by Alix Marsh
Flynn hadn’t, but he nodded.
“And you’re not admitted to the Academy until you’ve taken your pledge,” Ice informed him. “So the intake is staggered throughout the year.”
“That’s why they don’t teach us anything interesting in first year,” Jack said. “They’d just have to start all over again each time someone new came.”
Ice took a sudden turn into a bush, which turned out to be not a bush but another spindly trail winding endlessly between tightly packed trees and grabbing bush, and finally, after what felt like half the night, spitting them out right up against a sheer wall.
“Hang on.” Jack put a hand to the wall, craning his neck to look up. “This is the Training Field. We’re around the…the side?” He tut-tutted. “Your usual standard is slacking, Ice. When you said you had something to show me—”
“We’ve come out around the back, actually.” Ice slipped past him, following the wall closely. “And I didn’t bring you to see the Training Field.”
The channel between the wall and trees forced them into single file again.
Flynn poked Jack in the shoulder blade. There were plenty of things Flynn didn’t mind getting into trouble over. A midnight hike was not one of them. “Are we supposed to be out here?”
“Probably not.”
“Shhh,” Ice called out to them.
“Who’s going to hear us?” Jack called back, loudly.
“Will you just shhhhhh,” she whisper-shouted.
“Nerves, Ice?” Jack said, but he’d lowered his voice. “It’s not like anyone’s really going to care—oomph.”
Ice had stopped short, causing Jack to bump into her and Flynn into Jack. Directly to their right, the forest had been cleared back a bit for, as Flynn saw when Ice brandished her flashlight over it, a slab of iron sunk into the mulch of undergrowth.
“The Bunker,” Ice announced proudly.
Flynn prodded the four-by-four-foot square slab with the tip of his shoe. “What is it?”
“Originally, just that,” Ice said. “Built during the war.”
“And now?” Jack dropped to his knees, brushing aside the leaves and soil blown up around the edges as he examined the slab.
“Let’s find out.”
Jack rattled a sturdy padlock he’d uncovered, securing an even sturdier-looking bolt on each side of two metal rings. “Not so easy, genius.”
“Take this.” Ice passed the flashlight to Jack as she, too, crouched down.
Flynn peered over their shoulders, not really able to see much. “How did you know this was here?”
“I have my ways,” Ice said mysteriously.
Jack laughed. “She means she has three older brothers who have already graduated from the Academy.”
“They never tell me anything.”
Flynn jumped back as Ice straightened and reached behind her.
“But they do have their uses.” She fiddled with her hair, then crouched forward again. “So, last Christmas, straight after dinner, they disappeared into Dad’s study and I just knew…” Her voice trailed off, as if she were concentrating too hard, then came back. “They had to be planning how they’d get my dad to change his mind before February. I’d only just convinced him—”
“Blackmail?” snickered Jack.
“You know me so well.” Ice chuckled. “Uncle Bennie, Dad’s brother, has actually evolved out of the dark ages. Dad almost keeled over when I told him Uncle Bennie had promised to pledge me if he wouldn’t.” She went silent for a few more seconds. “Whatever they’d been planning didn’t work, obviously, but by the time I got into place to eavesdrop—”
“Have I mentioned?” Jack glanced over his shoulder at Flynn. “Ice here is a cracking model pupil, ain’t you?”
Ice ignored him. “They’d had one too many cups of Christmas cheer and were ribbing each other about the antics they’d got up to at Victor Grey, and then…”
“And then?” prompted Jack after she’d left them hanging for a full minute.
Flynn braced a hand on Jack’s shoulder so he could lean over to see what she was doing.
“Hmm? Oh, yes, and then they told Rhye he was full of it when he swore he’d found this trap door—”
“Are you—” Flynn burst out “—picking that lock?”
“This old thing?” Ice got to her feet, dangling the huge padlock in front of him. “Why,” she exclaimed innocently, “it practically picked itself.”
It was difficult to not be impressed. “Wicked.”
“I’ve been known to be that, too.” She turned the flashlight on her face, crossed her eyes and made a hissing sound.
“Gross.”
“When you two have stopped flirting,” Jack said, “could I get some light over here?”
