“What about you?” Skye asked.

Mitzi had only opened her mouth to reply when the ground under her feet shook, throwing her off balance. Dust rained from the ceiling, and the walls shook, seeming to sway, as metal squealed.

“No!” Mitzi thought of the pipes that would be running out from the reactor to feed into different parts of the stations. They were full of the Cymics, too, and if those Cymics decided to exert their full force against the pipes… “They’re trying to collapse the station.”

“They are collapsing the station.” Nic was typing furiously. “Get out of there!”

“The detonator’s in the maintenance room.”

Nic swore. “Well, you’re not getting it back. The station’s being crumbled from the lowest levels up. You’ve gotta move before they get to you.”

Mitzi could feel the intense, raw power below her feet, rising closer with a deafening rumble. The concrete floor cracked in huge black gashes, an arm-width wide and growing larger. She stepped back to be clear of them. “Door!” she hissed. “Open the door!”

Skye wrenched open the sliding doors, but she was barely in time to leap backwards as the outside corridor crumbled. Then the walls and roof smashed down to block the passage. The ground under them heaved again, throwing them closer to the pit. Mitzi, who was closest, hit the concrete barrier and threw out a hand to grab Eoin before he went over the edge. She twisted to see into the pit, and sick nausea grew in her stomach. The mass of Cymics continued to rise, stretching out immense tendrils the width of tree trunks. Thousands of pale shapes loomed out of the darkness, but Mitzi didn’t recognise what they were until she focussed on the nearest one and stared into the blank white eyes of a human face. The parasites were raising their skins.

“Step back!” Nic screamed, his voice hoarse.

Mitzi tried to stagger back towards the doors, but the ground had tilted, turning into a funnel, as the floors behind them rose, shooting up jagged shards of concrete and a flood of water from burst pipes. It was too steep to climb while the floor was shaking, and the plumes of dust were making it nearly impossible to see. Mitzi was thrown onto her back and felt herself sliding down the slope, towards the reaching, grasping arms of the Cymics. She tried to scramble backwards, but she found it nearly impossible to grip anything while the ground tossed her about like a rag doll. Her feet hit the concrete barrier—the only thing standing between her and an inevitable plunge into the maw of the monsters below—and Mitzi bit down on a scream as the concrete began to crumble.

A boom, so loud that Mitzi thought it must have deafened her, rocked through her, and she understood why Nic had told her to move back. The roof was falling. A huge circle, directly above the Cymic pit, plunged downwards, breaking into a multitude of fragments as the supports failed to hold the immense bulk together. It hit the reaching tendrils, crushing them back down into the pit. Mitzi spotted two small shiny shapes clinging to one of the pipes jutting out of the top of the collapsed roof.