Tunnels 03, Freefall

anything new or particularly interesting to record, and his efforts soon degenerated into a series of overlapping circular doodles scribbled in the margin, which almost matched the number of times he was yawning.
    An hour later, he'd discarded his journal and was hunched over a bible with a thick leather cover, which he'd discovered in a trunk earlier that day. The dry pages crackled like old leaves as he turned them, and now and then he squinted at a sentence he thought he might be able to translate, blinking his eyes with disappointment when he found he couldn't get anywhere with it.
    "Why didn't I take Spanish at school?" he asked himself as he closed the bible. He twisted round in his chair to contemplate the chessboard set up on a small side table next to him. After a few moments, he slid his queen to a new square, but didn't take his finger from it.
    "No, that's a stupid move," he grumbled, moving the piece straight back to its original position. He shot a look at his imaginary opponent. "Sorry, not thinking straight."
    Elliott stirred and said something. Will was immediately at her side. "It's me, Elliott -- it's Will. Can you hear me?"
    He took her hand and clasped it in his. Her eyes were moving rapidly under her closed lids, and the normally pale skin of her face was a disquieting color, as if she'd been dusted with crimson powder and it had collected around all her features, particularly her cracked lips.
    "It's all right," Will said soothingly.
    Her mouth twitched as if she was trying to speak, but didn't have the strength to draw breath. She frowned as if there was some internal conflict going on in her head, something in her febrile dreams that she was trying to resolve. Then she murmured a few words that Will could just about catch. The first sounded like 'Drake', then a few minutes later she said something which could have been 'Limiter'.
    "You're safe now, Elliott. We're all okay," Will said softly, realizing she might be reliving the events at the Pore.
    Then she said Drake's name again, much more clearly this time, and her eyelids looked as though they might actually open.
    "And Drake's fine," Will assured her, although he didn't know this for certain.
    Elliott began to babble -- to Will's ear it sounded like a series of numbers. Over and over she said them, at a barely audible level. He snatched up his pencil and jotted them down next to his doodles. It seemed to be a string of the same numbers she was repeating, but he wasn't sure he'd got all of them down correctly.
    Just then Chester shambled in.
    "Can't be your turn already?" Will asked him.
    "No," he replied sourly. "I just couldn't sleep through there."
    "Why not?"
    "That bloody moggy of yours is snoring so loudly, I swear I kept waking up thinking I was about to be run over by a moped."
    "Well, just wake him up," Will said, unable to stifle a grin. "Perhaps you should try whispering the word 'dog' in his ear. That might work?"
    "Yeah, right, and get my face bitten off," Chester grunted. He looked at Elliott. "How's she doing?"
    "Very hot, but she's been trying to talk. She mentioned Drake, and I think she might also be having nightmares because she said Limiter . And she kept repeating some numbers -- I don't know what they are but I wrote down all the ones I could hear--"
    "Like these?" Chester interrupted, pulling a scrap of paper from his pocket.
    Will took it from him and compared the sequence with the one in his journal -- Chester's was the more complete.
    "Hey, cool. But do you think that's all of them?" Will asked.
    "I reckon so -- she said them enough times. Suppose they must be important to her, somehow."
    "Eleven digits," Will pondered. "Maybe it's a code?"
    "You tell me, Sherlock," Chester replied, then yawned as he sank down to the floor at the foot of the bed, and out of Will's sight.
    "Oh... goodnight, then," Will said in a disappointed tone. He'd been rather hoping that Chester was going to keep him company on his vigil. The only answer he received from his friend was some loud snoring, which continued unabated as he puzzled over the sequence of figures, trying to work out if there was some sort of pattern to them.

    * * * * *

    Mrs. Burrows came out of the employment agency, stopping on the pavement as she put the appointment cards in her bag.
    "Burrows," she overheard someone saying, the, "Bad business," but she didn't catch the rest.
    She turned to find two young women with a gaggle of children around them. The women had