Heat stung Flynn’s cheeks.
“Give us a few more minutes,” Ice said solemnly, “then we’ll be done.”
Flynn’s face grew even hotter, but then she giggled and turned the flashlight back on the slab. “I’ve been wanting to say that all term.”
Flynn moved around to grab one of the ring handles from Jack, who’d shot back the bolt and was trying to heave open the trap door. He should have thought of laughing and making a joke of it first. Instead of blushing like moron.
“Bet you a fiver you can’t say it to Gaskin’s face,” Jack said.
“You’re on.”
The weight of the slab pulled at Flynn’s arms as Jack paused to stare at her. Flynn stared as well. Maybe there hadn’t been any joke.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Jack said.
“In that case…you’re not afraid to raise the stakes?”
“A tenner?”
“No, something more interesting than money.” Ice shone the light in his eyes. “Let’s trade favours. The winner gets a favour, anything, from the loser.”
Jack thought that over. “Okay, but you have to do it next week and the favour must be called by the end of the term.”
“Deal.”
“Deal.”
“I hope you’re not going to shake on it,” Flynn said, since Jack seemed to have forgotten about the ton of iron attached to the end of their arms. “I can’t hold this thing up by myself.”
With their newly combined effort, the slab drew backward on its hinge and slammed over, leaving a square hole in the ground with a very narrow, steep set of steps descending into blackness.
Jack snatched the flashlight. “I’ll go first.”
“Wait.” The beam had caught a dangling cord as it swept over the hole. Flynn fell to his stomach and reached inside, feeling air, and then his fingers found the nylon cord. He tugged and light flooded the basement room.
The steps were very sharp and built into the side of the wall with no banister. One wouldn’t have far to fall, though, because the room was as squat as it was small. If Flynn stretched his arm, he’d have been able to touch the cement ceiling. Another wall was bracketed with a floor-to-ceiling aluminium shelf system crammed with weird sports equipment, a box of boomerangs…another filled with small bouncy rubber balls like the kind from a vending machine. About a dozen wooden poles took up one rack, half the length of vault poles but just as thin and bendy.
“Looks like a storage room for the Training Field,” Jack said as he glanced around.
Ice had wandered across to the other end. “Come check this out.”
That wall was lined with free-standing steel cabinets packed side-by-side except for a space reserved for the solid iron door Ice had stopped in front of. There was no door handle, bolts or lock, just a rectangular patch where the iron shimmered a luminous light green.
“That’s a Darswich lockpad,” Jack said somewhat gloomily. “My dad has one installed on his safe at home.”
Ice turned to them and Flynn got his first proper look of her in full light. Her hair wasn’t black, but a very dark brown and she had a natural tan, making him think that at least one of her parents must be Italian or Greek or of some other Mediterranean desce
nt. Those turquoise eyes, however, were the worst (in the best possible way) and it took him a few more seconds than it should have to look away.
Luckily, Ice didn’t seem to notice. She wrinkled her nose at Jack. “A what?”
“The only foolproof security in existence, that’s what,” Jack said. “If your Darswich hasn’t got access, you don’t get in. This is as far as we go.”
“By Darswich,” Flynn had to ask, “we are talking about a dagger?” The look Jack gave him was answer enough. “Okay, so how do you give a dagger access to a lock? Is there some kind of microchip inside it?”
Ice turned her wrinkled nose on him. “And I thought no one ever told me anything.”
“Don’t take this wrong,” Jack said, his lips twitching, “but you are beyond a clue. Take your swich out.”
“My swich?”
“Your Darswich.”
“I don’t have it on me,” Flynn said.
“Where is it?” asked Ice.
“Back in the room.” Flynn gave them an astounded look. “It’s not like we can carry—” His mouth snapped shut as Jack and Ice simultaneously whipped out their daggers, Jack from the area at his hip and Ice from a hidden sheath along the inside of her left boot.
“A slayer and his swich are never parted,” Jack told him. “Never.”
Ice’s fingers closed so loosely over the smooth, ivory hilt of hers, the dagger was really just balancing on her palm. “Haven’t you felt it when you hold your swich, the energy flowing between you? As if you’re one with it?”
