The Power of Five Oblivion

in it. A few lines, anyway. That’s important to me.”
    “Do you know what happens?” Jamie asked. “Do you know how it ends?”
    She shook her head. “Only one person knows that and I don’t envy him. To know the future is to carry a terrible weight. But I will tell you this, Jamie. None of it is going to be easy. There will be a lot of pain and a lot of death. You’ll need all your strength.”
    “What about Scott? Can you tell me anything about him?”
    “Scott has a part to play. Like all of you.”
    “I really miss him.”
    “I’m sure. But the two of you will find each other again. In time…”
    I must have moved or something because suddenly Miss Ashwood called out to me. “Holly…?”
    I wondered how she could possibly have known it was me and I felt guilty about being found eavesdropping on them and moved forward hurriedly. “I came to say goodbye,” I said.
    “It’s very brave of you to make the journey into London, Holly,” Miss Ashwood said. “And I have to say that I am quite jealous. You are now a companion of one of the Gatekeepers. Who knows where that will take you? Look after Jamie. And yourself.”
    The Traveller came over with his brother. “Time to go…” he said. He had a huge backpack strapped to his shoulders and I wondered how he could manage it with his wound.
    The other four men joined us. Their names were Blake, Simon, Ryan and Amir and they were all in their mid-twenties. Sophie also came to say goodbye, holding the Traveller close to her and trying (I could tell) not to show how worried she was. I think she’d asked to come with us, but someone – Susan Ashwood perhaps – had told her she had to stay behind. And then we were off. There was another door that I hadn’t noticed, this one with a huge handle and an airtight lock, like something on a rocket or a plane. Will opened it for us and we stepped through. I heard it close behind us and that was it. We were on our own.
    There were no lights here. We were carrying our own torches and straight away I saw the answer to at least one question that had been puzzling me. The Traveller had said we were ten miles from St Meredith’s, which had struck me as an awful long way to walk, but now I saw that my legs were going to be spared. There were two vehicles waiting for us; electric cars, still plugged into the wall, recharging. I sat in one with Jamie and the two brothers. The rest got into the other. Someone unplugged us and we were off, shooting down the tunnel at about twenty miles per hour, the engines whirring softly but making no other noise.
    The tunnel was new. The floor was cement and the walls were tiled and I wondered if the Nexus had actually constructed it themselves. It must have cost them millions. Each of the cars had headlamps which lit the way ahead and, despite everything, I enjoyed the ride, watching the walls flash by, with the breeze – cool and musty – blowing in my hair. It had been years since I’d been in a car of any sort. The only thing with wheels that had worked in the village had been my wheelbarrow. I was sorry when, after about forty minutes, we came to a solid wall, slowed down and stopped.
    “We go the rest of the way on foot,” the Traveller said.
    We all climbed out. Ryan and Amir turned on their torches and I saw a small, jagged opening set in the wall. We climbed through and found ourselves in another tunnel, quite different from the one we had left. It was much older, for a start. The walls were blackened with soot and as the two men swung the beams across, I made out long lines of cable, stapled together, running into the distance.
    “Take care,” Ryan said. He was softly spoken with an Irish accent, I think, and I didn’t need to be told to know that from this moment on we were always going to be close to danger. He lowered the torch to show a series of metal tracks bolted to the metal floor. “There’s no current but you can still trip over and hurt yourself. Try to stay close.”
    We set off again. And with a sense of excitement I realized where we were. This was the Tube – the underground train system that had run through London. I tried to imagine commuters rushing along in the darkness from Oxford Street to Piccadilly Circus and Knightsbridge. These were just names to me. And yet here I was, following one of the tunnels; a maze of tunnels, in fact, that would eventually bring me to whichever part of the city we wanted. They’d had moving staircases too.