“You’ve got to be prepared for anything, dear,” cooed Olivia from the kitchen.
As always in regard to training, his mum and dad were a united front.
“And you need to work on your smoke screens,” warned Terrence as he set the table for dinner. “Very effective, but too much power—”
“—brings attention, I know, I know, but what’s the point in learning how to evade danger if all we do is hide away from it?”
Olivia pretended not to hear and busied herself with preparing their supper, whilst humming to an awful version of “White Christmas” on the radio.
“Don’t you miss it, Dad, the Hidden, the Circus – our friends?”
“Course I do, Ned, but not nearly as much as I missed or worried about your mum. Or you, whilst we’re on the subject, after you crossed the Veil. I will never let us be apart again, Ned, not now, not ever.”
“But Barbarossa’s dead, Dad, all that’s behind us.”
His dad shook his head. “Do you know what they call you behind the Veil? ‘The hero of Annapurna.’ Everyone knows what you did, what you’re capable of, but you’re still just a boy, my boy – and there are plenty of creatures on the other side as bad as he was and with as much to gain by getting their hands on you.” His dad paused. “Nowhere is as safe as you think, Ned, not for people like us.”
“Oh, Dad, really? We used to live in the dullest suburb in England, and now we live next door to it. Nothing happens here.”
“Which is precisely why our powers need to stay a secret. If jossers found out about us, we’d have to move, and quickly. Besides which, ‘nothing’ much was happening before Mo and his cronies came looking for me in Grittlesby. Trouble could just as easily come looking for us here.”
“Then teach me how to fight, really fight, not hide.”
His dad’s face darkened. The truth was that Ned could do any number of the training exercises asked of him, with his eyes closed and both hands tied behind his back. Ned knew it and so did his dad. What he was really asking was for permission to work outside the limitations of the Engineer’s Manual.
“You know I can’t do that, son.”
“I’d be careful, Dad.”
“It’s not about that. What you did at St Clotilde’s, that level of power, it’s simply never been done. Not by a single Engineer before you. We have no idea of the dangers.”
“What if it has, though? The missing pages from the Manual, maybe that’s what they’re about? You could help me, we could work it out together.”
His dad’s expression looked somewhere between anger and concern, before finally settling on kind.
“The pages are gone and there’s no way of knowing what was on them. Ned, any Engineer could have made a smoke screen without choking themselves half to death and you’re better than all of the ones that came before you, better than me. Remember last week, when you got angry? The power grid for half the suburb went out and not for the first time. We’ve gone through three blown microwaves in less than a month and every time you do homework, car alarms start sounding off all over Clucton. I can’t do that, son, none of it.”
“Then help me control it, Dad, please?”
And this was where the conversation always wound up.
“Your powers have changed since Annapurna, since you connected to the Source, that much we know. But there’s something else, something troubling you that you’re not telling us. I can’t help you if you don’t let me know what it is.”
For a glimmer of a moment, Ned looked into his father’s kindly eyes and prepared himself to say something. About what happened at night, when he let himself fall asleep.
About the voice.
But this time – like all the others – he found that he couldn’t do it. Because if he talked about it now … it would live outside his dreams and nightmares. It would become … real.
“Tomorrow, Dad, I’ll tell you both. I promise.” And a part of him believed that he actually might.
Suddenly there was a shriek from the kitchen, followed by an unusually panicked Olivia Armstrong, flapping her arms.
“Oh dear Lord, it’s ruined!” she gasped. “And the Johnstons will be here any minute! Will you two stop dribbling on about ‘Amplification’ and set the table. Terry, I need a spatula, and fast!”
Sometimes, Ned found it hard to believe this was the same woman who, mere months ago, had fought off countless gor-balin assassins, to protect her “wards” at the battle of St Clotilde’s. Ned’s mum could happily face off against a mountain troll if the mood took her, but the mystery of weighed ingredients and a timed oven were not a warrior’s domain.
As the aroma of burnt “something” hit their noses, the kitchen radio blared.
“The third kidnapping from the capital in less than a week—”
Terrence’s face whitened and his eyes flitted to Olivia for a moment, before he started rifling through a kitchen drawer for implements. But Ned had seen it.
All his dad’s talk of dark forces that might be interested in Ned. All the training he was making him do. There was something he was worried about – something specific – and it had to do with the kidnappings on the news.
Sleep.
For weeks now he had been plagued by the same horrifying nightmare. The hot metal walls. The sense of being trapped, and then the walls blowing open and …
Just thinking about it made him shudder.
But it was not the nightmare itself or the part Ned’s ring always played in it that he could not tell his parents about. It was the voice that lay waiting whenever it began. A voice both familiar and ancient – like a call of trumpets over the grinding of rock.
“TheeRe yoU arRe,” said the voice, when Ned finally succumbed to his exhaustion.
Deeply asleep and trapped in his dream, Ned shuddered.
Downstairs, the TV blew its fuse. A light bulb in the kitchen popped. And all down the street, car alarms began to wail.