1.4 (18 page)

My father’s study was unlocked and we went in. For the first time ever I noticed how empty the room was. A desk and a chair and a single picture on the wall had always been his sole concession to stamping his personality on the place. He spent so much of his home time in here, thinking and working, but you would have been forgiven for thinking that the room was never used.

The picture was of a weird dome-like structure and I’d asked my father about it once.

‘It’s called a geodesic dome,’ he had said, mildly irritated by the question. ‘A beautiful construction that provides remarkable strength for its weight.’

I’d always thought that it was an odd picture for him to have on his wall, but then that’s my father for you.

On the wall behind my father’s desk was a door. The entrance to his laboratory.

I nodded towards the door and we made our way across the study and stood in front of it.

‘This must be the way,’ I said.

‘You have a room in your house that you’ve never even been in?’ Alpha said, in wonderment. ‘You rich people are weird, you know that?’

‘I know.’ I said, and touched the metal plate that served as a locking mechanism.

Nothing.

I pushed at it.

Still nothing.

I put two hands on it and gave it a good hard shove.

More nothing.

I deployed filaments. When they touched the plate the door slid open. It didn’t even seem to have any personalised coding to it. Anyone could have opened it, I reckoned. What did that say about my father? Was he incredibly trusting? Or arrogant? I stepped over the threshold.

It was dark inside.

Dark and cold.

And something else.

Moist . . .

I turned on my bioluminescence, and felt the usual tingle pass down my spine as I lit up the air around me. The dull red light was sufficient to show us that we were entering a tiny anteroom, with a platform that looked a lot like the
auto da fé
from Ellery Towers.

Alpha and I looked at each other, then stepped on to the platform.

It gave a high-pitched
beep
and then started to descend slowly.

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The platform took us on a slow climb down a narrow shaft. Alpha clung on to my arm as we descended, and I was only too happy for her to do it. I felt a tension that could easily grow into fear, and Alpha’s closeness gave me some comfort.

After about twenty metres, we reached the bottom. The platform lurched, then steadied, and we stepped off into another small anteroom. It was even colder down here, and the air felt damp and unpleasant.

There was a reinforced metal door in front of us and, as we approached it, there was a loud noise as a mechanism inside ground and crashed, and then the door moved aside and there was bright light within.

We emerged, blinking, into a vast metal dome that stretched as far forward as the eye could see, and there were lighting rigs in bands across the ceiling high above us. My bioluminescence was unnecessary, and I killed it.

‘Oh, my,’ Alpha said. Which was two whole words more than I could manage. We moved forward, hardly able to believe the evidence of our senses.

The dome itself was an impressive feat of structural engineering, and the fact that it was hidden beneath the ground under part of the city was bizarre . . . but what it contained was truly mind blowing.

It was an ancient, but perfectly preserved, village. On all sides of us were buildings of a type that simply no longer existed in the world: squat little houses made of brick and wood and glass, none of them over three storeys high. They were like even older versions of the café that Alpha had taken me earlier, and I had no doubt at all in my mind that I was walking along the streets of the village of Millgrove.

The light from above revealed every detail with almost alarming clarity: an old-fashioned pavement; a weedchoked road.

We walked along, wide-eyed, and after a while Alpha pointed at something excitedly. A sign on the wall identified it as the ‘Happy Shopper’.

‘It’s smaller than I thought it would be,’ she said, her voice over-brimming with excitement. ‘Will you just look at that! It’s real!’

I gave her a tight-lipped smile in reply. For her this was the confirmation of a lifetime of belief, and I could imagine that it must be intoxicating to finally discover proof as undeniable as this.

To me it had somewhat the opposite effect.

This place was proof that my father had been lying to me all of my life.

That he had been lying to the world.

That he had painted Strakerites as superstitious fools, while building a house above their most sacred place – Millgrove.

I felt sick and angry and betrayed.

Alpha was trying the door of the Happy Shopper, only to discover that it steadfastly resisted her efforts.

‘It’s been
sealed shut
.’ She said. ‘There’s some kind of transparent skin around the whole building.’ She moved on further down the road. ‘It’s around all of the buildings. This must be why they are so perfectly preserved after all this time. It’s like . . . it’s like it’s been kept as a museum . . .’

‘Or a shrine,’ I said, feeling the word fit better, somehow.

If Alpha heard, then she ignored me.

‘If this is the Happy Shopper,’ she was saying, ‘then . . . then just down the road should be . . .’

She hurried down the road and I followed, my steps feeling heavy.

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Two minutes later I was standing on Millgrove’s village green, with recently cut grass beneath my feet and stretching out all around me. It boggled the mind that this place was actually tended: that the grass was cut and the buildings were preserved. This place clearly meant something to my father, but there was no way that he kept this place maintained by himself.

That meant there must be other people who knew that Millgrove was down here, under the streets of New Cambridge; but no one had shared that knowledge with the Strakerites who must have dreamed of finding the place mentioned by their prophet.

I couldn’t work it out. Why? Why would my father go to all this trouble? Why would he keep the mythical village clean and tidy and preserved in a plastic skin?

I watched as Alpha examined the bus shelter that squatted by the side of the green, and then as she ran on to the grass, laughing with pleasure.

‘The Millgrove talent show,’ she yelled. ‘Mr Peterson and his ventriloquist act. It happened here. All of it. Peter, LOOK!’

She span around on the spot with her arms fully extended. ‘Thank you.’ She came over and whispered in my ear. ‘I never thought . . .’

