She cried out. She couldn’t help it. A voice crackled on the walkie-talkie, asking her what had happened.
The biochine swayed snakelike, its head level with her face. Its underside was like a string of pale vertebrae, each bearing a pair of stiff spikes on prominent ball joints. Its head was small and complicated, with a ring of flexible whiskers twitching around a lamprey maw. It swayed back and forth, then struck with speed and precision, its mouth clamping around her left wrist, a stinging sensation, tugging, sudden release. She snatched her arm back, but the biochine was already flowing away. She remembered to breathe, and a deep trembling started in every muscle.
Her wrist throbbed.
She stripped off the camo jacket and pulled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt, discovered a mottled circle of small white blisters around her wrist, each tipped with a spot of blood. She said into the walkie-talkie, ‘Are these things poisonous?’
‘What happened?’ Drury said.
‘One bit me. Are they poisonous?’
‘I guess you’ll soon find out. Where is it now?’
‘Gone.’
‘Then why are you still standing there?’
Chloe shrugged into her jacket, zipped it up, and went on, hollow with fear and anticipation. Biochines resolved out of the blowing dust all around her. Tall, skinny black things that stalked about on two legs, with narrow heads that were mostly serrated jaws. Shelled things covered in fluorescent orange and green spines that flexed in pulsating waves. An elephantine boxy thing stumping past.
Monsters. Creatures whose logic confounded human experience.
Animated mops topped with writhing ribbons. Small hopping things that were here and suddenly there, hundreds of them seething around her. She froze, and they were gone, all at once, and she rubbed her legs and arms, wondering if she’d been bitten again.
The blisters circling her wrist warmly throbbed.
The mound loomed ahead. Biochines shifted away from her as she walked towards it. Treading carefully, her heart beating high, afraid that if she mis-stepped or tripped they might attack. She reached the shallow trench at the edge of the mound, squashed a foolish impulse to turn and wave to the men watching her.
She said into the walkie-talkie, ‘Okay. I’m here.’
She could see the mouth of the tunnel that slanted down into the mound. Clusters of rat-sized things clung spiderwise to the flaking ochre mudstone around it. Shield-like bodies, splayed legs thin as wires, clusters of eyes — she supposed they were eyes — that glowed sharp and green. She clambered down an aluminium ladder into the trench, stepped towards the tunnel mouth. Froze when the rat-spider things shifted, scurrying around and over each other, green eyes flashing and blinking.
When they stopped moving, she called Fahad’s name. No answer. She called again, said, ‘I’m coming in,’ and switched on the torch and ducked into the tunnel.
It was about a metre in diameter and roughly circular in cross section, mudstone walls sprayed with some kind of polymer or resin. Glistening like a gullet in the torchlight. Chloe crawled on hands and knees, clambered through a narrow slot between two dark straps. Beyond was a puckered opening in a dense weave of black wire. She scrambled head first into the hollow space beyond.
The black room. The oval print of the torch beam changed shape as it flowed over flat planes and sharp angles. A shadow crouched in a far corner.
Chloe pulled off her mask and said, ‘I came alone.’
‘He sent you, didn’t he?’ Fahad said. He was filthy with dust, clutching something in his left hand. A knife. No, a screwdriver…
‘Of course he did. But we can talk without being overheard,’ Chloe said.
She switched off the walkie-talkie, pulled one of the bottles of water from her pocket and tossed it to Fahad. He flinched when it smacked down, made to reach for it and then hesitated, as if suspecting a trick. Chloe unscrewed the top of the other bottle, drank. Cool water dissolved the parched taste of dust and fear. After a moment, Fahad reached out and snagged the fallen bottle and retreated.
Chloe sat on the slanting floor. One facet of an angular volume enclosed by walls of close-woven black wire. It was as chilly as metal but slightly resilient, like plastic or hard rubber. The individual strands were about the thickness of her thumb, knotted over and around each other in no obvious pattern.
She checked the borrowed watch — a little over fifteen minutes left — and told Fahad, ‘One of the things outside bit me. Tasted me. And the others let me through. So I guess Ugly Chicken wants me here.’
Fahad took a long drink from his bottle of water. He said, ‘You’re protected because he’s inside your head. A small piece of him, anyway.’
‘He made me want to come all the way out here. I felt it when I first saw this place. Felt as if I’d come home. Is that what you feel?’
Fahad nodded.
‘Did you call up all those monsters to keep you safe, or was it your friend?’
‘He wants to keep this place safe.’ Fahad paused, then said in a rush, ‘It’s happening, Chloe. It’s begun.’
‘This wonderful thing you told me about.’
‘He called to his friends.’
‘The biochines?’
Fahad shook his head. ‘Ugly Chicken is a memory of someone or something that had used this place long long ago. After he woke up, he used us to get back here. But that isn’t the end of it. He wants to go back to where his original came from. So he went inside the operating system of this place, and he called to his friends. Out there beyond the sky. In space. And one of them answered him.’
It took Chloe a moment to process that. She said, ‘Ugly Chicken called to a shuttle?’
‘To some kind of spaceship. He said it’ll be here soon. Here to take him home. He’ll help us, Chloe. He brought the biochines. And the spaceship he talked to will be here soon. Then it won’t matter about what Drury wants.’
‘Even if it’s about to land, or whatever it does, you can’t stay here any longer,’ Chloe said. She explained about the rocket launchers, and Drury’s ultimatum. She checked the watch again, said, ‘We have just ten minutes to work out what to do.’
‘He wouldn’t blow up this place,’ Fahad said.
‘Don’t bet on it. He has Rana’s bead. And this isn’t the only mound, the only spire.’
‘I told you. Ugly Chicken isn’t in the bead any more.’
‘Drury doesn’t know that,’ Chloe said.
‘And anyway, he still needs me. If he didn’t, he would have already fired those rockets into the tunnel.’
Chloe scooted closer to Fahad. ‘And what will he do when he doesn’t need you any more? When this spaceship comes? You’re hiding in here because you’re scared of him. That’s okay. I’m scared of him, too. Henry’s dead: one of Drury’s men killed him. And Drury killed your father, too. Wait,’ Chloe said when Fahad started to say something. ‘Let me finish. Drury took over McBride’s business when McBride went to prison. Drury found out that your father was dealing in Elder Culture artefacts, and that he wanted to go to work for his old boss, who’d just been released from jail. So he killed him and made a video of it, to keep other people who worked for him in line.’
‘But it was McBride who told you that.’
‘Yes, it was. And I trust him about as much as I trust Drury. But I think he was telling the truth about your father.’ Chloe paused. It was an ugly thing to ask, but necessary. She said, ‘Did you see the video? The one Jack Baines’s bosses sent?’
‘Why do you think we ran away?’
‘You saw what was done to your father. He was shot, wasn’t he?’
Fahad didn’t say anything.
‘McBride had some kind of ray gun. Henry took it off him, and then Drury took it from Henry. But before that, McBride used it on Hanna Babbel. I saw him do it. He paid her to lead Henry and me into a trap, and then he killed her. Also, when we were trying to find who had taken you, Henry found news reports about murders of men associated with McBride, all of them killed like Hanna. So if McBride had killed your father, he would have used his ray gun. It’s like his trademark. Drury lied to you, Fahad. He was scared that you wouldn’t cooperate with him if you found out that he killed your father, so he told you it was McBride.’