Fading Light

by Nick Cook

  It seemed like an eternity before we at last broke the surface. I spat my mouthpiece out to gasp in a lungful of air.

  Kelly pulled her own regulator out. ‘Are you all right, Jake?’ she asked.

  ‘I heard something strange down there,’ I explained, turning through three-sixty degrees to look back. Moon Dancer was bobbing on the waves less than a hundred metres away, but I couldn’t see anyone or anything else.

  Chloe raised her mask. ‘What was it, Jake?’

  ‘Someone screamed.’

  She frowned at me. ‘But I didn’t hear a thing.’

  Kelly’s mouth thinned. ‘You definitely feel OK, Jake?’

  ‘Yes, totally, apart from being freaked out.’

  ‘OK.’ Kelly gestured to the boat. ‘Let’s get back to Moon Dancer.’

  I nodded, hooked my regulator back into my mouth and dropped my face beneath the surface. The sense of peace I’d had a moment ago was now long gone.

  With a kick of our flippers, we started back towards Moon Dancer, her anchor line acting as a guide through the haze.

  As we swam out over the deeper water, I felt my stomach fall away into it. The darkness beneath only increased the icy sensation inside me…the same sense I had whenever the Shade, the creatures from the Void, were around. But this wasn’t like those occasions, because my subconscious hadn’t automatically pitched me into the Shadowlands, a darker version of our world that my Awoken ability allowed me to see. It was an early warning sign that a Shade was close by. So what else could be going on here?

  The white hull of Moon Dancer rose and fell on the slight swell. The next minute we’d reached the yacht’s rear ladder, with Kelly taking the lead. She clambered up the ladder, removing her own tank before bending over the stern to help us.

  Chloe slipped her tank off along with her flippers and handed them up to Kelly. She frowned at me. ‘You look really pale, Jake.’

  ‘I feel fine, honestly.’ I took my equipment off and passed it to Kelly too.

  I followed Chloe up the ladder, trying to adjust to my body feeling heavy again after the weightlessness of the dive.

  On deck, Kelly had already handed Chloe a towel. She threw me another. I caught it in mid-air.

  Kelly peered at my face. ‘No headaches, nosebleeds, anything like that?’

  ‘Will you stop fussing? I haven’t got the bends, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘You certainly shouldn’t have, at least not at that depth, but it’s the hearing things underwater that I’m worried about.’

  ‘Maybe it was just my imagination playing tricks. I was almost in a trance when it happened.’

  Chloe’s expression brightened over Kelly’s shoulder. ‘That will be it. You’ve always been a bit of a daydreamer, Mr Stevens.’

  ‘Takes one to know one,’ I replied with a smile.

  ‘OK, let’s run with that,’ Kelly said, looking relieved. ‘Anyway, how was the dive itself?’

  ‘One of the most incredible experiences of my life,’ I said.

  ‘That makes two of us,’ Chloe added.

  Kelly beamed at us as she grabbed her phone. ‘There really is nothing quite like your first dive. And you so take after your mum, Jake. She adored diving – couldn’t get enough of it.’

  ‘I can really understand that now,’ I said as I towelled down my hair.

  Kelly picked up her mobile in its heavy-duty sea-proof case and frowned at the screen.

  ‘Problem?’ I asked.

  ‘Only that I need to transfer even more funds into my online account. I’ll break that losing streak eventually.’

  ‘You really should talk to Sentinel about the odds for you coming out on top with gambling,’ Chloe said.

  Kelly snorted. ‘And where would the fun be in that?’ She put the phone down and turned the radio on in the yacht’s cockpit.

  ‘The government will be releasing additional resources to deal with the crisis in the NHS caused by the Zoom virus,’ a newsreader’s voice said. ‘Angry words were exchanged today during the parliamentary session between the acting prime minister, Joanna Whittaker, and the leaders of the opposition parties about the lack of staff and beds, which is causing unnecessary deaths—’

  Kelly hit the off button. She frowned at us as she started to raise the yacht’s anchor. ‘Sorry about that, guys.’

  ‘No problem, it was just nice to get away from the consequences of Sentinel’s actions for a moment,’ I said.

