Rebecca Lim - Fury

I crouch down, preparing to go through, but as I stretch my hand towards the breach in the concrete, I feel a shift in the air and hear footfalls, drawing closer, fast.

I bump into Ryan as I back away and he tenses instantly, saying, ‘What? What? ’

‘ Shhhh , listen. Can’t you hear it?’

He’s still shaking his head when I grab him by the front of his jacket and push him hard against the wall behind him, just as a pack comes at us through the drill hole. Then a pair of hands comes shooting through the gap, then a head, and a kid covered in white bone dust slithers out and falls on the floor, like he’s just been born.

He’s fourteen, maybe fifteen at most, just starting to really grow, and he’s already snatched up his pack, is already sprinting, before we can call out to him to stop. I feel the surge of his energy as he passes us, his body a psychic scream of fear, eyes wide. He turns his head briefly, taking us in, his mouth a round O of shock, before he disappears out of sight up the tunnel we just came down, his sneakered feet seeming not to touch the ground.

Another boy shoots out of the hole — also wearing a thick dusting of white — in the same urban uniform of hoodie, canvas sneakers, distressed jeans. He reaches back in for his pack, tugging at the strap, unable to yank it through, his fear carving a sizzling arc through the air around me. Then he spies us watching him, and gives a long, unearthly scream and runs, arms around his head, abandoning everything.

Five minutes we give ourselves, before we move. Nobody else comes through, physical or otherwise.

Ryan exhales in a rush when he sees me crouch down to look through the hole again. Cool, quiet darkness beyond. But there’s something inhabiting that darkness that made a teenage boy abandon his precious swag and run, shrieking, like he’d lost the power of speech.

‘It’s the first sign of anything alive down here,’ I say apologetically. ‘You know we have to take a look.’

Ryan’s still standing, frozen, up against the wall. ‘It has to mean something,’ I insist. ‘What it means,’ he says through gritted teeth, ‘is that I’ve passed shit scared and gone into orbit on the fear-o-meter. You’re amazing, you know that? Most people would be falling apart right now.’

‘Of course I’m afraid,’ I say softly. ‘But placed in the balance against hope — which is what those two kids represent — hope is winning out . You, of all people, understand what it feels like to have someone you love imprisoned in darkness. Selaphiel may be the closest thing to family someone like me will ever have. He is the gentlest, the most unworldly of the Eight; so kind, so absent-minded, so intent upon the workings of the universal, that he is blind to all else, including personal danger. And I owe him my life.’

I add quietly, ‘Something is alive down here, I can feel it. And I understand if you want to turn back now. If you head up through that manhole back there, you should make it back to Henri in time. You’ve got his number. Call him — he’ll have to pick you up. If I can, I’ll catch up with you, I promise. But I have to do this. I have to keep going.’

Ryan hesitates, clearly torn, and I say fiercely, ‘It’s not about fate , Ryan. No one owns anyone else. I am the last creature on earth to want to trap you, to keep you here against your will. It’s about gut instinct and reaction and choice. It’s about what you can handle. If this feels bad to you, I release you. I won’t hold it against you. You are already peerless in my eyes. I have … trouble saying the words you want to hear because I’ve been burnt so badly, so literally, I shouldn’t even be here. But you know what I feel about you, and you have to know that it’s real . One day, maybe, we’ll have that time for ourselves, just to be and be with each other. But not now. You’ve seen things no human being should ever have to see. If you love me the way you say you do, you’ll go .’

I rise to my feet and kiss him, tasting that all-permeating dust on his lips, the familiar salt-sweet tang of him. Everything I feel for him in my mouth, in my hands.

But I tear myself away before there can be that lick of warning fire that whispers: forbidden . Then I bend and wriggle through the drill hole without looking back.

When I get to my feet, I’m in a long, narrow tunnel with a blind corner ahead. What I notice immediately is the uneven line of spray paint running along each wall, black on one side, green on the other. The paint’s fresh; I can smell it, sharp and heady. One boy, one can, each unimaginatively vandalising the seamed stone as he walked.

There’s a bump behind me and I turn instantly, my outline beginning to shred protectively into mist, into vapour. But I recognise the pack that’s come through the drill hole, and Ryan follows it, hands first, moments later. I coalesce immediately, the outline of my human form solid and unremarkable in the darkness, and watch him straighten with my green, green eyes. I know that he can’t see me in the absolute absence of light.

‘Tell anyone I almost lost my nerve, angel girl,’ he whispers, ‘and there will be repercussions.’ He dusts himself off self-consciously before feeling around and picking up the pack.

I grin, and look down at the skin of my hands, expecting to see them gleam with the joy that I can’t seem to contain: that he chose me over safety. But my hands are matte and unrevealing in the darkness, and Ryan fishes his torch out of his back pocket and flicks it on, his dark eyes settling first on me, then on the graffiti.

We walk again, me ahead, following the black line, the green. I reach the blind corner, Ryan at my shoulder, and we suddenly find ourselves standing ankle deep in bone shards. For a moment, I feel the chill flash of ancient memory rise up: of waking atop a stone dais in a chamber choked with bones, to find the Eight waiting and watching.

The chill intensifies as we walk forwards, and the ground drops away until the fragments of bone rise up to the level of our knees. Ryan scans the area around us with his flashlight, his hand shaking badly.

‘I don’t like this,’ he mutters, as the torch picks out the eye sockets of broken skulls that stare at us lifelessly from the sea of bones surrounding us. ‘I don’t like this at all .’

The ground rises again beneath our feet and we’re into another long passageway with the tags of green paint and black on either side. I read rising terror in the unsteadiness of the lines.

When we reach the next fork, we turn into the passageway that’s marked by spray paint, but then it peters out, both lines running partially down the wall before stopping completely.

There are three gaps in the rock wall ahead of us. The left opening leads to more tunnel, blank and unrevealing. The middle one, more of the same. But in the third tunnel, I see a faint gleam of luminescence trailing low upon the wall to the right, as if something injured came this way, and recently. I imagine broken wing feathers bleeding light.

Even Ryan can make out the smeared and glowing uneven line near where the wall and the floor meet. The fear he’s radiating spikes up, and stays up, and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to block it out because it’s in me, too.

We follow the glowing smear of light for at least a mile. I know the boys must have come this way because we pass a can of green paint dropped on the ground, then find the black one abandoned on a natural ledge of rock on one side of a narrow opening.

The opening is only just wide and tall enough to accommodate me, and I hear Ryan grunt as he ducks his head to pass beneath it. From our narrow corridor of stone we stare out into a cavern that’s vast and high and filled with murky, grey water from end to end. On the other side of the cavern, another opening leads on into darkness, but it’s what’s positioned inside the huge chamber that catches my attention immediately, makes me place a shocked and stilling hand upon Ryan’s sleeve.