City of the Falling Sky (36 page)

Sanfarrow entered the room carrying a tray
that was covered by a red cloth. He unsheathed it, and underneath
laid a heap of rabbit shaped cookies.

“
Made them fresh myself this
morning,” he said, smiling. “You like cookies, don’t
you?”

Danney shook his head.

“
Everyone likes cookies,”
Darklight persisted.

“
I wanna go home,” Danney
said, through tears.

“
Dear Gedin, Kan, what are
we doing? We have to let him go. We have to give him back to his
mother.”

Darklight breathed in slowly.

“
Ropart, I’d like to remind
you who’s in charge around here. I’m project manager, not you, and
this little experiment is going to earn me a shot at being CEO of
the whole company.”

“
Kan, do you really think
this . . . this
torturous
experiment is going to sit well
with the Endrin governing board?”

“
Well, Ropart, if it
doesn’t, I’m sure I’ll find a way to change their opinions. Now,
throw me one of those shapes.”

“
What?” said
Sanfarrow.

“
The shapes. The cookie
shapes.”

“
The . . . cookie cutters?
Why?”

“
Just do it!” Darklight
snapped.

There was a pause before Sanfarrow tossed one
of the metal rabbit shapes across the room.

Darklight examined it for a moment, like a
surgeon inspecting his tools. A peculiar smile appeared on his
face.

“
You want a tattoo for your
birthday, little boy? Mummy’s not around to stop you, is
she?”

Sanfarrow said, “Kan, no!”

Darklight smiled and laughed as though he
couldn’t believe what he was doing, and then he held up the cookie
cutter with one hand, and heated the blade of it with a
lighter.

“
The scar,” Eiya said, and
she buried her face into Seckry’s arm.

Seckry could do nothing but stare at the
screen, transfixed and horrified at what he was seeing.

Seckry’s stomach lurched as Darklight pressed
the cookie cutter against the boy’s skin. The scream that was let
out was so loud that the tape crackled and distorted from it.
Darklight’s other arm was holding the boy down by the head, keeping
him still as he violently wriggled in pain.

There was a flash of light as the tape
malfunctioned, and then it cut to a steady shot of the boy, looking
older now. He was lying on a surgery table, completely naked, and
his eyes were rolling around, deeply sunken into blackened eye
sockets.

“
Time to begin procedure
203, the second step of amalgamation,” said Darklight. He began
cutting a line down the skin of the boy’s forearm. The boy didn’t
stir, his eyes just kept rolling around, and saliva was dripping
from his mouth.

Darklight picked up a strip of metal that was
dotted with the green and black nodes of an electronic chip, and
pushed it into the wound.

“
The glowing light under his
skin,” Eiya said.

“
Plasmatic pulsers,” said
the voice of Darklight, a hint of pride in his voice. “This is
where the boy becomes the slave.”

The tape crackled and flickered again, and in
the next shot, Danney was standing in the corner of the room, his
head hung and his hair dangling in front of him.

Little balls of something were hitting him,
and it took Seckry and Eiya a moment to realise that they were
coming from the direction of the camera.

“
Come on,” said Darklight
aggressively. “Aren’t you getting angry?”

He screwed a piece of paper into a large ball
and threw it at Danney’s head. It bounced to the floor and there
was no reaction.

“
Come on you little piece of
dirt . . . what makes you angry?”

Darklight wandered around a bit more before
saying, “Hey . . . I wonder how that
mother
of yours is
doing without you.”

At this, Danney lifted his head and launched
himself at Darklight. In mid dive there was a loud crack and a
flash of blue light and Danney fell to the floor, lifeless.

Darklight laughed incredulously, seemingly
impressed by his own invention.

“
Perfect,” he said, and the
tape distorted before cutting to black.

Seckry pressed stop on the player.

“
We’ve seen enough of this,”
he said distantly. Seeing Danney, as a child, being electrocuted
like that made him want to vomit. He took a moment to compose
himself before switching the television off at the
mains.

