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Human Nature - Chapter Ten

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What's Bigger on the Inside than on the Outside?

Major Wrightson was sitting in the front of the van, trying to compose a cable to HQ as the rain lashed down, visibly bouncing off the dome over the town. His own feeling about the barrier was that it was somehow divine rather than the work of the enemy, but he couldn't put that down. He had already called for reinforcements, without much idea of what they were to reinforce. All he really wanted was a general to come down here, see the barrier and make it into his problem. His men had been turning away civilians all day, and now it was approaching dusk. Tomorrow, they'd probably have the press to deal with. From inside the barrier, around teatime, had come the noise of machine-gun fire. That had dismayed the men. Machine-guns were the ultimate taboo for the private soldier, and the thought that they might be being used in there on civilians... Wrightson had walked round the barrier in the last hour, having a word with all the sentries shivering in their oilskins.

There was still, of course, the matter of composing a letter about Torrence.

A new figure appeared on the darkening road, a bicyclist in a long mac. He hopped off as Wrightson looked up, and wandered over to the van. He had a centre-parting and a grin that had been utterly unperturbed by the rain.

'What's going on, Major?'

Wrightson was pleased that somebody had recognized his rank. 'The area's been sealed off, sir. Nobody in or out, I'm afraid.'

'But I live in Farringham. I'd just cycled over to see my aunt in Shellhampton. Not only that, I'm due to address a meeting in town tonight.'

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'Sorry, you'd best make provisions to stay somewhere else for the night. How are you fixed for accommodation?'

'That's all right, I can just go back to my auntie. You can't tell me what this is all about, I suppose?'

Wrightson shook his head. He hadn't been able to think of a story that wouldn't cause a mass panic. 'What's this meeting of yours, anyway?'

'Labour group. I'm Richard Hadleman, hopefully the next MP for this town. Hello.' Hadleman shook Wrightson's hand.

'You'll have some hope, won't you? No cotton mills in there.'

'Plenty of underpaid farm-hands and shop boys, though. Here, have one of our leaflets.' Hadleman reached into his satchel and produced one of the newly printed red pamphlets.

Wrightson smiled at it. 'The Ten Commandments Of Socialism? Won't please the clergy, will it?'

'The opiate of the masses, according to Marx.' Hadleman smiled, but, seeing Wrightson's frown, he became serious. 'Anyway, I'm not here to win votes. If you can't tell me what's going on, can you at least tell me when it'll stop?'

'I'm afraid not. Out of my hands, rather.'

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'Sure. Tell you what, if you chaps would like it, I can have my aunt send over a pot of stew and some whisky.'

Wrightson nodded. 'Thanks, but hold the whisky.'

'Oh, so it's that sort of - '

From the town, there came the sound of an explosion. Wrightson leaned out of the van window and called to the soldier standing by the barrier to his left. 'Position and weapon!'

'Position and weapon!' called the soldier to his comrade near by.

Hadleman listened as the call was repeated into the distance. 'That wasn't a shell or a grenade.'

'No,' Wrightson muttered, and then turned to Hadleman in surprise. 'How did you - '

'My friend Constance has an interest in the military. What the hell's going on in there, Major? Have you engaged an enemy?'

'No, I wish I bloody - sorry, I wish I had.'

'I'll leave you to it, then.' Hadleman started back up the road, hopping on to his bicycle.

Wrightson instantly caught the falseness of the comment. 'Don't do anything rash! There's - ' But Hadleman was already out of sight. Wrightson sighed. He wasn't sure what kind of lie he could tell about the barrier anyway.

'Excuse me, sir,' the soldier by the barrier to his right called. 'Do you really want to know the position of Rippon?'

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Smith led his class quickly through the corridors of the school to the library. 'But this is mutiny, deserting our post!' Hutchinson was protesting. He was the only one who still carried his rifle. The rest had been left piled in a comer of the dormitory.

'Quiet!' Smith growled. 'I'm trying to save our lives. Bernice, the Doctor, how does he do what he does?'

'It's hard to say. It's rather like judo, or Reversi. The opposition usually thinks they've won, and then he makes them see the situation in a different way, and it turns out he has.'

