‘That old chestnut.’ I winked to cover the anxiety gnawing inside.
She shot me a darkling look. ‘What’s a chestnut? Anyway, I distinctly remember giving your Outsider feet something to think about when Fabius let the manticore out for a run!’
‘Yeah I remember … you were quite fast … for an Insider,’ I teased, before dropping lightly to the floor of the balcony.
I gesticulated and steadied her fall as gently as I could.
‘I’ll have you know … Rajid and I broke Isca Prolet’s rock-climbing record when we were ten!’ she whispered breathlessly, as I set her on her feet in front of the floor-length windows, which had given August his first real taste of Octavia’s disloyalty.
‘Uh-huh … sure that was hard with a Cyclops on your team.’
She smirked, raised an eyebrow, but the banter was lifting both our spirits.
‘OK, let’s see how Cassius likes it when we return the favour?’ I exhaled, gripping the handles and twisting. To my relief they opened easily.
‘Too easy?’ Aelia breathed.
‘Too arrogant,’ I clarified, stepping inside.
***
I peered down the long marble corridor, with a torrent of blood pounding in my ears. It looked familiar, yet different too, and a million memories stilled my thoughts.
This was the place Grandpa had killed Octavia, the place I’d first glimpsed her deception and intentions for the outside. It was also the place I’d said goodbye to August, believing I was leaving behind a new Isca Pantheon, one that wanted a new-world order that valued freedom and peace.
I clamped my mouth tightly, trying not to breathe in the over-sweet scent of wood musk, which barely concealed the formaldehyde anyway.
The truth was I barely remembered the girl who flew from this place on a back of the griffin. And peace was the very last thing on her mind now.
We paused to let our eyes adjust. Gone were the billowing materials and soft luxurious chaises and, in their place, a series of floor-length tanks glowed against dark-veined marble walls.
There was no need for words. Time was short and we approached silently, each step echoing our trepidation. Tanks always contained ugly secrets as far as Pantheon was concerned. But Eli wasn’t here, Arafel was gone, Max belonged to Cassius and August was probably dead.
What possible thing could there be left to scare me?
The thought emboldened me to creep close, to know and defy Cassius’s new monster as we passed. But I knew I’d made the very worst assumption as soon as I stepped close enough to recognize its profile.
Because this face belonged in the rippling forest pools of Arafel, streaked with red earth and shadowed by dappled sunlight. Not here, clean and terrifying, a sleeping monster just waiting to be woken.
Was this what his team had been working on when I was unconscious?
I took an involuntary step back, nausea rising, needing physical space to buffer me from the violation. And suddenly I felt small and foolish. Cassius always had a way of undoing me, just when I thought I’d reached a place where there could be no more hurt, that there was nothing left for him to take.
‘It’s me,’ I whispered, feeling the raw edge of my words razor every cell.
The logic was so simple really. After all, what was left when you’d stolen everyone and everything else?
‘It’s not you,’ Aelia forced out vehemently, eyeballing the flashing coloured panel next to the upright tank. ‘It’s a copy. He’s been trying to reproduce you because of your chimera control, Tal … Because of Lake.’
‘My blood didn’t give him what he needed,’ I breathed, ‘so he’s re-created everything to try and understand the chimera bond. So he can replicate it … and control Lake.’
‘Because if he controls her, he controls everything that’s left.’
I nodded, staring down the line of dark bleeping tanks.
‘It’s not what you think, Tal!’ Aelia interrupted sharply, shuffling closer. ‘These aren’t grown from modified eggs in the same way as the embryos in the laboratory. They’re constructed … a form of … unique biotechnology … Look, they’re spares, not new life. It’s different,’ she panted.
I nodded again, forcing through the shock trying to claim my limbs. Tank after tank returned the same blank, unconscious stare. A forest of my face, sterilized and trapped, and closing in on me.
And just beyond, there were more faces I didn’t recognize beside a new bank of flashing screens and controllers.
Think what Cassius is capable of, Talia … For the love of Nero, he can re-create pretty much anything.
