First published in Great Britain in 2021 by
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Copyright © 2021 Karen Langston
The right of Karen Langston to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.
ISBN 9781913913953
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
To Mark, for opening the door andencouraging me to follow a brighter path.
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE: ABOVE AND BELOW
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
PART TWO WITHOUT A MAP
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Acknowledgements
Prologue
The woman sat up in bed, her naked skin prickling as her breath quickened.
“What is it?” said the man lying beside her.
“I heard a noise.”
Her ears strained to decipher the silence. Wide-eyed, she stared ahead, blinded by the darkness that shrouded their bedroom.
“I don’t hear anything,” said the man. He grunted and turned over, submitting to sleep.
The woman remained sitting up, her body tense. She reached over and turned on her bedside light. As her eyes adjusted, she noticed the glass of water beside the lamp. Tiny rings rippled across its surface.
Creaks and groans of a building in agony broke the silence.
The man bolted upright. “What the…?”
The woman screamed.
Their room tipped violently, spilling the couple from their bed. They slid across the floor, slamming into a wall. The woman’s head smashed against the concrete blockwork, cracking her skull. She could feel warm blood seeping into her hair, snaking down the side of her face, pooling beside her mouth.
A few feet away, the man called to her, but his voice was drowned by a grinding roar. Then the concrete floor beneath the woman cracked and collapsed. Instinct compelled her to reach out, to grab and cling on. Her trembling hands gripped a loop of exposed rebar, suspending her body over a pitch-black abyss.
The man screamed from his precarious platform, the slither of floor beneath him having remained intact. Leaning over the edge and reaching out to the woman, he cried out, “Here. Take hold of my hand.”
Just as their hands clasped one another and the man began to pull, there came another roar and a rush of warm air. A huge slab of concrete plummeted from above, crashing down, wrenching the woman from his grip.
Alone on the ledge, his empty hand still reaching down, the man howled in horror at the fathomless maw below.
–
The hole had yawned in the night, devouring concrete and steel, skin and bone. By the yellow haze of dawn, the full horror of the devastation had become apparent. A gaping blackness loomed beneath vertiginous walls of rock. Barely visible in the gloom, the dust-covered roof of an apartment block lay three hundred metres below its own foundations.
The swallow hole was as wide as it was deep. It had sucked down three buildings and a tooth-gap chunk of the Westway Road.
Part of the third building remained standing. Five storeys of rooms stood exposed to the elements: a model dolls’ house with the front removed. A woman crouched in a pigeonhole room on the fifth floor, wailing at the drop below her. A dog barked on the fourth floor, its owner quivering in the shadows behind. On the third floor, a man lay on a narrow ledge, a trembling hand reaching down towards nothing.
The sirens had screamed on arrival, adding to a soundtrack of terror. Searchlights of the Emergency Division sought out the stranded in the pre-dawn gloom, illuminating white masks of horror praying this was a nightmare.
By daybreak, the clamour had fallen to an eerie quiet. Emergency officers knelt as close to the edge of the hole as they dared, leaning forward, straining to hear. The rescued residents of the severed building lingered behind them, listening for traces of loved ones. Stillness filled the void, tangible and laden with loss.
The rescue operation was an exercise in protocol, with little hope of success. Emergency officers were winched down, their lines running out before they even came close to twisted steel and concrete. A unit of Allears was deployed: an elite division of the Authority’s Special Forces, armed with the physiological capacity to detect sound beyond the range of human hearing. No sign of life was found.
After thirty-six hours of delicate operation, labouring in fear of further collapse, the Authority called off the search. A cordon was erected around the swallow hole and military personnel were placed on guard until the area could be made safe.
No bodies were ever recovered.
Following an assessment of registered residency and reports of missing persons, the Authority declared that the death toll was thirty-two adults and fifteen children.
This did not include Saltire and her players.
PART ONE:
ABOVE AND BELOW
Chapter One
“Naylor, it’s Chase. Wella’s missing.” It was two days after the swallow hole had left a bite out of the city of Wydeye. “She was supposed to meet me this morning, but she didn’t show.”
“Now, don’t panic, Chase. Where are you calling from?”
“A kiosk on Second Went. Can you meet me?”
“I’m on shift. I shouldn’t even be taking this call.”
“When you finish, then. What time is that?”
“Four. I can be at the market by half past.”
“I’ll meet you at the north gate.”
Chase Newell should have been at work too, but he couldn’t face a twelve-hour shift at