'Hmm. Tricky.'

'John,' Joan began nervously. 'You aren't labouring under the delusion that you really are this Doctor, are you?'

'Of course not!' Smith held up his hand, and the troupe of boys halted in front of the library. From all over the school, the sound of small-arms fire could be heard. 'It's just a useful mental model. Now, something I've been wondering since I got here.' He gestured with his umbrella at an elaborately carved panel above the library door. 'What did you say that meant?'

'Maius Intra Qua Extra?' Joan laughed. 'You mean you really didn't know what the school motto meant?'

'No,' Smith mumbled, 'it's in a foreign language, isn't it?'

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'Bigger on the inside than the outside!' Hutchinson snapped. 'It's about books. Now, don't you think we should - '

There came a vast explosion from one of the floors above. The boys all fell to the ground. Smith remained standing, tapping his teeth with the umbrella handle. 'Yes. I see. How long's the school been in this building? Twenty years?'

'Yes,' Joan picked herself up and took his arm. 'Eighteen, to be exact.'

'Then how old's that inscription?'

Somewhat self-consciously, Benny took his other arm. 'Older. The arch is needed to support the ceiling here, and you can tell the carving's not been added later, because it extends further out than the edges of the arch. That was planned from the start.'

'So the motto was originally that of the building. Rocastle took it on. Is it a family motto?'

'No coat of arms,' Alexander said.

'It would be Rocastle all over to see it there and appropriate it,' Joan added.

'And, being over a library, it is, as I said, about books!' Something inside Hutchinson snapped. He pulled back the bolt on his rifle and swung it to cover Smith. 'Take us back to our post, you're guilty of mutiny.'

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Smith took a step forward, so that the muzzle of the rifle was pressed up against his chest. He held up a hand to stop Benny from making any sudden move on Hutchinson.

The other boys stared at the two of them.

'If you don't return to your post, then I'll be forced -'

'Forced?' Smith's tone was quite mild. 'To do what?'

'To...' Hutchinson looked desperately around the other boys, looking for any sign of support. But all he saw were tired, frightened, sometimes tear-stained faces. Even Merryweather was slowly shaking his head, as if advising Hutchinson that this was a bad move. 'To report you to the Head!'

'Really? Oh.' Smith turned away from the gun and started examining the inscription again. 'Off you go, then.'

Hutchinson looked round his classmates. 'Well, which of you lads are coming with me?' There was a general turning away. Not one of the boys responded to Hutchinson's eager stare. 'Come on! There's adventure happening! A scrap! What sort of boys are you?'

'Living ones,' Anand told him.

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'All right!' Hutchinson snarled. 'If you prefer cowardice over honour!' And he ran off.

'Isn't it odd,' opined Alexander, 'how close masculinity is to melodrama?'

'Only in an Irish dictionary,' said Joan.

'Why an Irish one?' asked Benny.

Joan stared at her. 'Why - it's a joke...'

'Is it?'

'Stop, stop, I need you both to think!' Smith put a hand atop each woman's head and turned them to face the inscription, flashing Alexander a mixture of grin and shrug. 'I think that's a joke. An architectural one. Let's go inside and see if it's true.' He shooed the boys into the library. 'The walls are marble, too. Very hard. Very sturdy.'

'Doctor,' Benny began.

Smith glanced at the look on Joan's face. 'Call me John. You know, I think that being covered in all that blood did something strange to me. I saw a dead cat. Is that normal?'

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'You had a cat. Chick. It died in a very bad way.'

'Chick...' Smith whispered. 'The name means something... something far away. And Gallifrey, you've mentioned that twice to me. I used it in one of my stories. I thought I'd made it up until I remembered - '

'John,' Joan touched his face with her hand, and wiped another tiny patch of blood away, 'you're frightening me. Are you in shock?'

'I'm not sure. It's working though. Don't worry. I love you.' The last of the boys had been ushered into the library, missing his whisper by a second. Now he shouted to them, 'I want everybody to start combing the walls. Call if you see anything unusual.'

Joan was smiling at him. 'I love you, also.'

Benny took Alexander by the tie and dragged him away, her fists clenched. 'That woman!'

