City of the Falling Sky (38 page)

Seckry and Eiya were both gaping at him like
goldfish.

“
Would the blood of a cross
breed between a short eared and a long eared gimmypug do?” said
Seckry.

“
I . . . didn’t know a cross
breed existed,” said Sanfarrow. “I would imagine some of the
healing properties would have been carried through the DNA,
yes.”

Seckry didn’t even have time to appreciate
the wave of hope that flooded his body right then.

“
We have to get back to
Butterkins’ sanctuary,” he said to Eiya, and she nodded
quickly.

“
There’s a cross breed? Here
in the city?” Sanfarrow asked, fascinated.

“
Yeah,” Seckry said. “And
when we get some of its blood, all we need to do is get inside the
Divinita chamber. Jenniver said you had a key, right?”

“
Not exactly,” Sanfarrow
said. “It’s still under construction.”

“
Under construction?” Eiya
asked.

“
This is my key,” Sanfarrow
said, and pointed towards the elevator he had come down
in.

Seckry and Eiya’s confused expressions
prompted Sanfarrow to explain.

“
Do you know where we are,
geographically?” he said.

Seckry glanced all around him.

“
When you followed the
tunnel to this place,” Sanfarrow continued, “did you notice the
direction you were headed in?”

“
I guess we didn’t think
about it,” Seckry said.

“
Well you were headed
towards Endrin. And you found it.”

“
You mean–” Eiya said,
pointing upwards.

“
Yes,” said Sanfarrow, “the
Divinita chamber is directly above us.”

“
All this time that
Darklight has been looking for you, you were right beneath him,”
Seckry said, shocked.

“
I had to be,” Sanfarrow
said. “I knew I had to stop the Divinita Project myself and I knew
the only way to access the chamber was from below. I just didn’t
expect that the time to do it would be now. I thought maybe I had a
few more months left before activation. From what you’ve told me,
evidently I was wrong. But that leaves us with one huge problem.
The passageway isn’t complete. You see, I installed the elevator
recently to replace the makeshift ladder I had been using, but it
still only travels halfway up to where we need to be. The rest is
solid earth. It’ll take months to chip away. If we use explosives,
the whole place might collapse. I don’t know how we’ll get rid of
it.”

“
What if we had more
people,” Seckry said. “Could we all hack away at it?”

“
There’s enough room up
there for a team of about seven, I’d say. It certainly would speed
the process up, but still there’d never be enough–”

“
What if one of those people
had some kind of very powerfully charged glove that could crumble
fragments of rock within seconds,” Seckry said.

Sanfarrow raised his eyebrows. “Do you have
somebody in mind?”

Eiya insisted on heading to the sanctuary
alone, which would give Seckry enough time to gather up all the
people they would need to help them hack away at the earth.

As they were leaving, Seckry spotted the wall
again which was tacked with hundreds of pieces of paper bearing
different sixteen digit numbers.

“
They are attempts at a
combination for a lock,” Sanfarrow explained. He reached into his
pocket and pulled out a small box with a panel of numbers on it.
“This was given to me by Kevan,” he said. “He wouldn’t tell me what
it was or what was inside. He just told me that I would be able to
open it when the time was right. It’s been driving me insane trying
to work out the combination, because if Darklight has murdered
Kevan, I will never know.”

They backtracked through Sanfarrow’s tunnel
and hauled themselves out into the fresh air. A young couple who
were walking hand in hand across the road gave them a peculiar
glance as they emerged from the out-of-bounds, disused reactor, but
Seckry had no time to worry about such trivial things any more.

As Eiya headed for Estergate, Seckry flipped
open his mobile and called Tippian. He realised that if he wanted
help from Tenk, Tippian and Loca he was going to have to get them
all together and explain everything. He needed Vance too. If anyone
was going to be a help in storming the Divinita chamber from below,
it would be him. The only person he wouldn’t be able to get on
board would be Kimmy, because he knew that Kimmy had gone on
holiday.