  ‘I still can’t believe he could have released such a dangerous virus into the world,’ Kelly said.

  ‘That’s cold-hearted computer logic for you,’ Chloe replied. ‘I will scream at him if he tries to justify to us one more time about having no other choice but his precious phase three plan. If he wasn’t an AI, and actually Sentinel had a conscience, he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.’

  I shrugged. ‘In his defence, we shouldn’t forget that he said he had no way of knowing that it would affect some people like this.’

  ‘That may be true, but it doesn’t excuse him either,’ Chloe replied. ‘And what about the new Awoken out there. One day they’re fine, living their lives normally, and the next thing their DNA has been screwed with and they’re suddenly developing psychic abilities. Tell me that’s not going to mess with your head.’

  ‘I know, but at least we can do some good with that, using the Summoning. Once you’ve finished the upgrades to your Ember sim, we can reach out to help them.’

  ‘Yeah, no pressure or anything,’ Chloe said. ‘But I still say it would have been better if I’d finished the new interface with Sentinel first and then he’d unleashed the Zoom virus, not the other way around. This way, those with the Awoken gene are out there with no clue about what’s happening to them.’

  Kelly nodded. ‘I’d certainly be frightened out of my wits. And I bet that’s exactly how you both felt when Sentinel altered your own DNA and you started seeing the Shade for the first time?’

  ‘Scared shitless would be a more accurate description,’ Chloe replied. ‘And thanks to Sentinel, it’s not just two of us, but happening to thousands and thousands of people around the planet.’

  ‘I’m not normally one to defend Sentinel’s actions, but the fate of the world is hanging in the balance here,’ I said. ‘The more time the Shade have to prepare their next attack, the more likely it is that this whole planet will be destroyed. Like Sentinel said before, what happens if they build multiple DECs and open lots of portals to the Void at the same time? You and me, Chloe, won’t be able to stop them by ourselves for ever. As awful as it is, Sentinel had no choice but to create as many Awoken as quickly as possible for this world to stand a chance of surviving.’

  ‘If you talk about cracking some eggs to make an omelette next, I swear I will punch you in the face. People are dying out there because of the shortcut Sentinel took in releasing a genetic pandemic. If he had targeted individuals, as he did with us in phase two of his plan, then people wouldn’t be dying.’

  ‘And Sentinel would probably say that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.’

  Chloe glowered at me. ‘Just reduce lives down to numbers, why don’t you?’

  I clenched my fists. ‘I’m just pointing out…’ I took a deep breath. ‘Oh, whatever.’

  Kelly held up her hands. ‘Hey, time out, you two. You shouldn’t be taking out your frustration on each other.’

  Chloe picked at loose thread on her towel. ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right.’ She gave me an apologetic smile. ‘Sorry, Jake. It’s hard not to get worked up by what’s been happening, that’s all.’

  I nodded. ‘You’re only saying what I keep thinking, Chloe. The arguments for and against are endlessly spinning around my head.’

  ‘Me too… In some ways I envy Sentinel, because he can reduce this down to a question of statistics without paying the emotional price of that decision.’ She shook her head and dropped her towel into a plastic crate.

  Kelly put he
r hands on her hips. ‘But that’s what makes you human and Sentinel an AI, however clever he is. You two care deeply about people and that will always be the right decision, in my book.’

  ‘In other words, we shed the tears that Sentinel can’t,’ I replied.

  Kelly patted my shoulder. ‘Just so.’

  On the horizon, a blue-and-white ferry was speeding off in the direction of England.

  Kelly followed my gaze. ‘That’s the last scheduled ferry from the Channel Islands. After that, there’ll be no more boats, or flights for that matter, until the hurricane has hit and run out of steam. Till then we’re going to be totally cut off. The last time something this big blew through here the Channel Islands were isolated for days.’

  ‘Sounds as though this storm could be seriously dangerous,’ Chloe replied.

  ‘It’ll be fine as long as we’re safely indoors. And it’s going to be an incredible thing to witness that I’m sure neither of you will ever forget it.’

  ‘Sounds kind of cool,’ I said.