August had tried to warn me, to make me see Cassius had the technology to do what he liked. Why stop at the Voynich when you can re-create or simulate whatever or whoever you liked.
‘Emperor Nero … Emperor Augustus … Emperor Constantine,’ she whispered, ‘Tal … he’s begun the Imperial Programme.’
Her voice was uncertain, her breath rasping.
‘The senate voted against it so many times, but when Livia took over as Empress … the mood was clear, voting against the programme would only lead to Ludi … It’s the farthest he’s gone … re-creating Roman Emperors from fragments of ancient DNA.’
She reached out to touch the glass of a tank containing a tall, imposing profile of a figure, aware of how fundamental this was for her. I didn’t look any closer. Somehow creating a living memory of someone who’d been at peace for more than two thousand years felt too Pantheon for my feral head.
I looked at her slight, peering figure, so intrigued despite her injury. Always the doctor, saving others, standing alongside me when her own kind had never known the outside. And never would unless we moved.
I reached out for her hand. Time was too short and we’d both sacrificed so much already. Cassius may have stolen my construct, but they weren’t me.
‘Your wound, Aelia?’ I whispered.
‘Barely feel it now,’ she dismissed, her eyes too bright, her body too stiff.
Panic reached up from the pit of my stomach. I knew the pain of her loss already, though I’d never given up all hope.
This time I could see a shadow in her eyes. It was the same shadow that clouded Ida’s eyes the day the Eagles came.
‘The Dead City river? We could ask … the Oceanids?’ I rushed, fear suddenly engulfing everything.
She smiled then, and it terrified me. Because she knew too much.
‘The Oceanids will only defy nature once, Talia,’ she whispered. ‘We’re all mortal in the end and I’m not afraid to find out what comes next … Come on … the only thing I am afraid of … is not finishing what we came here to do …’
She ran out of breath as I slid my good arm around her, feeling her weakness. I dug my nails into the flesh of my free hand, and planted the briefest of kisses on her head, making myself a promise to get her to Eli, come what may.
Swiftly, I sprinted over to the door of the old media suite. It was closed – and just as I remembered. I reached out to grip the handle, and momentarily the ghosts closed in around me.
Max in my shadow, August to my side, Grandpa to find and Arafel to protect – everything to live for. But these ghosts were clamouring, not for the past, but for the future. And it was only me and Aelia left.
Resolutely, I pushed open the door. And we were back. Back in the room that held the key to it all: The Book of Fire. And it was all exactly as I remembered, the same bank of flickering, moving screens watching everything. Pantheon’s spying eyes.
‘Tal,’ Aelia gasped from just behind me.
And somehow, by the intonation of her voice, I knew exactly where to look. Just beyond the central camera where I’d set up the photograph of Cassius striding through the forest, hoping it would be enough, to the floor – where a single white tank lay. It was identical to the one in which Octavia had incarcerated Grandpa, and inside lay the figure of a tall gladiator.
And it felt as though all the air left the room at once.
/> I took a step forward. It was too dark to see properly. Cassius had to have an army of enemies, perhaps even more victims. And yet my forest sense, or perhaps it was my fractured heart, just knew.
My shaky gasp blurred the room, fuelled by months of suppressed emotion. Denial, desperation, grief and, finally, a burning fury at the injustice of it all.
And suddenly I was back in the North Mountain caves, running my fingers over his Equite skin, glistening in the firelight, anchored by guilt when he knew we needed to escape. Would he ever be the same? Had I thrown everything away?
My limbs flooded with life just as Aelia threw out a warning hand.
‘Lasers!’ she hissed, gesticulating towards the faint red lines criss-crossing through the room.
I teetered on the balls of my feet and narrowed my eyes to glimpse the faint lines. They were everywhere. I threw Aelia an anguished look, recalling August’s own warning the last time we were here. She could only look at me yearningly, the hollows beneath her eyes more pronounced in the low light, and my mind was made up. He was her brother before he was ever my … whatever he was, after all.
