Fading Light

by Nick Cook

  ‘That’s the one. There is certainly more than enough money in it for several thousands of Awoken to travel here and train, all expenses paid.’

  ‘Claiming that they’ve been identified as gifted students is a great cover idea. At last we’ll be able to make a difference to people who have been Awoken. That’s a start…’

  I tried to speak, but my throat was too tight for the words to get out.

  ‘I need to tell you about the others I found,’ Chloe continued. ‘There was this Icelandic woman called Nina. The weird thing was, I could understand her even though she was thinking in a different language.’

  ‘Excellent – that means my interpreter filter is working directly with your mind and translating thoughts even as you contact them via Ember,’ Sentinel said.

  ‘You didn’t tell me anything about that,’ Chloe replied.

  ‘It was a side project of mine as it occurred to me that many of the newly Awoken wouldn’t necessarily speak English. I’m working on a wireless earbud you’ll be able to wear when they are actually here on the island. It’ll also interpret for you outside Ember too.’

  I tried to move my hand a fraction but couldn’t. For whatever reason, it was taking me longer than normal to surface from this remote-viewing session.

  ‘Anyway, you were talking about this woman called Nina?’ Kelly said.

  ‘Yeah, she was asleep and her dreams were all about this drop-dead gorgeous guy who happens to be her best friend’s boyfriend.’ Chloe smirked. ‘After that I switched my search to London to try to locate Gemma.’

  ‘Any joy there?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘None, but I did find a teenager called Sanjit. He was in the middle of an aeronautical engineering class at UCL.’ Her eyebrows flicked upwards. ‘I think I may have put him off a bit.’

  Gemma… My hand at last obeyed me and I pulled the headset from my head and let it fall to the floor.

  Everyone’s attention focused on me.

  ‘Fantastic, you’re back with us,’ Chloe said. ‘Wasn’t it great—’ She cut off and her eyes narrowed as she took in my expression. ‘What’s wrong, Jake? You look freaked out.’

  ‘I…’ My throat felt as if it were filled with razorblades. I mimed a drinking signal to Kelly.

  She passed me a glass of water.

  I downed it in one, the fluid loosening my throat. ‘I found Gemma and another two of the Awoken…’ I paused, rubbing my neck. ‘Including a guy who you’ve been dreaming about called Ethan.’

  Chloe’s eyes widened. ‘How did you know…?’ She swatted her hand, as if it were nothing. ‘Later. But what about Gemma?’

  ‘Mathews is holding her captive inside Big Ben. He’s trying to convince her that it was the Awoken who killed her parents. He’s also told her that we deliberately released the Zoom virus to kill people.’

  Chloe didn’t say a word but scowled at Sentinel.

  He ignore her and concentrated on me. ‘Did you learn anything else, Jake?’

  ‘Yes, Mathews told Gemma that she had a power she could use against us.’

  ‘What sort of power are we talking here?’ Sentinel asked.

  ‘He didn’t get to that part – Gemma lost consciousness at that point. But whatever it is, it has to be the reason the Shade have targeted her in the first place and are spinning her half-truths and outright lies in order to persuade her to work for them.’

  ‘Then we need to get our arses back there and rescue Gemma from the Shade before it’s too late,’ Chloe said.

  I took another big gulp of the coffee, feeling the caffeine start to steady me. ‘Damned right we do.’

  ‘You should really give yourselves time to recover. I can see from your vital signs that you’re still exhausted,’ Sentinel said.

  ‘We haven’t got time to debate this, Sentinel. We have to act now in case they move her again,’ Chloe said. ‘Besides, I’m all about saving people, even if you’re not.’

  ‘I understand your anger and your determination to do something to help Gemma, Chloe, but something doesn’t seem right here,’ Sentinel replied. ‘To start with, why hold her in a high-profile place like Big Ben rather than a more discreet location?’

  Chloe’s gaze snapped to me. ‘Did you see any evidence of a new DEC machine, Jake? That would make sense if they were going to sacrifice her into it to feed a portal?’

  ‘Nothing like that, although it doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t placed one nearby.’