It was all too much for her, I guess, for she couldn’t articulate the thought.

We stayed there for a short while, under the artificial suns of the dome’s lighting system and then Alpha sighed and we moved apart. She started looking past the green, up the road that snaked by, and out of the village.

‘Do you think that THEY are still there?’ she said, and her tone was an odd mix of awe and terror.

‘The silos?’ I asked her. ‘That’s got to be the Crowley road,’ I pointed at the street that led out of the village, ‘so the Naylor farm should be up there somewhere.’

I consulted the GPS map and it confirmed what we already knew in our hearts.

‘We should go there,’ Alpha said. ‘I think it’s where we’ll find the answers.’

‘And maybe the man who knows them all,’ I said. ‘And has known them all along.’

Alpha gave me a sad look. ‘This must be hard for you. I’ve turned your world upside down, haven’t I?’

I shook my head.

‘No, Alpha,’ I told her, seriously, ‘I think you might just have put it the right way up.’

She studied my face for a couple of seconds, and then nodded.

‘Lead on,’ she said.

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The same care and attention that had been afforded Millgrove did not, it seemed, extend to the countryside outside the village. This should have been open fields, but it was all overgrown and chaotic, and looked like it was being claimed back by nature.

The road, however, was beautifully preserved and it looked so strange cutting through the tangled brambles and weeds that filled the land on either side.

We picked our way along, and soon we spotted the towers that meant we were approaching our destination.

A part of me wasn’t
that
happy to see to them.

They might hold answers to the questions that consumed us – that consumed me – but there was a grim inevitability about them that made me feel uneasy and scared.

And, of course, there was the other thing.

I had seen them before.

I realised that the moment that I saw them. It was like an enormous flash of déjà vu that stopped me in my tracks.

I was just rationalising it away, thinking that of course I would recognise them if this was
really
where the farewell scene with my mother had played out, when the darkest thought of the day rose up and blotted out everything.

Because suddenly I remembered
exactly
where I had seen them before.

I didn’t even have to think back very far.

Just as far as that weird, disturbing dream I’d had. When the crystal towers suddenly sheared and changed, these were the concrete structures they had become.

A friendly tap on the arm from Alpha pulled me out of it, but a feeling of dread – like a leaden weight in my stomach – persisted as we moved closer to the silos.

The dome was narrower here – no longer a dome at all really, but something more like a high-ceilinged tunnel – and I could see that the countryside ended prematurely on either side, and the tunnel wall could be seen in the distance.

A path had been cleared though the brambles and weeds, leading to the Naylor farm and then the two towers that loomed above us, looking sinister and oppressive.

The closer we got, the bigger they appeared.

I thought of Kyle and Lilly, about Annette Birnie and the strange, moving language that enveloped her, turning her into one of them . . .

Or should that be ‘one of us’?
I corrected myself, and didn’t like the way the thought made me feel.

We rounded a bend and then both of us stopped and stared ahead of us, uncomprehending.

The silos stood, tall and silent, but they weren’t the only things there.

Someone’s been busy down here
, I thought.

A number of large holes had been bored into the sides of the towers, with bunches of wires and cables coming out and being fed down into banks of computer machinery. The machines themselves were sunk down in a vast circle, accessible by four metal ladders at compass points around the edge of the crater.

The machines were all linked together with more cabling, and I could see that a number of tunnels led off from the rim of the crater like spokes on some gigantic wheel. Cabling ran from the crater down the throat of each tunnel.

A couple of white-coated technicians were working down there, attending to the machines and they were making adjustments and programming data into old-fashioned keyboards on the front of each terminal. Alpha look shocked to see them there, but I just gave her a shrug. I guess I was running short of the ability to be surprised.

The air felt different here. It was still cold, but the dampness had gone, and had been replaced by a weird kind of static charge that, although it was far from hot, made my skin feel so agitated that I was beginning to sweat.

The hairs on my neck were bristling, too.

Alpha was pointing at something and I followed her finger to a huge computer display that was part of the wall that split off into tunnels. It was showing numbers a metre high that were steadily counting down: 53.23, 53.22, 53.21, 53.20 . . .

In the areas in front of the clock, the banks of computers were arranged in concentric circles, and more cables led from each bank and into a metal and frosted glass dome made up of triangles that sat at the very centre of the manmade crater.

I recognised the shape.

It was the same geodesic design that my father had on his study wall; the only picture that had ever been there.

Alpha was still staring, transfixed at the countdown on the screen – 53.15, 53.14, 53.13 – and I put my hand on her shoulder.

‘You know that it’s counting down to the next upgrade, don’t you?’ she said, looking back at me. ‘We’ve got less than an hour until the world changes. Forever. Again.’

She was only saying what I already knew in my heart, but hearing the words spoken made it seem all the more true, all the more terrifying.

Words gave concepts power.

Once they were released, there was no choice but to understand them, no matter how painful they might be.

I’d known that time was counting down. I’d known it since I realised that young man in the Grabowitz photos was showing us the time we had left on his fingers. I’d known what it meant for all of us, but it wasn’t until I saw that clock, and heard Alpha’s words that I
truly
understood our situation.

My father was able to predict the time of the next upgrade. He’d put wires and cables into the silos and was processing the code within, all so he could . . .
so he could what?

What was to be gained by knowing the precise time of the next transmission from the alien programmers that Kyle Straker talked about?

What could my father possibly hope to
gain
?

Even though it felt like the last thing in the world I wanted to do, I knew I had to get inside the geodesic dome. It was the only thing there was left to us: we had to find my father.