ll turn it on, accessing the comms. And then he can talk to everyone on Outer Earth, and tell them what’s coming next.
Amira grabs me. She’s outwardly calm, but her eyes burn with adrenaline. She jerks her head in the direction of the railing, and I realise what she wants us to do. She, Carver and I grab the railing, and in one synchronised movement, hurl ourselves up and over.
For a moment, I flashback to the job where I transported the eye to Darnell, when I threw myself off the Level 5 catwalk to
escape the Lieren, and time seemed to stop. It seems like years ago. Decades. This time, there’s no silence, no peaceful floating sensation. Just the air rushing in my ears and the screams from the catwalk above.