“
He’s done nothing wrong,
has he?” Eiya said, pained. “They basically forced him to murder
all those people, and if he didn’t, they’d electrocute him from
inside his own body.”

Seckry couldn’t bear to think about it any
longer.

“
Come on,” he said, “let’s
search the rest of the place. We have to think about the innoya who
Darklight have captive. We have to save them. If we can find the
key to the Divinita chamber, then maybe we’ll be able
to.”

They both began rummaging through more of
Sanfarrow’s things, and after a few minutes, Eiya said, “Seck,
there’s a door to another room here.”

Eiya pushed open the door and led them into a
smaller space in which there was a human sized tubular booth and
what appeared to be a makeshift rope elevator.

Eiya glanced back at Seckry. “This place has
more than one floor?”

But Seckry was more interested in the booth.
Dozens of diagrams, charts and figures were tacked to the wall
beside it, and it was connected to another formidable array of
blinking computer equipment. As he peered closer at the mess of
paper on the wall, his eyes widened and his heart began to
race.

Each diagram was labelled with the same
prefix: Innoya Detection Device V 2.3.

“
Eiya, this thing detects if
someone is innoya,” Seckry said, his eyes scanning everything in
front of him rapidly.

Eiya joined him. “I guess this must be a very
early form of the white chip.”

Seckry looked down at the control board of
the computer. Stuck to the panel was a laminated sheet labelled
‘Usage.’ Seckry and Eiya exchanged knowing glances.

“
This is where we find out,
isn’t it?” Eiya said. “I must be innoya, it all fits together. I
must have escaped somehow from the Divinita chamber and that’s when
you found me. But now . . . now we can know for sure.”

“
Are you certain you want to
step into that thing?” Seckry said. “It looks really old and
unstable.”

“
I need to know,” Eiya said
softly, and Seckry nodded. In truthfulness, so did he.

“
Okay,” Seckry read. “It
says that once you’re standing inside the booth, I’m to slide the
glass door shut and secure it with the latch provided. Then I must
flick these three switches in succession.” Seckry made a mental
note of them. “Once the scan has begun, an image of the subject
will be projected onto the wall. Humans will emanate a bright red,
and innoya, due to the level of helitonic particles in their DNA,
will emanate a bright blue.”

“
It sounds simple enough,”
Eiya said. She took a deep breath and stepped inside the glass tube
before Seckry slowly slid its casing shut.

Seckry double checked he had his fingers on
the right switches, and then one by one, flicked them on.

A deep, mechanical whirr, like the sound of a
motor, filled the underground chamber.

Eiya gave him the thumbs up from inside the
glass.

After a few minutes the motor wound down and
everything went quiet again. Then a projector that was hanging from
the ceiling flickered into life and a picture spread across the
wall.

Neither Seckry nor Eiya said anything
initially. Seckry narrowed his eyes in confusion.

What they were both looking at was an image
of the chamber and a very faint outline of Eiya’s clothes. But
where Eiya should have been, there was nothing. No red light, no
blue light, just blank space.

“
I . . . don’t think it
worked,” Seckry said.

“
Let’s try it agai–” Eiya’s
words died in her mouth as something made both her and Seckry
freeze in horror.

The rope elevator was moving.

Someone was coming down.

They had no time to run, and nowhere to run
to.

Eiya yanked open the glass door and hauled
herself out of the tube, but before they could even contemplate
what to do next, the elevator platform came into view.

There was a heavily bearded man aboard it,
puffing and sweating, his eyes closed. When he reached the bottom,
he opened his eyes and swore loudly as he saw Seckry and Eiya. He
grabbed the sides of the elevator to steady himself, before pulling
a gun out of his pocket, dropping it in his haste, then picking it
up and waving it at them nervously.

“
Stay where you are!
”
he said, through trembling lips. “I will smash your skulls to
pieces.
Do not
make a single movement!”

