City of the Falling Sky (33 page)

Seckry swallowed hard.

“
Seckry, the Divinita
Project is almost at its final stage of completion and it must be
stopped. I don’t know if you know what it is that’s going on here,
but be assured that the project should never have come into
existence. What I’ve said about the worms is true, they are
incredibly dangerous, but if they’re found they should not be
returned to Endrin, they should be destroyed immediately. The worms
that were living in the cultivation unit were serving a very
specific purpose, they were consuming toxic waste produced by
modified helitonium radiation in the Divinita chamber, which is
situated directly beneath the soil you visited. I’m surprised you
didn’t get sick and collapse whilst you were digging. The light,
whatever it is, may also be dangerous.

“
Seckry, what I need you to
do is find Ropart Sanfarrow. Find Ropart Sanfarrow, Seckry. He is
the only one that can explain all of this to you, and he’s the only
one that has a key to the Divinita chamber aside from Darklight. He
is in hiding somewhere, but he would never leave the city. He is
here in Skyfall but I do not know where. If you have been looking
for Kevan Kayne, you should stop now. Kevan Kayne is dead. He was
murdered here at Endrin by Darklight.

“
Before you leave, I’m going
to give you a locket that you have to give to Sanfarrow when you
find him. This locket will earn you his trust. I’m going to take
the headset off you now, and you need to act as though it has
worked, for your own safety, okay? When I remove the headset, ask
me where you are, and pretend that you have no idea what you’re
doing here.”

Jenniver suddenly stood up and removed the
headset from him, slipping the locket silently into his pocket as
she did so.

Seckry said nothing for a moment, taking in
everything that he’d just heard.

Then he said, “Where am I?” his eyes still
locked on Jenniver’s.

“
Seckry!” Eiya said
exasperatedly, when Seckry entered the flat. “What on earth
happened?”

He explained everything and watched Eiya’s
expression turn from worry to shock.

“
It’s kidnapping!” she said
angrily. “They can’t do that, they should be arrested!”

“
This is Endrin . . . they
do what they want,” Seckry said grimly.

Eiya made to say something a couple of times,
but no words would come out. She eventually punched the bed with
her small fist.

“
I was a bright light on the
security footage?” she said after a while.

“
I don’t understand it
either,” Seckry said.

“
And this Jenniver woman
recorded a secret message?”

“
She said the Divinita
Project is almost at completion, and we have to find Ropart
Sanfarrow to stop it. He’s the only one who has a key to the
Divinita chamber, and he’s the only one that can explain all of
this to us. And Kevan Kayne has been murdered by
Darklight.”

“
What happens if we don’t
find him? What if the Divinita Project is activated? What in
Gedin’s name is the Divinita Project anyway?”

“
That’s the thing . . . we
don’t know. That’s why we have to find Ropart
Sanfarrow.”

Seckry pulled the locket that Jenniver had
given him out of his pocket. “She gave me this, too. She said to
give it to Sanfarrow when we find him.” He unclipped the face, and
inside was a tiny photograph of Jenniver with a man, an older
looking version of the man in The Broken Motion’s photograph,
Ropart Sanfarrow. They were pressing their cheeks together and
smiling at the camera happily.

“
It looks like this Jenniver
Layne and Ropart Sanfarrow were a couple,” said Eiya.

Seckry’s mobile began vibrating in his
pocket. He took it out and looked at the name of the caller.

“
It’s Vance,” he said to
Eiya, and answered it.

“
Seckry?” Vance said, his
voice urgent.

“
Hi sir.”

“
Seckry, I’m sorry this
phone call is so late, but are you and Eiya both free tomorrow
morning?”

“
Uh . . . yeah, I think
so.”

“
I know it’s the weekend,
but can you come to my office as soon as you can? I’ve discovered
something about the innoya. There’s something I need to tell
you.”

“
Okay,” Seckry said.
“There’s something I need to tell you too.”

