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They crept their way down the glass corridor, overgrown on the outside with shrubs and weeds and low-hanging trees so that the corridor was lit green. The corridor was floored with straw and dead branches cleared from the middle as though someone had dragged something large and heavy to the same destination they headed for now. They were tense, the two of them. Jules could feel her legs shaking with each step, through a combination of hunger and adrenaline. She didn't betray anything to Jack. He was too intent to notice. They wound their way down the long corridor amid the drumming of rain on the glass overhead, a long protracted thundering that covered the sound of their footsteps. Still no-one came to greet them. Jack held up a hand. They stopped. He listened. A faint rhythmic clicking was audible under the rain. It echoed down the corridor from a bend up ahead. Jules looked questioningly at Jack, who shook his head, pensive. The click subsided. Jack scanned along the corridor, looking for anything which might have changed. Then a loud metallic twang behind them, back down the passage. A rusted wall of cage swung round the corner, a hideous scraping and crash as it hit the glass, which stood firm, and on the cage went, dragged along by a chain on each side the corridor. They ran. The cage was faster though, and gained on them fast. Jules and Jack sprinted, legs burning, not daring to turn, but still the cage wall bore down on them scraping and howling along the glass walls until it was at their backs with its horrific noise - and it clanged to a halt, jammed on a fallen strut in the ceiling. A network of cracks spread through the glass, fine at first, then the size of the tree branches outside. Great splintering cracking sounds echoed down along the passage as the ceiling started to give, then as cracks spread along the panels to the sides of the corridor the first glittering flecks started to fall. These were followed down by larger splinters, until finally the whole long passageway fell apart around them. Jack held Jules to him and they stood there among flying knives and broadswords and guillotine blades of glass, trapped as it all fell, an ear-splitting chorus of crashes all around. Then Jules spotted an opening. She grabbed Jack by the arm and dragged him bodily through the raining glass to a gap in the wall, and hurled him through, diving after him, and dragging him further out of the way of the debris. They watched from under the spreading trees as the whole great glass passageway came down in thunderous noise, until there was nothing standing at all but for the rusted cage wall, until the support which had held it gave out and it rocketed on unchecked, flinging broken glass in its wake. Jack turned to Jules. "Thanks,"he said sheepishly. "There was no way you were surviving in that glass storm," said Jules, "Not with your luck." "True. So what now?" Jules turned to the path of shattered glass along the forest floor. "Follow the cage?" So on they went. |