Many of the children slept, or curled up silently on chairs and beds brought into the large common room. None of them would sleep on their own, and no one would force them. There were twenty-four children in Coldbrook now, twenty of whom were without parents. They all had stories to tell. Holly didn’t want to hear any of them.
Jonah was gone, Holly had barely seen Vic since his return, and she was more exhausted than she’d ever been in her life before. Her wound hurt, though the bleeding had stopped. And each time she blinked she saw Paloma’s head coming apart and splashing across Drake’s face. You didn’t save me, you saved Paloma, Drake had told her. But she could not help wondering what he saw each time he blinked.
As she arrived back in Secondary, Marc was talking French on the satphone, and even if Holly had concentrated she would only have picked up one word in ten. So she set his steaming coffee down in front of him and took a seat, accessed the Net, and sipped her own mug as she surfed news sites. The taste of coffee, so familiar and usually comforting, seemed strange against the things she saw.
The BBC World News site was still being randomly updated, movie clips and photographs now seemingly uploaded by members of the public. And no news was good news. Governments were falling, communications were failing, and humanity’s timeless ability to wreak destruction upon itself was being put to the test in a variety of ways. The UK were firebombing several of their main cities, recycling Second World War tactics in an effort to wipe out the furies. China was using biological weapons against their population, killing tens of millions in vast swathes in an attempt to protect a billion. Russia continued to defend its borders, even though the plague was rife across the country from east to west. Small wars flared, larger wars threatened, countries joined forces, others attempted to isolate themselves and ride out the storm alone.
‘We’re running out of time,’ Holly said softly, and Marc threw the phone onto the desk.
‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck fuck fucking hell.’
‘What?’
‘Time!’ Marc leaned back in his chair and rubbed his face, covering his eyes as if to shut himself away from the views on the large screen. Holly switched them off. She had seen enough herself.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Not good.’
‘I thought you were gathering information, getting people involved. This network of friends you and Jonah have around the world.’
Marc laughed. ‘Yeah. Net’s already glitchy, and it’s going to go down eventually. You know that, don’t you? It’s way overloaded, and servers will crash. Bash, back twenty years.’
‘So . . .’
‘So I’m going to do my best. I am. But it’s going to take me months, or years, and—’
‘We probably don’t even have days!’ Holly gasped.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘But at least we have Jayne and Mannan,’ she said, desperate for any shred of hope.
‘Yeah.’ Marc nodded at the laptop. Holly turned the screen to face him. Marc accessed his mail account, the printer in the corner started whispering, and he dialled the next number.
Will it really all go? she wondered. A world with no Net, no phone communications . . . and then she knew that yes, it would, because this had all happened before. Earth was following in Gaia’s footsteps.
She left Marc in Secondary and paced through Coldbrook, afraid that if she stopped she would not be ready to run when the danger broke through. Perhaps she would never feel safe again. She wished she could see Vic. But he and his family had retreated to his old room, they needed their peace, and she was the last person to deny them that.
Surrounded by more people than she had ever seen in Coldbrook, Holly felt so alone.
She walked along the short corridor and passed through the common room to the garage area. Even before she opened the door and saw the unsettled expressions of the two guards – Moira and Hitch – she heard muffled hooting echoing from the plant room.
‘They just won’t shut up,’ Moira said.
‘Spooky fuckers,’ Hitch said. His voice wavered. He held a pistol ready in his hand.
Marc was right. They were running out of time.
2