Chasing Imagination

Amy

Half of my heart yearned to make up with Casper; the other half refused. As for my mind, well that had sided with the refusing half. Which meant that, for the moment, refusing won. I couldn’t just give in every time. I wouldn’t let myself be so weak. And how dare he take my hand! Who did he think he was?

I could see the sadness in his eyes and the way he refused to talk to anyone tonight; not just me. He had mouthed ‘sorry’ at me, but sorry was a pitiful attempt at an excuse, and I wasn’t going to listen.

I was terrified down here, but I was determined also not to let it show. I wasn’t going to be that weak girl. I couldn’t bear it if he tried to act all protective over me again, but even more than that, I felt like I had something to prove. I was the new girl, undertaking a task so risky that most people would never come anywhere close to doing anything like it, and I knew that they all believed I shouldn’t be here. I believed it too, and I wouldn’t have come if there had been any other choice.

The silence hanging around us screamed. It was too intense; totally unending. The dark was so black that it felt as if we would never see daylight again. Night held London in its tight grasp; it wouldn’t be surprising if day was unable to vanquish it. The air down here was as cold as death, and even the softest footsteps resounded far too loudly on the concrete floor.

‘We’re under the Houses of Parliament now,’ Casper said, so quiet that he barely even breathed the words. I was standing close enough to pick up what he was saying, though.
He got out his gun, ready for an attack, and so the others followed.

And then we saw it.

The opening to Vault One was just ahead.

Sure enough, the entrance to the Vaults really was a hole in the wall. It was far too risky to enter the Vault by any mapped route, so the Dreamers had had no choice but to blow a hole in this otherwise fairly useless tunnel that ran beneath the church and hope that it led through. And they were lucky. Why they hadn’t gone in, I had no idea, but I wished that they had. If they had, we wouldn’t have to be here now.

‘Here we go,’ Casper whispered, eyes resting on two surveillance cameras; one on either side of the walkway. It was almost an understated reaction to the fact we had been picked up on CCTV. After all, it was inevitable. It just meant that we had to be fast. Really fast.

‘Amy, can I borrow your torch?’ Casper asked. Initially, I felt like saying no, but that would have been silly and immature, so I handed it to him wordlessly.

He swung it round, the light resting on the hole leading into the Vaults.

Only, this time, there was a man standing in the entrance.

‘Visitors, are you?’ he jeered, raising his gun to point at Casper.

My reaction was instinctive. He was clicking his gun off safety.

I was the only one who had mine in my hand.

So I pointed it at him, and I fired. Twice.

The first missed.

The second one hit.

The man yelled out in pain with the force of the stun—of course it was only a stun—and, spurred on by the adrenaline pumping through my veins and the cheers of my friends, I fired twice more, hitting him both times. He yelled out again, a long, drawn-out cry, before collapsing, unconscious yet convulsing.

I was shaking as I lowered the gun. Casper looked at me, awe-struck. Linzy cheered.

So why did I feel so damn fantastic?

‘Amy,’ Casper whispered, his voice shaking almost as much as my hands were.

‘I shot someone,’ I said, enthralled as much as I was horrified.

‘It’s only a stun,’ he reminded me kindly, yet in an offhand way. ‘But you might have just saved my life.’

‘Don’t be so melodramatic,’ I said, my turn to be offhand. Linzy burst into hysterical laughter, which made me laugh. The tension that was pulling the nerves in my body so taught was finally released, and I practically staggered forwards.

‘What’s this; a mother’s meeting?’ Leah snapped. For once, she was right. ‘We got to get a move on!’

The tension was back again, stringing my nerves tightly together.

‘Run,’ was the only thing Linzy said.

‘Run,’ Dan echoed. ‘Run, and find that Bible.’

We were five horses, released from our gates at the start of a race. At Dan’s words, we all charged forwards, Casper practically diving through the hole in the wall, and then we were in, in Vault One, and we would have been detected long ago. It was only a matter of time until a plague of guards got down here, swarming in their masses. Our time was limited.

Aside from the fear, though, it felt amazing. I charged into the gargantuan storeroom, which looked not so different from a windowless, darkened warehouse. It was considerably smaller than Vault 14, but no doubt everything in here was considerably more precious.

‘You two that way!’ Casper ordered to Linzy and Dan, pointing off down an aisle almost at random. They charged down, and we charged down the one next to it, scouring the shelves.

There were paintings down here. But not just any paintings; they were paintings that even I had heard of. That meant they had to be seriously famous.

Influential.

That was what Vault One contained: the others contained comparatively meaningless stuff; just clothes and books and music stored because burning them all would be too impractical; a great jumble of anything and everything. In here, though, in Vault One, were some of the most influential and famous, and therefore some of the most dangerous imagination-related artefacts ever to be seen by mankind.

‘Picasso,’ Casper was mumbling as he sifted in awe through the rows of paintings, ‘Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Salvador Dali, the lilies painted by Monet...’ it was like a foreign language to me; I had no idea who many of these people were. But the fact that I even slightly recognised some of them in a world where art was criminal suggested that they must be very, very famous.

‘Some of the most influential works of the 19th and 20th centuries,’ Casper was murmuring, still mesmerised. He seemed to have forgotten about the rush we were in. The art was like a drug to him, and I could see why—it was so beautiful, and so greatly forbidden. He looked at me, eyes wide. ‘Amy, we have to take some.’

‘Are you mad?’ I said, imagining trying to carry great big paintings out of here and across London, totally undetected.

‘Come on,’ he begged in a whisper, ‘we’ll call Nightshade; ask her to send over someone with a car. This is just too good an opportunity to miss.’ I could see the appeal, but trying to get these out onto ground level was a completely ridiculous idea.

‘The smaller ones?’ he asked, begging. ‘Come on. This one—‘ he gestured to one at random; I wasn’t about to even hazard a guess at what it was or who it was by. ‘This one is tiny. And so is this one. Please, Amy.’

I had no idea why he was even asking my permission, but a little part of me yearned to say yes. It was just the rest of me that screamed ‘no way!’

I took one step closer to the shelf, not saying anything, letting my indecision hang in the air as Casper waited in anticipation. I picked up one of the smallest pictures; an abstract painting that I could make no sense of, wondering whether it really would be feasible to take some of the pictures out. I had no clue about anything art related—this was the first time I had ever seen a real painting as opposed to photos in Recent History textbooks or one of the few strictly educational ones in the history museum—but I knew that this stuff was good. These pictures had influenced generations, changed people’s beliefs, started entire revolutions...

‘Casper!’ Linzy called, her voice high. I whipped my head to the side, where she stood at the far end of the aisle. She seemed to be panting, and her eyes were so wide they looked like great globes in her face. ‘Dan’s found it.’

The paintings forgotten, Casper took several hurried steps in her direction.

‘Found...it?’ he asked, hardly daring to hope. I followed, intrigued.

‘Found a bible,’ Linzy said, uttering the sacred word as though it was going to change our lives.