City of the Falling Sky (14 page)

It didn’t take long for them to reach the
Endrin compound, and neither man said a word. Seckry was led
through the front gates and into the main building.

Everything inside was just as white as the
outside. It was like a hospital, but quieter. Seckry hated the
atmosphere of hospitals but this was even worse.

Seckry seemed to follow the men around
corridor after corridor, and for most of the time, Seckry kept his
head down. But at some point he thought he heard a muffled scream
behind a door, and his eyes darted in its direction. The face of
the door was printed with a symbol of some sort, a few DNA strands
encased in a circle with graphical wings. Underneath it were the
words
Divinita Project
.

Before Seckry had time to study it more, he
was dragged into a room in which someone was waiting for him. A
blank table was situated in the middle. On one side of it sat a
woman, with tied back blonde hair and a clipboard, and on the other
side was an empty chair.

“
Mr Sevenstars,” the woman
said with velvety smoothness. “Please, have a seat.”

The two men left the room at that point,
leaving Seckry alone with her.

“
Would you like a glass of
water?” she asked.

“
No, thank you,” Seckry
said. He was going to say as little as possible.

There was a squeaking of stretched plastic as
the woman leaned back in her chair.

“
My name’s Jenniver Layne,”
she said. “I’m not here to interrogate you. I just want to ask a
few simple questions.”

Seckry remained sitting absolutely still, his
mouth pursed into a tight clench.

“
You can relax,” she said
comfortingly. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

Seckry forced himself to breathe a little
more.

Jenniver scribbled something on her clipboard
and looked Seckry in the eyes.

“
It must have been hard
relocating to the city. It’s mind blowing here isn’t
it?”

So they’d done their research on him. Seckry
wondered what other information was being stored about his personal
life. He decided not to comment.

“
The reason we’ve brought
you here today, Seckry, is that we know you gained unauthorised
access to our facility and we need to know what happened while you
were here. Did somebody ask you to do it?”

Seckry’s stomach was doing back flips, but he
had to keep focused and he had to keep to his story.

“
No,” he said simply, his
eyes fixed on the table.

“
Seckry,” Jenniver said
calmly. “The area that we saw you enter is a very dangerous place
to be without the right protective clothing. The worms that are
being held there are very important to us and if they were to be
removed from the soil it could have very serious consequences. It’s
very important that the worms don’t fall into the wrong
hands.”

Seckry swallowed hard.

“
Did you take any of the
worms, Seckry?”

“
I don’t know what you’re
talking about,” Seckry said unconvincingly.

Jenniver sat, looking at her papers for a
while. She placed the clipboard on the table and rested her chin on
her closed hands.

Seckry caught a glance at the papers. He
could just about make out the text, reading upside down.

Fatal breach . . . Divinita Project . . .

“
What’s the Divinita
Project?” Seckry asked.

Jenniver’s eyes darted to the papers. She
picked up the clipboard and slid it into a drawer on her side of
the table.

“
I’m afraid that’s one
question I cannot answer for you,” she said.

She was silent for a long while.

“
Seckry, we cannot tell from
the security footage if you took any worms from the soil or not, as
there was some malfunction on the tape. We only have footage of you
entering through the drainage system, and then you seem to spot
something before our tape begins to go very distorted and becomes
undecipherable.”

Seckry’s pulse was racing. If what Jenniver
was saying was true, that meant that they hadn’t seen him escape
with the girl. Jenniver hadn’t mentioned the girl at all yet. Was
it possible that Endrin had no idea she had been there?

“
We don’t know what happened
to the tape, but we have specialists working to repair the footage.
It won’t be long before we see the rest of it, so Seckry, if
there’s anything that you’d like to tell me about why you were
here, who sent you, or what you did here, then please do so
now.”

Seckry swallowed and tried to avoid
Jenniver’s gaze. He said nothing.

“
Okay,” Jenniver said
finally. “Here’s what’s going to happen, Seckry. We’re going to let
you go now. You’ll be driven back to your school where you can
rejoin your classmates.”

Thank Gedin for that
, Seckry
thought.

“
We’re not going to inform
the Skyfall Patrol. This is a matter for us to deal with and we’ll
deal with it accordingly. In the meantime, Seckry, if you manage to
remember anything that happened that night, just come to our front
gates and ask for Jenniver Layne. I’ll be here.”

Days went by and the girl they were now
calling Eiya still hadn’t had any breakthroughs with her memory.
Seckry took her to see Mr Vance, but even he could find no way of
getting her to recall a single detail of her past, though he was
very interested to hear Seckry’s description of the Divinita
Project symbol he had seen at Endrin.

Coralle had begun to start acting like her
normal self again for the first time since Seckry had told her
about his actions, and was more than happy to look after Eiya. In
fact, she seemed to be in her element, fussing and pampering. She
had pleasure in pulling out all of the old photo albums of Seckry
and Leena as babies, telling Eiya stories about them growing up.
Coralle recalled the time Seckry had been so tired sitting at the
table for dinner, he had dropped his head straight into his mashed
potato, which Eiya seemed to find particularly funny.

Seckry found it strange having Eiya around at
first. The only spare bed in the flat was in his bedroom so that
was where she slept. He no longer had the privacy of his own room,
but as time went on he found himself enjoying the company a
little.

Leena sometimes winked at Seckry and said
things like, “You two are getting along quite well . . .” but
Seckry just shrugged them off. Even though Eiya was a girl, Seckry
found that he didn’t feel nervous around her at all. He had none of
the angst inside him that he usually experienced when he was in the
company of an attractive girl. Maybe it was because he had never
met anyone quite like her.

