Hero Rising

“Please, we can’t—”

“And no one likes wasting custard.”

“Stop,” Scarlett ordered him, looking around to see if anyone was listening.

Finn was so close to them, crouched behind a bin, hardly breathing for fear of being caught. He pressed a hand against his mouth to stop himself making any noise.

“We have to be careful,” said Scarlett. “The walls have ears.”

Greyson examined the wall, ran his hand along it.

“I don’t mean they actually have ears,” said Scarlett. “Come on, let’s go.”

“If it doesn’t work at the cliff today, we should try rainbow sprinkles.”

“What did I just say?” Scarlett asked, exasperated.

They resumed their walk again. From behind the bin, squeezed into the darkness of the narrowest of gaps between buildings, Finn breathed again, mightily relieved they hadn’t heard Emmie on the far end of the phone asking repeatedly, “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” answered Finn, because he didn’t. All he knew was that something was going on. Something had been going on for a while now. Something strange. He’d spotted assistants moving suspiciously in and out and around the town. These two especially.

“They’re heading for the cliffs. Meet me there,” he said and hung up.

Using his local advantage over the assistants, Finn ducked into the laneways that criss-crossed Darkmouth. He knew that if he dipped in at Scrapers Lane there would be a shortcut to Red Alley. And if he nipped into the gap between two houses off Red Alley it would bring him to Stump Street, which in turn would allow him a quick route to Limpers Rock.

He emerged at the beach road ahead of the assistants. At the same time, Emmie arrived from another of the narrow lanes.

“Hey,” she said. “What do you think those assistants are doing? And why are you wearing a baseball cap that says ‘Cool Dude’?”

Finn took her elbow and pulled her around to face a shop window.

Scarlett and Greyson approached along the path. Hunched, with his baseball cap pulled down, Finn hoped they hadn’t noticed himself and Emmie or that the two of them were looking in a shop window long empty except for dead flies and dirt.

“They’re up to something,” Finn said after the assistants walked past. “They’ve been up to something for a while. We need to find out what.”

Emmie kept looking at his hat.

“And the best disguise I could do at short notice was this dumb baseball cap, OK?”

“You should have grown a moustache or something.” She smiled.

“This is serious,” Finn said. “Whatever they’re doing, we need to find out what it is so we can have our old lives back. Do you like sharing one toilet with loads of people every morning?”

“Good point,” she said. “Come on.”

The assistants climbed a path towards what remained of Darkmouth’s cliffs, a slumped mass of rock and earth on which grass grew and trees clung at precarious angles. They had collapsed when Finn’s grandfather Niall Blacktongue had returned from the Infested Side and exploded in a cave below the cliffs to destroy an army of invading Legends. During that adventure, Finn had also turned into a walking bomb and while he’d had a few explosive moments since, in the months since Gantrua’s invasion he was beginning to feel like the strange energy had finally dissipated, that he had gradually returned to something like normal. The cliff, though, would never be the same again.

Finn and Emmie took another shortcut, dashing along the stone shore, carefully making their way across the narrow strip of shingle squeezed between the soil and the sea. They clambered up the long, steep slope of weeds and grass just as the assistants arrived from the other direction. The breeze carried their curses as briars caught at their suit trousers, as they stumbled over ground that had come crashing down in one terrific, almost catastrophic implosion.

The cave.

That’s why they’re here, thought Finn. That was what they were looking for. The Cave at the Beginning of the World, as it was once known. A place where crystals had grown, where gateways to the Infested Side had popped open and shut.

But it had been destroyed, pulverised by the exploding Niall Blacktongue. Hadn’t it?

The assistants paused to look around them, and Finn and Emmie dropped behind the tendrils of a half-uprooted tree, still heavy with leaves, but its branches almost touching the ground on one side, as if it might topple fully at any moment.

They carefully manoeuvred themselves so that they were behind the web of roots that had been thrust into unwanted daylight and peered through them. The assistants were gone.

“Where are they?” asked Finn, pushing himself up for a better view.

“They just kind of dropped out of sight,” said Emmie.

They crept into the open again, carefully at first, presuming they’d see the assistants’ heads over the crest of the land. But there was no sign. They moved past a couple more lopsided trees, towards where they had last seen them, and Finn noticed a patch of ground that looked out of place, like a wig on a bald head.

He carefully pulled at it and the grass and dirt fell away like a kind of mat. It revealed a hole that, if he was to guess, was large enough to fit an adult with relative comfort.

“Is that a rope ladder just inside?” Emmie asked.

Finn knew every inch of Darkmouth – above ground and, more recently, the tunnels and caves below. “This was never here before,” he said.

From the collapsing trees angling behind them, birds sang, noisy. Something sticky landed on Finn’s neck, and he swatted at it while trying to concentrate on the voices he could hear rising from the hole in the ground.

“That didn’t work,” they heard Greyson say, and Emmie moved back instinctively, her feet pushing away a sliver of rocks and soil so they formed a tiny avalanche as they tumbled down the slope.

“We’ll try again,” they heard Scarlett reply from deep down below, in the ground.

Feeling a little braver, Finn stood higher, craned over the hole to listen better.

“Do we hold it this way, or that way?” Greyson asked.

“Well, we held it that way last time,” Scarlett replied, “so we should probably hold it this way this time and see what happens.”

Finn and Emmie looked at each other, frowning.

All went quiet. There was only the sound of the breeze and birds, and the pebbles sliding away from their feet. Finn began to wonder if the assistants had left the cave and headed out some other way.

Then a spark rose up from the darkness, a burst of light, lasting just a millisecond.

“What was that?” asked Finn.

It happened again.

And again.

“Again?” he heard Greyson ask.

“Again,” confirmed Scarlett.