City of the Falling Sky (40 page)

“
Now if you’ll all excuse
me–”

“
No!” shouted Seckry. “If
the innoya die, Eiya dies, and I’m not going to let that happen!
How can you be okay with murdering the innoya?”

“
Twelve years of hard
research. Twelve
years
. Do you think I’m going to throw it
all away just for the sake of saving a few creatures’
lives?”

“
Creatures?”
Seckry
said. “They’re human beings, you heartless pig.”

“
Human beings?” Darklight
mused. “No, no. I’ve never seen a human being with this much power.
No, these are something else. Something beastly. Some abomination
of nature that doesn’t know what to do with itself. Everything has
been put on this earth for a reason, Sevenstars, and finally we
have the technology to put the innoya’s power to use.”

“
Are you listening to
yourself?” Seckry yelled. “You’re going to
murder
them.
You’re going to pay for this. And you’re going to pay for what you
did to Danney Plum. How could you do that to a child?”

“
I assume you’re talking
about our very own Project Suffer, or the ‘Rabbit Man’ as the press
so amusingly like to call him.”

“
You
tortured
a
child,” Seckry spat. “Don’t you care? Don’t you have any kind of
remorse for that?”

“
Remorse?” Darklight
chuckled. “Why should I have any remorse? The project was a
success. A great success. Have you seen what a powerful tool that
weak little boy has become?” He shook his head. “Anyway, you’re
distracting me from my duties. See you all in a few moments, I’ll
be returning with a special guest.”

Darklight gripped the central lever of the
device and pulled it down.

“
Extraction
initiated,
” said an electronic voice.

“
No!” Seckry
screamed.

Everyone charged towards Darklight, but he
quickly tapped a line of buttons on his remote control and a
blinding sequence of light flashed underneath them, sending each
and every one of them crashing to the ground.

Seckry had never felt anything like it. All
movement had disappeared from his limbs. It was like he was
paralysed from the neck down. He groaned in agony as he saw that
inside the tanks, each and every one of the innoya was squirming,
their life blood being drawn out of them.

Next to him, Eiya was laying on the floor,
streaming silent tears, and clutching the gimmypug’s blood in her
small hand, refusing to let it drop.

Seckry couldn’t let this happen. He couldn’t
let Eiya just dissipate. He knew he’d rather die than live without
Eiya now. He used all the strength he could muster to lift his arm
and reach out to Eiya. She carefully let the test tube slip into
Seckry’s open palm.

Seckry tried to heave himself up off the
ground, but as he did so, Darklight jumped down from his podium,
gripped Seckry’s wrist, and ripped the test tube from him.

Darklight lifted the lid and sniffed its
contents.

“
Gimmypug blood,” he said,
smirking. “You thought that this would save the innoya?” He gave a
deep sigh before throwing the blood into his mouth, dropping the
empty test tube to the floor and then crushing the frail glass
under his boot.

Seckry roared like a wounded animal. It was a
noise that seemed to come not from his voice box, but from
somewhere deeper inside of him, a primal cry of pain.

Darklight wiped the back of his hand across
his mouth and a smear of blood streaked across his cheek as he
grinned wildly.

“
Twelve years of research
and hard work. Do you think I’m going to let a bunch of misfits
like you lot sabotage everything?”

Seckry sobbed and tried to pull himself to
his feet. As he did so, he saw that across the room, Jenniver was
raising her hand weakly and pulling her own remote control from her
pocket.

“
It’s time you were judged
by your own creation,” she called to Darklight, and pressed a
button.

Suddenly sirens began blazing and a red light
flashed all around them. An electronic voice drowned out the noise
of the Divinita machine.

“
Warning. Project Suffer
vault has been opened. Warning, Project Suffer vault has been
opened.
”

After a few moments there was a huge crash
against the chamber door. Everyone went silent. Then it came again,
a humongous weight was hitting the door, denting and buckling
it.

“
It’s titanium, you oaf!”
yelled Darklight triumphantly.

But Darklight obviously hadn’t been keeping
an eye on Jenniver, who had crawled over to Sanfarrow’s unmanned
gun and was aiming it at the door’s opening button. She fired a
single shot and it fizzed and sparked before the door began to
slide open erratically.

Danney Plum looked even more ominous than he
had in Seckry’s bedroom. His face was contorted into an animal like
insanity, and the veins on his muscular arms looked as though they
were going to burst out of his scarred skin.

For the first time, Seckry thought he saw
genuine fear in Darklight’s eyes.

“
Stay back!” Darklight
yelled, as if talking to a dog.

But Danney walked forward, his eyes locked on
the man who had tortured him.

“
Danney,” called Eiya
weakly. “You’ll be electrocuted!”

But Danney Plum didn’t seem to be aware of
anything that was going on around him. It seemed like the only
thing in the room that he could see was Darklight, and he wasn’t
going to stop until he reached him.

Darklight quickly pressed a button on his
remote and the square underneath Danney lit up.

But Danney didn’t fall down. His body seized
up, and his skin seemed to ripple for a moment, but when the light
dimmed, he carried on walking.

“
What in Gedin’s name?” said
Darklight angrily.

“
You should have thought
twice about using the same technology on your flooring as you did
on the inside of Danney’s body,” Jenniver shouted. “You’ve been
doing this to him for years, at much higher voltages. He’s
practically immune to it now.”

Darklight pressed another button frantically
and the square Danney was now on lit up, stopping him again
momentarily, as his body writhed in pain. But as soon as the light
faded, he wrenched himself forward.

“
You can’t endure this
forever!” Darklight yelled. “Too many shocks will kill
you!”

As Danney moved closer, Darklight pressed the
button again and this time Danney fell to his knees, spreading his
arms out wide as the power of the grid surged through him.

