Coldbrook (Hammer)(119)

‘We must change that,’ Drake said.

‘This casting . . . how do you do it? Is there temporal dislocation? How does the targeting work?’

‘I can tell you,’ Drake said. ‘But I’m sure you’d rather see for yourself, wouldn’t you?’

‘Probably not,’ Holly said. ‘It was . . . horrible.’

‘We’ve come from a dead world to see your world dying,’ Drake said.

Jonah felt a spark of anger. ‘We’re not finished yet. There’s hope.’

‘Hope?’ Moira mocked.

‘Holly tells me that you have someone immune to the disease. I assume you’ve been studying him?’

‘For a long time,’ Drake said.

‘And they test him,’ Holly said. ‘They let him get bitten again and again. Chunks have been taken out of him.’

Drake and Moira shifted uncomfortably, but Drake recovered quickly. ‘You can’t judge us. I won’t allow it.’

‘Allow?’ Holly scoffed. ‘He tried to—’

‘And I apologised for that,’ Drake said.

‘That was a mistake, Holly,’ Moira said. ‘You’re precious to us. We’d have suggested that more subtly.’

‘Suggested what?’ Jonah asked.

‘They try to reproduce Mannan’s immunity,’ Holly said. ‘And when I found him, he thought I was there to . . .’ She pressed her lips tightly together. ‘To be impregnated.’

‘He was still curled in a ball last time I saw him,’ Moira said, her eyes sparkling. ‘You certainly know how to look after yourself.’

Drake leaned forward suddenly and grasped Holly’s hand.

‘I was born into a place you can’t understand. Everything I know of my Earth before the End is from books, or recordings, or knowledge and stories handed down from my father. It’s not even a memory for me. And though some of us are resigned, I’ve never been able to let go of hope. Mannan is an oddity that none of us has ever been able to figure out, and that’s a frustration and a complication.’

‘Where did he come from?’ Jonah asked.

‘Forty years ago, in the midst of our epidemic, my father heard about him,’ Drake said. ‘Mannan was barely a teenager at the time. He was bitten in Illinois, survived, and my father did everything he could to get him to Coldbrook. There’s quite a legend built around it. Many died in their efforts to save Mannan, and for a time – well, my father remembered it as a time of hope . . .’ Drake trailed off, not needing to say what had happened afterwards. No cure, no inoculation.

‘And he’s the only one?’ Jonah asked.

‘Who knows?’ Moira asked. ‘Could be others on other continents. But we don’t travel. People came from France six years ago,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Three years before that, a group travelled up from South America. They brought news, but none of it good. So there are travellers, but not many. And their life expectancy is short. Knowledge is dying.’

‘But you have your casters,’ Jonah said.

‘Between veils,’ Drake said. ‘But not across oceans. That would be like you using your breach to travel to the next town – impractical and, so we found, impossible.’

‘How do they work?’ Jonah asked.

‘Our casting engines create mini-black holes, we stabilise them, and the casters move across the resulting Einstein-Rosen bridge.’

‘How do you deal with the Hawking radiation?’

‘Hawking?’

Jonah frowned. ‘No Hawking? Well . . . the overflow radiation.’

‘Oh. We feed it back via a second black hole within the first.’

‘Neat,’ Jonah said. ‘But only their consciousness goes through?’

‘Of course,’ Drake said. ‘They want to come back.’

‘Jonah, the processes don’t matter!’ Holly said. ‘It’s sharing our knowledge of the furies that’s important.’

‘Mannan,’ Jonah said.

‘Yes,’ Drake said, pouring them all another drink. ‘We’ve tested his blood, transplanted his DNA, examined every part of him again and again. Brain scans, cell cultures. We regularly try to impregnate volunteers, but we fear he’s infertile. That could be bad luck, or something to do with his immunity.’

‘I want to meet him,’ Jonah said.