Читать книгу Hero Rising - Shane Hegarty, Shane Hegarty - Страница 9

“Hello,” Finn said as he passed a man sponging down a car.

“Hello,” said the man from Bubble Blast Car Wash.

If Finn had stopped to think about it for a moment, he might have noticed that the Bubble Blast Car Wash man was washing the same part of the car over and over. And that he wasn’t really washing it too well anyway, just sort of waving a hand over a windscreen that looked shiny enough as it was.

But Finn was distracted. Firstly because he had managed to get a glob of Squishy Bar stuck between his teeth, which required trying to dislodge it with his finger. Secondly because he was following two people through the many back lanes of Darkmouth while trying not to be seen. Or heard.

Hanging back, with a baseball cap pulled low, he dialled a number on his phone. It was quickly answered.

“They’re talking about cakes, I think,” he whispered down the line.

“Cakes?” asked Emmie’s voice loudly.

“Cakes,” replied Finn.

Ahead of him, two assistants were walking purposefully towards some unknown destination. They wore the greyest of grey, as if someone had designed it specifically to be the least interesting colour ever invented. There were too many of these suits, and the assistants wearing them, around Darkmouth these days. Finn had begun to recognise these two, though. She was Scarlett. He was Greyson. Finn had made it his business to find out what they were up to.

Scarlett and Greyson stopped.

Finn nipped behind a bin, pressed in tight against the wall, and listened.

“Why hasn’t it worked?” Greyson asked. “It should have worked.”

“We can’t talk about this in public,” said Scarlett.

“We’ve added the sherbet,” replied Greyson, tapping his head as if hoping an answer would fall out. “We’ve added chocolate. We’ve even experimented with custard.”

“Please, we can’t—”

“And no one likes wasting custard.”

“Stop,” Scarlett ordered him, looking around to see if anyone was listening.

Finn was so close to them, crouched behind a bin, hardly breathing for fear of being caught. He pressed a hand against his mouth to stop himself making any noise.

“We have to be careful,” said Scarlett. “The walls have ears.”

Greyson examined the wall, ran his hand along it.

“I don’t mean they actually have ears,” said Scarlett. “Come on, let’s go.”

“If it doesn’t work at the cliff today, we should try rainbow sprinkles.”

“What did I just say?” Scarlett asked, exasperated.

They resumed their walk again. From behind the bin, squeezed into the darkness of the narrowest of gaps between buildings, Finn breathed again, mightily relieved they hadn’t heard Emmie on the far end of the phone asking repeatedly, “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” answered Finn, because he didn’t. All he knew was that something was going on. Something had been going on for a while now. Something strange. He’d spotted assistants moving suspiciously in and out and around the town. These two especially.

“They’re heading for the cliffs. Meet me there,” he said and hung up.

Using his local advantage over the assistants, Finn ducked into the laneways that criss-crossed Darkmouth. He knew that if he dipped in at Scrapers Lane there would be a shortcut to Red Alley. And if he nipped into the gap between two houses off Red Alley it would bring him to Stump Street, which in turn would allow him a quick route to Limpers Rock.

He emerged at the beach road ahead of the assistants. At the same time, Emmie arrived from another of the narrow lanes.

“Hey,” she said. “What do you think those assistants are doing? And why are you wearing a baseball cap that says ‘Cool Dude’?”

Finn took her elbow and pulled her around to face a shop window.

Scarlett and Greyson approached along the path. Hunched, with his baseball cap pulled down, Finn hoped they hadn’t noticed himself and Emmie or that the two of them were looking in a shop window long empty except for dead flies and dirt.

“They’re up to something,” Finn said after the assistants walked past. “They’ve been up to something for a while. We need to find out what.”

Emmie kept looking at his hat.

“And the best disguise I could do at short notice was this dumb baseball cap, OK?”

“You should have grown a moustache or something.” She smiled.

“This is serious,” Finn said. “Whatever they’re doing, we need to find out what it is so we can have our old lives back. Do you like sharing one toilet with loads of people every morning?”

“Good point,” she said. “Come on.”

The assistants climbed a path towards what remained of Darkmouth’s cliffs, a slumped mass of rock and earth on which grass grew and trees clung at precarious angles. They had collapsed when Finn’s grandfather Niall Blacktongue had returned from the Infested Side and exploded in a cave below the cliffs to destroy an army of invading Legends. During that adventure, Finn had also turned into a walking bomb and while he’d had a few explosive moments since, in the months since Gantrua’s invasion he was beginning to feel like the strange energy had finally dissipated, that he had gradually returned to something like normal. The cliff, though, would never be the same again.