“
Tipps,” Seckry said
hurriedly. “Can I call at your place? You live fairly close to the
school, right?”

“
What? Er . . . yeah sure .
. . you okay?”

“
I’ll explain everything
soon. I need your help, and we gotta get Tenk and Loca here too.
And Mr Vance from school.”

“
Loca? Here?
Why?”

“
I need her help
too.”

“
Oh man . . . I’d better
tidy up,” Tippian said nervously.

“
And Tipps,” Seckry said
before taking a deep breath. “I think I’ve found a use for your
Glove of Destruction.”

Loca agreed to meet them at Tippian’s,
sounding concerned and eager to find out what was going on, and
Tenk, despite initially pointing out that he was in the midst of
watching the entire season three of Battle of the Bots, agreed to
join them too. As soon as Vance heard that they’d found Sanfarrow,
he jumped in the car, asking for Seckry’s location.

Seckry just needed to get to Tippian’s
himself now. He had taken directions over the phone, and it didn’t
sound too far away. In fact, it wasn’t far from where he had been
brought by Natania on the trick date back at the start of term.

When he emerged into Ferry Road, he
recognised it straight away. He approached the alley where he had
been beaten up by Snibble and glanced down there as he passed.

But a single glance turned into a double
take, because the alley wasn’t empty.

“
Fippin heck!” came
Snibble’s nasal voice through a thick plume of crazydust smoke.
“After all this time you’ve come back for more!”

Seckry couldn’t believe it. Snibble was down
here right now? Did he spend all his free time here?

Seckry shook his head in disbelief and
continued walking away from the alley. He had no time for Snibble
right now. But Snibble jogged out of the smoke and overtook Seckry,
jumping about in front of him and slapping a crowbar over and over
into the palm of his hand.

“
Get out of my way,
Snibble,” Seckry said through gritted teeth, keeping his head low
and his eyes turned towards the floor.

“
What the fip? I can go
wherever I like, you fippin freak. I can knock you out right now if
I want, too.”

Snibble stopped moving and stood directly in
Seckry’s path. As Seckry tried to maneuver around him, Snibble
shuffled to the side, blocking him once more.

Seckry stopped. “Snibble, you better move out
of my way right now,” he said, breathing deeply.

“
Why? Where you going? Off
to bang that little bitch of yours?”

Seckry’s next movements seemed completely out
of his control. He ripped the crowbar out of Snibble’s hands and
swung it at his head, smashing into his skull with a dull crack and
knocking him to the pavement.

Snibble was still and silent for a moment,
before groaning in pain and coughing out a mouthful of blood.

“
You’re dead,” he said, as a
dribble of sticky, red saliva seeped onto the gritty ground.
“You’re life is over, you psycho.”

A girl came running out of the alley to see
what was happening and screamed at the sight of Snibble on the
floor.

“
We’ll see,” Seckry said,
and threw the crowbar on top of him. “Call an ambulance,” he called
to the girl, and continued walking to Tippian’s at a slightly
brisker pace.

When Seckry reached Tippian’s house, he
thought he’d be feeling some kind of emotion about Snibble right
now, some kind of guilt or regret for lashing out so violently, but
he didn’t. He was so completely consumed with a fear of losing Eiya
that nothing else in the world mattered. Snibble had been in his
way, and he’d had to get past him. He’d consider the consequences
later.

Vance answered the door and beckoned Seckry
inside.

“
There’s a lot to tell you,”
Seckry said.

“
Eiya isn’t . . . real?”
Loca said softly. Out of all four of them, she was finding the
information the hardest to digest.

“
No, she’s certainly real,”
Vance corrected. “But if Ropart Sanfarrow is right, then she is
made up of constantly evolving helitonic counter-particles. It’s
incredible. I mean, I knew that helitonium had the ability to
distort matter around it, but . . . actually creating something as
complex as a human being?” Vance shook his head slightly. “And
Darklight . . . how couldn’t I have worked it out? The symbol from
Seckraman’s robes . . . the stealing of Hindglubber’s theories. It
all makes sense.”

