Hero Rising. Shane Hegarty

back.

      There would be no holiday yet.

      “You really would love Smoofyland,” his mother kept insisting. “You know it’s in Slotterton? It was an old Blighted Village, once filled with Legends, so you never know what might happen.”

      “I’ll be bored and embarrassed, that’s what’ll happen,” said Finn.

      “Smoofyland has a rollercoaster.” She smiled. “The sparkliest rollercoaster ever built.”

      “Exactly,” said Finn.

      

      “Hello,” Finn said as he passed a man sponging down a car.

      “Hello,” said the man from Bubble Blast Car Wash.

      If Finn had stopped to think about it for a moment, he might have noticed that the Bubble Blast Car Wash man was washing the same part of the car over and over. And that he wasn’t really washing it too well anyway, just sort of waving a hand over a windscreen that looked shiny enough as it was.

      But Finn was distracted. Firstly because he had managed to get a glob of Squishy Bar stuck between his teeth, which required trying to dislodge it with his finger. Secondly because he was following two people through the many back lanes of Darkmouth while trying not to be seen. Or heard.

      Hanging back, with a baseball cap pulled low, he dialled a number on his phone. It was quickly answered.

      “They’re talking about cakes, I think,” he whispered down the line.

      “Cakes?” asked Emmie’s voice loudly.

      “Cakes,” replied Finn.

      Ahead of him, two assistants were walking purposefully towards some unknown destination. They wore the greyest of grey, as if someone had designed it specifically to be the least interesting colour ever invented. There were too many of these suits, and the assistants wearing them, around Darkmouth these days. Finn had begun to recognise these two, though. She was Scarlett. He was Greyson. Finn had made it his business to find out what they were up to.

      Scarlett and Greyson stopped.

      Finn nipped behind a bin, pressed in tight against the wall, and listened.

      “Why hasn’t it worked?” Greyson asked. “It should have worked.”

      “We can’t talk about this in public,” said Scarlett.

      “We’ve added the sherbet,” replied Greyson, tapping his head as if hoping an answer would fall out. “We’ve added chocolate. We’ve even experimented with custard.”

      “Please, we can’t—”

      “And no one likes wasting custard.”

      “Stop,” Scarlett ordered him, looking around to see if anyone was listening.

      Finn was so close to them, crouched behind a bin, hardly breathing for fear of being caught. He pressed a hand against his mouth to stop himself making any noise.

      “We have to be careful,” said Scarlett. “The walls have ears.”

      Greyson examined the wall, ran his hand along it.

      “I don’t mean they actually have ears,” said Scarlett. “Come on, let’s go.”

      “If it doesn’t work at the cliff today, we should try rainbow sprinkles.”

      “What did I just say?” Scarlett asked, exasperated.

      They resumed their walk again. From behind the bin, squeezed into the darkness of the narrowest of gaps between buildings, Finn breathed again, mightily relieved they hadn’t heard Emmie on the far end of the phone asking repeatedly, “What’s happening?”

      “I don’t know,” answered Finn, because he didn’t. All he knew was that something was going on. Something had been going on for a while now. Something strange. He’d spotted assistants moving suspiciously in and out and around the town. These two especially.

      “They’re heading for the cliffs. Meet me there,” he said and hung up.

      Using his local advantage over the assistants, Finn ducked into the laneways that criss-crossed Darkmouth. He knew that if he dipped in at Scrapers Lane there would be a shortcut to Red Alley. And if he nipped into the gap between two houses off Red Alley it would bring him to Stump Street, which in turn would allow him a quick route to Limpers Rock.

      He emerged at the beach road ahead of the assistants. At the same time, Emmie arrived from another of the narrow lanes.

      “Hey,” she said. “What do you think those assistants are doing? And why are you wearing a baseball cap that says ‘Cool Dude’?”

      Finn took her elbow and pulled her around to face a shop window.

      Scarlett and Greyson approached along the path. Hunched, with his baseball cap pulled down, Finn hoped they hadn’t noticed himself and Emmie or that the two of them were looking in a shop window long empty except for dead flies and dirt.

      “They’re up to something,” Finn said after the assistants walked past. “They’ve been up to something for a while. We need to find out what.”

      Emmie kept looking at his hat.

      “And the best disguise I could do at short notice was this dumb baseball cap, OK?”

      “You should have grown a moustache or something.” She smiled.

      “This is serious,” Finn said. “Whatever they’re doing, we need to find out what it is so we can have our old lives back. Do you like sharing one toilet with loads of people every morning?”

      “Good point,” she said. “Come on.”

      The assistants climbed a path towards what remained of Darkmouth’s cliffs, a slumped mass of rock and earth on which grass grew and trees clung at precarious angles. They had collapsed when Finn’s grandfather Niall Blacktongue had returned from the Infested Side and exploded in a cave below the cliffs to destroy an army of invading Legends. During that adventure, Finn had also turned into a walking bomb and while he’d had a few explosive moments since, in the months since Gantrua’s invasion he was beginning to feel like the strange energy had finally dissipated, that he had gradually returned to something like normal. The cliff, though, would never be the same again.

      Finn and Emmie took another shortcut, dashing along the stone shore, carefully making their way across the narrow strip of shingle squeezed between the soil and the sea. They clambered up the long, steep slope of weeds and grass just as the assistants arrived from the other direction. The breeze carried their curses as briars caught at their suit trousers, as they stumbled over ground that had