“
Stop it!” screamed Eiya,
through tears. “Haven’t you tortured him enough?”

But Danney still wasn’t done. He began to
crawl forward, his face set in agony, and his eyes still locked on
Darklight’s.

Darklight’s expression changed. Danney was
almost upon him. He looked around frantically and made to run, but
in his haste he dropped the remote control. Danney got to his feet
and launched himself after Darklight, ripping the man off the
ground and swinging him backwards like a ragdoll. With a roar he
squeezed Darklight, his cracked, dirty, uncut nails piercing the
flesh through his uniform.

Danney’s roars were deafening as he pressed
Darklight’s terrified face against his own, but even through the
howling, Seckry could hear the bones of Darklight’s ribcage snap.
Seckry was sure he saw a small glimmer of shame in Darklight’s
face, just before his eyes closed.

Seckry wasted no time now that Darklight was
unable to hinder them. He used all of his might to give movement
back to his limbs and pelted towards the Divinita machine, punching
it with his fist until he started bleeding.

“
We have to stop this
thing!” he shouted.

Loca got to her feet and ran to help him,
hammering her heel with full force into its side. Tenk managed to
get to his feet also, and ran to their aid, picking up Sanfarrow’s
gun on the way.

“
Watch out,” he said, and
began to fire bullet after bullet after bullet into the machine.
Metal shards were flying everywhere and circuitry was snapping, but
the machine continued to run.

Seckry looked around rapidly and saw Tippian
struggling to his feet. There was only one thing left that they
could try.

“
Tipps, throw me the glove!”
Seckry shouted.

Tippian didn’t hesitate. He threw the glove
through the air and Seckry caught it, slipping it on.

“
Quick, everyone stand
back,” he said. “This thing could explode.”

“
But Seck,
you’ll–”

“
Stand back!” Seckry
screamed.

He grabbed a bunch of frayed wires that were
dangling in front of him and thrust them into the power input
socket of the glove before holding his thumb on the charge button
located inside.

Seckry’s hand seized up as power surged
around his fingers. He tried to take his thumb off the button, but
he couldn’t. His hand was frozen into a state of seizure. He roared
in agony as more and more power fed itself into the glove.

Seckry could do nothing but rip his arm away,
snapping the wires and severing the connection.

He had to look at his hand to see if it was
still there, as he could no longer feel it. All he could feel was
white hot pain.

This has to do it,
he thought.
If
this doesn’t destroy it then nothing will.

He raised his hand up into the air, ready to
slam it down onto the metal, but as he did so, the same electronic
voice they had heard earlier said, “
Extraction
complete.
”

With that, the circular gateway beside Seckry
fired into life. Streams of blue and green helitonium flooded into
the giant circle.

Seckry turned and saw Eiya running to him,
reaching out to him, screaming. And the last thing he saw was a
single tear fly from Eiya’s large, beautiful brown eyes, before he
was sucked into the gateway and everything went black.

Voices.

It was the first thing Seckry was aware
of.

Voices, and lots of them.

“
Have you come to save
us?”

“
He’s been sent from
Gedin!”

“
What is your
name?”

“
Tell us your
name.”

“
My . . . name is . . .
Seckraman,” Seckry said weakly.

“
Seckraman.”

“
Seckraman, who are you? You
are not of this world. You appear in a flash of light.”

“
Where am I?” Seckry said,
opening his eyes.

“
He’s the son of Gedin,”
someone said. “Did you see him just appear like that? It’s just
like the prophecies foretold! Gedin has spared us. He’s sent us his
son! In our gravest time the Lord Gedin has spared us. He has shown
us compassion.”

“
No,” Seckry said feebly.
“You’re wrong, I’m not the son of Gedin.”

He stood up and looked all around him. A
crowd was gathering, a crowd of men and women in all sorts of
multicoloured robes, and thick, bushy hair.

“
Look! He cannot be of this
mortal world. Look at his robes! They’re not Klaxion robes. And
look, he has power in his hand.”

“
What?” Seckry said, and
looked down.

The glove.

The air around it was rippling and distorting
and cracking violently, and it was only then that he began to feel
the pain from it once again.

It was getting hotter. And hotter. He writhed
around trying to yank it off, but his hand was still seized up. The
glove wouldn’t budge.

It was only as he looked to the sky in pain
that he saw something he thought he’d never see.

The sky was completely filled with craters,
and they seemed to be getting larger by the second.

“
We are being judged,”
someone shouted. “Will you save us? Please. I beg of you. Remove
this monster from the sky!”

Seckry couldn’t believe it. The gateway had
worked. But Darklight hadn’t come through, he had.

The question was, where was Seckraman? If the
legends were true, Seckraman would be here right now, raising his
hand up to the sky and blasting the meteor away, saving the earth
from the apocalypse. It looked like the meteor was about to
hit.

“
Seckraman,” a woman
pleaded, dropping to her knees and cradling a baby in her arms.
“Please save us. Please . . .”

Seckraman . . .

Was he . . .
Seckraman?

But Seckry had no more time to contemplate.
The pain in his hand suddenly seared so hot that he screamed and
thrust his arm out into the air. It felt as though his hand was
been ripped apart as the glove released its energy into the
sky.

There was a gargantuan boom, and as the sky
began to crack into millions of pieces, Seckry’s consciousness
faded away.

Eiya . . .

It was the only thing, the only word that was
going through Seckry’s mind.

Eiya . . .

“
Eiya,” he said softly, his
voice cracked.

Someone squeezed his hand. He opened his eyes
slowly.

“
Mum?”

Coralle was sitting in a chair next to him.
She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.

“
Eiya’s not here, my love.
I’m sorry.”

Seckry let out an agonised cry. His stomach
felt as though it was being ripped out of him. He had failed. She
was gone.