12: The Calm Before The Storm
As they ran down the corridor, Philip held the stone in front of him, trying as hard as he could to focus on the tiny rooms which shook with every footstep.
“What exactly am I looking for?” he managed to say between breathes, not taking his eyes off the map.
“For the last time,” Noah said, not panting as much as Philip, “look down the path your school took and see where the doors are opening and closing. It’s there that we would probably find them.”
Even on this side of the door, beyond ATLAS, they had come across no one. If the map had shown where people were, then Philip could be satisfied that they were all on the other side of the Collider. But without that knowledge, they could be anywhere, around any corner. It was nerve-wracking for him, and for the others, he assumed. He was leading them on into the unknown, trying to follow Noah’s guidance yet not really knowing himself what lay ahead.
And then, as they rounded a bend, he spotted a door opening, staying open for what appeared to be too long, and then closing. That had to be it.
“I see them!”
“Are you sure?” Noah’s head turned sharply to face him.
“It’s the only thing I can see which matches what you said to look for. Still, it might not be...”
“Just get us there!” Cary almost shrieked.
Philip and Noah stopped abruptly. The other three were a little late in reacting, and continued running down the corridor a short distance. By the time they jogged back to the two Mancynns, the pair had regained their breaths and were talking hurriedly.
“Are you strong enough to do this?” Philip was asking when they came within earshot.
“It will certainly weaken me, but not as much as before. I’ve had some time to recover.”
They didn’t say anything else, but grabbed as much of the clothes which Eve, Cary and Jimmy wore as they could, took one last glance at the stone still balanced in Philip’s hand, and went to where they hoped their group was now.
It is unbelievable that a group of five people, one adult and four teens, would materialise in a busy room and have no one notice them. Yet that is how it was.
In the room in question, Mr Dobrowski was showing the crowd of teachers and students another...interesting...detector, or rather, the feet of said detector. Gathered around were the assorted tourists, some listening to his every word, others...well, everybody’s a critic.
“The Compact Muon Solenoid consists of five layers, each of which is responsible for detecting a different...”
Away from the speech, at the back of the crowd, Dr Radcliffe peered at the pale Noah through the cluster of teens.
“Is everything alright? Where did you go?”
“We didn’t realise you had moved on,” Philip answered, quickly. “Mr Mason is just feeling a little faint at the moment, he’ll be fine.”
Dr Radcliffe looked Philip up and down, “You don’t look so great yourself.”
“Something I ate.”
“Excuse me,” Mr Dobrowski called over the heads of his audience, “Is anything the matter?”
“No, no,” Dr Radcliffe called back, “It’s all good. Please, continue.”
Mr Dobrowski stared at them quizzically for a few more seconds, before bringing the attention of the crowd back to the machine behind him.
“As I was saying, the CMS is used to detect not only the Higgs Boson, but other dimensions and dark matter.”
The weary Mancynns rose to their feet, tired from transit, and tried to blend in with the crowd. The only thing they could do now was hide from anyone who may have seen them in the lower cavern.
*
Gauthier leant back in his chair. Then he realised they were still in his office, and dismissed his supervisors with a casual flick of his hand. The door clicked shut behind them. He was alone. Sort of.
It was at times like this that they came. When people say others have met their maker, the interpretation is not a good one. But in this instance, the meaning behind him ‘meeting his maker’ would be a hell of a lot worse than if he were dead. Not that the prospect of dying was a bad one in Gauthier’s books. In his opinion, existence was...how could he put it...hell.
The rustling papers in his filing cabinets were the first indication of his arrival. The air crackled as the flames jumped from appliance to appliance. The faint roaring sound dissolved into the back of Gauthier’s mind, but didn’t disappear. It never did.
He looked up into the overly deep eyes of Gryal Repa. The skeletal hand withdrew from the back of his chair as the Lord moved around the desk to face Gauthier directly.
Gauthier ran his hand over his stubbly face, “I’m sorry. I truly am.”
Gryal continued to stare at the pathetic man before him.
“But I thought this was what you wanted,” Gauthier wittered on, “He saw the machine, he saw what was going on. That was your plan, wasn’t it?”
This last sentence was full of fear and desperation, a fact that Gryal relished. The depths of human worthlessness would never cease to confound him.
“The plan,” Gryal said through grinding teeth, “was to show him our just cause, not to make him run further from it. If you had allowed him to examine the data available to him, maybe the boy would have been more compliant, realised that this work is beneficial to everyone, but no.”
“In my defence, I did move my men away from where they were hiding. I did try to make up for my rash mistake.”
“After putting them there in the first place. And that was the least you could have done,” Gryal sighed. “We hoped that during your time in service your imagination and initiative would have grown to some satisfactory size. But evidently not.”
Gauthier would have looked at his feet if his desk wasn’t in the way.
“Those at the Towers have shown that, unless anyone else interferes, the boy will return to the cavern. When he does we will give you clear and easy instructions to follow. You have shown that any strategy you come up with will ultimately fail so I would advise you to stick to our orders, is that understood?”
