‘Don’t worry, there’s a boat,’ I say.
Nate swings the torch beam over the first marking. ‘If we could figure these markings out, life would be a lot easier.’
Ash glances at the markings again. ‘Two lines, one slightly shorter than the other. Are all the markings like this?’
‘Yeah,’ Nate says. ‘Just a load of different angles.’
‘They look like the hands of a clock,’ Ash says.
He’s right. A minute hand and an hour hand. I can’t believe I never noticed this before – a result of living in a digital age, I suppose. Count the minutes, not the hours. Where have I heard that recently?
‘The skipping rhyme,’ I say to Ash.
‘Count the minutes,’ he replies. ‘Do you think the rebels hid the answer in an old nursery rhyme? One that only the Imps would know?’
I nod. ‘The minute hand must point to the correct tunnel. Clever.’
Nate grins. ‘OK then, let’s buy back some time. Follow the human sat nav.’ He runs down the corridor, kicking up his boots so the water sprays around him, arcing from his feet and catching in the torchlight.
‘Keep up, slow coaches,’ he yells over his shoulder.
Ash and I follow. The air grows increasingly humid the further we get from the manhole, and running requires more and more effort, like pushing through treacle. Nate pauses at another pair of clock hands before jogging down a different corridor.
‘So what did the demigod want?’ Ash says, the damp and the moss of the walls absorbing his voice.
‘Look, Ash, what you saw in the hovercraft—’
He cuts over me. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I had to keep up the act so he’d let us go. It wasn’t real.’
‘It looked pretty real to me.’
We round a bend, pass another clock face. The passage tightens.
‘Bear right,’ Nate shouts.
The ground below us suddenly curves. This tunnel is entirely tubular, and my feet take a moment to adjust. Ash catches me as I lurch towards the murky water. I collect myself, only to see a rat weaving past my boots – slippery and black, half-running, half-swimming. I grip Ash’s hand, the warmth branching up my forearm, and push on through the warren. Something about that skipping rhyme bugs me. Where did it come from? The clock markings were in canon, so perhaps the coded skipping rhyme was too. But could a rhyme exist in canon if Sally King didn’t write about it? Perhaps not. Rose never figured out the yellow markings, after all. And she would have known the rhyme had it existed; Ash made it sound like it was well known by all the Imps. Maybe the rhyme really is a prophecy about me.
Hope starts as a little flower.
Nate stares up a ladder. ‘You have reached your final destination.’ He gestures to a single yellow brush stroke on the wall. ‘It’s the mark from canon. It means the bolthole’s overhead.’ The beam of his torch explores the manhole cover resting above.
‘What’s he on about?’ Ash says. ‘And what’s this canon you keep mentioning?’
‘You wouldn’t believe us if we told you,’ I say.
‘More secrets?’ Ash twists his hand from mine and begins to climb the ladder.
I feel a stab of loneliness. Right now, that wall of secrets feels more like an impenetrable forest of thorns and brambles. A voice interrupts my thoughts. Deep and familiar, and so very out of reach. And the Princess slept for a hundred years. Though she never did have the face of the dead, her cheeks remained pretty and pink like the day she was born. It’s Dad’s voice again.
I look upwards. ‘Dad?’
A mixture of excitement and concern crosses Nate’s face. ‘You heard Dad again?’
I pause, listening intently to the drip of water, the scuffle of rats, the clang of Ash’s boots on the rungs. I shake my head. ‘No, no, I’m just hearing things. Ignore me.’ I don’t have space in my head for anything else right now.
I place a hand on the ladder, ready to haul myself upwards, but Nate shines the torch in my face and whispers, ‘Violet, I’ve been thinking . . . How did the Gems know about the raid at the Meat House?’
‘I don’t know, and Willow couldn’t tell me in the hovercraft.’
He wrinkles up his nose. ‘I can’t figure it out. In canon, the only Gem who knew about the raid was Willow, because he made it happen. But in the current, Willow wasn’t even captured by the rebels, so how could he have possibly known about the raid . . .’ He shoves his hands in his hair. ‘Agh, it’s messing with my head.’
Ash interrupts from above. ‘Are you guys coming or what?’
I look up at him, the soles of his boots so badly cracked I swear I can see the blisters on his feet. ‘Yeah, just a sec.’ I turn back to Nate. ‘Willow said his father told him about the raid.’
He frowns. ‘What really gets me is the Gems knew we would be at the Coliseum – that didn’t even happen in canon.’
‘I know. But the Meat House is only a few streets from the Coliseum. If the Gems knew about the raid, likelihood is they flew over the Coliseum and saw us. There must be a mole, maybe one of the Imp rebels. Someone we don’t know, or maybe even Saskia or Matthew.’
‘Maybe. Or someone else who knows the canon.’
We stare at each other. The realization scrapes out my insides. I reach for the split heart and end up pinching my bare throat instead.
‘Why would Alice do that?’ I ask. Everything seems to slow. The dripping water, the scuffling rats, even my own heart.
Because I already know the answer.
I can’t complete the canon if I’m dead.
Love. People talk about it like it’s a mental illness. Crazy in love, addicted, lovesick, obsessed . . . And maybe they’re right. Alice has loved Willow for two years. And I don’t just mean the actor, Russell Jones, I mean the fictitious character, Willow. That’s verging on insanity, surely? And if anyone should know, it’s me, having suffered from the same affliction.
OK, so Alice has dated the odd footballer, the odd boyband (yes – the whole band). But she always returns to her keyboard, tapping out her fanfic, the only place she could enact her Willow-related fantasies . . . until now, that is. But would she really have her best friend killed in the name of love? Perhaps, if she’s lost her mind. I risked the canon because of Ash after all. But kill someone?
‘I’ve known her since primary school,’ I say.
‘I’ve known her since I was born,’ Nate says.
‘She’s . . . good.’ The image of those four bronzed legs wrapped in satin appears in my mind’s eye. ‘Well, she’s not a monster, at least.’
Nate nods. ‘You’re right. This place is making me paranoid.’