I knelt down and grabbed the nearest wire, yanking as hard as I could.
Nothing. It didn’t even move.
I dug down with my hands to where the wire went into the drilled hole, and heaved with my whole weight. The wire cut into my palms; I got a few centimetres of it out, but that was all. It didn’t break, or pull out completely.
I scrabbled deeper. In films, it’s always cut the red wire or cut the blue one. I only needed to pull this one out, but it kept on going. As far as I could dig, there was yellow wire. It didn’t seem to have an end to it.
I sat back, gasping with the effort, sweat trickling into my eyebrows. All around me were neat piles of rock powder, lines of them in every direction. Every one had a yellow wire coming out of it.
“I can’t.” Merlin had said the workers spent weeks putting in the charges. Of course I couldn’t dismantle the whole lot in a few minutes.
Weeeeeaaaaaaaaaaa. A wailing siren, the second blast.
A million thoughts sparked in my head: Get out of here! Tell Isis! Run! Save the alien! Run! Any second now! Save yourself! Runrunrunrunrun!
And then the part of my brain that was still thinking straight said, They only press one button.
“Of course!” The yellow wires were laid out neatly in a net pattern, but if there was only one button to blow the lot, then somewhere there had to be a single wire joining all these ones together.
I ran, stumbling and tripping, my feet landing anywhere, racing for the furthest line of drill mounds. There there there! I could see a different colour wire, grey and red-striped, leading away from the field. I threw myself on the ground, tracing it along, trying to find where it joined the yellow wires. There! A junction: a connector with a load of yellow wires going in one side, and the grey and red one coming out the other. It would only have taken a second to undo it if I had a screwdriver. But I didn’t.
I grabbed the grey and red wire, trying to pull it out of the connector with my hands. I smashed at the little plastic box with my fist, bashed it on the ground, stamped on it, but it wouldn’t come apart, I couldn’t make a dent on it.
“Why… won’t… you… break?” With every stamp, every second that passed, I was expecting a spark of electricity, the surge to rush into all those other wires and blow the ground from under me. I put my mouth around the grey wire and bit it, hard as I could, chewing and grinding the wire, spitting out bits of plastic.
The wire gave! The two chewed ends now lay apart from one other. I sat back panting, nearly crying, and stood up slowly, the relief pouring off me. I’d done it. I’d saved us!
Then I saw another grey and red wire, about twenty metres along the line of mounds. And beyond that, another one. I stared at the field of charges. There was a red and grey wire every twenty metres or so, at least another ten of them.
My heart and mind seemed to stop.
I’d wasted so much time! It was obvious I couldn’t ever prevent the charges going off, and worse, I’d left Isis, told her to stay where she was – right underneath the explosion.
I turned and ran, sweat sticking my shirt to me. I practically threw myself down the slope, landing in a tumble at the bottom, my ankle a shot of pain as it twisted under me.
“Isis!” I hobbled towards her. “Isis, come on! We have to go!”
She was kneeling awkwardly on the ground, the side of her face pressed flat in the dirt.
“Isis!” She didn’t pay me any attention. “Isis?”
I knelt down next to her. “Isis, I can’t break the wire! We need to get out of here!”
Her eyes opened. “I need more,” she said, in this raspy voice. “You’ll have to do.” And one of her hands snapped out, clamping around mine.
I was back underground again.
I could see Angel, her whole body upside down in the dim and rumbling rock, like she’d dived in. It took me a moment to realise I was seeing through Mandeville this time, and it was his skeleton hand holding onto the line that curled and coiled around the darkness, flickering with every colour imaginable. They grew and brightened, as if we were sinking into them, and