'I think it's wonderful, loved one. Just because you and I have both lost our sweethearts, don't let's get bitter, eh?'

'I am not bitter.' They began to search the bookshelves. 'It's just so obviously going to end in tears. When the Doctor regains his senses, is he going to be pleased to find that he's going out with a wrinkly racist? I think not. Hey, wait a minute, did you say that you'd lost your sweetheart?'"

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Alexander froze. 'Oh, that was a long time ago...'

The library had an ornate plaster ceiling, which Smith stared up at, pointing his umbrella upwards and extending it at intervals in various directions, as if calculating. The only windows were a series of high panels to let in light. As she calmed down, Benny realized that she did, indeed, feel safer here. A number of small explosions were being heard at intervals throughout the school, hard to discern from the thunder outside. The boys were starting to look very stressed indeed, their little faces pinched up and their shoulders hunched. No wonder they hadn't gone with Hutchinson. Rocastle had hugely overestimated their interest in warfare. They desperately wanted to be rescued.

Despite some bad life decisions he might have made, she felt a surge of pride as she looked at the little man in the middle of the room. He was going to do that. He was going to save the day, again.

Then she caught sight of the look on Joan's face. She was also staring at Smith, unaware that she was being watched, and, caught unawares like that, she was terribly afraid.

Perhaps sometimes you couldn't save everybody.

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Serif was walking through the corner of the building, using a molecular redistributor to melt away the brickwork in front of him. From the other sides of the school came the noise of the others using their heavy weapons.

The corner masonry dissolved, and Serif walked into a kitchen area, through the remains of what had once been a stove, kicking aside the melting metal doors. Any staff had long since departed. This would make a good place to begin the search.

Greeneye and Hoff were exchanging fire with a group of boys with rifles on a balcony outside Rocastle's quarters, ducking in and out of a row of ornamental topiary.

'Fun, isn't it?' Greeneye grinned.

'If you like that sort of thing.' Hoff clicked a button on his cuff. 'I'm getting tired of it, though.'

He stepped out in the full view of the boys, and staggered back as a salvo of bullets bounced off the forcefield he'd erected in front of his chest. 'Good shot!' he called. 'My turn!'

He aimed his gun vaguely in the direction of the balcony and squeezed the trigger. A heavy shell spiralled out of the weapon and landed in the centre of the kneeling boys. Some of them stood up in alarm.

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The shell exploded and the balcony tumbled from the front of the building, a fiery mass of screaming, charring bodies. It landed with a crash, leaving a gaping hole in the masonry above it.

'Now,' Hoff turned to Greeneye as the latter emerged from cover, 'that's my idea of fun.'

Anand was tapping along a section of wall in the library. He was worried about his friend. Tim had been missing ever since he'd been summoned to the Head's office. In all this trouble, he hadn't been able to ask about him.

While he was thinking, his hand encountered a soft spot on the spine of a book. It was one of a whole panel of fake spines, a Victorian decorative device long-beloved of captains who would tell their bugs to go and fetch a particular non-existent title. The spine in question was that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the soft spot was circular, and halfway up the binding. Anand pressed it.

Something made a clunk and then a grind, and the whole panel of books swung open.

The boys cheered and the adults ran over to peer down a flight of dank little stone steps. 'Open sesame,' said Anand.

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Serif shot three boys who ran across the end of the corridor he was stalking down, and turned the corner a moment later.

He was in the central hallway where the bursar's office met the foot of the great stairways.

A group of boys looked up from the sandbags they had piled against the great doors, which were secured with heavy bolts. They turned, swinging round their rifles awkwardly.

Serif mowed them all down in a blaze of silent blue light. He broke step only to swing the bodies and the bags away from the doors, which he unbolted and swung open.

'Come on,' he called to August and Aphasia. 'I'm sure I haven't killed the right boy yet.'

Smith's party were running down a narrow brick-lined passageway. Smith himself hung back for a moment, noting that Captain Merryweather was always glancing behind him, biting his lip in panic, and tripping over his feet.

Smith drew level with him. 'What's wrong?'

'They'll come after us. They've got all those guns. They'll kill us.'

