Indestructible (Indestructible Trilogy Book 1) (7 page)

I look for Nolan, wondering where he’s gone, and see Cas, standing at the edge of the path we’ve just crossed, looking out over the water. A flame coils from the sea’s surface and leaps into the sky. Fire and water intermingle, setting off a mesmerising wall of flames. My breath catches at the sight. It’s more impressive even than the sunset.

“That’s our defence,” Elle explains. “It keeps the fiends away from the entrance.”

“Do the fiends even come out here?”

She bites her lip. “We’re lucky we didn’t run into any on the way. They follow us whenever we leave.”

I stare at her. “I thought Nolan and Cas were hunting
them
down.”

“Yeah, they were. But they hunt us down, too. They know where we live, and they can’t get in.”

“Well, that’s something,” I say, rubbing the goose bumps on my arms. It was naïve of me to assume I could ever really be safe, but the idea of those monsters always just outside the door unsettles me. I’m used to moving around, not stopping, always one step ahead of the fiends. I haven’t even thought about the possibility of staying in one place for longer than a night.

I stare at the wall of fire. The angle of the sun projects Cas’s shadow onto it as he turns his back.

Murray is already leading the way. A path meanders through the valley and gently slopes upwards, curving around the hillside. It’s like a photograph—green fields and foaming rivers and autumn-coloured hills dressed in heather.

Compared to the agonising minutes of crossing the sea, this takes no time at all. Elle gives a running commentary about how when the Earth split open, mountains became islands and sank into the sea, and Scotland has probably drifted halfway to Iceland. It should be twenty degrees colder than it is, but since the world changed, the Earth’s so much hotter than it was two years ago.

I knew that already, but I listen, wondering how she can know so much if she’s barely been outside.

“Dad taught me,” she says, when I ask. “Back when we were connected to the Internet, he watched it live. He has the only working computers in the country, I think. We have our own power supply here.”

“Electricity?” My voice rises in surprise. I’ve seen houses with solar panels and the occasional wind farm—not that there’s enough wind to power it anymore—but things like working lights, computers, and mobile phones disappeared with the rest of the technological age. I think I always assumed
someone
had to be prepared. I knew a couple of computer geniuses at school who could build computers from scratch, after all. But after going so long without seeing the brightness of an artificial light or hearing the hum of a computer, they disappeared into the distant past along with all my other memories.

“Yeah, hydroelectric power. We have to be careful with it and not overuse it.”

“Wow,” I say.

As we get higher up, the temperature drops. I start to shiver, wishing I had a thick coat like they do. The path grows narrower until we have to walk sideways, pressed against a rock face, the wind whipping at us. My hands and face go numb.
People used to hike here for
fun?

We stop briefly to make sure everyone’s caught up. “Whereabouts is your home?” I ask Elle, looking around. I can’t see any signs of human habitation.

“Inside the mountain,” she says. “It used to be an extinct volcano, but not many people know that.”

“Seriously?”

She nods.

I look up at the mountain’s distant, snow-capped peak, and shake my head in amazement.

The last part of the journey passes quickly. I’m expecting Murray to lead us right to the top, but instead, he disappears from sight. I inch along the path, thinking he’s gone around a corner, but as the others gradually disappear, too, I see that there’s an opening in the rock, and they’re going
inside
the hill.

Elle beckons me to follow. I have to duck my head under the rock shelf as I enter a narrow tunnel. It’s so well-hidden, no one could find it unless they were looking for it. I walk at a crouch until the ceiling gets higher and the passage widens into a corridor. The air is filled with the sound of footsteps, echoes bouncing off the walls.

Then the tunnel opens out into a cavern, lit by a panel of light on the ceiling. It’s so bright, it dazzles my eyes and I stumble forwards, my vision blurred white.

More corridors branch off, and I can see steps and paths carved into the rock itself. The centre is an enormous crater, fenced off with a metal railing. Lava pools below, smoke curling off the surface.

“I thought you said the volcano was extinct?” I say to Elle.

She flashes me a smile. “That’s what people think.”

This couldn’t possibly get anymore surreal.

Everyone splits up and starts going to different rooms. I hover around by the rail, Elle by my side, eagerly telling me where all the important places are. Training hall, dormitories, recreation room. I can’t take it in.

Some of the others pass by me, but I feel too awkward to say hello. It’s been too long since I really had a conversation. Opal liked to talk, but she knew Randy disliked it so she kept quiet a lot of the time. The rest of the group only discussed everyday necessities, unless they were reminiscing around the campfire, and even then the subjects of discussion were limited. Anything up until before the first energy blasts was allowed. We couldn’t talk about the fiends, the Burned Spots, even how we’d ended up joining the camp. Randy had found my sister and me crouching inside an abandoned cottage out in the middle of nowhere. It had been the nearest shelter we could find. A stray fiend had attacked her as we were fleeing, but we could both run fast and we managed to escape it.

Two weeks later, she’d died of her injuries.

I push the lid on the memories. After she died, I had no choice but to decide whether it was worth living on. Some of the others were hostile, seeing both my sister and me as stupid kids, a hindrance. So I worked hard to make myself useful. I thought I’d have to do the same here, but no one seems to expect me to. It’s so strange.

Others are starting to emerge from the corridors branching off, and there are suddenly a lot more people around. A couple of them glance at me. Suspicious.

Cas passes by, and I look back at Elle, determined not to see that hatred in his eyes again.

“Leah?” Nolan interrupts Elle’s chattering.

She goes brick red; I’m almost tempted to laugh, but that would be mean.

“Yeah?”

“Murray wants to talk to you about what happened. I told him my version, but he wants to hear it from you before he inducts you into the group, all right?”

