Shadow Breakers Read online

  “I thought we were properly firewalled,” says Miss Bellini sternly.

  Lyssa shrugs. “Well, they get cleverer all the time.”

  “Okay, here we are. Sorted.” Ollie has brought up some information on the screen. Looks like a restricted-access website. I don’t know how he did it, but I’m impressed. “There we go,” he says. “The new centralized power grid for the whole of the Southern Central England region . . . switches online at midnight . . . Tonight! Wow. Miranda, you’re right.”

  I try not to look smug. “Don’t sound so surprised. There was a mention in the paper the other day. I just put two and two together. So, it takes over the power grid . . . what does that mean?”

  Ollie looks up. “Well, the power station’s been built. It’s all automated and it’s ready to go online. When it does, thousands of millions of computerized electrical circuits will be focused on one central register, and the energy will spike. All the power will flow from there, probably in a web formation.”

  “And our friend,” murmurs Josh, “will be the spider.”

  Cal has been standing on the other side of the room, strangely silent through all this. But now her eyes are glistening. “So we have to stop it,” she says. “Her. Whatever. We need to get there now.” She looks at Miss Bellini. “Miss?”

  I still don’t know what shady connections with the authorities Miss Bellini has, but she seems to be able to pull strings when she wants to. We’re not an official organization, though — the government doesn’t even like to admit we exist, from what she’s told me. So maybe it’s all done discreetly, in brown envelopes on street corners. Or perhaps she’s got incriminating stuff on a minister or two. I think it’s best for us not to ask, frankly.

  Miss Bellini looks up and smiles. “I’ll get the necessary . . . procedures taken care of,” she says.

  THE POWER STATION: SUNDAY 23:16

  The VW camper van is parked at the entrance. We are ascending the steps, spread out in a line with Miss Bellini leading.

  We were all up for getting here earlier, but Miss Bellini had to get the place cleared of staff and have our entry authorized.

  The main part of the building looks like a huge steel drum, the size of a soccer stadium, gleaming in the moonlight. There are chimneys stretching up, like giant guards, and at the front there’s a jumble of steel and glass admin blocks that look as if they’ve been stuck on at random, with a wide flight of stone steps leading up to the glass entrance doors.

  I feel important, but also frightened. I’ve got a denim satchel over my shoulder, shoved full of a few odds and ends I picked up from HQ — you never know when they’re going to come in useful. I’ve been trying to suppress the thudding in my head and ignore the odd noises and shadows around me. I’m not sure I’m succeeding.

  “Where are the staff?” I ask, puzzled by the darkness of the place and the empty parking lot below us.

  “The staff have gone off for some very convenient fire-safety training.” She gestures through the glass doors as they swish open for us. “So we’ve got just one security guy, and one big computer network.”

  When we enter the lobby, we see it is lit by a mellow orange light from glowing disks in the ceiling that cast long wobbling shadows. There’s a dark shape behind the desk. My heart skips a beat, but then I see it’s the security man, dressed in a blue uniform with a badge saying “RAY.” He gets to his feet as we come in.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asks, looking at Miss Bellini with a certain amount of respect, and then down at us with a questioning expression.

  Miss Bellini flips her official government pass at him. “Anna Bellini, special operations. I want this entire facility taken into lockdown immediately.” She hands the security man a sheaf of bound papers. “You’ll see I have full authorization.”

  I feel sorry for Ray. Bet he thought he was going to have a quiet night in, maybe make some tea and listen to the radio. He flips through Miss Bellini’s documents, shining a flashlight on them.

  “I wasn’t told,” he says.

  Miss Bellini flashes him a quick, tight smile. “Maybe they didn’t think you were important enough?” she suggests.

  He glowers at her and picks up the phone. “I’ll have to check.”

  “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.” Miss Bellini takes her gloves off. She looks around. “Something the matter here tonight?”

