A man was standing over her, shaking her shoulder. She asked to use the toilet and was taken outside. The sky had darkened and the dust haze had thickened, obscuring the mounds and dimming the frozen scarves of light tangled overhead. The toilet was a plastic sentry-box exactly like the ones at music festivals. It had the same stink, too. Chloe squatted inside it and listened to the wind hoot and wail outside until the man who’d escorted her rapped on the door.
Drury and Tommy took her on a tour of the mounds. There were ten of them, and they walked all the way around each one, Drury asking her if she could feel anything while Tommy swept the air with a long boom wired into his tablet, taking readings of local distortions in the magnetic field. Chloe said that only the mound they’d tunnelled into seemed active, and hoped that Fahad hadn’t told them any different.
Fahad was sleeping, Drury said. After the tunnel had been cleared he had spent half the night inside the mound. ‘He looked like one of those fairground fakirs, trying to summon spirits. He was about as successful, too.’
‘We should have brought a crystal ball,’ Tommy said.
‘I should have brought a real fucking archaeologist,’ Drury said.
He was tired and irritable. Chloe hoped that it was because things weren’t going the way he planned.
She told him that Fahad needed time; Drury said that was what the kid had told him. ‘His spirit guide is still fine-tuning the fucking machinery, or some such shit.’
‘Let me talk to him,’ Chloe said.
‘No, I’ll let him rest. Then we’ll give it another go-around. And if that doesn’t work,’ Drury said, ‘you’d bloody well better be able to find some way of motivating him.’
He wouldn’t let her see Fahad’s black room, either. They returned to the tent, and she sat in the sleeping compartment and tried to ignore the stray glances of the men. The oppressive claustrophobia reminded her of The World’s Worst Holiday, a camping trip in Wales when her parents’ marriage had been splitting open. Soon to be followed by The World’s Worst Christmas, after her father walked out. It had rained every day, in Wales. Classic British holiday weather, as if global warming had never happened. Or perhaps because it had. Her father had sat under the awning of their tent drinking cheap red wine, or had disappeared on long solitary walks; her brother had mooned after some unobtainable girl; Chloe, aged seven, had been forced to accompany her mother on trips to local churches and chapels. While her mother sketched architectural details, she’d sit in a pew, reading, or sit in the church’s porch and watch rain fall amongst gravestones and crooked crosses. Later, she would have given anything to have those long quiet hours back, but at the time she’d been bored and fractious, disturbed by the tension between her mother and father, the change in the family’s emotional climate that she couldn’t, at the time, understand.
She dozed, jerked awake with a little shock. There were more men in the tent now, big animals crowding the common space. She recognised the bearded, eyepatched driver of the Range Rover, one of the men who’d been left behind to search for McBride.
‘There’s a problem,’ Drury told her. ‘Get your mask. I need you outside.’
‘What is it?’
‘Your friend Fahad is trying to fuck me over.’
She was hustled to the trench cut around the nearest mound. Two men were standing guard there. One told Drury there was no change in the situation; the other handed him a pair of field glasses.
Drury pushed his goggles up to his forehead and leaned at the edge of the trench, studying something through the field glasses. Then he gave them to Chloe and told her to take a look.
She had to stand on a plastic crate. The field glasses laid reticles and several small stacks of numbers over a hazy view of things moving through blowing dust. Biochines, different sizes. Some as big as cows, or cars. A jostling crowd circling the neighbouring mound.
‘They started to turn up after the kid arrived,’ Drury said. ‘One or two coming in at irregular intervals. My guys shot them. But a few hours ago a whole lot more came in out of the countryside, and they’re still coming in. And when I sent two of my men to pull the kid out of his hidey-hole, his black room, a bunch of those monsters tore them to pieces.’
Chloe remembered the mantis-thing in Hanna’s cage, purring like a contented cat. She said, ‘You think Fahad called them here?’
‘You’re the expert on the kid and his eidolon.’
‘You took him prisoner, he saw a chance to try to take control…What would you have done, in his place?’ Chloe said. She was angry and scared because she knew what was coming, could see it barrelling down the tracks towards her, massive and unstoppable.
‘The question is, what’s he doing in there?’ Drury said. ‘And why is it so fucking important to those biochines?’
Tommy said, ‘The signal is steady. But who knows if that means anything?’
Chloe said, ‘What signal?’
‘A broad-spectrum radio pulse,’ Tommy said, hefting something that looked like an antique mobile phone. A fat antenna protruded from its leather case. ‘It started up a couple of hours ago. The kid said his Ugly Chicken has woken something. If he’s done something else since then, it hasn’t changed the signal, but it doesn’t mean he hasn’t done something else. Just that we can’t detect it.’
‘Because you didn’t bring the right equipment,’ Drury said.
‘So sack me and send me home,’ Tommy said.
‘Maybe I should send you in there to get the kid,’ Drury said.
Chloe said, ‘I’ll go.’
The two men looked at her.
She said, ‘I mean, that’s what you want me to do. So I’ll do it.’
‘I want you to bring him out,’ Drury said. ‘Tell him that I won’t hurt him. Tell him that I’m not even angry with him. But also tell him that if he doesn’t come out, I’ll smash that precious bead of his to dust. And just in case you’re thinking of trying any funny stuff…’
He snapped his fingers, and one of his men handed him a fat length of dull olive tubing. Drury pulled at it and it suddenly doubled in length; he unfolded a gunsight at one end and a trigger mechanism at the other.
‘This is an M-80 rocket launcher,’ he said. ‘A one-shot handheld anti-tank weapon made in the Republic of Serbia. Fine piece of kit. We have six of them. And if you don’t bring that kid out in the next thirty minutes we’re going to fire every single one of them into that fucking tunnel.’
Chloe walked out into the dust and wind with a heavy feeling of inevitability. The feeling that everything in her life had led up to this point.
A little walkie-talkie was hooked to the collar of her jacket and plugged into her ear; she was carrying a torch and two bottles of water, a watch borrowed from one of Drury’s men, an ugly thing with a ridiculous number of little dials. Drury had told her that if the biochines attacked her, he and his men would shoot the nearest, give her a sporting chance to make a run for it. He did not need to say what would happen to her if she returned alone.
With guns at her back she walked towards the pit, and the alien monsters that prowled its edge.
Several dead biochines were scattered across rippled sand and broken pavements of black stone. Then she saw the first live ones, long and low and segmented, scuttling over the irregular ground. She stood stock-still, holding her breath, as one of them coiled over itself and flowed towards her, moving on a multitude of stiff spikes. Tufts of hair bristled at the joints of its armour, a pair of black prongs jutting from its rear. It circled her twice, then reared up.