Finn and Emmie took another shortcut, dashing along the stone shore, carefully making their way across the narrow strip of shingle squeezed between the soil and the sea. They clambered up the long, steep slope of weeds and grass just as the assistants arrived from the other direction. The breeze carried their curses as briars caught at their suit trousers, as they stumbled over ground that had come crashing down in one terrific, almost catastrophic implosion.

The cave.

That’s why they’re here, thought Finn. That was what they were looking for. The Cave at the Beginning of the World, as it was once known. A place where crystals had grown, where gateways to the Infested Side had popped open and shut.

But it had been destroyed, pulverised by the exploding Niall Blacktongue. Hadn’t it?

The assistants paused to look around them, and Finn and Emmie dropped behind the tendrils of a half-uprooted tree, still heavy with leaves, but its branches almost touching the ground on one side, as if it might topple fully at any moment.

They carefully manoeuvred themselves so that they were behind the web of roots that had been thrust into unwanted daylight and peered through them. The assistants were gone.

“Where are they?” asked Finn, pushing himself up for a better view.

“They just kind of dropped out of sight,” said Emmie.

They crept into the open again, carefully at first, presuming they’d see the assistants’ heads over the crest of the land. But there was no sign. They moved past a couple more lopsided trees, towards where they had last seen them, and Finn noticed a patch of ground that looked out of place, like a wig on a bald head.

He carefully pulled at it and the grass and dirt fell away like a kind of mat. It revealed a hole that, if he was to guess, was large enough to fit an adult with relative comfort.

“Is that a rope ladder just inside?” Emmie asked.

Finn knew every inch of Darkmouth – above ground and, more recently, the tunnels and caves below. “This was never here before,” he said.

From the collapsing trees angling behind them, birds sang, noisy. Something sticky landed on Finn’s neck, and he swatted at it while trying to concentrate on the voices he could hear rising from the hole in the ground.

“That didn’t work,” they heard Greyson say, and Emmie moved back instinctively, her feet pushing away a sliver of rocks and soil so they formed a tiny avalanche as they tumbled down the slope.

“We’ll try again,” they heard Scarlett reply from deep down below, in the ground.

Feeling a little braver, Finn stood higher, craned over the hole to listen better.

“Do we hold it this way, or that way?” Greyson asked.

“Well, we held it that way last time,” Scarlett replied, “so we should probably hold it this way this time and see what happens.”

Finn and Emmie looked at each other, frowning.

All went quiet. There was only the sound of the breeze and birds, and the pebbles sliding away from their feet. Finn began to wonder if the assistants had left the cave and headed out some other way.

Then a spark rose up from the darkness, a burst of light, lasting just a millisecond.

“What was that?” asked Finn.

It happened again.

And again.

“Again?” he heard Greyson ask.

“Again,” confirmed Scarlett.

There was another momentary burst of light.

Finn placed his hand on the bark of the tree to keep his balance as he leaned over the hole in the cliff, but its sap’s stickiness was enough to pull at his skin. The birds were making a lot of noise too, above them and across the trees scattered over the crumbled cliffs.

He stood to gather his thoughts, trying to pick the drying sap off his hands while figuring out exactly what to do now. “What do you think, Emmie?”

“I think there’s something very weird going on with that little bird over your head,” she said.

He looked up. A tiny finch was hanging upside down from a leaf, desperately pecking at the branch and beating its wings, unable to pull itself free.

Finn reached up to the branch and felt the sap covering the bird, and he realised it was seeping from every part of the tree. As gently as he could, he helped free the small bird. It did not fight him, its exhaustion overpowering its fear. He felt its heart beat at a panicked pulse, held it out delicately to show Emmie.

She took a bottle from her bag and gently squeezed water over the bird’s back and wings while he massaged it as carefully as he could, until the sap gradually eased out and, with a shake, the bird found freedom again in its wings.

Finn held the bird out on the palm of his hand, where it stayed for a little while longer, regaining its energy. Eventually, it spread its wings and flew, dropping low along the grass before picking up and rising higher as it disappeared across the hill towards the town. They followed its flight, Finn feeling pleased that they had freed it, saved it from certain death.

Until he realised that in every tree in sight there were birds fighting, struggling, failing to free themselves from the sap that oozed from the leaves and bark. He nudged Emmie and showed her.

“That’s weird,” said Emmie.

“Are you spying on us?” asked Scarlett, her head popping up through the hole in the ground.

“I think they were spying on you,” said Estravon, appearing behind them, flanked by two assistants, stocky men who filled their suits, thick necks spilling out over their collars. “And I’ve had to ruin a good pair of shoes spying on them. Come with me, you two. Lucien will not be happy.”