Free The Ghost Roads (Ring of Five) by Eoin McNamee

they could react, the trapdoor slammed shut, locked from the inside. Danny’s mother looked at him groggily. He saw her wounds, her eyes swollen and bruised. The power raged within him. He took Pearl in his arms.
    “Outside!” The others followed him as he raced out of the building, giving orders as he went. “Dixie, disappearand reappear outside the wire. Les, can you carry my … Agent Pearl?”
    Les put his arms around Pearl’s waist and lifted her.
    “She weighs less than Dixie,” he said quietly.
    “Wait,” Danny said, “take Nala first.”
    “I stay with you.”
    “No,” Danny said. “You’ll die. Les, you must lift him out.” Les looked at the Cherb in disgust.
    “Please,” Danny begged. “He saved Pearl. She would have died.”
    With a disgusted look on his face Les rose, grabbed Nala by the shoulders and hauled him into the air. Nala didn’t struggle.
    “I wait for you,” he said quietly. Les flew back over the fences, Nala dangling beneath him. Danny writhed in pain.
    “Go, Dixie!” She started to protest, but his expression frightened her. “Please,” he moaned. Dixie hesitated, then disappeared.
    Danny knelt and took Pearl’s hand. She turned her head. He could see the glint of blue through her swollen eyelids.
    “What’s happening to you?” she whispered.
    “Talk to me,” he said, “tell me what I was like when I was small.”
    “When you were small? You remember the time you made a race car out of the old bath in the garden? I found you with a saucepan on your head. You were convinced you’d driven to the North Pole.”
    “Keep talking,” Danny pleaded. Pearl spoke of his childhood, of baths and bedtimes, of toys and teddy bears, until the moment when Les plucked her gently from the ground and took off over the barbed-wire fences of the camp. When Danny saw that they had reached a safe distance, he bowed his head, weariness overtaking him. He no longer had to resist.
    T en miles away, Conal, flying hard, saw a blue flash and heard a boom rolling across the hills. He smiled grimly. The first part of Longford’s plan had come to fruition.
    T wo hours later, helicopters hovered over the base site, spotlights focused on the desolation below. No buildings had been left standing. The fence posts that once held barbed wire were charred sticks. Teams of heavily armed special forces combed the wreckage. Firemen directed their hoses onto smoldering rubbish. It would have been impossible to keep it quiet: the force of the blast had shattered windows for miles around. Television news helicopters replaced the military choppers over the site as the air force began to focus its attention on the countryside and woods around the base.
    Silent residents stood in clusters in nearby towns and villages. There had been rumors of a possible terrorist attack, but they had never thought it would come to their quiet backwater. None of them had any idea what the installation had been used for, or what and whom had beencarried by the trucks that drove through at night. They stayed outside until their radios and televisions told them that there might be one or more dangerous fugitives in the area; then they went into their houses, locked their doors and waited for dawn.
    High in the hills above the wreckage, Dixie and Les lay on their stomachs, looking down.
    “What have you done, Danny?” Dixie said.
    “He can’t have survived,” Les said, glancing back at a semiconscious Pearl. In a nightmare flight from the installation, they had half dragged, half carried her this far. She knew little about what had happened; she was tormented in mind and body.
    “Of course he survived!” Dixie said fiercely. “But what are we going to do?”
    “The only place Pearl will be safe is Wilsons,” Les said. “I could fly back and get help, but I don’t know which way to go. What’s that damn Cherb doing?”
    Nala had tumbled a pile of logs onto the ground and was arranging them in a triangular