Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City) (19 page)

The girl was light, emaciated, hungry, and might well have been dead. But he could sense her life, and something about it was unbelievably strong. Without even trying—without clasping a talent—he could tell that she was alive, and furious, and that he would get to know her well. That was not some prescient thought, but a silent vow.

“They must be keeping my mother and sister in the other containers,” Jack said as he followed Fleeter down the boxy steps.

“If they're not dead already.”

“We have to look.”

The scene was much as they had left it…but not
quite
. The Choppers across Camp H were all backing away, confused at whatever had compelled them to drop their weapons. Beyond, Sparky and Jenna had taken half a step forward, and Breezer, the Irregulars, and Puppeteer were all advancing as well.

Fleeter glanced across at the other conjoined containers, then up behind Jack. “Out of time,” she said, pointing.

From atop a stack, something was growing. Jack frowned, squinting against the light. Even the sunlight felt slow.

“What's that?” he asked.

“They've started shooting,” Fleeter said.

“Shit.”

“We've got maybe a minute before—”

“You go,” Jack said, nodding down at the girl in his arms. “And take her with you.” He was now more convinced than ever that the other three containers formed a prison. A cattle truck, where they kept the subjects for their gruesome, inhuman experiments.

“You really want to play a lottery for whom that bullet's aimed at?” Fleeter said. She was pointing up, and Jack could now see a metallic smear to the air ahead of where the flash of gunfire and smoke was blooming from high up.
I'm watching a bullet travel through the air
, he thought, amazed. It was just about the only thing visibly moving.

Neither of them knew whom the shooter had been aiming at.

“Damn it.”

They hurried back across the clearing towards their friends and allies, and as they reached them Jack saw a smear of blood hazing the
air around the girl's face and across her chest. She was bleeding from her nose and eyes, but he had no time to help her right then. He set her gently on the road.

“Hurry!” Fleeter said. Jack glanced back and saw the silvery trace of the bullet. It was already halfway between the sniper's rifle and its intended target, and Fleeter was standing at Reaper's side. “Remember, gentle,” she said. “Just ease them aside. It'll hurt, but if you shove them over into the ground, the impact might kill them.”

“Did it kill those guards?” he asked, but Fleeter did not answer. She was guiding Reaper to one side, lovingly, reverently, and Jack had to look away. That was his father she worshipped. A man he loved, and now the most brutal person he knew.

No, not quite. That title now went to Miller.

He stood in front of Sparky and Jenna and turned to watch the bullet, tracking its path. “It's him,” Jack said. “Fleeter, it's my dad.”

“Safe now,” she said. “Kneel by the girl, flip back, make sure they see her.”

“You think we can stop this now the first shot's been fired?”

She looked around more urgently. “Can't see any more flashes. Come on. Flip.”

With a smack against the dulled air, Fleeter grew dull and motionless in Jack's vision.

He closed his eyes and did the same.

The gunshot and ricochet were deafening.

Jack gasped in a heavy breath, winded, and scooped the girl from the ground.

“Bloody hell!” Sparky said. “Where did you—?”

“We've got the girl!” Jack shouted. “And your torture doctors are dead! One more shot and the rest of you die too. Every…single…
one
of you!”

“Hold fire!” a voice shouted. It was electronically amplified, and Jack recognised Miller right away.

The rush of sound and input shocked Jack. The breeze against his face, his friends’ heavy breathing, the rustle of clothing, mysterious, distant noises from elsewhere in the huge container park or beyond…he heard none of these when he was flipped.
I accelerate
, he thought, but knew that was not quite right. He could not fully explain what he and Fleeter could do.

The girl moved in his arms. She moaned something, and whined, and blood was still flowing from her nose and eyes. She was much too light, and he could feel bones he should not be able to feel. In using her, they had also neglected her. It was so brutal that it made him want to cry, or rage.

He chose rage.

“One more gunshot, you bastards, and you'll only kill one of us!” he shouted, voice echoing from stacked containers around the clearing. “That'll leave the rest, and others you can't see. Check on your torture hole.
Check
it!”