“
They were going to
hypnotise you? Erase your memory?” Vance paced around his office
the next morning, his eyes darting back and forth. “Dear Gedin,
Seckry, it’s worse than I thought. I should have been able to do
something, to stop them from taking you again.”

“
It’s okay,” Seckry said.
“There’s nothing you could have done. You can’t watch over me all
day long.”

“
Jenniver Layne,” Vance
said. “She’s Darklight’s second in command. And she’s working
against
him?”

“
Sir,” Seckry asked. “How
are we ever going to find Ropart Sanfarrow? He could be anywhere.
What happens if we don’t? What is the Divinita Project going to
do?”

“
Well Seckry, that’s what I
needed to talk to you about.” He led them towards his desk, which
was strewn with ancient books, scrolls and artefacts.

“
Are these all from the
library?” Eiya asked.

“
The library? No. That’s
where I had been going wrong. I should have realised it sooner, but
the Great Library is monitored. It is censored by the government –
a government that is at the mercy of Endrin. The reason why there
is no information in the library on the innoya is because Endrin
have removed anything that mentions it.”

“
Where are these from?”
Seckry asked. Now that he was close to them, he could see how old
the books really were. Some were falling to pieces and some were
well preserved, though even the ones in good condition were caked
in dust.

“
These books are from
Professor Holdenbubble’s private archives,” Vance said.

“
Holdenbubble?” Seckry
gasped. “Isn’t his stuff being kept locked away in his old study
and sealed off from the public?”

“
Well, Seckry, remember I
told you that I used to be a lot like you when I was younger,
sneaking into places I shouldn’t have been? Let’s just say a little
bit of my old self returned for one night.”

“
You broke in to the
university?
” Eiya said in an excited whisper.

“
It was the only way to get
access to this material. As soon as I found out that the library
was being regulated, I knew the only place in the city that would
have uncensored books would be Holdenbubble’s study. And look what
I found.”

Vance smoothed his palm across the largest of
the open tomes.

“
Innoya,” Vance read aloud,
“possess tremendous power. They hold within them helitonic
particles.” He looked up. “Just as we gathered, right? We think
that Endrin are trying to extract helitonium from an innoya
root?”

“
Yeah, that part we kind of
guessed,” Seckry confirmed.

“
Well, we were right, except
for one thing,” Vance said gravely. He flipped the page, which was
wafer thin and yellowed in its corners.

On the next page was a diagram of a woman,
with blue and green swirls coursing through her body, like liquid
smoke.

“
Who’s that?” Eiya
asked.

Vance leaned back to let them have a better
look.

“
That . . .” he said. “Is an
innoya.”

It took both Seckry and Eiya a moment to
speak.

“
Innoyas aren’t plants?”
Eiya said slowly.

“
Indeed not,” Vance replied.
“As is shown here, they are human beings. Human beings with one
very important difference. Their bodies are filled with helitonium.
It is in their DNA.”

“
Endrin are extracting
helitonium from human beings?” Seckry said.

“
It seems like all the
evidence is pointing that way.”

Eiya suddenly turned away from them.

“
It makes sense, doesn’t it.
This is the answer. This is why I was at Endrin.”

Vance put a hand on her shoulder.

“
I’m an innoya, aren’t I?”
she said.

“
It’s very possible,” Vance
said. “It may explain why you showed up as a bright light on
Endrin’s security tapes. The helitonium in your body could have
been too much for the camera to deal with.”

Eiya looked at her hands.

Seckry didn’t know how to feel. His emotions
were all over the place. If Eiya was one of these people, the
innoya, then her family, her friends might be inside the Endrin
complex right now, having helitonium extracted from their
bodies.

“
The extraction process . .
.” Eiya said to Vance. “Does it . . . hurt?”

