And then she was on her feet and running, the torch clattering unnoticed from her hand, rolling away under one of the Kays with its beam zigging and zagging crazily across the floor, making another shadow-Lina that briefly ran beside her. She pelted out of the hangar door, slipping in a patch of oil, almost falling, stretching out a hand to right herself, swerving round the corner and into the warehouse. She ran through a haze of red light, bunched darkness, regiments of shelving that gave way to bare corridors. She crashed into one of the techs from aeroponics as she sprinted past, knocking them flying, steel instruments spilling from their hands. She didn’t even see who it was, let alone stop to apologise. She ran, on and on, her heart jumping and thumping in her chest, wishing she was fitter, wishing she would wake from this insane dream.
She rounded the door of the medical department and skidded to a halt. Where was Jayce? She looked around frantically, checking behind the door of the small canteen room that adjoined the main reception area. Nothing. She ran to Eli’s treatment bay, already knowing what she’d find.
He was gone.
‘No. . .’ she said, but it came out in a whimper that was frighteningly small in the deserted medical department.
She checked the next treatment bay. The technician whom she had avoided earlier was lying crumpled in one corner, entwined with the equally-dead body of Jayce. Blood had formed a veritable lake around them, almost reaching to the doorway where Lina stood with her mind hitching and misfiring, unable to believe what she was looking at.
Unwilling, but unable to resist, she felt herself drawn into the room as if by some magnetic force, her feet moving slowly through the clotting blood, making little sucking and squelching noises as she went. She took hold of one of Jayce’s arms and tried to turn him over. Instead, his whole body rolled and splashed onto the floor, splattering her legs with gore. His arm unfolded slowly and plopped down beside his helmeted head.
Eli had jammed something sharp up under Jayce’s helmet and into his neck — maybe a surgical scalpel or something. Whatever it was, it had done the job efficiently enough, because Jayce was undeniably stone dead.
Lina looked up at the technician, whose face was a frozen picture of fear and surprise. Her mouth was locked open in a final scream, her eyes were liquid circles of terror, and she was latticed with slashes, some of them deep enough to show the bone beneath her flesh. Lina noticed that her hands were also cut to pieces — the tip of one finger was actually missing — as if she had used them in an attempt to protect herself from the onslaught. An ultimately futile attempt, then.
Lina stood back, horrified, her stomach suddenly filled with butterflies. ‘He’s gone,’ she said to herself. ‘Eli’s gone. . . But where?’ And then an idea began to dawn on her with slow implacability, crushing and grinding everything before it. ‘Marco. . .’
When she reached the door of her quarters she found it ajar, and knew that she might already be too late. An agonising surge of fear and anger and love exploded inside her, almost stopping her in her tracks. But somehow, she made herself open the door fully and step inside.
She padded through the deserted living-slash-dining room as quietly as she could, on legs that felt stuffed full of lead. And then she heard Marco’s voice, weak and frightened. Maybe hurt.
‘Eli. . . don’t. . .’ that voice said.
Lina forgot all notions of stealth and burst into Marco’s room with her blood keening in her ears, barging the door open with her shoulder. It smashed into something meaty the other side and she heard another voice — Eli’s voice — utter a short grunt of pain and surprise.
And then she was in there, her mind filled with a savage blood-lust — the rage of the protective mother — a rage so clean and bright and pure that it shut off all conscious thought, scrubbed it into nothing.
Eli, behind the door, recovered his balance and stepped back a pace, the scalpel he had stolen from medical swishing and slicing in the air. Red light ran along its blade like blood, hypnotic and terrible. Maybe it was blood — Jayce’s and Tamzin’s.
Marco was on his bed, his back pressed up against the far wall, with the covers pulled up tight around him. All children know that bed-covers are monster-proof, thought Lina distantly. He looked utterly terrified, and her heart stung to see him that way.
‘Eli,’ she panted, stretching out one hand to keep him back, mindless of how little good it had done Tamzin, trying to circle in between him and the bed. ‘Don’t!’
Eli turned with her, still drawing patterns in the air with the blade, feinting left and right minutely, like a big cat about to pounce. Unbelievably, tears squeezed from his eyes and tracked down his trembling face, dropping from his chin to the cold floor. His bottom lip convulsed, then his whole face began to quiver, but he didn’t relax from his fighter’s stance.
‘I didn’t want to, Lina,’ he said thickly, advancing slowly towards her. His face hung like a curtain of flesh, undulating with rage and misery.
‘Then don’t,’ she replied, backing away from him. Her calf bumped against Marco’s bed, and she almost overbalanced and fell onto it, which she suspected would have spelled the end for her and her son. ‘It’s easy, Eli. Just don’t.’
‘Mum!’ cried Marco in a terrified little squeak. Lina didn’t look back at him, didn’t dare to take her eyes off the weeping, slashing madman that had used to be her closest friend.
‘But I’m the emissary!’ sobbed Eli, as if that explained it all. He sounded like a toddler in a tantrum, torn by raw, intense emotion: It’s not fair! was how it sounded to Lina.
‘Eli, just be cool. Put the knife down,’ she said, reaching behind her with one hand, seeking to touch Marco for what she supposed might well be the last time. ‘It’s me, Eli. Me and Marco.’ As if he didn’t know that.
‘It’s the dragon,’ wailed Eli. His tears were coming faster now, and Lina wondered how much he could actually see. Maybe this was her chance, maybe her only chance. She wished she’d had the presence of mind to grab a weapon on her way in. ‘It said it might be difficult. But I have to do it, Lina, I have to. I’m going,’ he said in the tones of one pleading for understanding, ‘to cut him up small, Lina, into little bits. And if you want to go first. . . well. . . the dragon said that was okay, too.’
‘No!’ screamed Marco, sending a jolt through Lina’s body. Eli was itching to pounce, she knew. She could see the tension in his posture, almost hear it crackling inside him.
‘Eli, no. . .’ she said, feeling tears begin to well in her own eyes, knowing it was useless, that her son would watch his mother murdered, and then the madman responsible would butcher him, too.
‘NO!’ screamed Marco again — deafeningly loud this time– a sound that filled the room and made the walls vibrate like a struck drum.
And then Eli moved.
Several things happened at once. Lina, sensing that Eli would spring for Marco, attempting to simply bypass her, launched herself into his path. Caught against the bed-frame, she staggered and fell, right on top of her son. As went down, she saw somebody else in the room, a hulking shape behind Eli, moving in a swift and purposeful blur. Marco screamed. The sound drew out and stretched like chewing gum, hideous and tearing. Eli practically landed on her, the keystone in a veritable human pyramid. The scalpel, striking for Marco, who still cowered beneath his covers, caught Lina in the shoulder, opening it to the bone and tearing a jagged gash right down to her elbow. The breath that came from his mouth washed over her in a sickening wave. He smelled like something had died inside of him, and Lina supposed that was actually pretty close to the truth.