A rustle through the hidden loudspeaker, and then two Choppers jogged from different directions towards the doorway Jack and Fleeter had exited moments before. But they did not need to check. As they approached, a woman crawled into sight in the open doorway. She was on her hands and knees, bloodied head nodding slowly up and down, hair matted with gore. A high, soft keening came from her mouth, but Jack could not pity her.

“We'll kill them,” Miller said. Faceless, voice crackling and distorted through speakers, he was more inhuman than ever. “The ones you want are still alive, but we'll kill them the moment something happens. One of you moves, one of you even
blinks
, and they die.”

“We can be on you in less than a blink, Miller,” Reaper said. His voice was low and casual, but it echoed from metal walls, and grit
vibrated across the ground. Jack could already hear the fury in his father's voice.
Good
, he thought, elated.
Good! He is here to help. He does want Mum and Emily
.

The girl in Jack's arms opened her eyes. “Jamie?” she said.

“No, I'm not Jamie. My name's Jack.”

The girl blinked bloodily, slowly raised a weak hand and wiped at her eyes. She looked at Jack for a few seconds, so sad, so soulful. His heart sank. He could have fallen in love with those eyes in an instant. “Oh,” she said. “You're not Jamie.”

He set her down, but kept an arm around her shoulder. Leaning against him for support, she felt dreadfully cold and weak.

“Every one of you,” Jack said. “Every one of you, Miller! You'll be shooting at shadows, strangled by hands you can't see, seeing things you can't imagine. You think you know what the Irregulars can do, just because you've sliced them up and taken
samples
of their
brains
? You think you have even an inkling of what the Superiors can do, because you lose Choppers to them every week? Do you…do you have any idea what I can do?” He felt the others watching him—his friends, in fear; the Irregulars, nervous and yet ready to fight. And his father, with what might have been respect.

The scene fell almost silent. Hidden speakers crackled with Miller's doubt. Choppers stood tensed, uncertain, glancing down at their dropped weapons. Jack, Reaper, and the others faced them. And the girl leaned against Jack, starting to shiver with the knowledge that she had been released.

“We're the New,” Jack said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “The fighting stops now. The killing ends here. You, Miller…you're the old. History. The past. And you know how the saying goes.”

Beside him, Sparky chuckled softly then shouted, “Out with the old!”

“And in with the new,” Jenna said.

“You really think we'd stay in London, here, without protection?” Miller said. “Without an insurance policy?” Jack was sure he could detect a note of resignation in the Chopper's voice.

“No good when you're dead,” Reaper shouted.

“No more killing unless we have to, Dad,” Jack said. Reaper did not even glance at his son as he started forward.

Puppeteer moved Choppers aside. Others backed away of their own accord, leaving their weapons where they had fallen. Jack and his friends followed, Breezer with them, and the New moved across Camp H unopposed.

Yet Jack felt no sense of victory. Something was wrong. The girl by his side was a living expression of Miller's inhumanity, and those rooms he had seen in the container buildings, the jars, the smears of blood and chunks of something—of
someone
—being cleared away….

With all that, could he ever really hope for peace?

As they approached the three joined containers, a door creaked open at the top of a gentle wooden ramp. Miller appeared strapped into a wheelchair, his terribly mutilated legs resting on footplates, his left arm ending in a stump just above his elbow. He looked thin and drawn, corpselike and lessened. Yet it was his smile that shocked Jack the most.

“Like your new chair, Miller,” Reaper said. “Maybe this time I'll take your other arm, and your cock, and one of your eyes. Then how will you—”

Miller started laughing. He tilted his head back and guffawed at the sky, and Sparky and Jenna shot Jack a glance that said everything he was already thinking.

Something terrible was about to happen.

“We need to leave,” Rook said. “Really. Now. We're going the wrong way, Lucy-Anne!”

“Leave if you want, I'm going the
right
way.”

They had been following Nomad since she had left. At least, Lucy-Anne had been leading them north. And soon after the strange woman had seemingly abandoned them, things had started to change. The wilderness around them had grown wilder, and more shapes and shadows made themselves known. They darted across hillsides and huddled beside lush growths of shrubs, and though the two of them kept to the open spaces, Lucy-Anne feared that soon they would meet more residents of the Heath.

