City of the Falling Sky (29 page)

“
Really?”

“
Yes, hun. Why’s
that?”

“
Why was it so important to
him?”

Coralle shook her head lethargically. “Who
knows? The man was a mystery. He’d never talk about it.”

“
What was he like,
mum?”

Coralle sighed. “He was a good man. I used to
think he was the perfect man. He was a great father to you both . .
. and then, well . . . you know what happened. He disappeared.”

Seckry continued to stir his cereal, knowing
that he wasn’t going to be able to eat a single mouthful.

“
It was the hardest thing
I’ve ever had to go through,” Coralle continued. “I denied it for a
while. I thought that it couldn’t be real, that there would be some
strange explanation of why he had vanished and taken all traces of
him with him. But no answers came. He had gone and that was
it.”

“
How did I take it?” Seckry
asked. “How old was I, five?”

“
You were six. Six years and
eight months, actually. You kept asking me if it was the end of the
world.”

“
The end of the world . . .”
Seckry said, lost in his own memories.

“
I don’t think you fully
understood what had happened at the time. But your sister was old
enough. I really think it was at that point that she started to
become so hardened.”

After school that day, Eiya decided she
wanted to spend some time on her astronomy coursework in the
library, so Seckry returned to Kerik Square with just Tenk.

As he was about to use his key in the door,
he heard his mum’s voice through the woodwork speaking his name and
he paused for a moment.

“
Seckry was asking me about
your father again today,” she said.

“
Again?” Leena said
exasperatedly. “Why is he so obsessed? The guy dumped us. He left
without looking back.”

“
Leena, love, it’s only
understandable. Seckry’s not as strong as you are, he’s more
sensitive to things.”

“
Thanks, mum. So I’m just a
cold hearted cow am I?”

“
Leena, you know I don’t
mean that. You’ve got a thick skin, probably because you had to
deal with your father leaving. But Seckry doesn’t remember any of
that. He was really young. He’s yearning for a father.”

“
Did you tell him about the
phone call you got a year after he left?”

“
No I didn’t,” Coralle said
sadly. “It’d break his heart. I think Seckry’s got this image in
his head of this heroic man who looked after us all, before
disappearing to do some noble thing that couldn’t be
avoided.”

“
He’s gonna have to know the
truth sooner or later, mum. Dad was a fake, wasn’t he? He probably
had another family somewhere. That’s why he told you a fake name
when he met you, and that’s why he left.”

“
The day I got that phone
call was the worst day,” Coralle said, upset. “Before that there
must have still been some glimmer of hope that he’d turn up on the
doorstep again, as foolish as it was.”

“
What was the real name that
the guy asked for?” Leena said.

“
It was Ringold. He said it
was very important and that he was looking for Pawl
Ringold.”

“
Ringold,” Leena repeated.
“Pawl Ringold. I wonder if the Ringolds knew we
existed.”

“
I don’t think we’ll ever
find out, my love,” Coralle said sadly.

Seckry stayed outside the door, leaning
against it for a little while, even though his mum and Leena had
finished their conversation. He didn’t know if he could take any
more secrets, any more heartache. He eventually turned his key in
the lock and let himself in before heading straight to bed.

The next morning at Estergate, Vance spotted
him in the corridor.

“
Morning Seckry, what
lessons have . . . Seckry? What’s wrong?”

“
What?” Seckry
said.

“
You look . . . terrible. Is
everything okay?”

“
Uh, yeah,” Seckry said
unconvincingly.

“
Why don’t you come to my
office for a moment,” Vance said, looking at his watch. “There’s a
little while before lessons start.”

Seckry nodded and followed Vance to the
second floor.

“
Would you like a cup of
tea?” Vance asked.

No,” Seckry said. “No thanks.” He glanced up
at Vance’s board, which was strewn with equations and labelled
Hindglubber’s theory of Illusional Time.

Vance followed his line of sight.

“
Something I’m teaching the
sixth formers,” he said. “Dr Hindglubber argued that time is just
an illusion. It is something that sentient beings are given to make
sense of the universe around them, and that past, present and
future actually occur simultaneously.”

“
That’s . . . quite hard to
get your head around, isn’t it,” Seckry said, glad to think about
something other than his dad or Eiya for a moment.

“
Indeed,” Vance said,
smiling. “The example I use is that if Mrs Cutson, in her alternate
universe of 7am this morning, were to walk in here and place a
large bunch of flowers on my desk, those flowers will appear in
front of us right now. But to us they will have always been there,
because our past was changed and everything in between. Similarly
the future is interchangeable.”

Seckry scratched his head.

“
Don’t worry, I barely
understand it myself. And it’s just a theory.”

Seckry was about to say something else, but
the lump in his throat was stopping him from doing so.

“
Something is hurting you
very deeply, isn’t it?” Vance said.

Seckry swallowed for a moment and let himself
breathe.

“
Things are just getting on
top of me, I think. But . . . I overheard my mum talking to my
sister last night about my dad. He disappeared when I was six years
old and we haven’t seen him since. We’ve never known what happened
or why he left, but . . . they think he had another life, with
another family, and that’s where he disappeared to. It turns out
this name, Sevenstars, it was fake. It means nothing, it wasn’t
even his real name. I guess for all these years, even though I knew
he left us, somewhere at the back of my mind there was always
something telling me he’d done it for a reason, that he had really
loved us.”

Suddenly Seckry couldn’t hold it in any
longer, and weeks’ worth of tears began flooding from his eyes.

“
Hey, hey,” Vance said
affectionately. He put his arms around Seckry and patted him on the
back.

