Anthony Horowitz - Necropolis

He looked up and saw two clouds rushing together, moving faster than he could have believed. They hit and there was a massive burst of thunder. A bolt of electricity so bright that it hurt his eyes crackled down and smashed into a skyscraper half a mile away, cutting it in two. Shards of glass and broken pieces of metal burst outwards as the top seven storeys of the building leaned over and then fell, trailing wires and pipes. Matt didn’t see where they landed or how many people were killed but he heard the massive explosion as they hit the street below. Despite the rain, what remained of the building caught fire. The orange flames licked at the falling water, desperately trying to climb into the air.

“We must wait…” Lohan was right next to him. Matt understood what he meant. If they took so much as one step forward out of the protection of the walls, they would be whisked away. He was having to shout the words to make himself heard.

“We can’t wait!” Matt shouted back. “We only have this one chance. We must leave Hong Kong now.”

Scarlett was behind him with Richard and Jamie. Matt turned round and their eyes met – and in that moment they both understood what was happening. They could have no secrets from each other. “This is you!” he shouted at her. The wind was still howling. A window on the other side of the road was suddenly torn out, the glass leaping away. “You’ve done this…”

“No!” Scarlett shook her head, trying to deny it.

“We all have powers. All five of us. This is yours.”

And Scarlett knew he was right. In a way, she had known it all along.

Her real name wasn’t Scarlett Adams. White Lotus believed that she was a reincarnation of Lin Mo, a figure out of Chinese mythology, a goddess of the sea. And if she had once been a goddess, then she would have a power that went far beyond anything humanly possible. The chairman of Nightrise had made another mistake. He had thought she could only predict the weather. In fact she could control it.

The evidence had always been there. At school in Dulwich, when Scarlett had wanted to go on a history trip, the weather had cleared up against all expectations. The same thing had happened again in Hong Kong when she needed to get to The Peak. Against all the forecasts, the rain had stopped and the sun had suddenly come out.

She had even used the same power at the battle, ten thousand years before. Jamie had once described it to Matt. Just as Pedro had appeared with his reinforcements, a storm had started, the rain coming down so violently that the Old Ones had been unable to see him.

It hadn’t been a coincidence.

It had been her.

The chairman had claimed that she was the weakest of the Five. He had been wrong. She was by far the most powerful.

“You can stop it!” Matt shouted.

“I can’t!” Scarlett shook her head. She had brought the dragon. She accepted that much. But looking inside herself, after three days in prison, after all she had been through, she knew that she didn’t have the strength to turn it back.

“Then you can protect us. You can keep it away.”

Scarlett looked out into the road, at the crashing rain, the buildings being scattered like confetti, cars spinning crazily, broken pieces of wood and metal hurtling past. Had she really done this, brought destruction on an entire city? How many people would she have killed? The thought terrified her more than anything else she had seen. Was she really responsible for this?

“I can’t do it, Matt…”

“You have to… We have to reach the temple.”

Lohan understood. “It’s not so far from here,” he shouted. “I can show you…”

“Scar…?” Matt looked at her.

And maybe it was simply the fact that he had used that name, a name from ten thousand years ago. Maybe that was the trigger. But in that second, something changed. Scarlett took a deep breath. For too long she had been a victim, pushed around by the chairman, by the Old Ones, even by the Triads. It was time to put that behind her. She was a Gatekeeper. That was what had brought her into all this and suddenly she felt a great anger for everything she had lost – her friends, her home, – even her father. And with the anger came the full knowledge of her own strength. She knew what she had to do.

“Follow me,” she said.

They left the prison. First Lohan, then Scarlett and Matt, with Richard and Jamie behind. They stepped outside into the rain, into the wind, into an endless explosion as nature pounded the city with all its strength. They should have been thrown off their feet instantly, or battered senseless to the ground. But the wind spun around them. The rain was lashing everything but they remained dry. They walked into the heart of the typhoon and it swallowed them up without touching them. It was as if they were inside a glass ball that surrounded and protected them. They could barely see. Everything was chaos. But while they stayed together, they were safe.

Lohan led the way but it was Scarlett who made it possible. She seemed to be in a trance, gazing straight ahead, her arms by her side. Matt kept close to her, knowing that his life depended on her protection. All around them, everywhere he looked, brick walls crumbled, buildings fell, windows shattered and, spinning in the rain, lethal shards of broken glass came slashing down. Again and again the thunder sounded. The clouds were a boiling mass.

They didn’t hurry. There was no need to. No living thing was going to come out in the typhoon and the five of them were completely invisible. Scarlett was more confident now. She looked almost relaxed. Walking next to her, Matt was amazed by the extent of her power. He could feel it flowing out of her. She was a girl and she was fifteen years old. But she could destroy the entire world.

Another building fell behind them, crumbling in on itself as if it had simply lost the will to live. Bricks showered down, slamming into the pavement, but not near them. The road continued straight ahead. They could see the park. Most of the trees had been uprooted and turned into flying battering rams. The few that remained were bending over, kissing the ground. The Tai Shan Temple was on the other side. Matt was surprised that it was still standing, but perhaps the wall that surrounded it had protected it from the worst of the weather.

Lohan pointed. Scarlett nodded. There was no need for any of them to speak. They had made it. They had crossed Hong Kong in the middle of a Signal Ten typhoon and they had survived.

Moving faster now, they crossed what was left of the park and went in.

The chairman of the Nightrise Corporation was watching the final destruction of his necropolis. He was back in his office on the sixty-sixth floor of The Nail and he could feel the whole building trembling as it was buffeted again and again by the storm. Every now and then there was a grinding sound followed by an explosion of breaking glass as another window burst out of its frame. The lights had long ago flickered and gone out. There was no power in the office. Nor were there any people. The staff had all evacuated, fighting and clawing their way down sixty-six flights of stairs. Some of them might have made it to the basement and would be huddled there now, but he suspected that many more of them would have been killed on the way down – pushed down the stairs or trampled in the general panic. The chairman certainly had no intention of joining them. He was safe here. The Nail could stand up to anything. And it was a spectacular view.

It did trouble him that his plans had somehow gone wrong. The city had been meant to die. That had been the whole idea. But not like this. Indeed, the typhoon might well end up saving many more people than it actually killed because there had been a side-effect. The poisonous gases put in place by the Old Ones had been dispersed. The pollution had been swept away. When the storm finally eased off, the people would be able to breathe again.