When Eiya arrived with a test tube full of
Bubble’s blood, Seckry said, “This is it. Does anyone want to back
out? This could be really dangerous.”

“
Give up my chance to use my
Glove of Destruction?” Tippian laughed. “Are you kidding
me?”

Loca shook her head and her eyes met Eiya’s.
“You deserve to be here, Eiya,” she said. “You deserve to live. I’m
not letting anyone take your life, or the lives of these innoya, as
you call them.”

“
Yeah, Eiya . . . I’d . . .
kind of miss you, y’know,” said Tenk, looking away from the group
and swallowing a large lump in his throat.

“
Let’s not waste any more
time,” said Vance.

After they had all followed Seckry and Eiya
into the disused reactor and down into the depths of Sanfarrow’s
refuge, they were all fitted with protective clothing which
Sanfarrow had retained from his days at Endrin.

The clothes were white lab jackets emblazoned
with the Divinita Project symbol.

“
These jackets are made of a
special substance that will keep you safe from the radiation of the
Divinita machine,” Sanfarrow explained.

Seckry exchanged glances with Vance.

“
They even made their
jackets look like Seckraman’s robe from that painting,” he
said.

Once they were all fitted up they took the
rope elevator in groups and emerged into what seemed to be another
cavernous tunnel, lit by a few scattered gas lamps, this time
leading upwards at a steep diagonal.

“
If my coordinates are
right,” Sanfarrow said, “the angle of my digging will lead us
directly to the left side of the Divinita chamber, where the
flooring is weakest.”

“
Weakest?” questioned
Vance.

Sanfarrow gave a wry nod. “For the last two
months that I had access to the place, I would drop a splash of
acid onto a small patch of the metal flooring every time I passed
it. I knew that I’d have to return to the chamber one day, and I
knew that without a key, there was no way of getting through its
titanium walls. The only way back in would be from below, through
its fairly weak, steel ground. Everyone ready?”

Sanfarrow didn’t wait for anyone to respond.
He threw each of them a shovel and they all began hacking away at
the solid earth.

Tippian used his glove at sporadic intervals
to send a shockwave through the rock, which loosened the material
for a few yards, though nowhere near enough to make the task of
digging an easy one. Sanfarrow took the job of wheeling all of the
broken earth away in a wheelbarrow, taking it down in the lift, and
dumping it in a designated dumping area that he had built adjacent
to his living quarters.

After twenty five minutes of frantic digging,
Seckry was sweating profusely, Tenk had already collapsed onto the
ground in exhaustion and Loca was breathing fast, short gasps of
air. Eiya was trying her best to dig away as much earth as she
could, but her tender arms just weren’t strong enough, and she was
visibly shaking with every movement. Even Vance was taking deep,
heavy breaths.

“
This isn’t going to happen,
is it?” Eiya said.

Seckry plunged his shovel into the earth and
ripped out a heavy clump with a heave.

“
We’re going to do it,
Eiya,” he said sternly.

“
Seck, look,” she said.
“We’ve barely moved forward. We’ll be here for weeks.”

Seckry lowered his shovel and looked behind
him. It was true, it seemed as though they hadn’t moved an inch
since starting.

“
Guys,” Tippian said. “There
is one thing we can try.”

Everyone looked towards him and stopped what
they were doing.

“
When I designed this glove
I gave it an internal limiting device that controls the amount of
power released to a level that’s not fatal to the human
touch.”

“
Well I’m glad you thought
about my wellbeing before trying to shake my hand with that thing,
Tipps,” Tenk said dryly.

“
What I’m saying,” Tippian
continued, “is that I can turn the limiter off. I’ll need more
power than these batteries though, can we get a wire hooked up from
something?”

“
The power supply for the
innoya detection device,” Sanfarrow said hurriedly. “That old thing
generates enough to light half the city.”