“I need time to think,” Tristan said, when Dylan woke to find him halfway into his school uniform. He had laid hers out on his – already-made – side of the bed. “We don’t want to go off half-cocked and—”
“Half-cocked?”
“Half-cocked. It means unprepared, to just barge in when you’re not—”
“I know what it means!” Dylan snapped, exasperated. “Just… don’t say that word in front of anyone at Kaithshall, all right?”
“What… half?” Tristan shot her a quizzical look.
“No! The other—” she broke off, staring suspiciously at Tristan. He tried to hold on to his wide-eyed, innocent expression, but his lips were twitching.
“Idiot.” Dylan snorted, shoving at his arm, before getting them back on track. “We need to come up with a plan. We’ve only got three days – we need to do something, not go to bloody school!”
“Yes, we need a plan,” Tristan agreed. “And for that, I need to think. Until I’ve worked out the best thing to do, we should follow a normal routine. If you truant now,” he said, raising his voice because Dylan had opened her mouth to argue, “then Joan will clamp down on us just when she’s beginning to trust us again. We won’t be able to do anything.”
So they went to school, although Dylan lectured Tristan about how stupid it was all through computing class, and planned to continue doing so until he listened to her.
Dylan couldn’t stop thinking about what seemed an impossible task – finding any other wraiths that may have escaped.
“There haven’t been any more killings,” she said.
“No,” Tristan agreed. “I suspect the one in the tunnel was not the one that killed those four men. It’s still out there. But perhaps it hasn’t killed again because it glutted itself. Eating a real live person is more of a feast than eating a soul. And it went through four.”
Dylan made a face against the image that raised in her mind.
“It could get hungry again any time then,” she reminded Tristan. “So we need to go there, make sure we’re in the right place.” No response. “Tristan?”
“Damn…”
His low-muttered curse made her look over at his screen. Rather than the lines of code they were supposed to be working on, his monitor was filled with angry red lettering: BLOCKED.
“What did you search for?” Dylan asked. Dove had been hauled out of class in second year for trying to look at dirty videos, but there were other things that triggered it.
“How to create home explosives,” Tristan admitted, looking a little sheepish.
“What!” Dylan’s yell made every head in the class turn her way – even Mrs James looked up from what she was doing. Dylan ducked down and waited until her classmates’ attention drifted elsewhere before glowering at Tristan. “You can’t google that!”
“I can see that,” Tristan mumbled.
“Not just’cause it’s blocked – it causes an alert to the government or something. They’ll think you’re a terrorist!”
“Well, give me your smartphone. I’ll search on that.”
“That’s even worse!” Dylan squeaked. Sometimes she forgot how little Tristan knew about the inner workings of the world. “If you really need to, we’ll have to go to an internet café.”
“You know what,” Tristan said, his gaze suddenly fixed over her head, “I’ve got a better idea.”
“What?” Dylan spun round, tried to see what Tristan was so interested in. All she could see was Dove and his cronies messing around with the wires at the back of their computers. “Tristan, what?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he murmured, and without another word he got up and went over to join the small crowd of boys, sitting down beside them and drawing Dove – David MacMillan of all people! – into conversation.
***
“Are you going to tell me what you’re up to?” she asked as they left computing. She figured she’d been patient long enough, sitting watching Tristan talk and joke with Dove’s gang of morons as if they were all best buddies.
“Explosives,” Tristan murmured, opening the door for Dylan.
“What on Earth does that have to do with Dove?”
He looked at her, surprised, and she knew he’d assumed she understood what he was thinking. “I’m going to blow up the tunnel. Well,” he shrugged. “Try to.”
Dylan still wasn’t getting it. “But why did you need to talk to Dove about it?”
“Remember the other day in the science lab? He nearly blew the whole place up. I asked him what chemicals he was messing about with.”
“I doubt he remembered.”
“He did,” Tristan told her. “He knew exactly.” Tristan paused to glare at a little trio of first-year boys who’d come too close. As one, they scarpered. “He told me he’s tried it at home, just using household stuff. Cleaning supplies, mostly. Nearly took the roof off his mum’s place.”
