Roderick Gordon - Deeper

Chester and Elliott were no longer yelling to get his attention.

Will swayed where he stood. He was numb, oblivious to the rope as it bit sharply into his waist.

He didn't feel a thing.

Cal was dead.

This time there was no question in Will's mind. And he might have saved his brother's life if he'd surrendered to the twins.

But he hadn't.

Once before, he'd thought Cal was gone for good, and Drake had performed a miracle and resuscitated him. But now there were no reprieves, no happy endings. No this time.

The intolerable weight of responsibility he bore crushed him. He, and he alone, had been responsible for destroying many lives. He saw their faces. Uncle Tam. Grandma Macaulay. People who had given everything for him; people he loved.

And he couldn't help but believe his father, Dr. Burrows, was lost to him, too. He would never see him again, not now. Will's dream was finished.

The lull was brought to an abrupt end as the Limiters opened fire again, the barrage even fiercer than before, and Chester and Elliott resumed their panicked shouting as they tried to get through to him.

But, as if the sound had been turned down, Will wasn't hearing anything. His glazed eyes drifted over Chester's stricken and desperate face, mere footsteps away, as his friend yelled with all his might. It had no effect — even his friendship with Chester had been taken from him.

Everything he'd relied upon — the certainties underpinning his uncertain life — had been knocked out from under him, one after another.

His brain burned with the horrific image of his brother's death. That last moment blotted out everything else.

"Enough," he said, quite steadily this time.

Cal had lost his life because of him .

There was no avoiding it, no room for excuses, no quarter.

Will knew it should be him hanging there, punched full of holes, not his brother.

It was as if something was being stretched and stretched in his mind, creaking and bellying from side to side, until it was so close to the breaking point that it would fracture into tiny, sharp fragments that might never be pieced together again.

He struggled to stay upright as Cal's deadweight pulled at him. The Limiters continued to fire, but Will was somewhere else, and none of it mattered anymore.

He took a single stride toward the Pore, allowing the weight to draw him on.

From the top of the stone steps, Chester came toward him, holding out his hand and hoarsely shrieking his name.

Will looked up and saw him as if for the first time.

"I'M SO SORRY, WILL!" Chester yelled, then his voice became strangely calm as he realized Will, at last, was listening. "Come here. It's OK."

"Is it?" Will asked.

Just for that second, it was as if they were insulated from all the horror and fear that surrounded them. Chester nodded and smiled briefly back at him. "Yes, and so are we," he replied, his words heavy with meaning. "I'm sorry."

A tiny germ of hope was born within Will.

He still had his friend — all was not lost, and they would get themselves out of this somehow.

Will took another step, reaching out his hand toward Chester.

Faster and faster, closing the distance between them, the rope pulling him forward: By the very edge of the Pore, he was just about to take hold of Chester's hand.

At the top of the slope, the Rebecca twins shouted simultaneously.

"Good riddance to him!"

"Bust out the big guns!"

The heavy artillery bucked into life. The Limiters' bank of howitzers spat massive shells that swerved like fireballs, leaving flaming red trails behind them. The whole slope was lit up with their blazing light, and the sound was deafening.

The shells struck, splitting any menhirs in their path and throwing up huge curtains of dirt, smashing into the paved platform and lifting the flagstones like a gust of wind scatters a pack of playing cards.

Will was thrown forward, knocked senseless by the blasts. He sailed straight into the pitch-black, clean over his friend's head.

If he'd been conscious, Will would have seen Chester's flailing arms and legs as he grabbed at anything he could in a last-ditch attempt to prevent himself from being dragged over by the rope that bound him to Will.

And he would have heard Elliott's screams as she, too, was yanked into the Pore after Chester.

If Will had been capable of thought, he would have felt the dark air rushing around him as he plummeted down and down, his dead brother somewhere beneath him, and the other two, still howling and screaming, up above. And he would have been terrified by the odd sections of masonry and rubble from the pulverized menhirs that were falling all around them.

But there were no thoughts, just a black nothingness in his mind, identical to what he was plunging through.

Will was in free fall, his ears popping mercilessly and his breath stolen every so often by the rush of air as he shot through it, reaching terminal velocity.

On occasion he collided with Elliott, Chester, and even Cal's limp corpse, the ropes twisting around their limbs and torsos in random arrangements to bind them together, and then untwisting as they floated apart, as if they were dancers in some macabre aerial ballet. Every so often Will's trajectory took him to the side of the seemingly endless Pore, where he either crashed against the unforgiving rock or, curiously, hit softer matter — which, had he been conscious, would have caused him a great deal of surprise.

But in his insensible state, he was unaware of any of this; in a place beyond caring.

If his mind hadn't been disconnected, he would have noticed that although he continued to fall through the black vacuum, his rate of descent was slowing.

Imperceptibly at first, but definitely slowing… slowing… slowing…

Once they were in sight of the Styx floodlights, Drake hadn't risked remaining on his feet for the final distance. Instead he had dragged Sarah with him to a vantage point midway between where the Limiters were concentrated and, at the bottom of the slope, where Elliott and the boys had apparently been run to ground.

As Drake crouched behind a menhir, Sarah just lay there. She was too shattered to do anything but listen. With her head propped on a boulder, and her clothes soaked through and stuck to her with her own blood, she caught some of the shouted exchange between Will and the twins. The fact that there were two Rebeccas didn't come as any great revelation. There'd long been rumors in the Colony that the Styx dabbled in eugenics — genetic manipulation for the advancement of their race — and that twins, triplets, and even quadruplets had become the norm as they multiplied their numbers. Yet another myth that had been borne out to her. She should have twigged that there were two Rebeccas when the one on the train claimed to have been at the Topsoil hospital that same morning — the Styx child had been telling the truth.

Sarah heard the twins taunting Will, then their threat to kill Topsoilers using Dominion.

"Did you get that?" Drake whispered over to her.

"Yes," she said, nodding grimly in the darkness.

The shouted exchanges came to her as if she was at the bottom of a well, echoing and swirling and often too indistinct to grasp in their entirety. But despite her deteriorating condition, some part of her brain retained enough functionality to process the snippets.

She heard her name mentioned and what the twins said about Tam's and Grandma Macaulay's deaths. Sarah's body locked up with fury. The Styx were wiping out all the members of her family, one by one. Then she heard the threats to kill Will and Cal and everyone with them.

"You've got to help them!" she said to Drake.

He looked helplessly at her. "What can I do? I'm hopelessly outnumbered and I've only got stove guns. There's a whole Styx army over there."