Dusk approached, crawling across the hillsides like a living thing and driving the sun into the western expanses of London. Rook's birds drifted along above them like echoes of night, turning and spiralling up into the sky before swooping down again. Lucy-Anne was becoming used to their constant flap and swoosh, and she feared not hearing that anymore.
He's scared, he's terrified, and if he leaves me I'll be just as scared.

Something burst from the trees ahead of them and came rapidly down the slope. Rook grasped her shoulder and pulled himself in front of her, squatted down, ready for a fight. He sent his birds and they angled in towards the shape, but then veered away at the last moment. Their
caw-caws
sounded panicked to Lucy-Anne, and she dreaded meeting what could scare them so much.

But it was Nomad, only Nomad, and she grew from shadows to meet them.

Lucy-Anne went to her knees.
I've found him
, Nomad had said, and if that were the case, where was Andrew now?

“I'm…sorry,” Nomad said. It was the most emotion Lucy-Anne had heard in her voice.

She took the gold chain and signet ring from Nomad's hand. Their parents had bought Andrew the ring for his eighteenth birthday, and the chain had been a present from one of his first girlfriends. His parting with her had been difficult, yet for some reason he'd still worn that chain, and treasured it. She'd once asked him why, and he'd told her it was because it reminded him of good times, not bad. She loved that about him—his positivity, and optimism.

“Where…?” she asked.

“It doesn't matter,” Nomad said. “You don't want to see.”

I'll sleep
, she thought.
I'll fall asleep and dream him alive and fine and laughing, and when I wake up…

Lucy-Anne could not find her tears. She realised that she had not even cried for her parents, because from the moment their deaths had been confirmed to her everything had been Andrew, Andrew, all Andrew. And now…

“I've got nothing left,” she said. She felt Rook's hand on her shoulder and remembered his dead brother, but it was Nomad she looked at. “Nothing. Nothing left at all. And…and you killed him. You killed my parents, and my brother.”

Nomad's expression barely changed, but she did not look away.

Lucy-Anne knew she should be feeling rage at Nomad, and the Choppers, and everything that had happened to steal away her family. She should be grieving for her brother, who she had hoped would still be alive so that she was not now alone in this cruel new world. But she felt only a peculiar emptiness. Everything was distant to her, and she was a hollow girl.

“We need to get away from the Heath,” Rook said. “Night's falling, and it feels strange. Like something terrible's about to happen.”

“Something already is,” Nomad said. And she told them.

Running again, always running, and Lucy-Anne so wished she could simply sit somewhere and fill her emptiness with grief.

But she feared that if she did, the grief would consume her. At least running, she had something else to think about. Rook held her hand and she so loved the contact, feeling a rush of affection for him as he squeezed her hand. They had both lost and found someone.

And she refused, totally, to lose anyone else.

On the back of the news about Andrew, Nomad's talk of the fate hanging over London had felt vaguely flat, almost uninteresting. But then Lucy-Anne had thought of Jack and Sparky, Jenna and Emily, and her heart had started sprinting in her chest. No. Not them as well. They were her friends—they had been her family for every second she had been on her own since Doomsday—and she would not let them die.

Running, always running, it took some time to even consider the possibility of her own death. It meant nothing.

Nomad had vanished again, and Lucy-Anne had let her go without a second glance. She could inspire no hatred for the strange woman or anger for what she had done. Perhaps over time, as her hollowness faded, that would come.

“It's not fair,” Rook said, running with her. Birds swirled around them and took turns landing on his shoulders, and he kept tilting his head to hear their calls. They were scouting the way ahead and keeping a watch on their rear. He was doing his best to get them off Hampstead Heath safely, but with every step she sensed danger increasing. There was nothing specific—no shapes darting at them,
no cries of attack—but a sense of doom had dropped over her that had nothing to do with Andrew.

It was the future that terrified her, and with every step they were closer to it.