Flynn thought back to the few times he’d held the Darswich—or swich, which was much less of a mouthful. Had there been an energy? Well, the first time, definitely, what with a bolt of lightning slashing through him. And since that? He didn’t know about energy, but he did feel drawn to it. He’d assumed it was just the thrill of owning such a wicked weapon.
“The Touch of Zeus bonds your swich to your blood,” Jack said. “You’re connected at a DNA level.”
“That’s freaky,” Flynn said.
Ice shook her head. “It’s an extension of you.”
“Don’t worry, you and your swich just haven’t had a chance to get to know each other.” Jack said.
“Now you’re just messing with me.”
“We are so seriously not.” Jack said.
Whatever. Flynn bit down on his scepticism, noting the Celtic crosses with black markings on Jack’s swich instead: he was flipping it around and around with some fancy finger-work and then slid the swich into what Flynn now saw was a leather sheath sewn into the fabric of his black, narrow-leg cargo trousers, lying flat against his upper thigh.
The snakes on Flynn’s own swich were totally cool, but the collars of coloured stones suddenly seemed a little girly compared to Jack and Ice’s.
“So, this is like a fingerprint system,” Ice said as she tapped the broadside of her blade against the lockpad. Nothing happened.
“Better than fingerprints,” Jack explained. “The lockpad rejects the energy print if it isn’t the swich owner’s will to open the lock. You can’t force someone to give you access.”
Flynn took a step back. He still didn’t quite believe how the lockpad worked (energy print? an innate object able to read your will or intent?) but all that didn’t seem quite as important as the thought that had just struck. “What is behind that door that needs such high security?”
Jack had a look of disgust on his face. “We’ll never know, will we?”
“This Bunker isn’t exactly a secret.” Ice walked up the line of steel cabinets, examining each in turn. “Rhye was boasting about a hidden trap door inside the Bunker.”
She wore fitted black leather pants tucked into her boots and, between one step and the next, she sheathed her swich in a single fluid movement. Definitely a move he needed to learn, Flynn thought. Then he remembered… yeah, right, straight after he convinced his mom to buy him a pair of leather boots with a built-in hidden dagger sheath.
“A little help?” Ice had stopped at the end cabinet, which was really just a very tall locker, and couldn’t get a decent grip to pull it away from the wall.
Jack went over and pushed on the adjacent side. “Tilt it forward.”
“I’m trying. Give it a shove.”
“There isn’t space to get my fingers behind here.”
Flynn nervously glanced at the door, and the luminous Darswich lockpad, they were determined to bypass. “Am I the only one who doesn’t think this is the brightest idea?”
Their response was to pull and push more vigorously while barking out orders and complaints to each other. The cabinet tilted ever so slightly, it looked as if it might—no, Ice’s grip slipped off the flawlessly smooth steel and the cabinet rocked back firmly into position.
“It’s not likely your brother accidentally stumbled across a trapdoor under there,” Flynn pointed out to Ice. He still had grave misgivings, but wasn’t about to be the lone voice of cowardly reason. “Why would he have come down here? Maybe to get something the coach had sent him for?”
“Don’t let Instructor Adango ever hear you calling him a mere coach,” Jack said. He threw his hands up and stepped away from the cabinet. “But that makes sense.”
“You don’t know Rhye,” Ice said darkly. “He’s as sneaky as they come.”
Jack put one hand up again. “Kettle.” His other hand came up. “Pot.” He smacked them together. “Say hello, why don’t you?”
Flynn laughed.
Ignoring them, Ice nevertheless spun away from the cabinets, glancing around the room and then her gaze stopped on a pine crate wedged into the corner by the aluminium shelves.
The crate was filled with basketballs and not at all difficult to pull out from the corner. The sliver of a wooden panel, set into the cement floor, was just visible before it disappeared beneath the shelves.
Jack dropped down, feeling blindly beneath the lowest rack. “This is it,” he said excitedly.