  Ray shrugs. “One of those power drains again. The computer’s got the backups running here, but most of the building’s on standby.”

  “I thought it looked dark,” I murmur, looking up out of the glass window on the far side, gazing up at the dark steel drum of the power station itself.

  “Yeah,” says Ray as he waits for the phone. “You don’t wanna be going up there.”

  “Oh, we’re quite prepared, thanks,” says Miss Bellini with a smile. “You, ah, may as well take the rest of the night off,” she adds to Ray.

  He looks dubious. “Can’t do that, ma’am. More than my job’s worth.” He nods. “I’ll be in the back room with my coffee if you need me.” He shuffles off, muttering.

  “Splendid,” says Miss Bellini with a taut smile. “Lyssa, Ollie . . . get the equipment set up.” They nod, and hurry off to the table in the lobby, to get out the computer equipment and other bits of scientific paraphernalia. Miss Bellini nods at me, Cal, and Josh. “And you three — we’re going upstairs.”

  I feel a thrill of danger, anticipation, terror. “We are?” I say. “But . . .”

  Miss Bellini has produced four candles in brass holders from her bag, and hands them out to me, Cal, and Josh, keeping one herself.

  “Not flashlights?” Josh asks in surprise.

  “The Animus can drain electrical power,” she reminds us curtly — and, striking a match, she lights the candles in one smart, swift movement.

  “If that thing tries to get in,” murmurs Josh, looking up at the high ceilings, “we’ll know about it.”

  He swings down the bulky canvas bag he’s brought with him and puts it on the nearest seat with a thump.

  “Uh-uh.” Cal indicates the readouts on the resonator, which she’s been waving about. “And I swept the entire building for pyroelectric traces as we came in. Nobody here except us chickens.” She grins. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”

  I can’t help smiling, too.

  Lyssa and Ollie are crouched down beside the desk, with a complex collection of equipment next to them. It looks like a heap of junk — two old laptops, some microphones, and a radio all lashed together with multicolored spaghetti wiring and duct tape, and linked with crocodile clips to a — to a — what is that?

  “What’s the thing with the little screen that does the wobbly green lines?” I ask Lyssa, nodding at it.

  “It’s an oscilloscope,” she says.

  Of course. How could I forget?

  “That . . . mess is a bit low-tech, isn’t it?” I ask. “Did you build it?”

  She smiles at Ollie. “Geek Boy did.”

  “Blimey.” I’m impressed. “Sorry I called it a mess.”

  Miss Bellini has come over. “Anything?” she asks.

  Lyssa shakes her head. “Not a thing.”

  Miss Bellini sighs and looks at her watch, then looks down at me. “This had better not turn out to be a wild-goose chase.”

  I have had no communication at all from Jade. I’m starting to wonder if she has disappeared from the face of the earth.

  Or from this reality.

  Something is really, really niggling at me about this whole thing, though.

  I can see that’s what my brain does sometimes. Gets a deep, dark sense that something’s wrong. Mixes thoughts and dreams and instincts. Like it sent me a message and told me to get out of the way of a speeding truck. Helped me look beyond t
he dark figure in the park to see the form of a girl . . .

  But its face . . . Its face . . .

  The fleeting worry . . .

  Leaving Ollie and Lyssa in the foyer, Cal, Josh, Miss Bellini, and I head farther inside the building. Into the darkness.

  There’s no emergency lighting here — only the glow of our candles. There is an odor of smoke and hot wax over the chemical new plastic smell of the place, and the shadows dance. I’m looking over my shoulder every second.

  There’s a vast central atrium with a marble floor, escalators straight ahead, flanked by a waterfall, and a big central glass column with a brass elevator. There’s also a metallic spiral staircase. It’s trying to look modern and old-fashioned at the same time.

  I crane my neck, lifting the candle upward. Miss Bellini risks shining an electric flashlight for a second, and we can see the atrium goes all the way up to the top of the building. On the various floors, fronds of red creeper hang over gleaming chrome balconies.