Gauthier nodded, but it was hard to tell as he was shaking terribly, making it look like he was disagreeing at the same time.
“I do hope you succeed, Vincent,” Gryal may have sounded comforting, if he hadn’t been a demonic personification of all that is dread, fear and hate with a voice like the collapsing of a thousand stars, “It would waste so much time moulding a new General Director.”
*
For Eve’s sake it was lucky that teachers don’t check to see who else is on the bus besides those on the register. They may check who’s missing, but they don’t necessarily check who’s new.
Near the back of the bus, out of the way of prying eyes, Eve had been snuck into a window seat, next to Philip. That was another thing they had to be thankful for: an empty seat. This is where she hid when the minibus pulled away from the spherical building and onto the main road. No one looked twice in her direction; most never looked once. What was one girl whom they may or may not have missed on the way there? And just as nobody watched, nobody listened to what she had to say.
“You honestly believe your friend’s story. It seems a bit too...sci-fi, don’t you think?”
“I told you,” Philip didn’t look at her, but at the seat in front of him, “Noah showed me some things which confirm his story.”
“But what does that mean?”
“Since before I was born the Brethren Lords have been imbuing my DNA with something you might call dark matter. This has given me abilities which some would explain away as magic; I’ve used them a number of times. But they’ve also been shrouding my memory. Anything that I may have read, anything that I may have heard which would turn me against them, they wiped. Just before I came here, Noah sent a shock through me which undid the damage. Since then, my memory has been coming back, and I can see now that my entire life has been guided by them, not me.”
“So you remember everything now?”
“No. It’s all coming back in patches. I’m remembering some stuff which happened years ago, some stuff from a couple of weeks back. My brain’s all a bit of a mess right now.”
They fell back into silence, watching the world go by, or as much of the world as they could see on what remained of their five minute journey. And it was silent, until Noah walked up the length of the minibus to lean over their headrests.
“Have either of you considered where she’s going to stay for the night?”
The teens turned to one another, not knowing what to say.
“You could always stay in my room,” Noah suggested.
“Excuse me?!” Eve cried, incredulously.
A number of people on the minibus twisted in their seats to look at who was making the sound, and there was a shout from the teachers at the front to quieten down.
Philip put a hand on Eve’s shoulder, “It’s okay, he got himself a room, I’m sure he could do the same for you.”
Noah nodded in agreement, though wasn’t sure he liked being referred to as ‘he’ while he was standing right next to them.
Later, after a brief tour around Meyrin, and everyone had been sent back to their rooms until their next meeting (which was to be held just before dinner was available at the restaurant), Eve finally had her own room. She didn’t exactly have any bags to unpack, but the three of them had agreed it best if she didn’t go talking to the students.
In Noah’s room, Philip sat on the edge of the bed, the stone in his hand. Noah was just coming out of the bathroom, shaking his hands to get the last of the water off. Philip looked up at him expectantly.
“What?” Noah asked eventually.
Philip proffered the stone, “I thought you would want this back.”
Noah waved away the little device, “No, no, I want you to have it. Seeing as you’re the one the Brethren Lords are focusing on at the moment, I feel that you need it most. Not to frighten you of course.”
Philip retracted his arm, pocketing the stone, raising an eyebrow at this last comment. Turning away, Noah drew the phone from his inner pocket, switching it on with a finger.
“So are you going to tell me what exactly we stole from their computers?” Philip attempted to peer over Noah’s shoulder, but to no avail.
“Data,” Noah said, matter-of-factly, not really listening to Philip in great detail, “Schematics; equations; plans. Something we can use against the Brethren Lords, I hope. For we know it’s them behind this now, they gave that away when they taunted us over the intercom.”
Philip jumped up from the bed and walked over to Noah’s side. Looking down onto the tiny screen before him, Philip saw a vast web of numbers, diagrams and who knew what else spiralling down into the black heart of the pixels, deeper than seemed possible, shifting and contorting before his eyes. And then, just as he thought the intricate masterpiece had settled into its final prodigious design, the images themselves began increasing and decreasing in size as well as focus, one becoming the main image upon the screen before being superseded by the next. Anything which would logically be in a CERN database was there to be seen, as well as information on the strange and wonderful aspects of the world of science with hints to the twisted reality the Brethren Lords left in their wake.
“How are we meant to know which of these is going to be of any help to us?” Philip asked, his gaze remaining on the river of misbegotten information.
“This isn’t random,” Noah said, indicating the phone with his free hand. “I’ve put in a search, the phone is looking for anything which appears...not of this Earth.”
And as if on cue, a schematic enlarged which did not subsequently reduce. The search had brought up something at last.
As far as he and Noah could make out, it was an in-depth blueprint of the machine which had been taken from its home in South America. The picture gave no new light onto the machine’s purpose, at least not at first. It merely gave up the design of the inner workings. How they worked together as one was something else entirely, something not labelled there before them in Noah’s palm.
