Free The Border Part Eight by Amy Cross

spending his whole life… Well, whatever he’s doing down there, he should be happy.” She paused. “Do you think he’ll ever be finished with the Border?”
    Jane looked up at the stars for a moment as she contemplated her answer. “I think one day I’ll come to meet him and he won’t show up,” she said finally, “and I think that’ll be the end of that.”
    “So you don’t think he’ll get to the last level?”
    “I think if he does, he won’t have the strength to come back. I think whatever he finds there…” She paused, before turning back to Lucy. “I should have stayed down there with him, but I had Stuart and Oliver to think of, I couldn’t leave them behind to go fight whatever’s in the Border. Ben could do that, finally someone was willing to make the sacrifice, and all of Bowley should thank him except… No-one has any idea. He’s fighting the darkness so that the rest of us don’t even have to admit that it exists.”
    They sat in silence for a moment, each of them thinking about Ben making his way wearily down into the depths.
    “Let me know,” Lucy said finally. “I won’t ever tell anyone, but… Let me know if one day he doesn’t show up anymore.”
    Jane nodded.
    “And if he ever does get finished with the Border…” Sighing, Lucy stared ahead, seeing the edge of the town square in the distance and hearing the sounds of people laughing and talking. After a few seconds, all she could think about was the fact that she’d be leaving town soon, and that she’d be living in a city. “Wait,” she said cautiously, with a frown, “what were we just talking about?”
    Jane stared at her niece, before putting an arm around her shoulder and smiling. “I think we were talking about how you’re going to be getting out of town tomorrow, and how you’re going to be moving to the city.”
    “I can’t wait,” Lucy replied. “I mean, I love Bowley, but… This might sound crazy, but do you ever feel as if there’s something dark here, something that people don’t notice?”
    Jane paused. “Like what?”
    “I don’t know. Like, something beneath our feet. It’s just, like, an itch of a thought really, but it’s been nagging at me.”
    “Don’t you remember what just -” Another pause, before finally Jane understood. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said finally. “If there is anything dark here, I’ve got a feeling someone’s taking care of it.”
    ***
    “I think,” the man in the suit said with a frown as he stared at the screen, “maybe we finally have to admit defeat here.”
    He watched for a moment as the screen showed a CCTV image of a man approaching a door. With a shotgun in his hands, the man kicked the door open and stepped forward, before opening fire.
    The man in the suit flicked a switch and the screen switched off.
    “He’s not going to give up,” he muttered. “The Border beneath Bowley is obviously lost.”
    “So should we start working on a plan to start it up again?” the technician asked. “It probably wouldn’t take that long. We could have a team there within a weak, they could deal with the guy who’s causing all the trouble and then, I don’t know, they could probably have a new Border up and running by Christmas.”
    “I don’t know about that,” the man in the suit replied, heading across the room and stopping to look at the vast world map that filled the far wall. Tens of thousands of red lights were showing dotted all over the map, marking locations on every continent. “Maybe the Bowley site should remain closed, as a reminder to us that sometimes, just sometimes, we can still be vulnerable.”
    “But -”
    “I’ve made my decision, and I’ll relay it to the boss.” He turned to the technician. “Bowley is to remain inactive. Ben Freeman is never going to get back up, he’ll just keep going down and down until he reaches…” He paused, and slowly a faint smile crossed his face. “Let him have his little victory.