“I guess maybe I knew he was dead,” Lucy-Anne said.

“Not that,” Rook said. “London. Everything they've done to it, what they've made it. And now…” He sounded like a child, and she could not feel angry at him. He didn't mean to lessen the impact of her brother's death. He had found a place for himself in London, and now everything was about to change again. What of Rook then? What of any of them?

“We'll get out,” she said. “Find my friends, and all of us will get out.”

“But what about my birds?”

You can set them free
, she went to say, but realised that they were an integral part of him. Everyone left in London—Irregulars, Superiors, and anyone in between—belonged there now, and nowhere else.

“Maybe we can stop them,” she said. Rook did not reply. Even if Nomad had stayed with them, it was a foolish idea.

“All these streets,” Rook said. “All this city.” He tilted his head as another rook landed on his shoulder, smiling as he glanced across at Lucy-Anne. “We're close. Just down this slope and through those trees, and we'll be—”

He vanished. Lucy-Anne ran on for a couple of seconds, barely registering what had happened. Her feet stamped through long grass, breeze ruffled through her dirty hair, her jacket flapped at her hips like loose wings. Pain kicked in across the back of her hand where Rook's nails had raked her skin, and as the gashes welled blood she heard his voice.

“Lucy-Anne!”

And then his scream.

She skidded to a stop, turned back and saw the hole in the ground, the stark edges of snapped branches protruding from where they had been laid across the pit. She could not see Rook, but his birds swooped around the pit and spiralled up again, taking up his cry, amplifying and echoing it, and she couldn't tell which was more bloodcurdling. She screamed herself, but did not hear. She smelled blackberries.

Please, no one else!
she thought, because she had already lost too much. She went back to the hole and looked down. She wished the sun had set a little more.

Rook's scream faded as she saw what had happened to him, and with his one remaining eye he looked up at her. She hoped he saw her, but thought he was probably dead already, because the long, pale worm-thing—with its remnant of human limbs and filthy, tangled auburn hair—was pushing its snout deep into the hole it had torn in his throat and up beneath his unhinged jaw. It shook and scrabbled at the ground as it struggled to push its mouth deeper, and Lucy-Anne could smell the stench of freshly spilled blood.

“But I saved you,” she said. “I saved you, I saved you, I—”

A rook tangled on her hair and pecked at her cheek. She swatted it away, then had to squeeze her eyes closed as two more came for her face. She punched at one and clawed at the other, and their cries as they swung away from her were heartrending. Loss rang out across that hillside. Lucy-Anne tripped and fell onto her back in the long grass, and looking up she saw the rooks circling higher and higher, an aerial dance for their dead master.

She crawled to the hole again and looked down, and the worm-thing was eating him now, chewing into his head with awful jaws. A crunching sound, a twitch of his body, and what remained of his face shifted sideways.

Unable to scream, not knowing what to say or do or think, she stood and ran down towards the trees, aimless and thoughtless, until she tripped over something hidden in the grass and smacked her head on the ground.

Vision faded, and sound grew distant.
I don't want to wake up
, Lucy-Anne thought as she drifted away.
Let me stay down here
.

Nomad is running towards her. She is in a burning street somewhere in London—buildings are aflame, a vehicle has exploded, bodies litter the road and pavements, and someone is staggering across the road, crying wretchedly as they try to gather their unspooling guts.

Lucy-Anne holds up her hands, but she cannot speak. She tries to back away from Nomad, but her feet will not obey her. She can do nothing as the woman runs closer, jumping past a burning motorcycle whose flames barely seem to touch her.

In the distance, gunfire. Closer by, the sound of heavy footsteps. Bullets strike the road and kick up gravel and dust.

Everything seems to be converging on her.

Nomad reaches her and does not stop running. She knocks Lucy-Anne to the ground and sits astride her, raising one hand high above her head with two fingers pointing down, like a child forming its hand into a gun.

This is my dream
, Lucy-Anne thinks,
and whatever happens next I can just dream away
.

Nomad's hand strikes down and her stiff fingers punch a hole directly into Lucy-Anne's throat.

But this is my…