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  It all started in the rainforest, years before it would come back there to end. Back then this wasn’t jungle, just rainforest. It may seem a pedantic distinction, but when you’re travelling through them it makes a world of difference. The canopy miles above blocked out the sun, so the undergrowth between the majestic trunks was weak and starved of light. A jungle was a phenomenon rather than a place, a sudden volcanic surge of growth when one of the giant trees fell to let light energise the lower regions, and the jungle around this valley wouldn’t spring up until people started cutting down the trees for building.

  There was an expedition trekking between the trees today. It was hot and humid, and the foreigners still only had two days experience in this climate and terrain. They required less help from the native guides now when it came to clambering over the buttresses of the larger trees, and hardly anyone tripped or misstepped on the uneven ground. There were a handful of explorers, though they were assisted by quite a larger party of guides. The leader, Dr Faulkner, had invited other scientists with an interest in the jungle to join the party this time, even though their work was unrelated to his own purpose in being here. The people of the nearest towns had assured them that such a large group made attack by wild animals less likely, and it certainly seemed that their strategy of safety in numbers was paying off.

  The natives were in two groups here. The first had been easier to find. They would have passed unnoticed in any of the college towns Dr Faulkner had lived in, if it weren’t for the jewellery. They wore light coats, so as not to trap the heat, but were careful always to cover up their arms in order to discourage insects. Around their upper arms, they wore wooden bangles called orbajen to show off their pride in the local culture and their heritage. These looked like the unlikely offspring of a bracelet and a wind chime, cut from the ubiquitous red timber that seemed to be used for virtually everything around here, but the surfaces were made darker by the shadows of impossibly intricate carvings. A lot of people wore those things in town; and the paler their skin tone, further from the heavy tan that seemed to be most common in these parts, the more intricate and bulky the bangles became. A student of psychology might have assumed that they were instinctively trying to reassert that they were a part of this nation, that they belonged here. The thought had crossed Dr Faulkner’s mind, as well as Lucretia’s, but he assumed that if it was worth debating then Dr Corliss would already have discussed it with his little team of anthropologists.

  The other group of natives were much darker, ranging from the colour of rosewood to aged oak. To a man they were heavily built. If you could imagine people being carved out of one of the gnarled and knotted father trees – the ones that it might take you a full minute to walk around the base of – then you would probably picture people like these. They wore similar wooden bangles on their arms, but without the intricate carvings. The shapes were roughly the same, but these were less polished, less manufactured, and in most cases generations older. They made you wonder if a tree could be trained to extrude jewellery, or if the tribes that lived out in the jungle used some kind of organic carving process otherwise unknown to civilised man. They kept their shoulders bare, almost mocking the Benedicteans’ caution about the insects, and their heads were shaven. Some people said this was a tenet of their religion, but they had never been willing to answer outsiders’ questions. Even Dr Corliss had stopped asking questions when it became clear that he would need to do a lot more to earn their trust first.

  In fact, the darker natives preferred mostly to live in isolation with their tribes, deep in the jungle where white or walnut-coloured man was nervous to tread. They only rarely came to the city to trade, though they had enough needs that a few of them had mastered the style of bartering popular in the city. Most times, as in this case, the most valuable thing they had to offer more civilised visitors was their knowledge of the jungle pathways. So in order to gain modern medicine, or any other invention they might occasionally see a need of from the outside world, they acted as guides, allowing outsiders to come into the rainforest, or as mercenaries in boundary disputes between the states that ruled here. They weren’t grateful for the trade, though, and even less happy to be in close proximity to their lifelong adversaries.

  They saw the paler natives as interlopers, people who had come to this land less than a dozen generations ago and claimed it as their own. The tribesmen said that the others had claimed their land and taken on some of their traditions without ever knowing what it meant to be one with the life of the rainforest. However much they protested that this was their land, their souls would never become one with the groundwater and sink down to their underground nirvana. The tribesmen spoke little, and never uttered a word to the other group of natives. Above all, they wouldn’t do anything beyond what they had been paid for, or offer any advice unless it was demanded of them.

  The groups of natives both marched ahead, cutting a path through old branches piled up beneath a dead tree. Maybe a few months earlier, the death of a giant had opened a gap in the canopy. The adjoining trees had quickly grown out to claim a little more of the sunlight, but tough vines still remained at ground level as a reminder that light had managed to reach this far down, and as an obstacle to the travellers. The natives cut through the vines with their distinctive knives, known as brwance, but they never even smiled at their employers.

  The only person in the group who seemed to get any sympathy from their guides was Lucretia. She was different from the other travellers, and they seemed to recognise it even if it wasn’t obvious why they would help her. They respected the child more than anyone else the group had come across in their travels. There was nearly always one of the natives stopping to help her on tough ground. Sometimes they even carried her on their shoulders, or lashed together a kind of chair from strips of bark. This amazed Dr Corliss, who had studied the native traditions and language before coming here but had never heard of any tribe singling one outsider out from the group like this. It couldn’t be just because of her youth, because they showed the children of the city-born natives the same hatred as their parents. Why did they take such care over a girl who was unlike them as anyone could be? She was small, weak, and had skin white as ivory even after a month’s journey across the tropics.