No, he couldn’t possibly. “You can’t do that! Tristan, we’d get into so much trouble! If the police found out, we’d get arrested! And you don’t have any ID or anything. Tristan, you can’t!”
“More trouble than having to tell the Inquisitor we’ve failed?” He let that sink in. “Dylan, it’ll take me back to the wasteland and let the wraiths have me. I’ll become one of those slathering, mindless vermin, and you – you’ll die, Dylan.”
“Yes, but—” she shook her head. “Even if you did blow it up, it’s one of the main train lines to Aberdeen! They’d just open it back up and uncover the hole again. Think about this, Tristan!”
“I have thought about it,” he told her, deadly serious. “I’ve done nothing but think since we heard the news about those four men who died. And I’ve got the answer: I’m not blowing up the tunnel here, I’m going to do it in the wasteland.”
Dylan just stared at him, absolutely aghast.
***
It was disturbingly easy to buy the ingredients for a bomb. They went to Homebase, and Tristan loaded up a trolley with chemicals and duct tape, a small reel of copper wire and some other miscellaneous bits and bobs. He also bought a jerrycan. It all looked very suspicious, but the middle-aged woman at the counter didn’t even blink as she stuffed it into a carrier bag. Dylan winced when the bill rang up.
All the way around Homebase and on the long walk home, Dylan barely said a word. They ate dinner with Joan – pork chop and mashed potato – and then sat through a cookery show that she usually really enjoyed. She went through the routine of getting ready for bed like a robot and then, while she waited for Joan to go to sleep, she stared up at the ceiling.
Blank. Expressionless.
It was the only emotion she could manage, because if she let herself feel anything, she might scream.
Finally, Tristan curled in beside her. He didn’t even have time to get comfortable before Dylan rounded on him, her words thick with accusation. “You’re leaving me.”
“What?” Tristan snaked his arms around her, squeezing her closer. “I’m right here.”
“You’re going to leave me,” she repeated. “This plan of yours, going to the wasteland. You know… you know if you leave you won’t come back.”
Silence. Dylan stayed subdued for the first five seconds of it then tried to wriggle out of Tristan’s arms. He wouldn’t let her.
“Stop,” he pleaded. “Listen.”
“Listen to what? You justify yourself? You did this before when you made me go through to the other side alone!” Dylan choked her words off, unable to control her volume. “Please, Tristan. You can’t just wander back and forth.”
“I’m not leaving, Dylan,” he promised, “I’ve got an idea.” She waited. “If I tether myself to the real world, I should be able to go through and find my way back before the bomb explodes.”
“Tether yourself?”
“Like a safety line. The sort of thing climbers use.”
“So you’re going to tie a rope around your waist and hope that you can pull yourself back, that’s your plan?” Her tone dripped with derision.
“We have three days,” Tristan reminded her. “Two now. Do you have a better plan?”
No. But going back to the tunnel, letting Tristan disappear into the darkness, leaving her all alone there…
“I’ll go with you,” she blurted. “We’ll set the explosion together.”
Tristan’s grip became steel bars around her. She felt the sudden tension in every line of his body. “No.”
“Tristan!”
“No.” A hard squeeze to emphasise his point.
Dylan scowled in the darkness. So it was all right for him to go and not her? Did he not think she could manage? She’d survived on her own there… twice.
“Why not?” she asked, her voice hard.
“I need you on the other side,” Tristan said. “You’re what I’m tethering myself to.”
Oh.
Well. That did make sort of sense. But she still wasn’t happy about him going through on his own, and she’d argue it to death if, as Tristan had pointed out, she had a better idea. Which she didn’t.
“If you don’t come back,” she told him, “I’m coming to get you.”
Another squeeze, this one much gentler.
“Good,” he said in her ear.
He followed his words with a kiss to her earlobe. Then to her jaw, her neck. Finally her mouth. Residual anger and tension from their conversation kept her rigid and unyeilding for a heartbeat, but when he kissed her more deeply, she melted.
She’d crossed the wasteland for him before, she’d do it again.