Torchwood: Exodus Code

and probing through his hair, pouring out of the black rock, engulfing Jack, absorbing him. Suddenly the veins were wrapping his body, mummifying him, swarming and slithering, engulfing Jack’s shoulders, his neck, his head.
    A low growl, seductive, echoed in the chamber. Jack licked his lips. He tasted mint. His hands tingled. Jack’s head was almost fully covered in silver threads, and he could see in front of himself, behind himself. The universe floating around him. He was in the stars. He was home.
    ‘Hey! Hey! Are you OK?’
    ‘Wait,’ shouted Jack. He felt hands pulling his head and shoulders from the soft rock. ‘I’m not ready.’ They were his hands.
    Jack watched the silver veins retreating, screaming, into the granite.
    Looking down, Jack could see a school of blue fish with bulging marble eyes and spiny scales gliding in and out of his line of sight.
    The growls were louder, less seductive, angry and feral.
    Jack stared at the fish, mesmerised, a memory from his childhood playing out before him like a hologram inches from his eyes. Jack was a teenager, running into the Boeshane Sea with his brother, Gray, trying to catch blue anchoa. An almost impossible feat, but if you caught one when its eyes were open then you could see your future.
    Had we caught one that day? Am I still a boy and this is my future?
    Jack looked down. The fish were gone, and Gray, and their past too.
    The growling became a word, ‘
Fall!
’
    The word pulsed from the veins shooting like electricity from the granite again, attaching to Jack’s head. A thunderous roar erupted from beneath him.
    ‘
Come on, Jack. We’ve got no time left.
’
    The roaring was getting louder and as it did the taste in Jack’s mouth was intensifying, ginger and lemon and eucalyptus.
    ‘
Fall!
’
    Jack stood and took a step towards the precipice, staring down at the three rings of fire, all circling in unison, chasing each other, the end of one the beginning of the other.
    ‘
You must fall together
,’ howled the voice, animalistic, deep, and not human. Like Jack was hearing an electrical charge, a sound wave, a force of nature.
    The veins throbbed brighter and pulled tighter around Jack, even as he stood on the edge.
    ‘No!’
    Jack tore himself from his cocoon and when he did the entire chamber began to crumble around him. Jack threw himself across the ledge as a massive rock crashed down from the wall behind him. Jack rolled from its path, but as soon as he did, the rock raised itself up on the ledge. Shifting its shape into a petrified version of Jack, it lunged at him.
    Jack locked his fingers together into a double fist and swung at the monster’s head. The rock crumbled in front of him, sending pieces of smouldering rock and ash into the abyss below.
    Jack felt as if his skull was cracking. He stared at his hands, willing them to move again. He ripped the rest of the silver vines from his head, his chest, his arms, and his legs. The mountain screamed, the rock rumbled, a thunderous roar burst from the rings of fire, sending a flaming serpentine fissure up from below. The fissure shot along the lip, chasing Jack across the ledge. The chamber shook. Jack skidded, scrambling for a foothold. Hot bubbling lava began rising from the rings beneath him.
    ‘
Fall!
’
    ‘No!’
    The keening shriek whistled angrily from every crevice. ‘
This is how it must be
.’

14
    JACK’S EYES FLEW open.
    ‘Jesus, amigo,’ said Renso, tossing a bloodied rock down into the dark abyss of the mountain. ‘How the hell did you get all the way down here?’
    Jack stared blankly at Renso. He felt as if he’d been in a bar brawl and he had not won. Every muscle ached, his head hurt and he smelled of sex. A heavy gold blanket was draped across his waist. He kicked it away and stared, stunned, at a beautiful dark-skinned young woman curled next to him.
    Jack shook her. She was unconscious, a cut on her forehead bleeding onto Jack’s tunic.
    Confused, Jack looked up at Renso. ‘Where am I?’
    ‘You’re on some kind of altar,’ said Renso, helping Jack sit up. ‘Like a grotto that’s been carved into the inside of the mountain. There are three of them all round the perimeter down here. I think that’s what we were seeing from the Hornet jutting out from the inside the mountain’s basin.’
    ‘The what?’
    ‘My plane, which, by the way, is nothing but melted rubber and tinder now. You owe me so badly, amigo.’
    Jack wobbled to his knees. He