  “Come on,” says Miss Bellini, “the energy spike is programmed for midnight. We need to be right at the top of the building.”

  Candles aloft, we start to ascend the stairs. Miss Bellini goes first, and indicates that I should follow. Josh is behind me, and Cal brings up the rear. The flickering candlelight gives all of our faces an unearthly glow.

  This is it. Whatever this is about, whatever the Animus really is, we are going to find out here.

  CENTRAL POWER COMPLEX: SUNDAY 23:45

  Far below us, the scattered lights of the town glitter like orange jewels. The rhythmic pulse of the lighthouse flashes across the bay, catching stormy waves in its beam. Some distant lights are moving slowly across the sea, probably a night ferry.

  I know this is a special place. Out there, under the darkness, is England — beautiful, patchwork, ancient England, with its standing stones and its legends and its witches and warlocks. And here we are, twenty-first-century kids, trying to make sense of it all with our computers and iPhones and MP3 players.

  Sometimes I get a twinge of terror about what would happen if the modern world just disappeared. If we all had to go back to roasting sheep over fires, sticks and mud, bashing rocks on stones. We’d cope with it far worse than any people from previous centuries. All those old skills are lost now. It’s like time and progress are taking us forward too fast.

  I turn away from the view and face into the room, holding my candle up to see as much as I can.

  We’re in an octagonal chamber with a window across two of its sides. A viewing platform with a railing runs all the way around it. In the sunken middle of the room is an octagonal arrangement of eight computers around a central pillar. At each apex of the octagon is a glass globe on a black pole, eight of them arranged like some modern imitation of a stone circle. These are linked to eight separate energy terminals, each supplying a different part of the South Coast. Miss Bellini is looking carefully at each of them, peering under them, making notes on a clipboard. High up in the ceiling, there is a red digital clock, counting hours, minutes, and seconds. It now reads 23:46:03.

  High up here, the winds howl and buffet the building; it’s like being in some chilly, creaking old medieval castle. And whose domain is it?

  Cal is just pacing up and down, texting, candle in one hand and phone in the other. Her red hair is gleaming in the candlelight.

  Josh sidles up to me. “Okay?”

  I nod, my face taut with tension.

  Cal’s phone beeps. We all jump.

  She glances up at Miss Bellini and at Josh, and nods to each of them. Not to me, I notice in annoyance.

  “They’ve got something,” she says. There is a pause. Then, “Really? Here . . . ? You’d better let her in.”

  My blood runs cold.

  Let her in.

  Someone has arrived and they are letting her in. What the heck is happening now?

  And that’s when it all starts to go crazy.

  Cal puts her phone on speaker. “Ollie? Speak to us.”

  “Massive disturbance patterns!” Ollie is saying. “It has to be right on top of you!”

  My blood turns cold at the way he says it. This is bad. Everything is happening at once.

  I don’t know if I am imagining it, but the room has started to turn darker. The orange light deepens until it is almost red, shadows lengthening further, as if we are all bathed in blood. There is a silence so deafening it seems to ring in our ears.

  And then I can hear it.

  Whispering voices. Shush-shush-shush-asss-isss-hsss. I can’t make out the words, but the sound is clear enough. A female voice, chanting. It might possibly even be in Latin. Chanting. It sends chills through my blood and makes me feel weak as if . . . as if time and darkness are working together to drain the energy out of me . . .

  I try to focus.

  I look around at the others. “Can anyone make out what it’s saying?”

  They don’t immediately answer. Josh and Cal look at each other in alarm.

  “Can you hear it, Miranda?” says Miss Bellini gently.

  “Yes. Clear as anything. I mean, I don’t know what it’s saying, but I can hear its voice.” I look around at her in sudden realization. “Can’t you?”

  Miss Bellini shakes her head. For some reason, she has her cell phone out.

  I look at Josh, and at Cal. “Can’t you hear it?” I ask them.

