Part 23 (1/2)

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?'

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 gla.s.s. Patterns of light from the s.h.i.+mmering 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 gla.s.s statues, boys captured as they were caught in postures of running or hiding, their bones burst into gla.s.s 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.

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 sc.r.a.p 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.'

Chapter Eleven.

Castling

Amid a crowd of local people who rushed out of the pub, gesturing and shouting at the shape in the sky, Smith gathered his party together. 'Bernice, you know what that was. Did they - the ones who are after the ball - do it?'

'Unless a first-year had an unusually successful day in the physics lab, I think they're a good bet.'

'Then we definitely shouldn't fight them. They're too strong.' He walked back and forth through the huddled boys and adults, his hands clasped ferociously behind his back. 'This is only a war if we make it a war. We need to play a different game. A game like chess.'

'p.a.w.ns,' Alexander told him carefully, 'get taken in chess.'

Smith bit his knuckle in concentration. 'Yes. So we cheat. All of you, listen to me, we need to find Tim.' He divided the boys up into groups, and sent each of them out to a particular one of the boy's haunts and gave them the same instructions. 'If you find Tim, with or without the red sphere, bring him back here. Come back here anyway in two hours. If you see the enemy, run and hide. Don't let adults try to protect you, just get out of their way. Benny, Alexander, you two take a few boys and go up on to the hills. Joan and I will try the orchard.'

'Now, wait a minute -' Benny began, but Alexander had grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her away through the gathering crowd before she could finish her sentence. The boys delegated to their party ran after them.

'I don't think your niece likes me very much,' Joan told Smith as she watched them go.

'You're too alike,' Smith told her, leading her away. 'Not that I think either of you appreciate the comparison.'

A few minutes after the couple had left in the direction of the orchard, another commotion added to the one that the crowd were creating. Another group of tired and tattered schoolboys, a vast number this time, threaded their way out of the pub and collapsed in the garden, holding their hands to their bleeding ears.

They'd been in the tunnel when the bomb went off. The explosion had rushed down it as a pressure wave, the air rolling over them and bursting their hearing like a terrible, intangible fist against their temples. They looked like defeated prisoners-of-war and their faces were blank and hollow. Some of the locals started to help them up and a doctor moved from boy to boy. The startled townsfolk began to ask questions of them.

After the last schoolboy had climbed the stairs, Mr Moffat, the bursar, staggered up out of the cellar behind him. He'd run about the school for half an hour before the explosion, avoiding battles and shepherding schoolboys towards the library.

He collapsed on to the bar and a barmaid ran to him, pressing a gla.s.s of brandy to his lips in concern. 'Ah...' he said to her. 'You've saved my life.'

Smith and Joan approached the gate of the orchard, holding hands. They'd been talking about Bernice's bizarre idea that finding the Pod would transform Smith into another person and had even started making jokes about it.

The dark cloud was starting to disperse, and the silver dust had begun to settle across the countryside.

'The size of that explosion...' Joan whispered. 'John, I am beginning to suspect that some of what Bernice says may be true.'

'Some of it,' Smith muttered. 'Not all of it.'

'So, may I ask why you have suddenly steeled yourself so?'

'Once, perhaps, but try asking it five times fast.'

'Don't evade me, John. You've changed.'

'For the better?'

'Yes. I didn't think you could play a soldier for long.'

'You're right, it isn't me.' Smith vaulted the gate and I helped Joan climb over. 'I can see why Rocastle thinks that way. It's attractive. Imagine, never having to make any decisions. Because of honour. And etiquette. And patriotism. You could live like a river flowing downhill, hopping from one standard response to the other.