Roderick Gordon: Deeper

"But you have to do something!" she exhorted him.

"What do you suggest? I chuck rocks at them?" he said, his voice uneven with anguish.

But Sarah had to at least try to go to her sons' aid. Unnoticed by Drake as he continued to watch events from behind the menhir, she began to haul herself over the ground. She was determined to get to where Will and Cal were, even if she had to stop often to rest.

She heard the Rebecca twins counting, and the shouts of desperation down at the end of the slope.

Squinting through the glare, she glimpsed a small figure as it stepped into the light. She knew with a mother's intuition that it was Cal. Her heart pounded feebly as she extended a hand to where he stood, so far away. She watched him frantically waving his arms and heard his hopeless cries.

Then the shots came.

She saw his death. She dropped her hand to the ground.

There were terrible screams, then a cacophony of sound, and the air was filled with what appeared, to her jumbled head, to be flaming comets. The ground shook as she'd never felt it shake before, as if the whole cavern was collapsing around her. Then the noise and light were gone, and in their place an awful quietness.

She was too late, too late for all of them. She'd wanted to call out to Cal, but hadn't.

She wept dusty tears.

She realized what a fool she had been. She should never have doubted Will! The Styx had tried to trick her into making the biggest mistake of her worthless, sorry excuse of a life. They'd even convinced Grandma Macaulay that Will was to blame. The poor, deluded old lady had believed their lies.

It was so obvious to Sarah now that the Styx were purging their domain. Once she had served her purpose, she'd have been next in line for the chopping block.

Why hadn't she trusted her instincts? She should have taken her life in the excavation back in Highfield. It had felt so wrong when she'd lowered the blade from her throat and allowed that little snake to persuade her to work with the Styx. From that moment of weakness onward, Sarah had unwittingly committed to a misguided manhunt for her own sons. A dumb cog in the Styx's grand plan. For that she could never forgive herself — or them.

She closed her eyes, felling her fluttering heartbeat, as if there were a hummingbird trapped in her rib cage.

Maybe it was better this way, to let it end at last, right here and now.

She flicked her dull eyes open.

No!

She couldn't allow herself the luxury of death, not quite yet. Not while there was the faintest chance she could put some of this unholy mess right again.

She retained a sliver of hope that Will was still alive. She might be able to get to him. These thoughts pierced her brain like skewers, causing her as much pain as her injuries, and spurring her on.

Using her arms, she dragged herself toward the place where Will had been trapped, but every action became more and more labored, as if she was clawing her way through molasses. She didn't let up. She'd covered a significant distance when she blacked out again.

She came to, not knowing how long she'd been unconscious. There was no sign of Drake, but she heard voices nearby. She lifted her head and caught a glimpse of the Rebecca twins. They were issuing orders to a squad of Limiters at the very edge of the Pore.

She knew then that she was too late to save Will. But could she exact revenge for Tam, for her mother, for her sons?

Dominion!

Yes, there was something she could do. She was willing to bet that one or both of the Rebeccas still had the Dominion phials on them. And she'd seen how vitally important the virus was to their plan.

Yes!

If she could at least stymie the Styx's schemes, and maybe save some Topsoiler lives in the bargain, it would go a little way toward absolving her. She had doubted her own son. She had done so much wrong. It was time to get something right.

Using the side of a shattered menhir, she managed to get to her feet. Her irregular pulse thumped through her head, as loud as a kettledrum. The landscape swayed and pitched as she stood hunched over in the hard shadows, a different form of darkness amassing and beginning to engulf her; a darkness that light would not affect.

Pointing and looking down, the Styx girls stood at the rim of the Pore.

With a Herculean effort, Sarah dredged every remaining drop of vitality from her wrecked frame. Her arms outstretched, she flew at the twins, covering the remaining distance as fast as her broken body would propel her.

She saw the identical looks of surprise on their faces as they turned, and heard their identical screams as she swept both of them over the brink with her. It hadn't taken much to dislodge them, but it had taken all Sarah had left.

In her last moments of life, Sarah was smiling.

In Humphrey House, Mrs. Burrows sat alone in the dayroom. It was well past midnight and, now that her eyes were rid of the mystery virus, she had no problem watching television again. But she wasn't engrossed in one of her many soaps; there was a grainy black-and-white picture on the screen in front of her. As she'd done many times before, she stopped the tape, rewound it, then played it back again.

The video recording showed the door to the reception area bursting open and a figure rushing through it. But before the figure went out of view, a face was visible; it looked up and then hastily down, as if it was aware that it was being caught on the security camera.

Mrs. Burrows froze the tape with a decisive press of the remote and moved closer to the television, leaning in to see the face with its flustered eyes and flurried hair. She touched the screen, tracing around the woman's features, which, flipping between two frames on the tape, were smeared and blurry, as if a ghost had unwittingly been captured on film.

"For your delight and delectation, the one and only Kate O'Leary, Woman of Intrigue," Mrs. Burrows mumbled as she made slits of her eyes and clicked her tongue against her teeth, still scrutinizing Sarah's face. "Well, Mrs. Kate whoever-you-are , there's nowhere on this earth you can hide that I won't find you." She fell into thought as she whistled in an atonal and random way, a habit of Dr. Burrows's — curiously, one she had often upbraided him for. "And I'm going to get my family back from you if it's the last thing I do."

An owl hooted and Mrs. Burrows turned to the windows, glancing at the darkness of the gardens outside.

As she did so, a man in a large overcoat stepped neatly back from the window so she wouldn't see him. It was highly unlikely that the Topsoiler woman, with her crude night vision, would be able to make him out in the gloom, but he wasn't about to take the chance.

The owl took to the wing and glided between the trees, while the heavyset individual waited patiently before resuming his vigil at the window.

As he waited, another man on a small hill a short distance away focused in on him, his light-gathering scope mounted on a tripod.

"I see you," Drake said, pulling his jacket collar around his neck as a wind rose up. Making another small adjustment to a furled ring on the scope, so that he had a pin-sharp image of the man in the shadows, he muttered under his breath, "Who will watch the watchers?"

From a nearby road, the undipped beam of a car's headlights briefly fell across the rear of Humphrey House. At that distance, it amounted to nothing more than a glimmer, but, processed by the light-intensifying electronics of the scope, it was bright enough to make Drake blink. Taken by surprise at the unexpected interruption of his surveillance, he drew in a sudden breath. The flash triggered memories of the blinding arcs when Elliott and the boys had been shelled by the Limiters, those last moments at the Pore when all he'd been able to do was watch as the ghastly events unfolded.