in as I remembered the safety talk from our school trip. The quarry sides seemed taller, more looming than earlier. All that stone and rock towering above us. “It’s the warning siren. Before they start blasting.”
Isis’s eyes grew huge, her face white.
We’d run through the explosive charges, not even paying attention, and now we were right underneath them.
Chapter Thirty-two
Isis
She was still seeing the world through a ghostly doubling. She was Angel, gripping tight onto an alien, and she was herself, seeing Gray’s terrified face and the quarry pressing down on them.
The siren wailed on. What would happen when it stopped?
“We have to get out!”
She searched for an escape route. Not the way they’d come – it was too steep, and they’d be scrambling straight into the formation of charges. The quarry track also wound its way under the rock face, only metres from the blast area. They’d be killed there too.
The siren stopped, its echoes fading away.
“We’ll be all right,” Gray said.
“How?” She’d died before, but there’d been a chance that time, a frozen heart that could start beating once more. Not this time. “There won’t be anything left of us!”
She let go of Angel, of Gray. “We have to run!”
“Don’t!” Gray’s face was desperate. “There are two more sirens – we’ve got time. Please!” He looked up at the quarry face, then stood up. “I’ll pull out the wires!”
“What?”
“The yellow wires, the ones going to the explosive charges.” He was already at the steep bank, pulling up with his hands, scrabbling for footholds. “Stay with the alien! Help him!”
Gray climbed fast, his long limbs powering him up. In a few moments he was on the top, and he disappeared from view.
Isis stared at the empty space where he’d been standing, her heart pounding. Was he really pulling the wires out of the charges? Could you even do that?
Mandeville pulled his head from the ground. “Well I doubt we’ll be seeing the boy again. Probably running for his life.”
“He isn’t!” Isis said.
“I think you should run away as well.”
Isis stared at Mandeville.
“You’ll be no good to me dead. I can hardly be your spirit guide if you’re a corpse.”
Of course, the seances. It was what he always wanted… Isis smiled, realising that she had a bargaining point.
“I won’t leave,” she said. “I’ll die here.”
“Ridiculous! Especially as you know what it means to be dead!”
“You said it isn’t too terrible.”
“I was lying.”
She wasn’t going to let Mandeville see her fear. “I won’t leave until we’ve helped the alien.”
“Oh yes, let us be the valiant heroes,” Mandeville sighed. “And how, exactly?”
“You have to possess the alien, and make it leave, because we’re the flies and it can’t catch us.”
“I beg your pardon?”
It had made sense when Gray explained it, but now she wasn’t sure what they were meant to do. She looked up at the blank face of the quarry, her body shivering with the urge to run. Would the explosion start with a tremor? How much would it hurt, all that rock blasting into her?
She swallowed. “Can you possess such a big creature?”
“Why should I?” Mandeville brushed his hands on his jacket, creating clouds of cloth fibres.
“I’ll start the seances again. And not just in schools, wherever you want.” She knew she had him, by the flash in his blue eyes.
“Will you keep to your promise?”
The echoes of the first siren had faded now, and the whistles and distant shouts of the protest had been silenced too. There was only the sound of her own breathing.
“Yes.”
“This possession won’t be easy. It may even be dangerous.”
“I don’t care.”
“Then we have a bargain.” Mandeville’s skeletal finger poked onto her forehead.
“Whuh…” She couldn’t speak; the cold pierced her brain with a biting pain.
“I said this wouldn’t be easy,” said Mandeville. He leaned closer. “You will have to give me all of your power, all your strength. You’ll need the help of your little sister as well, and even then…”
He pushed her to the ground, using only his fingertip. The gravel pressed into her cheek.
“Shut your eyes.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Gray
I ran between the mounds, desperately trying not to step on any. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realised these were the piles left from drilling holes, that I hadn’t paid attention to all the wires. Now, every time my foot came down, I thought the ground was going to blow up.
My school shirt was sticking with cold sweat.
There were mounds of earth everywhere, and hundreds of wires, like a net covering the ground. I had to get started!