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regular structure at the top, and there's still a lot of fog."
"A building? Something we could use as a shelter?"
"It's too far off to see clearly, but I don't think so. It looks very
old. A lot of precipitation damage I expect."
"The environmental control system of this place is in an appalling
state," Jenine complained. "Don't they realise that allowing the temperate to
drop at night without lowering the humidity is going to lead to condensation
and precipitation problems?" She rummaged in the holdall for a biscuit. Her
fingers closed around a small, cylindrical device. She held it up. "What's
this?"
Ewen shrugged. "I was going to throw it away. It never was much use, but
I thought that its battery might come in handy."
"But what is it?"
"A radio. Father Dadley gave it to me. He said that if ever I was in
trouble, all I had to do was squeeze the ends together to get help."
Jenine studied the gadget with interest. "Have you ever used it?"
"A few times. All I ever received were cryptic messages. Recordings."
Jenine pushed the ends together.
"It won't work outside of Arama," said Ewen.
"Have you tried?"
"No. And you'll have to squeeze harder than that."
Jenine used the heels of her palms to press the capsule's ends.
"You're wasting your time. I was going to-"
Ewen broke off in surprise when a thin, barely audible voice spoke from
the radio. Jenine pressed it to her ear, listened for a minute, and passed the
gadget to Ewen, frowning.
"You're right. A cryptic message repeated over and over again."
Ewen listened. It was the same voice that he had last heard in his cell
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when awaiting trial.
"You must escape from the island... You must escape from the island...
Escape from the island..." The message was repeated more several times. There
was a faint click and the carrier died. Ewen pressed the ends of the radio
together again. The same message was repeated. Jenine took the capsule from
him and listened again, frowning in concentration. She looked up when the
recording ended.
""Escape from the island?" What does it mean?" Island of what?"
Jenine was right to be puzzled. In Arama the word "island" was an
incomplete descriptor; it was always used to modify another noun: an island of
bookshelves; public parks were islands of tranquility; there were even traffic
islands. By itself the term "island" was meaningless.
Ewen helped Jenine to her feet and they resumed their uphill trek along
the forest track. The lush trees thinned out rapidly to bush and scrub, and
their destination, a strange, squat circular structure thrusting through the
impoverished topsoil on a hilltop like a grey thumb, came into sight. They
toiled to the peak. The structure was a parapet of decaying concrete around a
mine shaft. Its sides were crumbling, and in one place were low enough for
them to peer down into the blackness. A rusting mesh grille was set into the
concrete a little way down. Ewen accidentally dislodged a large piece of
masonry. It dropped through the grille and rattled down the side of the shaft,
its echoes fading into oblivion.
"A ventilator shaft?" Jenine suggested.
"Certainly looks like it."
They turned and surveyed the circle of heavy mist that lay over the
forest like a tablecloth. The low sun shone a menacing crimson through the fog
like a broken blood vessel beneath a girl's skin.
"No central pillars or supports to hold the dome up," Ewen commented. "So
how do they do it? It flies in the face of logic and reason."
"Perhaps we should be asking ourselves who they are."
"So you don't think it's been created by the GoD?"
Jenine sighed and shook her head in puzzlement. "I don't know what to
think." She stared into the mist. "We could've left an hour later. It'll be
ages before we see anything."
"Don't judge that light by the zargon lights in Arama," Ewen cautioned.
"It's incredibly powerful." He touched his face carefully because it was still
smarting from the previous day's brief exposure. "Try calculating the power it
must be dissipating to heat everything up as it does."
As if to prove his point, the mist started clearing with surprising
speed. Within five minutes it was being rolled back like an expanding iris,
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