‘Sure,’ said Leaf. ‘Long as we don’t go to East Area.’

‘No way,’ said Ron. ‘There’s some serious stuff going on there. We’re working out of Lark Valley Private now. Okay, stand back. We’re going to lift you now, ma’am, onto the stretcher.’

The second paramedic had returned, pushing a rolling stretcher. The two of them expertly picked Sylvie up and put her on it, lightly strapping her in. The diagnostic unit beeped as they did so.

‘Pulse spike,’ said Ron. ‘We’ll have you hooked up to a couple of our miracle machines in a few minutes, ma’am. You’ll be fine.’

Leaf had been worried that some neighbours might ask who she was when they got outside, but she had nothing to fear. Though there were faces at various windows, no one came outside. They were probably all wondering if Sylvie was a victim of the new bioweapon.

They would not be reassured by the sight of the second paramedic handing Leaf a pair of goggles and a face mask and then liberally spraying her all over with something that looked bright blue when it came out but was colourless when dry. It did have a faint odour, though, of wet newspaper. Fortunately it didn’t leave any residue Leaf could feel.

After the spraying, the paramedic went to the front and got behind the wheel. Leaf climbed in the back, where Ron was bringing online a device that swung out above the stretcher and had half-a-dozen hanging tubes, leads, and sensors.

Leaf shut the door behind her, and the ambulance took off, the siren coming on once more. As they rounded the corner, she bent over and undid the straps around Sylvie’s arms, just as the paramedic on the other side was unscrewing the lid of a tube of conductive gel.

‘What are you –’

‘Don’t move!’ hissed Sylvie, rearing up and pressing the auto-injector hard against Ron’s thigh, where the needle would easily strike through his protective suit. ‘This is a two hundred and fifty milligram dose of Rapyrox. Tell your partner not to radio or hit an alarm either.’

The paramedic froze, then slowly turned his head to the front. Leaf didn’t know what Rapyrox was, but Ron certainly did and he was afraid of it.

‘Jules, the old lady’s got an injection unit of Rapyrox against my leg. Don’t do anything … I mean anything.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got two hundred and fifty milligrams of Rapyrox here and I’m not afraid to use it!’ screeched Sylvie, scaring Leaf almost as much as Ron. ‘I want you to drive me somewhere. And you keep quiet, young lady!’

Leaf nodded, suddenly unsure how much of this was an act.

‘Anything you want, lady,’ said Jules. Leaf could see his eyes in the rearview mirror, flicking nervously from that to the road ahead. ‘Where do you want to go?’

Sylvie gave an address two doors down from Arthur’s house. Leaf looked at her when the old lady said the wrong street number, then slowly nodded.

‘I read a lot of detective stories,’ said Sylvie, apparently without reference to anything.

‘Great, great,’ muttered the paramedic in the back. ‘Why not? I read a few myself. Uh, why do you want to go to –’

‘Did I say you could talk?’ yelled Sylvie.

The rest of the journey occurred without conversation. Jules in the front kept glancing back in the rearview mirror, but he didn’t try anything. Ron closed his eyes and took very regular, very controlled breaths. Sylvie watched him like a hawk, her eyes brighter than they should have been for someone so old.

Leaf sat and worried. She could still feel the pressure in her head, but it hadn’t got any worse. She still couldn’t think of anything else to do but call Dame Primus and hope that the Will would help in some way. Preferably by taking the pocket and getting to Arthur so he could destroy the Skinless Boy. Though even that might not help those already affected by the mould.

Even if there was something that Dame Primus or Dr Scamandros could do about the mould, Leaf knew she was going to be in a whole lot of trouble – but hopefully not the kind that ended with her being one more drooling zombie in the slave army of the Skinless Boy.

‘We’re almost there,’ said Jules from the front. ‘Do you want me to pull over?’

‘Yes,’ said Sylvie. ‘Girl, look out the window. See if we’ve got any company. If we have …’

‘I haven’t done a thing!’ protested Jules. Ron took an even deeper, more measured breath, but didn’t open his eyes.