  I gazed over the prow towards the nearby cliffs of France. We’d learnt from Kelly that it had been down to a twist in history that Alderney, and the rest of the Channel Islands, had become part of Britain. Ironically, in contrast to the clear French coastline behind us, the English mainland was less than a smudge on the horizon.

  I’d only been here for six months, but life on the island, thanks to its people and the landscape, had quickly snagged my heart.

  Although we did our best to keep ourselves to ourselves, despite the islanders being warm and welcoming. We had to be paranoid, because with the Shade’s ability to infect anyone with a compromised immune system, we were on the constant lookout for their spies. We were putting the islanders in danger just by being here, I knew that. My destroyed hometown of Stoneham was evidence of what the Shade were capable of – and just how high the stakes were.

  In the time it took Chloe and me to change into dry clothes, Kelly had Moon Dancer already underway. Now the yacht’s prow carved through the sparkling sea and the ferry to England was just a dwindling shape in the distance.

  ‘Tack it, Jake,’ Kelly shouted at me, her wavy blonde hair beaded with sea spray.

  I leapt towards the rope to pull in the slack as a small wave crashed over the side of the boat and soaked my dry clothes.

  After a few more frantic moments, I finally managed to fasten the sail and regain some of my dignity.

  I waved to Kelly. ‘Sorry about that.’

  She shrugged. ‘Practice makes perfect. Besides, mistakes are one of the best ways to learn. But you really shouldn’t be apologising to me, but to your skipper.’

  At the wheel, Chloe tilted her head to one side and shot me an amused look.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled.

  Chloe raised her eyebrows. ‘Sorry, skipper.’

  ‘Don’t push it.’

  She fluttered her eyelashes at me.

  I laughed as the yacht started to curve round towards the island.

  The chance to learn to sail with Kelly, not to mention have our first ever dive, had come as a welcome break for both of us. Aside from the stress about the dangerous Zoom virus, life on Alderney had turned out to be anything but a holiday.

  My Uncle Allan had taken it upon himself to become our taskmaster and keep the pressure on Chloe and me to get our college work done. He seemed to think that Oxford was still as high a priority for me as saving the world from the Shade.

  And then there was Dad. All my dreams about us making up for lost time had turned out to be something of a fantasy. The guy was so buried in building Waverider, a countermeasure to tackle his original DEC experiment, that it was almost as if I’d still lost him. It hadn’t been quite so bad at first, because I’d been able to help out, but even that had fallen away when Sentinel had piled on the pressure to train our Awoken psychic abilities. I’d barely seen Dad for the last month – he was nearly always locked away in his makeshift lab in the garden.

  I glanced over at Chloe, her face full of life and colour again. After the haunted look that she’d worn for the last six months, it was a welcome sight. And it had been a while since the muffled sobbing from her adjacent bedroom had woken me during the night. I knew from bitter experience about the intense pain of losing a parent, though given enough time it would become part of who she was. The loss of her dad would become a hollow in the centre of her soul that she would learn to live with.

  My eyes wandered across to Kelly, a pretty blonde woman in her late forties with a golden, wind-tanned face. Every pore of her skin exuded well-being, the sea and wide-open skies.

  Kelly was an old friend of Mum’s, and Moon Dancer belonged to her. A sculptor, she was a widower who had inherited the huge rambling house on Alderney that we now all called home. Allan had hinted that she’d also had quite a sizeable sum of money, but over the years she’d pretty much frittered it all away. Online gambling seemed to be her latest kryptonite.

  ‘All right, I think it’s time we got you two to swap roles,’ Kelly said. ‘Jake, do you fancy taking a turn at being skipper?’

  I sharpened my gaze on Chloe. ‘I don’t suppose you happen to have a mop and bucket on-board, do you, Kelly?’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘This deck looks like it could do with being swabbed down, that’s all.’

  Chloe sighed. ‘Just remember Mutiny on the Bounty, Mr Stevens.’

  I grinned. We really didn’t do this enough these days – be a couple of regular teenagers hanging out. Maybe that was because the fate of the world was riding on our shoulders.