They quickly cleared the lower two shelves (loads of deflated bicycle tyre tubes, reels of sturdy rope and boxes upon boxes of tacks.) Once they’d removed the lower shelves from the frame, there was just enough space to haul the trapdoor up by the handy rope handle looped through holes bored into the wood.
Flynn was suddenly a lot more cheerful about their adventure. The secret entrance was barely hidden at all, not even locked in the normal manner. And when he followed the others, sliding on his back into the gap beneath the shelves, legs first down the square hole, the drop was only about five feet. Nothing very secret or dangerous about the tunnel he had to crouch inside. It probably didn’t even lead into the room next door.
The tunnel was low and so narrow, the sleeves of his hoodie kept snagging on the rough walls. His trainers sloshed through muck he was grateful he couldn’t see; Jack was between him and Ice’s flashlight.
“What do you reckon this is?” Jack’s voice was a muffled, hollow echo.
“A drain of some sort?” suggested Ice.
“Ew,” Jack said, expressing Flynn’s feelings exactly. “We’re wading through crap?”
“We’re hardly wading, and this bunker was probably never used anyway. Cornwall was never quite invaded or bombed, you do realise?”
They hadn’t gone more than a couple of steps when Ice stopped short, shining the light at the tunnel roof. “It’s a grating,” she said a moment later. “This must definitely be a drain.” There was a small grunt. “I think it will move, but it’s heavy.”
“Move along further and I’ll give it a try,” Jack said.
“Nowhere to go, the tunnel—” another grunt “—ends here.”
Flynn slid his arm over Jack’s hunched back and twiddled his fingers. “Give the flashlight here and you both try.”
Something bony jabbed his bruised jaw (an elbow?) as Jack shuffled unexpectedly. “Watch it.”
“Don’t have eyes in the back of my head, do I?”
The flashlight was pressed into Flynn’s ha
nd and he moved back a little, keeping the light aimed at the roof. He still couldn’t see much, but heard the squeaky grind as the grid scraped over the metal rim and surrounding cement.
“Do you need a lift-up?” Jack said.
“Do you?” Her voice echoed from even further away, as if she’d straightened and her head was out the hole. And then, even further away, “It’s pitch black…can’t see a thing. Seems okay, though. I’ll see if I can find a light switch.”
Jack went next, then leant over to take the flashlight from Flynn. He kept the light on Flynn, who wished he’d just move on. His head only just cleared the hole and he didn’t need witnesses while trying to haul himself up from shoulder height. He’d never been very athletic. His skinny arms strained, but then his flailing legs struck the other side of the tunnel wall and he managed to walk himself up a foot or so and springboard himself over the edge using both his hands and feet.
If Jack had noticed his difficulties, he was decent enough to not say anything.
Flynn pulled himself off the ground, was turning about slowly in the disorientating blackness when tubing flickered above, undecided, and then caught, flooding the vast area (at least four times larger than the room they’d just come from) in neon light.
Jack screamed, jumped back, bounced off the wall behind him and screamed again.
Even Ice twitched a bit and made a small sound.
Flynn just froze, his heart attempting to beat a path out of his chest as he stared at the figure slumped forward in a hardback chair. Not a person, really. The uniform, slim outline formed an elongated shape of head, slender neck and hunched back before curving over his seated bottom and onto thighs and calves without filling in any of the details; like hair or clothes or elbows or knees. He was the colour of unbaked clay and similarly proportioned like some kind of sleek, minimal, modern art statue that might be titled something abstract like, The Long Man.
A pattern of intertwining symbols appeared to have been drawn on the floor around his chair in a perfect circle. The exact same drawing, same shape and size, was repeated on the ceiling directly above.
Flynn heard either Jack or Ice moving at his side, the shuffling of heavy soled boots, quick breaths that sounded just as panicked as his own, but he couldn’t peel his eyes from the statue, which it must be (even the strange drawings could be classified as art, he supposed) but that didn’t explain the other circle: a circle of prison bars surrounding it all with a gap of easily ten feet between the two circumferences. The bars shot up from the floor and into the ceiling, gleaming like polished silver. They were also spread a tad too far apart to be realistically (or artistically) useful since the profile of the seated statue told him it couldn’t be thicker than five inches.