“Er, sure,” I say. “Induction?”

“Nothing to worry about,” says Nolan. “Just standard. We haven’t had a new member in a while, and certainly not from outside.”

I catch sight of Murray beckoning me into an alcove. With a nod to Nolan, I follow, ignoring my quickening heartbeat. Electric lights aside, this place feels too enclosed for my liking after camping under the stars for so long. I already miss the sensation of the breeze on my skin. It’s not as warm as I’d expect given the pool of molten lava—do they have air con?—but it’s still almost stuffy in here.

To my astonishment, there’s a metal door set into the wall, like that’s normal on the inside of a volcano. Murray opens it and leads me into what looks like a cross between a workshop and a laboratory.

I’m pretty sure my jaw hits the floor. A leather chair sits behind a desk with an honest-to-God, working computer. The electric hum hits my ears like sweet music. My fingers twitch compulsively. I used to be glued to my iPad before the power cut out and I couldn’t charge it anymore.

“I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” says Murray, sitting at the desk and motioning me to sit in another metal seat in front of it. I perch on the edge, my eyes darting about the room, taking in the incomprehensible mess of wires and machinery on the work benches behind the front desk. If it wasn’t for that, I’d almost have the illusion of being back in the head teacher’s office at school, minus the rock walls. Not that I spent a lot of time there. Bar a couple of fights, my record was practically spotless.

“Yeah,” I say, in answer. “I do. For one thing, how can this place even exist? Elle told me you have your own power supply, but I never imagined…”

“We’ve been isolated for years,” he says. “Most of the younger generation grew up here, and some never leave. It’s not normal for such a large party to go out, but the strange behaviour of the fiends makes more sense now we know they were after you.”

“After me?” My heart drops.

“They target Pyros,” he says. “They attack and kill humans, too, but something draws them to us.”

“Us,” I repeat. “Nolan said you were around before the fiends.”

“Did he now?” Murray sighs, resting his chin on his steepled hands. “We made a lot of mistakes. This is a war that’s been going on for centuries. Our group has fought against the fiends for a thousand years, or more, but until two years ago, they never made an open attack on humanity. There were too few of them. But their leaders were shape-shifters, and used to blend in amongst humans.”

My mind spins with what he’s implying.
Amongst humans? They were here all along?

“They destroyed the world.” My throat’s dry, my heart pounding. Now I’m on the brink of getting answers, some small part of me doesn’t want to know any more.

Murray nods. “Well, you know something about what happened. The Fiordans—that’s the name of their leaders—led an army of fiends to invade Earth. We were too late to prevent it, and the aftermath ravaged our world. The fiends were trapped here.”

“Trapped?” I say. “Don’t they live inside the Earth? Isn’t that where they came from?”

“Not originally. The fiends inhabit a world that’s as barren as they’re trying to make this one. The two sides were on a tipping point two years ago, although only we, the Pyros, knew about it. The fiends’ world was dying, and they wanted ours. And in the process of invading, they destroyed it.”

He reaches and takes my palm, and I stiffen.

“Do you have any kind of a birth mark, or a strange marking on your skin?”

I shake my head. Even if I’ve seen enough with my own eyes to know at least some of what he told me is true, rationality still tells me it’s a trick. A louder voice tells me to stay put, that these are the answers I asked for—even if they’re far from what I want to hear.

“Or… on your head?”

He wants permission to remove the cap. I clench my fists to stop them shaking and give him a curt nod.
Just get it over with.

A sharp intake of breath. “Behind your left ear,” he says.

“What’s there?”

He rummages in a desk drawer until he pulls out a mirror. He holds it up in front of me, and I choke on a scream at my appearance. I look like a stranger. Angry red sunburn has blistered my face, and I look even worse without a hair on my head.

“Oh,” I say, tonelessly, “that. I thought it was a scar from something I don’t remember.”

It’s a round mark about the size of a penny, with a smaller, unburnt shape in the centre. Strange for a scar, but it’s not really in a place I look at often.

“No, it’s our mark.” He draws it on a scrap of paper. I’d assumed the shape was round, but now it looks more like… a flame.

“So my parents were—?”

“Not necessarily. The genes can skip a few generations. Or sometimes it happens after an accident—a blood transfusion. It’s in our blood. We never paid attention to it, until…”

“Until what?”

“Until it became relevant. Elle may have told you, it’s my mission to research the fiends, to find any way of beating them. When they invaded, the way back was cut off. They’re trapped in our world, and they aren’t happy about it. So they keep attacking us, no matter how many we kill.”

“So is that why you were outside?” I try to read his expression, but it’s inscrutable.

“Not exactly.” He leans forward. “What you have to understand is that this group is relatively young, and few people remember what the old way of life was like. Our ancestors used to move from place to place, as a group, but we’ve been settled here for nearly a hundred years—enough time to forget how hard it is to find new recruits, let alone bring them to safety. There are potentially other people like you, survivors who don’t know how they survived. Our mission is to find them and give them a choice, as I’m going to give you. You have the mark. What you do now is up to you, but if you join, there’s no going back.”

“Really?” I say, suspicion flaring. “Like a cult?”

“We’re definitely not a cult,” he says. “I realise this isn’t what you’re used to.”

A wry smile sneaks onto my face. “What’s normal?”

“Fair point.” He smiles back at me. “As one of us, you’ll have a few options to choose from. You can train to go out in the field, or join the research division. That’s what Elle chose to do. But I can tell you’re a fighter.”

“Out in the field,” I say. “Like the military?”

“Believe it or not, we used to live inside a hill next to an army training estate. That’s how we remained hidden from the public. But we’ve had to move here, into hiding. It’s the only place the fiends can’t get to.”