'But we're cleverer than they are.'

'That doesn't matter. That never matters. It's who's got the most guns that matters!'

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'Trust me,' Smith murmured. 'I won't let you come to any harm. I promise.'

Merryweather looked up at him uncertainly. 'Can you promise that?'

'Of course. You boys may know me as mild-mannered John Smith, history teacher, but secretly I'm the Doctor, universal righter of wrongs and protector of cats.'

'Are you?'

'So I'm told.' Smith smiled at Bernice as she hung back from the gentle jog to join him. 'How are you?'

'I'm fine, I was wondering about you. You've changed your mind.'

'So you say.'

'No, I mean that you've started to act like yourself again.'

'I just got fed up. This is all play-acting. I'm terrified. And mad. Like I'm too mixed up to care who I am. Who is this Doctor, then?'

'A man from another planet who travels through time and space having adventures. He has two hearts.'

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'I only have one.'

'That's because of the Pod. When we find it, you put it back to your forehead and you become you again. You grow your other heart back. Or so I assume.'

'So why do the villains want it?'

'They want to be like you.'

'Let me ask you a question. Merryweather, cover your ears, I'm in love with one of your teachers.'

Merryweather blinked and did so. 'That's all right, sir, so am I.'

'Ah, wait, before you ask me the question, look at this.' Benny pulled the list of Things Not To Let Me Do from her jacket and showed it to Smith. At the bottom of the list, she'd added, in hastily scrawled biro, 'Don't let me fall in love.'

'Interesting. My handwriting changes. Ah well, too late on that last point. The question is if in my original state I've got two hearts and two brains - '

'Just hearts.'

'Well, if I'm so odd that I've got lots of everything, could I still love somebody?'

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Benny grimaced. 'I've, erm, never known the Doctor to have any concern for the trouser department. He sometimes gets his snaps out and goes all moody, but I suspect that's more a sort of paternal bit. In short, no, I don't think he normally does that kind of thing.'

'I see, two hearts but no love. Well, that makes our plan easier. One, we get everybody to safety, and that includes going back for the other boys. Two, we find the boy who's got this Pod. And three - '

'You put it to your forehead, become the Doctor again and kick some alien bottom?' Bernice asked hopefully.

'Ah, no. We give it to them and they go away.'

Benny stared at him. 'I think it's becoming one of those days.'

Rocastle stood in the middle of the canteen, his pistol out and ready. The boys of 5B were clustered around him in a nest of sandbags. The explosions that they'd heard earlier seemed to have stopped, as had, worryingly, the Vickers gunfire. Quite a few of the boys who'd been sent out as scouts hadn't returned. Probably run away and hid; there was no indication that the defences had been breached. On a real battlefield, they'd have had the luxury of maps and hills to view it from, but here things would just have to be worked out as they happened.

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The only OTC unit to have had actual combat experience. Damn it. The doors at the end of the canteen burst open. Several of the boys snapped up into firing postures, but Rocastle cut the air with his hands. 'Wait!'

It was Hutchinson, running wildly, his clothes and half his face blackened. 'It's Smith, sir! He's deserted his post! He's taken Farrar down to the library to hide!'

'Get into cover,' Rocastle told him. 'Brave lad. Plucky of you to come here. We'll settle Smith's hash when this is all over. Did you get into a scrape on the way?'

'Yes, sir.' Hutchinson slumped behind the sandbags. 'They're inside the school. One of them pointed a sort of flamethrower at me and I caught the edge of it.'

'Well done, Captain. Did you see where the enemy were going?'

'They were heading for the gymnasium, sir.'

'I see.' Rocastle stood up. 'In that case, I do believe that an exploratory mission is in order. The gymnasium has only one exit, and the southern stairs lead down there. We'll have height and they'll have nowhere to run. We may have a chance of settling the whole matter. Follow me.'

The boys did so, shouldering their arms nervously.

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'I like being me,' Smith was insisting to Benny. 'Besides, I'm engaged to be married.'

'You're what!'

'If she says yes.'

'You're marrying... her?'

'She's very nice.' Smith tapped Merryweather on the shoulder and indicated that he could unblock his ears. Benny just glowered at him.

