The Anomaly(77)

“How?” Moll said. “Turning the whole place off and on again?”

“Don’t see that helping us either way,” Ken said. “I’m always happy to take a stroll down Woo-Woo Lane with the Anomaly-meister, but I don’t think moving the ball’s the answer. It’s a very heavy thing at the bottom of a slope. Physics is not our friend on this one.”

“I know,” I said. “The third answer sucks, too. I’m handing the Talking Stick over to somebody else.”

Nobody said anything for a while.



“What if there’s another trigger?”

Pierre spoke as we were gathering ourselves to cautiously head back up the passage, for no better reason than it didn’t seem like a great idea to be trapped with nowhere to run, should it come to it. Which it was increasingly feeling like it might.

“Not for, this ball,” he said. His speech was losing normal patterns, words clumping in odd ways. I’m sure mine was, too. “What if there’s a fourth answer? Something else we can move by pushing something or stepping on something or whatever?”

“We haven’t seen anything like that.”

“No. But we’ve been poking around in the dark, only looking for ways out. We haven’t rigorously checked every corner of every room. Like it’s a Tomb Raider game or something. Because, you know, it kind of almost is.”

Molly shook her head. Her voice was a dehydrated croak. “Pierre, there’s a hundred rooms. And God knows how much corridor. With…random things roaming them.”

“And the logic’s not secure, either,” I said. “This could be a failsafe designed precisely to stop people like us from unleashing the process before the proper time, or from doing it in the wrong order. Feather implied there could be more than one site like this.”

“She did?”

“Sounds like the permafrost expedition that Kristy’s on could be wandering into similar territory. Or was deliberately sent there, in that hope.”

“Shit,” Molly said. “I hope she’s okay.”

Molly has never met Kristy. She’s heard almost nothing about her from me, and I would imagine little from Ken. I felt absurdly touched that she would care. “Me too.”

“Nolan,” Pierre said. There was a faint tremor in his voice. “It’d be cool if you could stop proving there’s no way out, okay? I kind of need the idea. Even if it’s wrong.”

“Sorry,” I said. “And, yes—it’s possible the ball’s there to seal the site while it’s in Genesis mode, and there’s some way of releasing this shit into the wild at the right time.”

“I don’t think so,” Molly said. “There’s nothing to eat here. I’ll bet most of the rooms in this place were originally designed for storage. Like, grain and stuff. They’re empty. How were these things supposed to survive without food? We found the place by accident at the wrong time, when it wasn’t ready for action and hadn’t been stocked with food and freaking Ant People, or whatever, and we triggered a failsafe. We’re done. And we’re the only food in here.”

“Molly,” Pierre snapped. “Seriously. Shut the fuck up.”

“We have got one proper light and one small one and no idea how much power is left in either of them.”

“I’ve still got the camera light.”

“Great. So what do we do? Grid-search thousands of feet of floor and wall, stepping on every inch and pressing anything we can find? How long will that take? Plus there are fucking wolves in here. And saber-toothed tigers. And they’re going to get hungry, too.”

“I still think the paintings room is our best bet,” Ken said. “Or…well, there is that other pool room.”

Molly and Pierre turned to him and said: “What?”



“It’s crystal clear,” Molly said.

She was lying on her front, hanging over the pool, holding the light down close to it. Ken stood at the back of the group, keeping an eye on the corridor behind us.

“Yes,” I said, “but—”

“Don’t ‘but’ me,” she said. The more tired she got, the more Molly was turning into team mom again. A mom who was moreover done with taking her kids’ crap for one afternoon and in need of a weapons-grade alcoholic beverage, stat. “You drank from the other pool and you were fine. A few hours ago, you and Pierre ended up with postgenesis soup inside you, with the water clear again, and you both seem okay, right?”

“We need to drink, Nolan,” Ken said. “Or we’re done.”

Just talking about it was causing us to look hungrily at the pool—gaunt, drawn faces half-lit.

“It may have been Gemma’s blood that kicked the other pool into action,” I said cautiously. “I’m tired enough to speculate that ancient ideas of blood sacrifice could even be a mangled memory of a process just like this. Give the gods blood, and they will provide…weird stuff. In fact—”

“What?”

“The trigger plate. The one that made the big ball roll. She’d dripped blood onto that, too. Maybe that’s what kicked this whole thing off, instead of her treading on it.”

“Could be, mate. And something else struck me earlier. Those three letters chipped in the wall next to it.”