“
Please!” Seckry said,
frozen still. “We don’t mean any harm.”

The man’s hand was shaking even more
violently now.

“
How on earth did you get in
here?” he demanded. “And who are you?”

“
We came here looking for
Ropart Sanfarrow,” Seckry said, amazed at how calm he was managing
to keep himself with a gun pointing at his head. “But . . . we were
too late.”

The man’s eyes looked confused and were
darting from Seckry to Eiya and back again.

“
Who sent you?”

“
Someone named Jenniver
Layne,” Seckry said.

At these words, the man lowered his gun
slightly.

“
Jenniver?”

Seckry nodded shortly, and noticed a bead of
sweat drip from his forehead.

The man was silent for a long time, before
eventually saying, “You weren’t too late.”

“
What do you mean?” Seckry
asked.

With the gun still held shakily in Seckry and
Eiya’s direction, the man elaborated.

“
The skeleton you must have
seen in the other room is a decoy. It’s plastic. I just wrapped my
lab coat in it and made it look authentic with a bit of effort.
Ropart Sanfarrow is still alive, and he’s standing right in front
of you.”

It was near impossible to tell due to the
masses of facial hair that the man was sporting, but those eyes . .
. those eyes were the same eyes as that young man in the photo, and
the older man on the VHS tape. This was, indeed, Ropart
Sanfarrow.

“
How can I trust you?”
Sanfarrow asked. “How do I know you’re not working for
Darklight?”

“
We have something that’ll
make you trust us,” Eiya said, and she nodded to Seckry.

Seckry pulled out the locket that Jenniver
Layne had given him and held it out.

“
Jenniver gave us this,” he
said.

Sanfarrow’s arm dropped almost involuntarily
and the gun slid out of his hand and onto the floor as he gave a
whimper that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

“
Jenniver
,” he said,
and took the locket cautiously from Seckry.

He stared at it for a while, and it seemed as
though he forgot that anyone else was around for those moments.

“
Why has she sent you to
find me?” Sanfarrow asked, coming out of his daze.

“
Because you’re the only one
with the key to the Divinita chamber aside from Kan Darklight,”
Seckry said. “And we have to get in there and stop the Divinita
Project before all the innoya that Darklight has captured have the
life sucked out of them.”

Sanfarrow looked lost for words.

“
We need to sit down,” he
said eventually.

“
No, Kevan Kayne is not
here,” Sanfarrow said in response to Seckry and Eiya enquiring
about him. “I believed that Darklight had captured him, but I had
no idea whether he was alive or not. From what Jenniver’s told you
. . . it sounds as though he is dead.” His lip trembled as he said
it and he looked close to tears. “When Darklight learned that we
were plotting against him, me and Kevan had to make a run for it. I
escaped. Kevan . . . didn’t.”

“
What does Darklight want
helitonium for?” Seckry asked.

“
Kan would stop at nothing
to cut company costs. His only concern is financial success.
Endrin’s biggest costs are their power reactors. He always said
that he would find a more efficient way to power the
city.”

“
So that’s what he wants it
for,” said Eiya. “He’s going to use helitonium to generate
electricity?”

Sanfarrow shook his head lethargically. “It
would be easier if it were that simple. But no, helitonium cannot
be used to power the city. It’s the wrong type of energy, it just
wouldn’t work. No, Kan wants something even more powerful than
helitonium. The most powerful force ever recorded in history. Have
you any idea what that is?”

Seckry and Eiya exchanged bemused looks. They
didn’t have a clue.

“
In year zero, Seckraman,
son of Gedin, appeared in the midst of the city and prevented the
Great Meteor from destroying the planet. He raised his hand up to
the sky and unleashed a great power. The power of Gedin. Kan
Darklight wants this power.”

Seckry almost spat a laugh.

“
Seckraman? He wants the
power of Seckraman? Wait . . . is that why the logo for the project
is the same symbol that I saw on an old painting of
Seckraman?”