Worlds Explode. Shane Hegarty
library was strewn with pages, piles of paper arranged in haphazard order.
As Emmie approached, Finn disappeared into a side room before emerging with another armful of candidates to work through. Not able to see where he was going, he tripped over a mound of atlases, sending himself one way and paper the other.
“Have you been awake all night, Finn?”
Finn picked himself up, shaking off her helping hand, swatting a small hardback off his shoulder until he stood staring at the mess he’d created.
“No, of course not,” he said, sifting through the pages of tattered, yellowing books that had disintegrated as they hit the floor.
“Did you sleep here, though?”
“No! Well, a bit,” he admitted. “My mam forced me to bed eventually. I got up early. We’ve only three days to find something.” He stopped himself, looked at the watch given to him by the Assessor, the tiny daggers slowly working their way round an ivory face. “Actually, not much more than a full day now.”
“But you’ve been in the library pretty much since the Assessor said your dad was, you know, erm …”
“You can say it,” Finn said tersely. “You can say ‘dead’, Emmie. Go on. Because it doesn’t matter. It’s not true.”
Emmie didn’t say the word. “You must be exhausted.”
“I can’t stop,” he said, biting his lip. “Dad told me I wouldn’t. I can’t.”
Above them, a strip light flickered and died. Finn tutted and immediately headed to the narrowest door in the corridor which had S4 hand-painted on it. Emmie followed, hovering outside the door while Finn rooted around fretfully in search of a new bulb.
“We’re out. Do you have any bulbs at your house?” he asked.
“Come on, we’ll get breakfast before school,” said Emmie.
“We need to keep the place lit up, so we don’t miss anything,” he replied.
“Finn—”
“Can you get me a bulb from your house or can’t you?”
Emmie looked up at the Long Hall’s ceiling. “Doubt it. These are strip lights, like you’d have in an office or something. I live in a normal house. Not a crazy house like this.”
Silence.
They both paused for a moment to appreciate the inadvertent clumsiness of what she had said and the words that were left hanging there: she didn’t live in a crazy house like this for now.
Emmie coughed.
Finn felt his hopes sink even more.
Emmie looked at the lettering on the door and pushed her head in to find a room crammed with boxes, tools, dusty and rusting equipment. “So, what does S4 stand for anyway?”
“It’s a storage room,” explained Finn.
“Just junk and stuff?”
Finn stood with hands on hips, looking around, admitting defeat in the search for a new bulb. “Yeah, and stuff. Do you think I should just give up searching?”
“No, there must be one here somewhere,” said Emmie, squeezing past him and rooting through the overcrowded shelves. She pushed aside some boxes to see what lay behind before she belatedly realised what Finn had actually meant. “No, Finn, I don’t think you should stop searching for the map.”
“What if the Assessor’s right, though? What if there is no map?”
“They didn’t find one,” said Emmie. “There’s a big difference.” She kept rummaging through the clutter, as much to move on the conversation as in the hope of finding any light bulbs. She pawed at a couple of things as she went. A ship’s wheel with rusted wrenches taped to each handle. What might have been a satellite dish made out of a roasting dish, tinfoil and a spoon.
She knocked against something propped on a shelf and just about caught it before it hit the floor. A tin box attached to a circuit board, it had a couple of old brass light switches fixed on to it and what looked like an egg whisk protruding from one end.
“What’s this, Finn?”
“An egg whisk, I think.”
“No,” said Emmie, “what is this whole thing? What does it do?”
“Actually, my dad loves this,” said Finn, taking it from her and examining it. “It’s a Legend Spotter. It was used years ago, before they invented scanners to track Legends down. Come on, I’ll show you.”
He headed quickly to the library, pushing the door through a carpet of papers and books, and carefully picked his way to the centre of the room. Emmie followed.
“Wait there, by the wall,” Finn told her while he found a switch on the Spotter’s underside and thumbed it for a moment. “Now turn off the lights. All of them.”
Emmie flicked off each of the dozen or so switches, section by section, until the library was in total darkness. She promptly fell over a pile of maps as she tried to return to Finn.
“You OK?” asked Finn.
“This had better be good, Finn. I think I’ve broken a tooth.”
“It is. I promise.” He pressed the button and the device’s whisk glowed a weak orange, hardly enough to illuminate his chest.
“Wow, great trick,” said Emmie, her sarcasm carrying across the darkness. “Halloween must be a blast in this house.”
“Just wait.”
Then it began. It was hard to perceive at first, but across the span of the room, on its shelves, in spots along the floor, they began to make out dull smudges of orange light. Quickly, each flicker grew in intensity until the room was lit solely by the glowing balls of Legends caught over the decades and now scattered across the shelves and floor of the library. The unbroken jars, which each housed a desiccated ball of a creature caught invading Darkmouth, were like glow-worms in a cave, the still lights fostering an eerie calm.
“That is pretty cool actually,” Emmie said.
“If something’s been on the Infested Side or in a gateway, this will identify it,” Finn explained. “We use scanners now, so this hasn’t been used to track down a Legend in years, but Mam and Dad sometimes have their dinner here on Valentine’s Day. My dad calls it ‘the Planetarium’. Apparently, this is how he asked Mam to marry him. He spelled it out on the floor in glowing desiccated Legends.”
In the galaxy of orange lights, Emmie picked her way across the floor to where Finn stood and they enjoyed the silence and surprising beauty to be found in the glowing husks of savage creatures from a parallel world.
“I can see why they found it romantic,” said Emmie.
Finn moved away a step, a flush of heat running through his face. “I’ll turn the lights back on.”
He started back towards the wall and its light switches, while he looked again for the on/off button of the Spotter.
“Wait,” said Emmie, looking at him. “The orange.”
Finn looked down at himself and for the first time realised he was lit up; a radioactive glow was spreading across his skin, emanating from his chest, but pushing out of his sleeves, the neck of his sweater, the gap between his trousers and socks.
“That’s weird,” he said, holding his hands out to examine them. “But I was there, on the Infested Side, so I suppose that’s why I—”
“No,” said Emmie, “not you. What’s that beside you?”
Finn looked around, unsure