  Kelly frowned. ‘But I’m with Sentinel on this. Why Big Ben? It’s almost as if they chose somewhere famous to make it easier for you to find her.’

  ‘What…you’re saying they’re using Gemma as bait to lure us in?’ Chloe asked.

  ‘Possibly,’ Kelly replied.

  ‘Or maybe it’s that they’re simply holding her there because they can, flaunting their reach into the government in our faces,’ I said.

  ‘But even if she is bait, does that matter?’ I said. ‘They’ll be expecting us to turn up in person. What they anticipate is for us to use remote viewing to locate her. It’s not as if we’ll be physically there – they won’t be able to actually grab hold of us.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Maybe I’ve become a bit too paranoid over the countless millennia,’ Sentinel said.

  ‘I think you have,’ I replied before Chloe could jump in with another verbal kicking.

  But despite my words, I had a nagging feeling about this too. Maybe it had been too easy to find her. Or maybe it was just that Sentinel’s and Kelly’s paranoia was rubbing off on me? But the thing that overrode all of that was that we had do what we could to help Gemma while there was still time. Everything else was secondary. I scooped my headset off the floor and pulled it back on.

  ‘Looks as if we’re on then,’ Chloe said, putting on her own headset. ‘OK, Sentinel, jack us back into Ember.’

  ‘Confirmed. Commencing in three, two, one…’

  The light flared in my vision again as the data HUD swam into focus. At least my heart rate had fallen back to just below a hundred.

  This time it seemed as if Chloe and I were almost instantly outside and shooting away through the storm towards London.

  ‘This certainly beats taking the train,’ Chloe said. Her tone was light, but I could tell she was worried too.

  I had to keep reminding myself there was nothing the Shade could do to us as London hurtled closer, but still my sense of unease wouldn’t let go. And why had it taken me so long to surface from the remote viewing last time? Exhaustion, or something more?

  I spotted the familiar silver ribbon of the Thames snaking its way through the city. I shifted into the Light Web and the river became a dancing path of energy.

  We sped over it towards the Houses of Parliament, heading straight for Big Ben’s tower.

  Chloe’s avatar passed through one of Big Ben’s four clock faces ahead of me. I followed her, dialling in some Real – our nickname for the normal world – under the superimposed view of the Light Web.

  Inside the room, storm light shone faintly through the yellowish clock faces, casting the room into sepia tones with deep shadowed recesses. I’d been so fixated on Gemma before that I hadn’t noticed how much dimmer the waveform energy field seemed in here. I could hear the steady clicking of the clock’s mechanism, all this detail modelled by Sentinel in DT3. Shifted or not, it was hard to remember this was just a sim and that we weren’t actually here.

  The chair where Gemma had been tied up was empty, a discarded rope lying nearby on the floor.

  Something sagged inside me. ‘We’re too late – they’ve already moved her.’

  ‘They can’t have gone far. You were only here a moment ago,’ Chloe’s avatar replied as it stood by my side.

  Something flickered across the semi-opaque glass of the clock face. My senses sharpened and I instinctively tuned my vision into the thermal wavelength of the Shadowlands.

  ‘Chloe…’

  ‘Yeah, I saw it too. A shadow crow?�
�

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Frost rippled across the floor towards us as the darkness intensified. My heart rate shot up again in my HUD display, and my blood pressure was rising fast too. Animal instinct was already screaming at me that I should have taken better notice of my gut feeling before coming here.

  Then Gemma stepped out of the shadows and walked towards us with a blank expression, almost as if she were sleepwalking.

  ‘I’ll plant a thought in Gemma’s mind and try to make contact,’ Chloe said.

  Gemma gaze tightened directly on us. ‘No need – I can see and hear you both perfectly.’

  The dead tone of her voice iced my blood. But the fact she could sense us, no doubt because of her Awoken ability, could only help to make this next step easier.

  ‘Look, Gemma, my name is Jake – and this is Chloe. We need to get out of here somehow, because you’re in danger.’

  ‘The only danger here is from you two,’ Gemma replied. She glanced back over her shoulder. ‘The Awoken are here.’

  The darkness within the Shadowlands seemed to thicken behind her and out of it stepped Mathews.

