Coldbrook (Hammer)(125)

He would have gasped if he’d had any breath, and as he was drawn on he felt a tug coming from behind him, a gravity exerted on every atom of his body and tying him to every other part of his universe. This is where it’s all wrong. The wrench gave way and he felt the pull of the new world, and realised that what they had done should never have been allowed. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. There were consequences to removing himself from one universe and entering another. The look in Drake’s eye, a startled bird taking flight from the other side of a small stream – these were immediate effects of his arrival in this new place. And he could breathe again. But perhaps his intrusion would echo on. Maybe, in a billion years, stars would twist into the bellies of black holes because of him and galaxies would collide. He was the butterfly, and the multiverse his hurricane.

Jonah went to his knees and drove his fingers deep into the soil of this whole new world.

Drake had released his hand at some point, though Jonah felt as if someone was still grasping him. He looked at his right hand, pressed to the damp grass, fingers curled into the soil, and he felt the warm presence of another.

‘Jonah, stand up,’ Drake said. ‘I’ve got so much to show you.’

Jonah stood, and several people who were standing around him took three steps back. To begin with he thought they were scared, but they were smiling softly, and one of them – a short woman, with dyed purple clothing – nodded a greeting.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. He breathed in and smelled heather and the subtle perfume of unfamiliar flowers, and beyond the gurgle of the stream all he could hear was the soft whisper of a breeze through the shallow valley. The sky was a startling red, and he glanced at his watch to see how long past dawn it must be. But the watch’s hands had stopped.

‘Just past noon,’ Drake said.

Jonah turned and saw a pile of beheaded furies’ bodies stacked a hundred feet away from the breach. A couple of people were piling wood around the heap’s base, preparing a bonfire. There were plants close to the stream that seemed to be propped on three stems instead of one. They looked alien and elegant. He looked up.

‘The sky,’ Jonah said.

‘Dust,’ Drake said. ‘Final solution. They nuked New York first, then Washington, then the West Coast.’ He shrugged, stretching. ‘Europe, too.’

‘Bombs against that?’ Jonah asked, looking at the stacked bodies once again.

‘Nothing else had worked,’ Drake said. ‘I’m not sure I can blame them.’

‘What about fallout?’

‘Levels can still be high, if the wind’s in the wrong direction. But the bombing was quite limited. They soon realised it was useless.’

Drake signalled to one of the guards with a series of bizarre finger gestures. Jonah was just about to ask about the sign language when Drake held a finger to his lips.

‘From here to the facility, we move in complete silence,’ he said softly. ‘They can scent us but they home in on sound as well.’

They set off and as Jonah walked he looked at a sky made beautiful by the dust of destruction.

In Coldbrook they took him down to stare at something monstrous.

‘This isn’t what you said you were going to show me.’

‘Yet it’s something I thought you should see.’

They had walked across Gaia’s strange yet familiar landscape, and though Jonah itched with questions he had obeyed Drake’s instruction to remain silent, observing with an intense excitement the variety of flora and fauna, and the distant hills hiding valleys that might contain anything.

Now, in the depths of Drake’s Coldbrook, he looked at something that did not belong in this – or any other – world.

‘Kathryn Coldbrook ordered it retained,’ Drake said. ‘My father said she believed some cure could be created from the thing that came through and infected our world. The first vector. Then she disappeared, and everything died, and it’s been here ever since.’

‘And you’ve been experimenting on it?’ Jonah asked, horrified.

‘Not for decades,’ Drake said. ‘The few efforts we can still make, we concentrate on Mannan.’

It was chained to a wall, a manacle around each wrist and ankle. They were tightened around bones, not skin and flesh. There was another restraint around its neck, screwed securely around its spine. Dried skin and flesh hung around the rusty iron like some sort of grotesque plant growth. Three sets of iron gates and a scratched glass screen locked it in, but somehow it could still sense them standing just inside the large cell’s door.