Smith took a deep breath and began a chant matched to the rhythm of the jog. 'Do we want to fight and slay?'

'We should all just run away,' returned Benny, remembering the form from grotty route marches around the Academy.

'Do we want to all get shot?'

'If we scarper, no let's not.'

'Do we want to bathe in glory?'

'It's overrated, dull and gory,' Benny continued, with a little grin of pride at that one. The gang of children and adults continued to run down the narrow corridor, repeating the verses.

Smith tried to give Benny a reassuring smile, but the look she returned him was anything but reassured.

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The family met outside the gymnasium, August's party almost bumping into Greeneye and Hoff.

'I gather we've come to the same two conclusions,' said August. 'One, a complete holographic scan reveals that the boy we're after isn't in the building, and - '

'Two, there's a dirty great tunnel around here somewhere. Three, shall we get after the little crukker? Please?' demanded Greeneye, and ducked into the gym. Hoff, August and Serif followed.

Aphasia remained outside, her finger in her mouth, pondering something she'd read as the family had marched through the building. 'Maius Intra...'

Rocastle's party rounded the top of the landing, and scattered down the banisters into pre-arranged firing positions, surprised to find that the only person they were aiming at was a little girl.

'Miss!' Rocastle hissed. 'Miss! Would you please come here?'

Aphasia turned and saw them. She smiled. 'Oh? Why?'

Hoff poked his head out of the gymnasium doors.

'Aphasia, come on, we - '

Then he noticed the boys.

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He slapped his weapon up to head height.

The wall exploded with gunfire, splinters bursting everywhere. Hoff ducked back inside.

Aphasia spun as the bullets caught her and slapped her to and fro, her chest and limbs erupting with bloody debris.

'Cease fire' screamed Rocastle.

The little girl fell to the floor, and struggled to right herself, her balloon lying burst across her shoulder. Only one arm seemed to be working, and her eyes were blinking at a tremendous rate, like a clockwork toy winding down. She put her teeth to her wrist, and pulled open the pouch there.

Rocastle noticed that a couple of his boys were standing up, about to go to her. 'No! Wait for - '

Aphasia gazed at the black capsule inside her wrist, and a sweet smile crossed her face.

Then her head hit the floor, dead.

Hoff stepped out into the corridor, looked down at the body, almost casually, and turned to face Rocastle and his boys.

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They were staring at what they'd done, appalled.

Hoff looked for a moment like he was going to say something, but then he just shrugged.

He raised his gun and ran a burst of blue light up the stairs.

A row of boys screamed, dissolved, were blasted sideways, tried to run, cannoned into each other, threw their guns aside, separated, exploded, bled. The banisters before them steamed away into a cloud of ugly smoke.

'Retreat!' screamed Rocastle. 'Retreat!'

Amidst the smoke, a few boys did just that, running to his voice.

Hutchinson collided with him as they both sprinted up the stairs.

'We got one!' the boy laughed, clutching at his headmaster's lapels. 'Did you see, sir, we got one!'

Rocastle could only stare at him as the others bundled past.

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'Aphasia!' Hoff stumbled back into the gym, dragging the body with him. 'Aphasia!'

The family had been scanning the floor for the hidden tunnel their earlier scans had revealed. They all ran to the body, Serif shoving the others aside to bend quickly to the child, putting a gloved hand on either side of her face. 'If there's a chance, any neural activity at all- ' His expression froze and he let out a long hiss. 'No...' His white teeth clenched and he closed his eyes. 'She is dead.'

'Why didn't she put up her field?' Greeneye howled. 'Kill them all, every single one of them.'

'Close the doors,' August told Hoff. 'Put a field across it. Prepare a fusion bomb. This building will be her memorial. Now, quick as we can, let's be about the ceremony.'

Steaming tears were dropping from Serif's eyes, hissing as they fell on to Aphasia's dress. 'This one who was our mother and daughter, flesh of ours, let her be our flesh again.'

'Let her be our flesh again,' the others chorused.

Together, they bent to the body to feed.

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The old wooden door gave way after a couple of shoves. Benny looked around the cellar. 'Yes, that makes sense.'