  ‘Run, Gemma!’ Chloe shouted.

  But Gemma stayed exactly where she was, her eyes still locked on to us.

  ‘Where are they, Gemma?’ Mathews asked, his gaze hunting the room.

  She pointed to our avatars. ‘There are two of them here and they seem to be using some sort of mental projection. Their names are Jake and Chloe.’

  ‘Why are you telling him all this?’ I said. ‘Mathews is a Shade. He’s your enemy, not your friend.’

  Gemma shook her head. ‘No, you’re my enemy, Awoken.’

  So she’d believed all the lies that Mathews had spun her. Every instinct was screaming at me to get out of there, but first we had to convince Gemma of the truth.

  ‘Gemma, all the crap they’ve been telling you about the Awoken is an outright lie,’ I said.

  ‘They are saying that you lied to me,’ Gemma repeated with the same flat tone to Mathews.

  ‘And of course they would say that, but you must not believe them, my dear. Those two are part of the group responsible for murdering your parents. And the time to avenge them has come, Gemma.’ Mathews raised one hand and clenched his fist.

  There was a deafening crack – a clock face shattering – and Gemma’s eyes filled with shadows. As the glass shards of the smashed clock flew inwards, hundreds of shadow crows swarmed into the room.

  My hands twitched to throw out a fireball at them, but nothing happened. My mind raced. Back on the island, Clarke had only been a few hundred metres away, not hundreds and hundreds of miles like now. And besides this was, for all its complexity, just a simulation within Ember. So much for projecting my powers within the sim… I felt like kicking myself for not testing this out sooner.

  ‘Jake and Chloe, you should leave right now,’ Sentinel’s voice said to us back in the tower. ‘I don’t know what the threat is here, but I’m certain there is one.’

  ‘Sentinel, chill,’ Chloe said. ‘We may not be able to hurt them, but they can’t hurt us either.’

  ‘Chloe’s right,’ I said. ‘And while there’s still a chance we can get through to Gemma, I say we should stay and try to do exactly that.’

  Gemma gave us a blank look as the shadow crows started to mob us, closing in like a shadowy net.

  Mathews tightened his hand on Gemma’s shoulder. ‘Jake and Chloe, I am so glad that it was you two who fell for what you humans call our honeytrap. Of course, we deliberately let Inspector Clarke get away, hoping he would lure you here.’

  I traded a worried frown with Chloe.

  ‘Processing the revised threat level,’ came Sentinel’s voice.

  Red warning markers appeared all over the view, marking the flocking shadow birds. A bigger marker centred around Mathews… My heart froze as one also appeared around Gemma.

  Chloe gasped. ‘She’s been possessed!’

  ‘Abort your mission now!’ Sentinel shouted. ‘A Shade might not be able to hurt your psychic projections, but an Awoken is another matter entirely.’

  Before we could respond, Mathews lowered his mouth to Gemma’s ear. ‘My dear, I think the time has come to demonstrate your power to your enemy.’

  Gemma’s blank face nodded and she raised her arms. The shadow crows swirled away from her as she started to thrash her head from side to side.

  Chloe’s avatar hand gripped mine as we both started to back away. The air tingled over my skin as though it was becoming charged. Something was happening to the energy in the room. I overlaid the Light Web on the Shadowlands once more to see what was happening.

  At first, I thought I was seeing things. Golden energy lines flowing over Gemma’s body began to shift around her into a new form. Thread by thread, the thing built until her physical body was enclosed within a ghostly creature with leathered wings. Its horned head stared at us with red-ember eyes.

  ‘Move!’ I shouted.

  We both turned and raced towards one of the broken clock faces.

  Mathews’s voice seemed to fill the clock tower. ‘Feel your pain, feel your anger, Gemma. These Awoken are responsible for murdering your parents.’

  Gemma’s mouth stretched wide. The demon creature around her opened its mouth too. Its scream mingled with hers, the demon’s reinforcing the human’s. Together their cries grew into a roar.

  The deafening noise reached deep inside me, jamming up my own thoughts. I felt my energy draining away even as my heart rate soared upwards.