  Josh has lowered his head slightly, and looks not at me but across at Miss Bellini. “It isn’t fair,” he says. “We ought to stop this now.”

  Something shifts in the room, and I feel as if I am acting on a stage now. It all seems wrong, artificial.

  And then my whole body goes bitterly cold and burning hot, both at the same time. And my brain kicks into action.

  I am standing in the shadows, in the center of the room, staring at my friends. I don’t understand what’s going on.

  Josh looks embarrassed. Miss Bellini looks uneasy. But Cal — she has that cool, threatening confidence she’s always had. She unfurls herself from the wall where she’s been leaning and starts to stride around the room, never taking her eyes off me.

  “I didn’t . . . quite tell you the truth earlier, Miranda,” says Cal quietly. “In fact, a lot of us haven’t been telling you the truth for quite a while.” She looks at Miss Bellini for the nod of approval — and gets it.

  I’m feeling a sense of panic now. “What is it? What do you mean?”

  “We’ve let this charade continue for just one reason,” says Cal. “To let the Animus think it had won, then we could pin it down and contain it.”

  “Charade? What do you mean?”

  “You asked me if it was already here. And I said no. And maybe that was the right answer, in one sense. But in another, well, maybe I should have said yes. Shouldn’t I?”

  She looks down at me from the railing, her green eyes so bright they are almost burning into me.

  “In fact,” she says, “it’s been with us for quite a while. Anticipating our moves. Enjoying teasing us as it waited for the right moment.”

  What does she mean?

  Her pale face looks triumphant.

  “How has it known, Miranda?” she says softly. “How has the Animus kept one step ahead?”

  I back away, my hand over my mouth.

  “You see, this Animus is very clever,” says Cal. “It’s had to learn to adapt, to survive. It can exist in all kinds of different wavelengths, outside the physical world. We know that — we’ve seen that. It sort of tries to tune itself in. It can even live inside data — it can corrupt data.”

  “It . . . can?” I ask weakly.

  “Oh, yes. It can change the nature of a computer program, for example. Manipulate the results so that they look totally misleading. It’s playing with the p
eople who are trying to hunt it down. Toying with them. Laughing at them.”

  “All right, Cal,” snaps Josh. “That’s enough.”

  “Oh, no,” Cal says. “It’s not enough. She needs to know. But I think she already does, on one level.”

  Shaking and shivering and burning up, I stare at Cal. Behind her, the clock reads 23:48:07.

  Time ticking away to midnight.

  “You,” I say. “It’s not Jade, it’s you.”

  I look desperately at Josh for help. He’s impassive. Miss Bellini, too.

  Cal opens her mouth wide and laughs, laughs, as if I have told her the funniest joke. “Don’t be so stupid,” she says.

  Josh steps in. “Miranda,” he says. “You have to realize. This is very difficult for you, but . . . we came to realize that the Animus — the Shape — whatever you call it . . . had established a psychic hold on someone in Firecroft Bay. That it was in female form, and that something here was giving it strength, giving it life.”

  Behind them, I can see something happening.

  There is someone coming up in the elevator.

  The green numbers above the doors, from 1 to 20, are lighting up one by one. It is on 3 and rising steadily.

  “Go on,” I say slowly.

  I can hear my pulse throbbing in my ears.

  Like a warning. Like a danger sign.

  Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Every strand, every thread is coming together, here, now, in this room here at the top of this building.

  The elevator’s now on 4 . . . 5 . . . 6 . . . I wonder if Josh, Cal, or Miss Bellini have noticed.

  Josh says, “I asked myself the question — what’s changed here in the last few weeks? And then I asked — wherever this thing’s been seen gaining a hold in the physical world, wherever it’s been strongest, what’s been the common link?”

  Ba-boom. Ba-boom.

  “This place,” I say. “Obviously. Renewable energy source. That’s why we’re here. It feeds off electrical power. Right?”