Shane Hegarty - Worlds Explode

Finn’s father had told him to go to room S3 in the house.

Then he’d pushed Finn out of the Infested Side, back through the buckling gateway to their own world and safety. Finn’s dad had gone to the Infested Side to rescue Finn’s mam, and Finn had gone there to rescue both of them. The last time he saw his dad, he was stepping towards the onrushing Legends and the human who led the charge – Hugo’s own father, Niall Blacktongue.

So, once the gateway had closed, trapping his father on the other side, Finn ran straight to room S3 in the Long Hall. All he found there was a plain box. Inside it was a handwritten note with a simple instruction: Light up the house.

So Finn did. He switched on every lamp and light bulb from the library to the bedrooms, from the bathrooms to the storerooms. He replaced spent light bulbs. He filled empty sockets. He lit up rooms he’d spent hours training in. Rooms he’d never been in. Rooms he’d hardly even noticed.

By the time he’d finished, the house must have been visible from the moon.

“Find the map,” his father had also said.

So Finn found maps.

Lots of maps. Two weeks of hard searching later, he hadn’t found his father, but he was still finding maps.

They were now stacked in piles the length of the Long Hall, under his ancestors’ portraits lining the wall. One mound of maps was overseen by the painting of a meek, almost shameful Niall Blacktongue that Finn could hardly bring himself to look at since losing his father.

Pages were heaped up across the circular floor of the high-ceilinged library, scattered about the device in the centre of the room that his father had built to desiccate Legends, but which Mr Glad had used to awaken them for the invasion. And, at the very spot where Glad had been trapped by a collapsing gateway and scattered into light, there was a small mountain of maps, sorted, discarded, ruled out or held on to for further investigation. Finn sat on one of its slopes.

But he wasn’t alone.

“I’m guessing we can ignore The 1956 Guide to Norway’s Best Pudding Restaurants ?” he asked Emmie.

“ The Great Scourge of 1886: A Map of Missing Legends ,” she read from where she stood by a half-ransacked section of the vast shelves that ringed the room. “How many Legends went missing? And how can there be a map of them if no one knows where they are in the first place?”

They had spent a fortnight leafing through books of maps, fold-out maps, laminated maps, two braille maps, even a jigsaw map of Ireland that Finn used to play with as a child. That very afternoon, they had put the jigsaw together and become very excited when they discovered the piece for County Tipperary was missing.

“It must mean something,” Emmie had said excitedly, until Finn remembered that he’d almost choked on Tipperary when he was very young and the piece had been thrown away as a safety precaution.

He and Emmie continued sifting through the maps in the hope that something might jump out at them. Although, given that they were surrounded by the desiccated husks of Legends, shrunken and frozen but not at all dead, they quietly hoped that nothing would literally jump out at them.

Since his father’s disappearance, no alarms had wailed. No gateway had opened. No Legends had come through. Instead, it had been all about the maps, with the problem being that even if they found one that looked right they didn’t have a clue what it would lead them to.

A weapon? A person? A Legend with its mouth wide and teeth sharpened? Maybe it would be a convenient path to the Infested Side, and they would skip their way along it to find Hugo sitting in a room somewhere, grinning at them.

With the way things had gone so far, that seemed unlikely.

“We’ll know it when we see it, I guess,” Emmie said, apparently sensing Finn’s despair. “I’m sure that at some stage the map we’re looking for will just drop out of something like …” she looked at the book she was holding, “… An Illustrated Atlas of the Last Stands of Slain Legend Hunters . OK, bad choice.”

Finn was flicking robotically through another book, The Happy Rowers’ Guide to the Inlets of Southern Sweden, 1974 edition (Now with Added Coves) .

“Dad wouldn’t have told me about it if he didn’t think we could find it,” he said, trying to convince himself as much as Emmie. “And he told me he knew I wouldn’t give up. So I won’t. Except …” From the book he was holding, a small, red, frayed hardback notebook dropped to the floor. “… we’ve been doing this for weeks now, looking for something we mightn’t even recognise.”

“We’ll find it soon, Finn,” said Emmie.

“I’m not saying we won’t,” Finn replied, picking up the notebook. On the inside cover were the initials NB, and he scanned its pages of hand-drawn mathematical symbols, diagrams and shapes, the writing so small it was like a spider had fallen in an inkpot before scampering across the page. NB , he thought. Niall Blacktongue? Was it possible this notebook belonged to—?

A crumpled-up bit of paper bounced off the side of his head. “Earth to Finn?” said Emmie, with a sympathetic grin.

Finn blinked. “Oh. I’m not saying we won’t find it, I’m just afraid we’re looking for the wrong thing in the wrong places.”

Which was the exact moment he found a map.

Low evening sunlight flooded the small Darkmouth alley, forcing Finn to pull his visor down to block its glare. He crept low along the narrow laneway, brushing the high walls on either side, the butt of his Desiccator pressed into his armoured shoulder, ready to protect him against whatever he might find. Whenever he found it. Whatever it was he was looking for.

He backed along a wall, the armour of his clattering fighting suit screeching across the stone. Keeping out of sight, he took a hard right into another alleyway of high glass and nail-rimmed walls in a town built for defence. Gouges and missing chunks in the brickwork were a reminder of the invasion only two weeks before, of the chaos and near catastrophe wrought by multiple Manticores, a Minotaur and those trying to hunt them down.

He scuttled down the laneway where Mr Glad’s burnt-out shop stood behind a criss-cross of police tape warning trespassers to keep out, a blackened reminder of the traitor who had opened a hole in Darkmouth through which Finn’s father and mother had gone and only one had come back.

Where the lane bisected another, Finn stuck his head round the corner. From a parallel alley, the barrel of a weapon emerged, followed by a helmet and a flurry of exaggerated hand signals.

Palm out flat. Knuckles curled. A swirling motion.

Finn flipped open his visor, squinting against the sun as he tried to properly convey his bemusement. “What?” he mouthed.

Steve pushed his visor open and repeated the gestures, this time adding some kind of pumping fist motion.

“Lie down?” asked Finn. “Hop?”

Steve gritted his teeth with obvious frustration. From behind his back, another head appeared.

Emmie, her helmet propped on her head, tight red hair avalanching from it, waved at Finn. He waved back.

Her father gently but firmly pushed her behind him and then, pressed against the wall, crab-walked towards Finn. Emmie followed, no Desiccator in her hand. She wasn’t allowed one. Her sole weapon was an eagerness that almost burst from her.

The three crouched at the wall. Finn’s fighting suit was pushed up uncomfortably at his neck; his kneepads dug into the top of his shins. He shifted awkwardly and loudly as Steve spoke.