I was moving before she could stop me, using every tree-flying acrobatic skill I possessed to leap, roll and tumble my way across the room. And somehow, within seconds, I was kneeling beside the canister.
It was him. Proud, Roman and … inanimate – the white scar skating down the left-hand side of his face gleaming beneath the flickering lights of his prison.
I stifled a painful choke.
‘It’s August,’ I whispered back across the room, recalling the moment I’d seen the same scar glinting in the cathedral moonlight.
‘The charioteer in the arena … you were right … no scars.’
Aelia’s eyes closed briefly.
‘Manual override,’ she whispered when they reopened, pointed to a flashing box on the wall.
Swiftly I reached up to pull down the switch inside a small red box. The humming noise disappeared first, followed swiftly by the flickering red lines.
She was beside me in a heartbeat. ‘August?’ she whispered in a raw voice.
For one brimming second, it was as much as we could do to look. And even though his eyelids were still and lips silent – his smile was etched into the fine lines around his mouth and I could picture them whispering my name the way he’d whispered it in the cathedral. Like a wish.
Even back then I’d disbelieved him. And now, he lay here like a corpse ready for burial, because of me. Because of my denial that Pantheon could create someone who believed enough in the outside world to forsake their own.
It was real for me, Talia.
His last words reached through the hard Perspex of his tank as though still echoing on his steady breath.
Why did I always end up hurting those I loved most?
Then a noise broke the whirring silence. I shot a look at Aelia, neat adrenaline coursing my limbs.
‘Can you do something about this?’ I nodded towards the large panel above his head. From what I could see his arms were wired but, mercifully, there was no plate attached to his head.
‘I … think so.’
‘Aelia …?’ I began, my chest constricting at the sight of her trembling hands working the wires back to the panel.
Should have taken her to Pantheon’s infirmary? Cassius might have saved a talented Prolet doctor. And yet, she would likely never have seen the outside of a prison cell again.
‘Talia, stop with the fretting! You’re putting me off … I’ve got to recall the correct sequence.’
Her eyebrow forked exasperatedly, and I bit my tongue, praying as she began tapping and sending the levels dancing wildly across the screen. She was the brightest, fieriest, humblest star I’d ever known. I wasn’t ready to let the night take her.
I dragged my gaze back to August’s unconscious profile; he was so vulnerable now. Had he given up the fight willingly?
‘Just … one more … and that should start … there!’
There was a sharp click as the top of the tube rolled backwards exposing his shoulders and chest. A shrill alarm filled the air instantly.
‘I didn’t say it would be quiet,’ she rasped apologetically.
‘How do we get him going …’ I rattled. ‘We haven’t got much time left. They’ll be here any second.’
And as if on cue, a cacophony of noise from the outside corridor drowned any further exchange. It was the most violent chorus of animal noises, mixed with loud imperial commands and the acrid scent of lasered flesh.
‘They’re here,’ I whispered.
She nodded, her hollowed eyes so wistful and dull.
Clenching my teeth, I stood up and ran towards the cased manuscript.
The alarm was going crazy, but it didn’t matter any more. This was the Voynich, the book I’d vowed to burn on a funeral pyre. And it was going to end right here and now.
I reached the reinforced glass and felt around for a way into the box, the open, aged pages gazing back at me all the while. It seemed so small for the world-changing secrets it contained. On the right was a multi-genus animal shape. Homer’s chimera I muttered, recognizing the classical faded sketch. And to the left, a loose aged page in familiar handwriting, beside an astronomical diagram. My chest tightened. Its creases had been smoothed but I would know it anywhere, because it had lived inside Max’s treehouse dart tube for months, until Cassius stole it. It was Thomas’s research, containing the tiny double-lidded clue that led me to guess Lake’s real identity – the same page that had held the key to the cipher. REQ.
Requiem. Mass of the Dead. A prophecy in itself. This Voynich page had to be the coding for Hominum chimera, the coding for Lake. My blood knew it too. And it yearned with a feral heat I didn’t recognize, just as the door burst open.