Leaf looked out the tinted windows in the back of the ambulance. She couldn’t see anyone or any other vehicles on the street. But she could see the house numbers. There was Arthur’s house a couple of doors down from where they were parked.

‘There’s no one there.’

‘Good,’ said Sylvie. ‘Go and pick me some flowers, girl. I’ll wait here.’

‘But I don’t –’ Leaf got into the act.

‘I said, go get me some flowers!’ ordered Sylvie with a maniacal giggle.

‘Whatever you say,’ said Leaf.

She climbed out the back, missing the sight of Ron trying to blink an SOS at her.

‘Stop that!’ ordered Sylvie. ‘You just get flowers, girl. Nothing else! And shut the door!’

Leaf shut the door and quickly walked up to Arthur’s house. It was pretty big, but the front door was very visible across the lawn. Leaf ignored that and walked on till she came to the driveway. Ten feet from the garage door, she knelt down and pressed the button on the remote wired in place under a rock, exactly as Arthur had told her.

The remote opened the side door of the garage. Leaf crossed the drive, looking up at the house’s windows as she did, but she didn’t see anyone looking out.

Once inside the garage, it was quick work to get into the house proper and up the stairs. There were three levels above the garage, Leaf knew, and Arthur’s bedroom was right at the top.

She felt a bit weird breaking into someone’s house, and very nervous as well. More nervous than in the ambulance for some reason, though hijacking and kidnapping the paramedics was a really serious crime. Every time she took a step and it sounded louder on the stairs than she’d thought it would, she freaked out, anticipating a sudden meeting with Arthur’s dad or one of his sisters or brothers.

They’re probably all at the hospital, Leaf tried to reassure herself. Or staying with friends or something. The house is really quiet. Only one more floor to go … She arrived on the third-level landing. There were three bedroom doors and a bathroom door. Arthur’s was the first on the left … Or was it the first on the right?

Leaf suddenly doubted her memory. Surely Arthur had said first on the left?

Leaf quietly opened the door on the left and peered in. Then she shut it again as quietly as she could and backed away.

There was a girl in there, with her back to the door and earphones in, listening to music – or maybe the news – while she did something complicated with a light pen and big flat-panel display.

Leaf swallowed and opened the right-hand door, trying to be just as quiet. It was Arthur’s room, exactly as described, though tidier. And on the bookshelf was a red velvet box.

Leaf hurried over to the box, picked it up, and put it on the bed, taking off the lid at the same time. There was a phone inside. An old-fashioned phone, like a candlestick with the mouthpiece on that, and an earpiece on a cord. Leaf took the phone out and held it in front of her mouth, sat on the bed, and pressed the earpiece against her ear.

Even though the telephone was not visibly connected to anything, Leaf heard an old-fashioned, crackly dial tone, which was quickly replaced by a voice.

‘This is the Operator. What number, please?’

‘Dame Primus,’ said Leaf urgently. ‘I don’t know the number.’

‘Who is calling, please?’ asked the Operator.

‘Leaf,’ said Leaf. ‘Arthur’s friend Leaf.’

‘Hold, please.’

The voice went away and the crackling increased in volume. Leaf tapped her feet anxiously and gripped the main part of the phone even tighter.

‘Dame Primus is not available,’ said the Operator after at least a minute. ‘Can I take a message?’

Sixteen

THE POWER-SPEAR had hardly left Arthur’s hand when he was carried forward by the sheer press of bodies around him, as the Denizen ranks pushed ahead to replace the losses in the shield-wall of the front rank. It was incredibly loud, frightening, and confusing. At times Arthur wasn’t even sure which way was forward as the lines shifted and moved, and he had to move with the Denizens at either side or be trampled underfoot.

He’d automatically unsheathed his savage-sword, again without thinking, and he used it several times, moments of intense fear when he was either hacking at a Nithling that suddenly appeared in front of him or desperately blocking a lightning-tipped spear that came straight at him, apparently out of the blue.