  Kelly laughed. ‘Well, before you get Jake to walk the plank, you should also get some more tacking practice in. Let’s get this manoeuvre nailed before we sail back. Come on, Chloe, show Jake here how it’s done.’

  ‘With pleasure… Watch and learn, mister.’

  I took over control of the wheel from Kelly. ‘Don’t you mean “skipper”?’

  ‘Ha, aren’t you the comedian.’ Chloe headed to the front of the boat.

  Kelly scanned ahead of us. ‘OK, like I showed you both.’

  I gripped the boat’s wheel in readiness. ‘Prepare to tack,’ I called out to Chloe.

  She nodded, and, like we’d both been taught, replied, ‘Ready, ready, ready.’

  ‘Tack ho,’ I shouted back as I swung the wheel over to the right.

  Immediately, the jib sail at the prow of the yacht started to slacken. But Chloe was ready for it. She quickly let some rope out and the sail flapped across to the other side of the yacht. She refastened it and the sail billowed out as it caught the wind.

  My heart raced as the spray hit my face and the boat surged across the ocean. The yacht felt like a living being beneath my feet, rather than something made of wood and canvas.

  I gave Chloe a wide smile as she joined me back in the yacht’s cockpit.

  ‘Very well done, you two, that’s much more like it,’ Kelly said. ‘We’ll make sailors out of you guys yet.’

  Chloe beamed at me, all red hair and freckles – and seriously beautiful. I wasn’t sure why we hadn’t gone any further since our kiss outside the old lab all those months ago. Maybe we were both frightened about the consequences if it didn’t work out between us.

  ‘I wish we could stay out here a bit longer,’ Chloe said.

  Kelly shook her head. ‘No can do. Apart from delivering you back in time for your next lesson with Sentinel, I also want to get Moon Dancer safely moored up in the harbour before the sea gets too rough.’

  We both nodded, the joy of the moment before evaporating like early-morning mist over the sea.

  Kelly took the wheel from me and turned us back towards the Alderney. A large gull swept low over the yacht, its cry an echo of the scream I thought I’d heard underwater.

  A sense of unease gripped me again. Imagination or not, something still felt deeply wrong.

  Chapter Two

  Chloe and I jogged together along the narrow lane that wound aw
ay from the small harbour. Gulls wheeled over one of the surprisingly numerous palm trees on Alderney. This island seemed to think it was a tropical island rather than one of the cluster of Channel Islands stuck between France and England. The warmth of the sun on our faces was in stark contrast to the icy wind biting into our backs – another reminder of the approaching storm. The one thing you could say about Alderney was that, apart from traffic driving on the left, it really didn’t feel as if we were in the UK.

  We threaded our way along the lane, through a patchwork of fields, towards a white building on the moor ahead of us. This was Eaglehurst, a manor complete with a lookout tower peeping over its own small wood.

  Chloe ducked through a gap in the hedge on to a well-worn path towards the shrubs and trees. I was following her through when a tightness gripped my chest – the same feeling I’d had when we’d been diving.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ I said.

  Chloe grasped a palm tree to steady herself. ‘Yeah, I feel it too, Jake.’

  Before I could answer, a wall of nausea slammed into my gut. I dropped to my knees, heart racing, my palms slick with sweat.

  ‘Help me!’ a woman’s voice shouted.

  My pulse pounded in my ears as Chloe helped me back up.

  I cupped my hands round my mouth. ‘Where are you?’

  There was no reply.

  Chloe gave me a puzzled look. ‘Who are you calling to?’

  ‘That woman – you must have heard her.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not a thing.’ Her eyes narrowed on me. ‘Is it the same woman you heard scream when we were diving?’

  I squeezed the bridge of my nose, trying to organise my thoughts. ‘I think so.’

  ‘OK, I might not have heard anything, but this time I definitely felt something too.’

  ‘So what the hell is going on then?’

  Chloe tapped her fingers on the tree. ‘Right, this may be a bit of a leap, but could this be some sort of telepathy with another Awoken?’

  ‘Really? But I haven’t even met any other Awoken – apart from you. You really think that might be what’s going on?’