The trill came from further down the arm, just a little way, from the wrist which connected Noah’s arm to the hand which held the thing they watched with such unrelenting interest. Rotating said wrist, Noah looked at the time which his alarm was reminding him of.
“All these meetings downstairs, we never get to complete anything,” Noah both sighed and laughed.
“You know, we don’t have to go.”
“As your new assistant science teacher, I shouldn’t tarnish my newfound reputation by being late for a meeting called by my superior. I don’t think we have a choice, not while we keep up this charade.”
*
The landscape lay eternal, the plains reaching to every corner of the horizon and continuing. She trod upon the baked grains of sands, which were as insignificant as this worthless planet. With her hand she scooped them up, raised them before her face, and let them drift away on what wind there was. Her eyes scanned the never-ending expanse which stretched before them. Her nostrils flared. So did its. It moved on all fours to crouch by its mistress. It bowed its head. It didn’t like the light. But here it was, where it had been led, where it had to stay until it was told otherwise. It pawed the ground with the three talons of its paw.
She couldn’t understand it. This was where she had to be, so where was it? A treasure trove of artefacts hidden away thousands of years ago didn’t just vanish. She had never been here before, but she knew what she was looking for...and it wasn’t here. After all her work, it wasn’t here.
She knew they had said not to reawaken her ‘pet’, but what choice had she had? And what harm could it do while she was here? She’d made sure that she had total control over it this time. If she didn’t, how could she be sending it out to scour the ground, smell for traces of the city? She watched it scamper off, moving swiftly from spot to spot, taking a quick sniff before continuing the search.
She had many minions from her time in power, one of which came into being just behind her.
“Gryal, how nice of you to join us,” Mierdi said flatly.
“You summoned me, mistress, therefore I came.” He too began to watch the wild animal before them, “The real Gryal does not approve of using such a creature.”
“My dear creation,” Mierdi said, looking into his yellow eyes, “you are no longer the doppelganger, you are the real Gryal. He is the one behind the glass, not you.”
Her Gryal didn’t respond, but continued to stare ahead. And she joined him, gazing upon the barren landscape, upon the lonely animal searching desperately for…something. Time didn’t seem to matter here. Here it was always sand and sun. No differentiation, no sense of hours or minutes.
“It should be here,” Gryal spoke at last, “Everything indicated to this spot. We must be missing something.”
“And that, Gryal, is why I brought our furry friend here,” she responded, indicating it with a flick of her green hand.
He followed the hand, and saw the creature his counterpart despised. He saw it pause.
“It’s stopped.”
Without saying a word, Mierdi began striding after it, leaving Gryal to trail behind.
The animal had stopped at a large rock with a flat top, the only one for miles around, looking odd and out of place. On the top of the rock was an engraving, the shape of a much smaller stone.
“The Contour Stone, who has it now?” Mierdi asked, strangely calm.
“As far as I know, it was last seen in the hands of Chaos.”
“No!” she screeched, twirling to face her minion, trembling. “I should never have let them have it.”
Gryal didn’t back away, or make any sign that he was afraid. He’d been in the mirror too long to remember how to fear.
“I would have thought you needed to part with it to cement your alliance with them,” is what he said instead.
Mierdi’s shudders slowed slightly, “You’re right.” She paused, “You need to tell your men to bring the Stone to me. Do not tell them why, only that if they don’t they won’t live long enough to hear the end of their screams. Don’t forget that without the Stone my plans will come to nothing. This will have been a meaningless venture.”
“I regained my freedom,” he reminded her, disgruntled.
“And if you want to keep it you’d better get your act together.”
Gryal knew it wasn’t best to retort, “Don’t worry about the Stone; I know just what to do.”
*
Noah’s outburst during Dr Radcliffe’s speech was far from unheard, which is why when Philip moved over to his fellow Mancynn afterwards he was facing a reddened man.
“What was all that about?” he asked, almost hysterical with mirth, still remembering his teacher’s expression at the interruption.
“Yeah, that will probably cost me some points in my assistant teacher review. No, it’s just that I found it, the piece of information we were looking for in the data we retrieved.”
“And you had to shout about it in the middle of my science teacher’s talk?” Philip said, exasperatedly.
“It just came as a shock, that’s all,” Noah retorted, as if that was some kind of consolation.
They paused for a moment, watching the goings on in the rest of the room. Some of the students were still giving Noah strange looks, the rest on the other hand were strolling out in groups, either to the entertainment facilities of the hotel or to their rooms.
“Doesn’t it seem a bit odd, that all of a sudden the one thing we desperately need just falls into our laps?”
“Well the search was going to pick up on it eventually.”
Philip still wasn’t convinced, “It just seems too easy, that’s all.”
“Are you suggesting that we were given that information, that it’s a trap?”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“Well look at it this way: have you ever heard of a hero who didn’t walk into a trap?”
Philip smiled half-heartedly, “That’s no good comparison. I’m not a hero.”
“Not yet,” Noah replied, trailing off.