And the entire forest poured in on the back of one torrential, deafening wave of chaos.
I twisted in shock as the squawking, yowling cavalry spilled inside, filled the room in seconds. There were primates of all size and description, rodents, domestic animals, big cats, birds – every type of forest creature that was able to climb and track had followed us here. And there were hundreds of them.
‘Tal!’
August moaned as the doorway darkened with the shape of Cassius’s guard.
‘They’re in here,’ one roared.
I inhaled sharply. ‘Max …?’ I whispered, staring at the broad gladiator filling the space. He’d traded his charioteer uniform for regular Pantheonite colours but he was still unmistakable.
We locked eyes, and the moment he’d reached down and pulled the blade across the decoy’s throat ran through my mind. My fists clenched as several more guards appeared.
‘We’ve got them now,’ a low voice sneered behind him, ‘and get these lab specimens back where they belong!’
The words had no sooner left his mouth than a large male chimpanzee flew across the room, its eyes bright with fury, and barrelled into the soldiers. A fracas went up as the remainder of the chimps joined their alpha, and a tiny smile of wonder played across my lips. They were Outsiders too, creatures who had suffered cruelly at the hand of Pantheon, and now they were aligning themselves with their rescuers. With Arafel. My heart swelled as a large cat leapt past me knocking a small metallic restraint at my feet.
‘Thanks,’ I muttered, reaching down to pick it up.
The small metallic casement fizzed and sparked as I flicked it on and turned back to the casement. Without hesitating, I held it against the glass and watched as the restraint sent hundreds of volts through the Voynich’s case. There was a horrific cracking noise, and the whole room paused, as a million hairline cracks spread through the case like wildfire. Then a second screaming alarm ripped through the chaos, and this time I had no doubt it was echoing through the entire state of Isca Pantheon.
‘Stop her!’
‘The Book!’
‘Tal …?’
My gaze shot back across the room, in the direction of the
voice. A voice I’d longed so hard to hear I’d heard its ghost a thousand times over. And yet this time it was real as the iris-blue eyes, awake and staring back at me, across the chaos.
‘Lia?’
August’s voice shook, as his sister’s elfin face leaned into his view.
‘You’re … How can …? You were …’
‘Dead?’ she rasped. ‘Yeah … sorry about that … here now … boo anyway,’ I lip-read.
They grinned at one another, brother and sister tied and separated by the same screwed-up Civitas.
Suddenly aware of the fracas surrounding us, August pulled himself up and with a surge of strength, began ripping away all the wires still attached to his body. Aelia tried to assist but only fell back exhausted.
I skirted the fray and was across the room in a heartbeat, throwing my arm around her small hunched form. August scowled, pulling his legs free of the restrictive tube. Dressed only in simple cotton trousers, his chest bare save for his glittering Equite tattoo, he looked more the Outsider than Max now.
‘He said you were dead …? Arafel … there was no one left … I searched.’ His whisper cracked as he suddenly realized Aelia’s state.
I could only nod, as she fell sideways into my arms.
August was on his feet in one swift move, just as another violent noise claimed the room. A huge alpha male gorilla, frenzied and yelling its dominance at the top of its voice, had wrapped his huge arms around the fractured casing of the Voynich.
It knew. Somehow. And the whole room watched, silent and transfixed, as he lifted the entire casement high above his straining head, and threw with all his wild strength. The glass case hit the back wall and shattered into a thousand pieces, finally releasing its precious contents, which tumbled to the floor.
‘The Book!’ I gasped, as the world swung into counter-motion and every living creature started for the fallen treasure.
Guards and animals swarmed like a pack of vulturous creatures, giving chase as the gorilla followed up in a breath, swiping up the book in his leathery hands. He threw a single glance our way, enough for me to glimpse the light of a distant memory in his black eyes, before he lowered his broad head and battered his way back through the room, swatting his opposition like flies.
Storm of Ash Page 22