“
Aren’t you supposed to
refrain from close contact with pupils,” Seckry said through
sobs.

“
Well, Seckry,” Vance said.
“Sometimes common sense should come before rules.”

Seckry closed his eyes. Having Vance’s strong
arms around him should have felt strange, but he didn’t want him to
let go. As he breathed in Vance’s aftershave and the leather from
his jacket, he imagined that it was his dad who was hugging him,
and was telling him that he had come back.

As Seckry’s tears dried up, Vance gave him a
firm grip of the shoulder and sat down at his desk.

“
Sometimes I think I see him
looking right at me,” Seckry said. “Like amidst a crowd or
something. It’s like my heart suddenly starts racing and I try to
locate him again but I can’t find him. And then I realise it was
just my mind playing tricks on me. I don’t really remember what he
looks like. I’ve got this vague idea that must be from my
subconscious but it’s probably completely wrong. He took every
photo of him with him when he left. Including ones with the rest of
us in.”

“
Do they know what your
father’s real name was?” Vance said, sipping a cup of
tea.

“
They said someone phoned up
looking for Ringold.”

Vance paused for a moment before placing his
tea down very slowly on his desk.

“
Seckry . . . what was your
father’s first name?”

“
It was Pawl.”

Vance’s face slowly changed. His eyes began
darting from one side to the other, as if he were reading an
invisible passage of text in the air.

“
What’s the matter?” Seckry
asked.

“
Seckry . . . this is
unbelievable.”

“
Unbelievable? What do you
mean?”

“
Seckry, have you ever heard
of Adelbert Endoman and Rikard Ringold?”

“
No, I haven’t.”

“
They were two scientists on
the brink of brilliance back in the forties. They studied together
at the university and began their own company here in Skyfall. It
was known as the Endoman-Ringold Corporation.”

“
I haven’t heard of that
either,” Seckry said.

“
Oh, I think you have,”
Vance said gravely. “Shortly after its creation, they decided to
abbreviate their surnames into a catchier company logo.”

Vance was looking at Seckry intensely.

“
I thought you would have
worked it out by now,” he said.

“
They changed it to The End
and Ring Corporation?”

Vance said nothing.

Seckry slowly began to fill with horror and
realisation. End and Ring.

“
Endrin?”
he
said.

“
They were the scientists
that made those babies?” Seckry said. “The mutilated ones that died
when they were teenagers?”

“
Yes they were,” Vance
explained. “But there is one big flaw in the story that the media
have chosen to believe. Within the scientific circle, we have a
slightly different account of what happened. Seckry . . . the
bodies of the two boys were never found. The boys never
died.”

“
What? They’re still alive
now?”

“
Seckry do you know what
Rikard Ringold named his child?”

Seckry said nothing but he knew what was
coming.

“
It was Pawl. Pawl
Ringold.”

“
My dad was made in a lab?”
Seckry said, more to himself than Vance. “My mum said that whenever
my dad used to hear anything about the lab baby affair, he'd have
to leave the room because he was uncomfortable. That's why . . . it
was . . . him.”

Vance stayed silent for a moment.

“
Seckry . . . what this
means is . . . I think I may know why your father left you when you
were six years old.”

Seckry sat down, his eyes wild with
anticipation, fear, and shock.

“
Seckry, Adelbert Endoman
and Rikard Ringold were scientists involved in very experimental
procedures.
Very
experimental procedures. They were both
infertile, yet they both wanted sons. They began research into a
technique that would allow them to use their own DNA to grow their
own children in incubation tanks. Not many people knew what they
were doing; Endrin was always Endrin right from the very beginning,
full of lies and cover ups. The people who
did
know warned
them against it. But Endoman and Ringold were both convinced that
they
could
have children.

“
The lab was in a secret
location. To this day nobody knows where it was, or still is. All
of this information was relayed to their colleagues via secure
internet updates.

“
Forty two years ago, Pawl
Ringold and Lux Endoman were taken out of their incubators, and
were born to the world. But this was ‘49. Technology wasn’t the
same as it is now, they were mavericks experimenting with things
way beyond their grasp.”

“
What happened?”

“
The boys never left the
lab, probably because of the public outcry that would have ensued
if the boys had been revealed at the time. We have to assume, from
the little knowledge we have of its size or location, that it was
big enough for a group of people to live in. It’s recorded that
Endoman and Ringold were also growing their own fruit and
vegetables in there somehow, and they must have set up a water
supply, so they had an entirely self confined existence. But the
boys were ill, terribly ill. The health problems they had seemed to
have no end. And mentally they were incredibly unstable.

“
The thing is, Ringold’s
child had fared better than Endoman’s. They say that Pawl, over
time, began to develop more like any other normal child whilst Lux
. . . well Lux, he began to descend into madness.

“
It’s reported that Lux
would have seizures in which he’d scream and foam at the mouth
until they thought he was going to choke or suffocate, and he’d
thrash around so wildly that they had to restrain him with leather
straps. And he used to have terrible nightmares and hallucinations.
He thought that they were all tricking him, and he couldn’t
understand why they couldn’t see what he could see. But they were
just hallucinations, unfinished components of his brain, glitches
in Endoman’s botched experiment. His brain wasn’t fully formed, it
was missing things, there were things in places that there
shouldn’t have been.

“
They lived down there for
sixteen years, oblivious to the outside world. But the boys should
have been told what they were from the very beginning. They grew up
thinking that their mothers had died in childbirth. When Lux found
out that this wasn’t true, something inside him erupted. He thought
he was a monster. He became obsessed with self loathing.