“
I’m afraid . . .” Vance
said cautiously. “I’m afraid it says here that people have tried to
extract helitonium from the innoya before . . . and . . . the
process extracts the very life force of their being. Helitonium is
integral to their existence. It kills them.”

Eiya’s eyes widened.

“
Whoever’s in there,” Seckry
said sternly. “Whoever they’ve got captive, we’re going to save
them, okay? We’re going to find Ropart Sanfarrow and we’re going to
save them.”

Eiya shook her head slowly. “We can’t. We
can’t find him.”

“
Well . . . then we’ll just
break our way into Endrin by force and stop this whole
project.”

“
They would shoot us on site
without hesitation, Seckry,” said Vance. “Forcing our way into
Endrin is not an option.”

“
Then what do we do? We have
to do something!”

They stood in silence for a long time.

“
What is he doing? What is
Darklight doing? Why is he extracting helitonium?” Eiya said
eventually.

“
It sounds like the only
person who can tell us is Ropart Sanfarrow,” Vance said. “But there
is one other thing that I found in Holdenbubble’s study.” He
unravelled a curled up sheet that was inscribed with a list of
handwritten names. At the top of the page was the title, ‘The
Society of Believers.’

“
The Society of Believers?”
Seckry read.

“
Yes,” said Vance. “It seems
that Holdenbubble’s whole career was devoted to the study of
helitonium, now that I’ve looked through his books, and this idea
of a believer meant a believer in helitonium. This here has to be a
list of all the contacts Hindglubber had made who believed in the
existence of helitonium.”

“
Do you think we could find
one of them and ask them about it? They might know something about
what’s happening at Endrin.”

“
Eiya,” Vance said slowly.
“Have a look at the names.”

Seckry and Eiya both scanned the list until
they reached the bottom, which read ‘Ederith Umbercotton.’

“
Umbercotton,” Seckry said.
“That was the librarian who was murdered by the Rabbit
Man.”

“
Oh my Gedin,” Eiya said.
“And the others. This is them, all of them. These are the names
they’ve been talking about on the news. This is every single one of
the victims of the Rabbit Man, in the exact order that they were
killed.”

“
And Holdenbubble’s at the
top of the list,” Seckry said. “So it was the Rabbit Man that
murdered him too?”

Vance nodded grimly. “Nobody knew about the
Rabbit Man back then, they just thought it was a random murder. But
looking at this list, it’s hard to accept anything else.”

“
So who is this Rabbit Man?”
Eiya asked. “And why would he want to kill everyone that believed
in the existence of helitonium?”

“
To me there’s only one
explanation,” Vance said. “The Rabbit Man is a hired hitman of some
sort. Hired by someone who wants to keep the knowledge of the
existence of helitonium all to himself.”

“
Darklight,
” Seckry
said disgustedly.

Vance nodded. “Darklight fitted everyone in
the city with a white chip, which seems to have been a last attempt
at finding anyone who is innoya, but he must have been searching
for years. And over those years it seems that anyone that has been
talking about helitonium and the innoya aside from him has been
headhunted and murdered.”

Eiya sat down for a moment.

“
There’s something else I
need to mention about Endrin,” Vance said. “This illusional time
module I’ve been teaching my students . . . when I was doing some
research yesterday I came across some personal information about
the theory’s inventor, Dr Coronius Hindglubber. I found that he has
not left his house for three years.”

“
Why?” Eiya
asked.

“
Nobody knows. And nobody
has been able to contact him. But reports say that about three
years ago a group of men visited him at his home. A group of men in
Endrin uniforms.”

Seckry and Eiya glanced at each other.

“
I’ve looked him up on a
map.” Vance continued. “He lives in the west partition. I’m heading
over there later this evening. Would you both like to accompany
me?

“
Let’s do it,” Seckry
said.

It was about an hour’s journey to the
opposite side of the city. When they pulled up, Seckry noticed a
single neon strip humming across the doorway which read, ‘PRIVATE
PROPERTY KEEP AWAY.’