  Most days had been the same so far. They would travel as fast as they were able, the two native groups waiting patiently or disapprovingly for the foreigners when they got too far behind. They would usually stop in different areas and pretend not to notice that the other guides were there, as if this might allow them to hide their ancestral animosity. This day was different. One man, possibly chief among the jungle dwellers, barked an order and stuck out a hand in front of the foreigners. It took a few seconds for everyone to notice the change and stop moving, but by now they were smart enough to accept instructions straight away.

  Through the tangle of trunks and vines ahead, thick and vital unlike much of the rainforest, it took Lucretia a few moments to realise that the occasional cracks of light visible through the gaps extended below them. When she saw it she darted forward, and it was only Dr Faulkner’s warning hand on her shoulder that kept her back. One of the guides jabbed at the ground ahead with his otalya, a long staff cut from a tree branch that had grown as twisted as a corkscrew. This was some holy item, or maybe it was lucky for the man who found it, translations were never quite that simple. In either case, it had led them well through the dangers of the dark continent so far, and the scientists saw no reason to distrust it now.

  The old man needed to strike the ground with his staff quite hard before it parted, but still probably less force that would be exerted by an exuberant child standing there. The sun streaming upwards was reflecting from a river somewhere below their position. The tough old man barked another command, a dozen guttural syllables, and several men stepped forward cautiously with machetes and brwance. They made short work of the vines, but the amount of light glaring through to dazzle the tourists assured them that th
e wall of vegetation would have no trouble growing back in a week or two. Light was such a valuable and scarce commodity on the forest floor that any species not able to take advantage of it quickly would not have survived the recent centuries.

  As a window was opened through the foliage, the vista beyond took the travellers’ breath away. They were right on a cliff edge, but the carpet of green and brown vegetation under their feet continued without any apparent change, hanging out over the precipice. The cliff swooped into a canyon, with plants clinging desperately to every crevice that could possibly support them on the way down. The grey-brown stone opposite gleamed dully, polished smooth by a hundred generations of running water. Soft rocks had been worn away to leave only a granite spike which jutted quite a distance out from the far cliff face, with the river itself gushing from its underground source to run along the spur of dark rock before tumbling in a fountain to join the river in the valley below.

  Lucretia’s eyes were wide with delight as she looked out over the scene, and her jaw hung limp. She didn’t have the skill with words that many of the adults did, and even with her father’s help she knew whatever she wrote in her diary would never do this scene justice. But she had to try, because this view was simply too beautiful to go unrecorded. From the many-hued flowers that colonised the gleaming cliff to the interlaced rainbows around the spout, there was nothing that wasn’t the perfect example of natural splendour. Something like this was what she had dreamed of, the reason she’d wanted to visit this continent for as long as she could remember. Now that she was here, it was everything she could have hoped. She turned to offer joyful thanks to their guides, and then gasped in surprise for the second time in as many minutes.

  Her stomach burned with sudden pain, and only a tribesman’s quick reflexes saved her from tumbling over the unseen edge as her legs gave way. He held her while she retched, and one of the Benedictean guides joked that the foreigners’ weak stomachs couldn’t adapt to their spiced delicacies. But as Lucretia struggled to stand, her fine white-blond hair was stained black with blood where it had fallen across her face. They didn’t see it was something to laugh at any more.

  The expedition was curtailed the next day, rushing to a hospital as fast as Doctor Faulkner’s money could transport them. But when the explorers returned to that ill-omened site, with a few of the same members in the party and a lot of newcomers, they knew the name that they would have to give the place.

  Chapter 3 — Covert Mission

  It was some time after midnight, a week after I’d arrived in the compound. I didn’t know the exact time, my watch had been the first casualty of the pervasive heat and humidity, but I was sure I’d been waiting in that little crevice for more than an hour.

  I’d been welcome in the top part of the building, but certainly wouldn’t be here. It was a lot less comfortable, as well. The lowest guest quarters, alongside the underground river, were quite cool except around midday. The levels above were also comfortable in the morning and evening, and I wondered if they had some high-tech system of cooling powered by the torrent of chill water rushing out from the depths of the cliff. Down here near the cliff base, even in the middle of the night, the heat was almost unbearable. The various science labs – some inside the cliff base and some spread around a loose compound that circled half the lake – were linked by corridors constructed of little more than beaten steel panels. They rang out like a tuning fork if I stepped too heavily, and were often hot to the touch. I couldn’t shake the irrational sense of being trapped in some kind of diabolical oven

  Some of these corridors were cut into the cliff, some of the walls even cooled by underground streams diverging from the big river overhead, while others stretched out between a network of buildings on the valley floor. I’d seen it from outside as we approached, but hadn’t realised it would be such a maze. The outside corridors were warmed by the sun during the day, the thin metal walls too hot to touch, and the insulation of the rock meant that those underground held on to the baking heat of the air even into the small hours. And without any windows, there was no easy way to tell whether I was on the surface or not. There were occasional signs I could use to get my bearings, but I would have been lost without them. Every corridor, every junction, every lab door seemed identical to an outsider’s eye. Thankfully, the American troops who’d seized the place had decided to paste English signs over older ones in a dozen different languages. Presumably they had wanted to avoid any of the United Nations scientists and investigators getting lost.

