The Anomaly(61)

“So what do we do?”

“First, accept that we’re not getting any help from Feather. Which means anybody else either. Nobody’s coming.” I saw Molly start to blink rapidly. “Sorry, Moll—but that’s the deal. No point pretending otherwise.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s my head. It really hurts.”

Mine did, too, and my mouth felt like it was full of old cardboard. “It’s down to us to try to find a way out. But we’re obviously changing the conditions here by exploring. That’s already lost us our water supply. I don’t want to make things any worse. So…”

“There’s no choice,” Pierre said. He spoke slowly, and then paused to blink, scrunching his eyes up tight. “If we don’t do anything then it’s going to get worse anyway. I don’t know about you guys but I feel like crap. Headache. Weak. Fuzzy. Doing nothing is not an option.”

“That’s exactly where I was going,” I agreed. “We need to get on it, and fast.”

“Okay then.” Ken stood up decisively. Staggered. “Ooh. Nice little head rush. So. What’s the plan?”

I shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Shame,” he said. “You were on a roll there for a while. Okay. We haven’t looked up all the passages yet, have we?”

“I’ve done all but two,” Pierre said. He turned and pointed to doorways at the nine and twelve o’clock positions.

“All right, so job number one is we do that.” He peered at Gemma. “You all right, love?”

Gemma was crouched with her head over her knees. “I’m okay,” she said. “Just nauseous. It’s been coming on awhile, but whoa, suddenly it’s a lot worse.”

“We need to eat,” Molly said. She grabbed her backpack—which had become the de facto storage place for sustenance—and took out the carefully wrapped final scraps of sandwich. “I know there’s not much left but there’s no point saving it for when we’re dead.”

She unwrapped each fragment in turn, handing one to Ken first, probably unconscious of the way the traditional hierarchies were still operating. Then one to Pierre. Broke her little chunk in two, and handed half to me.

“My turn,” she said. “Kind of wishing you hadn’t been so gallant with yours yesterday, to be honest.”

“Trust me. Henceforth hungry womenfolk will have to pry the crumbs out of my cold, dead hands.”

She held out the last piece to Gemma, who accepted it without enthusiasm. We all took our bites, chewing slowly. The bread was even drier and harder now. The cheese tasted exactly like plastic. Swallowing wasn’t easy.

“Lovely,” Ken said. “My compliments to the chef.” He hesitated a beat as he remembered that the chef had been Dylan. “So. Moll and me will go check that passage, and Pierre and Gemma look at the other.”

“What am I doing?”

“Going down the passage to the stone ball.”

“Why?”

He lowered his voice. “Because I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Psychobitch is still on the other side, listening. And so you should go down there and talk to her. See if you can get her to respond. You’re the only person she seems to take seriously, Nolan. Get something out of her. Find out what the fuck’s going on and if there’s anything we can do about it.”

“I’ll try.”

“Do better than that, mate.” He looked at me seriously. “This would be the moment for your very best work.”





Chapter

37



I watched the others head off. It occurred to me, too late, that maybe they should all go together, so they only used one light. But then I realized it would take twice as long that way, so probably no power would be saved.

My mental processes felt like they had lead boots on, wading through thought-treacle: with the exception of sudden sharp, disconnected ideas that burst out of the fog like lightning and just as quickly disappeared. For a rare moment I experienced my mind as fully part of my body, and inhabited the exhausted, arid sluggishness of the whole.

I ran my tongue around my mouth and across my teeth but it didn’t help. It just made my gums feel big.

I hauled myself to my feet, turned off the light, and walked toward the big stone ball.



It was very dark. Perfectly dark. And perfectly quiet. I felt my way to the ball and sat down next to it, hearing nothing but the soft sound of breath going in and out of my body.

Nothing from the other side of the ball, either. I didn’t actually think Feather would still be there. Her farewell had sounded final, and she’d seemed confident that she’d heard enough to confirm that the situation on our side—whatever it might be—was heading in the direction that she, and whoever she was aligned with, wished it to go. Assuming there genuinely was anybody else involved, of course.

“It’s uncertainty that’ll kill you,” I said after a long pause. My voice sounded strange in the silence. Tired, lonely—the way it sounds inside your head when you’re lying on your bed in the dark, reliving old mistakes. “Not hope, like everyone says. If you can blindly hope, that’s what you’ll do. But if you don’t know…That’s poisonous. It’s impossible to commit. You’re unable to throw yourself in one direction and follow that path. I have no idea why I’m even saying this.”