  In that moment, the Shade thickened the air to treacle and slowed us both to a stop. They tightened their knotted bodies round us and dragged our avatars to the ground.

  ‘Gemma’s trying to trap your consciousness minds,’ Sentinel said as the view of the clock tower began to dim. ‘Try to coordinate your escape together and you may weaken her grip enough for you to get away.’

  ‘Got it,’ I said. ‘Chloe, are you ready to try?’

  She nodded.

  I threw everything I had left at pushing away from the ground, like an athlete bursting off the blocks. Together, Chloe and I pushed through the barrier of shadow crows.

  The hair swirled around Gemma’s head as her dark phantom spread its arms wide. The demon roared again and the Shade flocked towards us as we reached one of the shattered clock faces. I leapt out, Chloe just behind me.

  At once, the light-line linking me all the way back to my physical body in Alderney blazed with blue light and started to haul me up into the sky. But as I glanced back, my mind locked up. Chloe’s avatar was held within in a cage of shadow birds – and they were dragging her back into the tower.

  ‘Chloe!’ I shouted.

  ‘Promise me you will never give up!’ she called back. Then the swarm of Shade swamped her and she disappeared from view.

  I tried to turn but I couldn’t do a thing as my light-line hauled me away into the sky.

  What seemed to be a second later, I opened my eyes; I was back in the tower. Kelly stood over Chloe, gently holding her hands.

  ‘What happened?’ Kelly said as she saw me open my eyes. ‘Chloe’s been screaming and you’ve been out cold for ten minutes!’

  Fighting the numbness, I managed to tear my headset off and stumble across to her. ‘Chloe…’ I swallowed hard. ‘Are you OK? Can you hear me?’

  She remained as still as stone.

  ‘Sentinel, is she dead?’ I asked.

  ‘No, just unconscious,’ Sentinel replied.

  ‘So why can’t we wake her?’

  ‘The Shade, with Gemma’s help, have trapped her consciousness back in London.’

  I could barely breathe. ‘Are you saying that Chloe’s in a coma?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid that’s exactly what I’m saying.’

  Kelly rushed to the stairs. ‘I’ll get John here to see if he can help.’

  ‘I afraid her condition is far beyond your medical science,’ Sentinel replied in a ridicu
lously calm tone.

  Kelly flung her gaze at me as though it were a rock. ‘This is your bloody fault, Jake!’

  I gawped at her, not sure I’d heard her correctly. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re here and she’s not – that’s what I bloody well mean!’

  Her words stung me like nothing else could and I winced.

  ‘You’re not being fair to Jake,’ Sentinel said.

  ‘Aren’t I? All I know is that poor girl may never recover, thanks to Jake abandoning her.’

  ‘But I couldn’t do a thing,’ I said.

  ‘You think?’ Kelly shouted.

  I dropped my head and stared at my hands. However unfair Kelly’s anger at me was, in an awful way she was just voicing what I was thinking. This was the second time I’d abandoned Chloe to the Shade. Like the last occasion, when we’d tried to flee Archios on Ravens Hill, I’d been forced to leave her behind. And then, like now, I couldn’t get past the feeling that it should have been me. Maybe Kelly was right. This was all my fault.

  I clutched Chloe’s hand hard in mine and bent my head over her as Kelly thundered away down the stairs.

  Chapter Nine

  Kelly had helped me carry Chloe’s motionless body down to her bedroom without uttering another word to me.

  We were clustered in Chloe’s room. Allan paced up and down while I did my best to avoid eye contact with Kelly, which was pretty easy, since she was staring out of the window at the hurricane outside, an aura of hostility wrapped around her like a force field. Dad was on his way, after finishing something critical in the lab.

  I ran my thumb over the face of the diver’s watch to try to steady the swirl of my emotions. You can’t be gone, Chloe…

  Was that really her in the bed or just the empty carcass of her body? I shuddered at the thought. One minute alive and now this… I hung my head and stared at my hands.

  In the background, some classical piano music played, courtesy of Sentinel. He’d tuned into a station far away in the depths of France – one that hadn’t been affected by the power cuts. The music did its job of filling the crushing silence in the room, but couldn’t dampen the guilt screaming around my skull.