  The temperature was starting to drop to a comfortable level, but my body was still aching from the previous day’s trip out into the jungle. It was pretty clear that the main reason for all the excursions was to keep all the journalists busy for the time we were here, so we wouldn’t go looking into things that they didn’t want us to report on. And that’s why I was creeping about down here, having taken very special care to note the position of every camera and motion sensor in the hallways around my room.

  It hadn’t been too hard to avoid the guards, who seemed to be a mixture of heavily tanned natives – though not the deep mahogany skin of the tribesmen we’d been introduced to a few days before – and American soldiers sent in by the UN. Both groups mostly kept to their break rooms, where there was at least minimal air conditioning. I’d seen before that in these little kingdoms in the tropics, everyone stayed in shelter unless their work was particularly urgent, and patrolling the corridors was never an urgent task. In any tropical nation, finding the place I wanted to photograph was bound to be harder than avoiding guards who didn’t expect intruders.

  As it turned out, that problem had been solved by the menial staff. Half an hour after I left my room, I was forced to hide in a store room as I heard loud pairs of footsteps ring along the tunnels. A shift change, I assumed. But they hadn’t just walked past, oblivious of my presence. My heart had almost leapt into my mouth when they came into my refuge and started lugging huge sacks of feed from right beside me. I panicked for a moment and just hoped the closest man wouldn’t see me, but this was a routine task for them and the two natives were more concerned with making a joke about their amerikanjie supervisor than paying attention to their surroundings. As far as I could gather from a few lines of half-understood conversation, they’d worked out that late evening was a perfect time to do any heavy lifting that the daily schedule required. The air wasn’t quite as hot as it was during the day, and that made even more distance when you were breaking a sweat anyway through heavy lifting. I didn’t know most of the words they used, but the ribald laughter was a big clue both to the racist nature of the jokes they shared, and the fact that nobody had yet discovered that I was out of my room.

  On an impulse, and amazed at my sudden courage, I’d jabbed one of the sacks with my pocket knife before ducking farther behind some heavy piece of unidentified equipment in the gloom. It had worked better than I could possibly have imagined, leaving a trail of unappetising looking grey-brown kernels along the floor as the second man hauled it onto his shoulders. They looked like some kind of highly processed animal feed, so there was a good chance they were making a trail that would lead me to where the live specimens were kept.

  When this lab was originally running, most of the different research operations had been just a smokescreen. The lab I was hopefully heading to would have been the centre of the whole operation, but now there were few scientists remaining. A few of the original researchers remained, people who knew the layout but weren’t under suspicion by the international courts. They were outnumbered by UN experts sent in to supervise the winding down of all the experiments and make sure nothing went disastrously wrong. It was a skeleton staff, even with the recent influx of extra personnel seeking to understand what the modern-day Dr Frankensteins had actually been working on. There were committees meeting all over the world now to decide whether the freaks and mutants would be transported to labs in more well-regulated countries, or destroyed and analysed for an
y scientific insight that could still be gained from their torment. As long as their fate was undetermined, the animals were kept fed, but nobody cared enough to give them any proper care. They couldn’t put motion sensors in the areas where animals were kept, so the minimal staffing would make it a perfect target for a journalist looking for a little fame.

  I waited in the store room and counted a thousand heartbeats after the last footsteps disappeared into the distance. Then I headed out, and saw the trail was as clear as I could have hoped. The food pellets were scattered occasionally down the hallway, but rarely more than a few feet between them. I shuffled as quietly as I could, though I was aware that the walls rang like a cowbell every time I shifted my weight too quickly. I was confident enough that if anyone was more than a corridor away, they wouldn’t be able to tell who was here or where the sound was coming from. Even in the quiet times, there were always fifth-hand echoes of echoes travelling back and forth down the hallways. And then, I struck the jackpot.

  “Faulkner Memorial Laboratory,” the sign over the double doors proclaimed. An egotistical twist I wouldn’t have expected, but with a name like that I knew this lab couldn’t be anything other than the main event. In just about every story I’d reported around the world, I’d picked out one victim from many to put a human face on mass tragedies like war and oppression. But here, this massive situation that had already captured the attention of the whole world, all the chaos could be blamed on one mad scientist’s ambition: Professor Conrad Faulkner.