Once he stood alone for several seconds, in a six-foot-wide circle of clear space in the middle of battle. Badly wounded recruits and Nithlings gasped and gurgled around his feet, small sounds that were drowned out again as Arthur was swept up once more by his companions. But he would remember them always, for they were the sounds of terror, bewilderment, and finality.

There was always noise. Metal screeched on metal. Weapons thudded into armour and flesh and bone. The drums kept banging. Denizens and Nithlings shouted and screamed and howled. Lightning crackled and sparked and fizzed. Smoke and hideous burning smells drifted through the melee, wafting up from burning power-spears.

Arthur’s mind overloaded on fear and adrenaline. He became like a robot, his body moving according to training and orders, with no real intelligence directing it. He felt like his conscious self had retreated into a bunker, letting his eyes, ears, and nose record what was going on. He would look at it later and think about what his senses reported. He could not handle it now.

The battle lines surged backward and forward for a time that Arthur could not measure, for it was composed of seconds of total fright and sudden action, but those seconds also stretched on so long that he felt exhausted, as if he had been running and fighting for hours and hours.

Then, like a natural turning of the tide, the Nithlings were pushed back. The recruits began to surge after them but were restrained by yelled commands and directed to reform ten yards ahead of the front rank’s previous position. They obeyed, trampling over dead enemies and their own fallen comrades. Against this flow of forward movement, there was also a steady stream of badly wounded Denizens heading to the rear, many supporting one another, though no able recruit left the lines.

The sun had almost set when the Nithlings’ withdrawal became a full retreat. They fled back to the tile border, trying to get across it before the last thin segment of the sun dipped below the horizon and the desert tile moved somewhere else.

Arthur stood with Fred on one side and an unknown Denizen on the other, dumbly obeying the commands that were being shouted around them. It was still too much for him to take in. There were too many horrible details everywhere, from the awful feel of blue Denizen and oil-black Nithling blood underfoot to the croaking cries of the Nithlings that were too hurt to flee.

Refuge could be had in looking straight ahead and trying not to think about anything other than following the shouted commands. The first of these was to march, so they tramped forward, steadily pursuing the Nithling force back to the tile border.

Twice groups of Nithlings turned to fight, and then the order was given to charge, but it was not a wild, every-which-way run. The recruits kept roughly in their ranks, double-timing, shouting the war cry as they charged.

These charges were exhilarating and exhausting and dangerous, and Arthur found that it took all his energy and attention to make sure he wasn’t knocked over and trampled by his own side. He wasn’t sure which rank he was in now, as there were many more behind him, the Denizen force shrinking its front line and turning more into a broad column, harangued into shape by shouting sergeants relaying and amplifying commands from Colonel Huwiti.

Finally it was too dark to continue, the green moonlight and pallid starshine insufficient to track down the small groups of Nithlings that were all that remained. Many of the attacking force were dead or wounded and captured, but a significant proportion had crossed the tile boundary just before sunset and had disappeared as that tile moved on, the desert instantaneously replaced by a square mile of lush, rolling grassland. Tall grass, helpful to the Nithlings who crossed a few minutes too late to be carried away with the tile change.

Several platoons of recruits with additional NCOs and some of the officers were posted as pickets, but the rest of the force marched back to Fort Transformation. There was some attempt to sing at first, but this faded away as they crossed the field of battle and its remains. There were dead Denizens and Nithlings sprawled amid still-sparking weapons and blackened bits of ground, and there was blood everywhere, blue and black mixed together.

‘I thought Nithlings dissolved when they died,’ whispered Fred. Even at a whisper, his voice sounded strangely loud and dissonant, sharp above the sound of the marching and the occasional rattle of weapons or armour. ‘Went back into Nothing.’

‘They do,’ said the Denizen next to Arthur. Arthur looked at her properly for the first time and saw she was a corporal, the one in charge of one of the other recruit platoons. Urmink was her name.

‘What about these ones, then, Corporal?’ asked Fred.

‘Near Creations,’ said Urmink. ‘Originally made from Nothing, but close to being Denizens. They’re flesh and blood, of a kind. Very tough flesh and blood. Much closer to Denizens than mortals, and not at all like your normal Nithling.’