When two weeks had passed, Coralle decided it
would be best for Eiya to enrol at Estergate while she was staying
with them, so that she didn’t miss out on any education. Coralle
ordered a uniform and told the school that Eiya was a family friend
from Marne, with the made up surname of Tacana, which was the name
for the root of the eiya flower.

On her first day, Seckry introduced her to
Tenk and Tippian, who both seemed incredibly shy in her presence,
but after a few days they were back to normal. Seckry explained to
them both about Endrin and how he had found Eiya and got them both
to swear that they wouldn’t tell anyone else about it.

On the Sunday night before the beginning of
Eiya’s second week at Estergate, Seckry was finding it difficult to
get to sleep. He kept waking up and watching Eiya. His mind had
been pondering over the possibilities of who she could be and where
her family were for weeks now and he just couldn’t shut his mind
off. When he eventually got to sleep he found himself dreaming
about her.

“
Seckry.”

Where was he?

“
Seckry . . .” The voice was
soft and sweet. Seckry felt like smiling.

“
You missed your
alarm.”

“
What alarm?” Seckry said
dreamily.

Then he woke up.

“
Oh Gedin!” he said, his
eyes darting open.

Eiya was standing at his bedside dressed in
her Estergate uniform, smiling ashamedly. “I went for a shower
thinking your alarm would wake you up. You must have missed
it.”

Seckry shook his head and let his eyes
refocus. “What time is it?”

Eiya looked at her watch and cringed. “It’s
twenty to nine. The monorail is coming in five minutes.”

“
You go on ahead,” Seckry
said. “I’ll meet you on the carriage.”

Eiya nodded and let herself out.

Seckry slapped his face into the palm of his
hand.
Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go
, he said to himself.

He scrambled into his uniform and splashed
his face in the sink before brushing his teeth for about five
seconds and then grabbing his bag.

As he got to the station, panting like mad,
he spotted Eiya waving at him, inside one of the carriages. He ran
towards the door and was just about to jump on when the ‘doors
closing’
bing
sounded.

Seckry slammed his hands onto the metal.

“
No! Wait! One
second!”

Eiya jumped up and came to the inside of the
door. She was trying to prise it open but it wasn’t budging.

As the monorail began to move, Eiya mouthed,
‘I’m sorry,’ through the window.

“
Don’t worry, I’ll be there
soon!” Seckry shouted, and collapsed to his knees.

It was the first time he’d missed the
monorail. He’d have to walk to Estergate. According to Tenk it was
only a twenty minute walk if you cut through some lane called the
Blacklear.

Seckry picked himself up. If he upset Cut
Throat again, who knows what she would do? He was going to have to
run.

As he made his way through the streets he was
starting to get worried. He hadn’t seen any sign for any lanes
called the Blacklear. Up ahead were an elderly couple, walking hand
in hand.

“
Sorry to bother you,”
Seckry said, as politely as he could amidst wheezes. “Would you
happen to know where I could find a street named the
Blacklear?”

The couple stopped in shock. It was the lady
that spoke. “The Blacklear? My dear boy, why on earth are you
looking for that Gedin forsaken place?”

“
I’m late for school. I was
told it was a shortcut.”

The couple exchanged glances.

“
Who are these people,
telling young lads like this to take a shortcut through that place?
Probably trying to lure you there and get you involved in all of
that filth I imagine. If you’re a sensible boy I’d stay well away
from the Blacklear. Well away.”

Seckry gulped. “All the same, I’d like to
know where it is,” he said. “So I can avoid it in the future.” It
might have been sensible to avoid the Blacklear in any normal
situation, but being late for Cut Throat Cutson was not any normal
situation. He had to take the shortcut no matter what kind of place
it was.

“
Well, you see that rusty
sign over there? It used to say Blacklear.”

“
Now it says
No Entry
Punks
,” the old man said with very precise pronunciation. “In
red spray paint.” Seckry could hear the distaste in his
tone.

“
Thanks,” Seckry said.
“Wouldn’t want to turn down there by accident.”

He waited until the couple had disappeared
around a corner before pelting it into the forbidden lane.

The atmosphere of the place made Seckry slow
down a bit. It felt as though hundreds of eyes were watching him.
It was long and narrow with stagnant pools of water sitting
underneath drainpipes and wet rat droppings scattered across the
ground. There were buildings on either side of him, but a
particular one made Seckry’s skin tingle.

It seemed to be some kind of large, abandoned
warehouse, and as Seckry passed it he could hear lots of whispers
echoing inside. The most unsettling thing, though, was that, coming
from the depths of the building, was the sound of a young girl
crying.

“
Man, that Blacklear lane
shortcut thing wasn’t pleasant,” Seckry said to Tenk that
lunchtime. He had made it to school that morning with about one
minute to spare. Eiya was getting herself a can of fizzy pop from a
vending machine.

“
You went through the
Blacklear?” Tenk said, almost spitting out a baked bean.

“
Yeah you said it was a
shortcut.”

“
Yeah it is. I didn’t say I
ever used it though. I’d poo my pants walking through
there.”

“
What?” Seckry said, aghast.
“You’ve never even been through there? I thought I was gonna get
stabbed!”

“
Hats off to you, man. Did
you see any crazydust dealings happening?”

“
No, is that what they’re
doing in that warehouse?”

“
Yeah, bound to be. You see
all these hoodies coming and going. What else they gonna be
doing?”

“
I didn’t see anyone, in
fact,” Seckry said. “The place was empty, but I just had this
feeling as though someone was gonna jump out at me at any moment
and stick a knife into my back.”

There seemed to be a bit of a commotion at
the entrance to the canteen and Seckry and Tenk turned their heads
to see.

Snibble had turned up with the huge twins who
had been around when Snibble had attacked him. They looked like
stone gargoyles, with black leather coats and unpleasant frowns on
their faces.