There were casks of beer, racks of bottles and metal pipes all around. 'It's a secret route to the pub. The Lord of the Manor must have told the missus that he was studying.'

The boys filled the cellar and closed the door after them.

'Fascinating,' Joan said to Alexander. 'I've never been in a pub.'

'It gets better,' he told her, 'the higher up you get.' Smith hopped up a flight of stone steps and listened to the door at the top of them. Suddenly he took a step backwards and waved at the others to get down.

The door opened.

A surprised-looking landlord stared down at them.

'Thirty-eight lemonades, please,' Smith told him.

'And a pint of bitter,' Benny added.

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They marched out into the beer garden with their drinks. It was getting dark now and the storm was passing. The regulars had stared at the parade of schoolboys filing up out of the cellar. 'School outing,' Smith had explained as he paid for the round. It turned out that the landlord was quite aware of the passageway, and that the bursar had been an occasional customer through it.

Several of the locals muttered about the noise from the OTC being loud today, and one who claimed he was a Boer War veteran who'd 'drunk his fill of Bovril' cornered Smith and tried to row with him about it until the little teacher wriggled out.

'Well, what happens now?' Benny asked once they were in the garden. She'd had the awful feeling that she had been getting disapproving looks from locals who remembered her fleeing from Greeneye. 'We can't stay here long.'

'No, you can't.'

'You?'

'I've got to go back and let the others know there's a way out.'

Joan gripped him by the arm. 'Can't we communicate with the school in some way, let them know?'

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'No. They've been cut off from the outside world. I have to go back. I'll be careful. The rest of you must search for this Pod thing. Bernice, what did the boy who had it look like?'

'He was quite old, but still a bit small. Fair hair. Looked like he'd been dragged across a field.'

'Tim!' Anand said. 'You saw Tim!'

'Dean?' Smith asked, putting a hand on Anand's shoulder. 'Yes, he fits the description. And he's been very secretive lately. Who saw him last?'

'I saw him running out of school,' Alton murmured. 'He seemed intent on getting away. That was near teatime.'

'We saw him afterwards,' Benny told Smith. 'He's out there in the forest.'

Joan squatted down beside Anand. 'Where does he like to go? What are his favourite hiding-places?'

'There are several. He used to walk on his own quite a lot. He liked going to the teashop, and looking around the library in town. They have better books there than at school. And he always liked the orchard. We used to go picking apples there.'

Alexander nodded. 'As I said. We should send out people in all-'

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The skyline suddenly went white.

The shadows stretched negative black and long.

'Oh my God!' Benny shouted, the only one of them that understood it. 'Get - '

The sound cut her off, hitting like an enormous clap of thunder.

The blast knocked Smith's party off their feet, blasting the wooden pub tables into the field beyond the garden.

Benny, Joan and Smith grabbed the children and fell in a sprawling mass. Alexander wasn't so lucky, rolling over and over down to the bottom of the garden, finally flattening against the hedge. He looked up and yelled, astonished at what was coming towards him.

Through the blazing sky, a tree trunk was spinning straight at him.

It shot over his head, just clearing the hedge and bouncing off down the field. Splinters flew from it as it hit.

The wind roared past, thousands of tiny objects battering across the humans as they lay there. The hedge became a mass of glasses, foliage and stones. Alexander shielded his face with his arms.

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The blast thundered through the town, signs flying from buildings, shop windows disintegrating, the cockerel being torn from the top of the church spire. The market traders, turned back from the roads by the frantic shouts and gestures of the army, had reassembled in the square, and their carts were hurled all over, skidding and smashing across the cobbles.

People ran out of their houses, crying about the end of the world, and were blown off their feet in the wind, wailing as they skidded down the streets.

Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the sound ceased.

A fine grey dust began to descend.

Joan was curled in Smith's arms. 'What... what was that?' she cried.

'Some sort of explosive,' Alexander called from the hedge, trying to shout over the ringing in his ears. The boys were all shouting and openly sobbing, finally giving in to the fear that had pursued them for so long.

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'A fusion bomb.' Benny spat to get the dust out of her mouth. 'High blast, very low radiation yield.' She stood up, and shivered at the spectre of the mushroom cloud that was rising above the slight valley that had once contained the school. 'I had hoped that I would never get to see one of those.'

