Tunnels 06 - Terminal

seethe husks of locusts and a couple of bird skulls. And some of the New Germanian brothers’ equipment was still stacked against the walls, but there was nothing to show that they themselves had been there recently.
    The lift took her up the tower, but she had to climb the stairs to reach the very top level. She immediately went to the podium in the middle of the space and stepped up onto it, moving towards the largest plinth in the centre. Taking a quick breath, she held the trident at arm’s length, directly over it.
    As she lowered the trident and the tip of the shaft made contact with the plinth, she saw concentric ripples spread out across its smooth and very solid surface. The effect was identical to what happens when a stone hits calm water. Elliott blinked, not believing her eyes, but in the next instant something even more outlandish happened. She was forced to let go of the trident altogether, because it was being pulled into the plinth and absorbed back into the fabric of the tower itself. A few moments later, only the prongs of the trident remained, then they too dipped below the surface of the plinth. Elliott touched the plinth, feeling where the trident had vanished, and how the surface was completely solid again.
    For a while she stood looking at the plinth and the rest of the level around her, but nothing seemed to be different.
    The very first time Elliott had been there, she’d told Will something was wrong, something was missing. Now that the sceptre was finally back where it should be, all her pent-up fatigue hit her. She tried to take a step but her legs buckled and she sagged against the plinth, grabbing it for support.
    Elliott had completed the quest that she hadn’t understood in the beginning, and that she’d had no option but tocomplete. From the moment that she’d initiated the chain of events after touching the trident symbol in the pyramid, the blood she shared with the ancestors of the Styx had seen to that. She’d been under the spell of a genetic behavioural pattern that had removed her free will as surely as if she’d been a robot following its programming.
    Programming to find and restore the trident to its rightful place.
    Although nothing appeared to have changed inside the tower, there was a change outside it of which Elliott was only too aware. In the huge voids deep in the mantle of the planet – not just the zero-gravity belt that she and her friends had travelled across, but numerous others – the crystal belts had sprung into life. As the spheres in them rotated faster and faster, they gave off an intense light, far brighter than the triboluminescence Dr Burrows had correctly identified.
    And they also began to generate enormous amounts of energy.
    For these spheres were the source of propulsion that had brought the Earth into orbit around the sun.
    Finally, after so very long, they had been activated again.
    The insides of the cavities around the spheres glowed with grids of blue light in patterns that only one person in the whole world – Jiggs – had noticed after the nuclear explosion in the pore.
    But as if sleeping giants had been roused from their deep slumbers, no human could do anything to stop the spheres’ immense power.
    And this power was being put to use.

 
     
     
    Chapter Twenty-two

    T here were periods of intense activity at the hospital as fleets of vehicles arrived with survivors, most of whom – one of the nurses had told Will – were being treated for malnutrition or exposure. He heard them being wheeled along the corridor outside at all hours of the day, and caught glimpses of the soldiers who seemed to be running everything.
    As he recovered from his operation, Will had been quite happy to lie in bed and rest. But during one of the lulls in which there was complete quiet in the place and he’d been staring absently up at the ceiling, he was roused from his torpor. The door to his room nudged open a few inches as if a breeze had swept down the corridor. He kept watching just in case someone was about to come in to visit him. ‘Jiggs – is that you?’ he asked, wondering if it was the man with the ability to render himself almost invisible.
    But there was no one there, and Will mumbled, ‘I’m going doolally,’ feeling rather foolish.
    Then the strangest thing happened.
    With a scrabbling noise on the lino, a cat’s head poked up over Will’s feet at the end of the bed.
    ‘Bartleby!’ Will exclaimed, truly believing he was