Smith got slowly to his feet, pulling Joan up with him. The first people were staggering, shouting and screaming, out from the still-intact pub.

'All those boys...' Joan whispered. 'And the teachers...'

Smith held her tight, marvelling at the terrifying shape in the sky.

Tim had been wandering in the forest, wondering when the time would feel right to do anything. He'd felt suddenly certain when he'd happened upon the barrier and rescued that soldier. That had been like following lines in a play, remembering his cues. Now, he was back in the wings, waiting to be called again, hearing the faint whispers that seemed to come from the Pod in his hand.

He'd been startled by a noise in the bushes and come upon Wolsey, staring up at him from his hiding-place in annoyance.

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'Hey, come on, boy, come on.' Tim dropped to his knees and crawled towards the cat, clicking his tongue. Wolsey decided that the smell of the boy was interesting and strange, and not really frightening, and so edged up to him, rubbing his neck against Tim's hand. 'That's a good cat. Now where - '

That was what saved Tim from the explosion. Suddenly, all the trees on the hill were flat, and he was lying under one of them, the weight of its fall broken by the shrubs that Wolsey had been playing in.

As the roar rumbled away, the cat leapt off, jumping from tree trunk to tree trunk very fast.

Timothy clambered out from under his particular tree, holding his ears. He counted the descending note of the sound, wondering what he was doing as he did it, and came to some startling conclusions about distance and explosive force.

'The school!' he whispered to himself. 'What have they done?'

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The family opened their eyes, blood still on their lips. They were standing in a small force dome, in the centre of the school. Beneath their feet was a circle of unharmed tiling.

Above their heads stood the school.

Only now it was made of fused glass. Patterns of light from the shimmering cloud scattered through it, rain bowing the gym and the library and the kitchens. Multiple lenses twisted the images and magnified them, the fiery brightness flickering through the Upper School and along the dormitories.

Inside the building there were glass statues, boys captured as they were caught in postures of running or hiding, their bones burst into glass and their flesh fused away.

In the silence, silver dust began to fall.

Around the building, the grounds had been flattened by the blast of transforming energy. Trees and bushes had been ripped out of the soil and flung off into the sky. The circle of destruction only stopped at the distant boundary wall, still half upright, and the tree line along the top of the nearby hills. The gate lodge had been torn in half, the struts of its roof opened and the brickwork dashed into the road.

The family had followed the ceremony to the letter, walking out of the gymnasium when they had finished feeding, and locating the precise centre of the building, underneath the old clock tower. Serif had dedicated the transformation to the soul of Aphasia, which had now returned to the place from which it had come, the belly of her family.

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They'd set the fusion bomb on top of the force dome and closed their eyes, beginning the litany that they'd only just finished. The actual detonation had been almost unnoticed amongst the emotion of the words.

They looked at each other and licked the blood from their lips. Not a scrap of their daughter and mother remained. The ceremony was over.

'Now,' August said after a moment's appropriate silence. 'Let's find what we're after, shall we?'

'Yes,' Greeneye agreed. 'And along the way, we'll make them pay for Aphasia. Blood for blood.'

'Blood for blood,' the family agreed.

'Not much chance of finding this tunnel,' Hoff noted, looking around.

'No,' August agreed. 'Well, we can always follow the line of it overground. Still, who knows...' He tapped the keypad once more. 'The Pod's transmitting again, it's - ah, no its gone. It was somewhere over there...' He gestured over the hill. 'Why does it keep doing that?'

'It is transmitting information,' Serif hissed. 'Perhaps to the boy who is carrying it, perhaps,' he glanced at Greeneye, 'to others. Perhaps both. We can only detect it when it is processing information.'

'In that case, we'd better treat this more urgently,' August ordered. 'According to Laylock, the Pod's made of pretty strong stuff. So, as soon as one of us sees the boy-'

'We shoot the annoying little crukhead?' Greeneye asked.

'Precisely.'

'Good.' Greeneye slapped the power on his gun up a few notches. 'I was starting to think that we were planning to adopt him.'