Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City) (4 page)

“Now what?” Sparky asked.

“Now that
you're
changing, Jack, maybe you'll be the one to lead us out. And I truly believe that the only hope of curing what's slowly killing us is to appeal to people outside. There are amazing people in London, but we need doctors and scientists, not diviners and fire starters.”

“You need normal people,” Jenna said.

“Yes,” Breezer said. “The world has to know the truth, because we need their help.”

“Then our plan stands,” Jack said. “Escape London, expose the lie that everyone outside has been told. Reveal the truth.”

“Tell everyone that London isn't just inhabited by monsters,” Sparky said.

“Well, mostly,” Jenna said.

“We'll help you in any way we can,” Breezer said. “But the sickness is spreading, and more and more people are succumbing. Everything's against the clock now, Jack.”

“Not without my mother,” Jack whispered. “And not without my sister.”

“But
you
can lead us! No one has ever been touched by Nomad. Few people have even seen her, and most still consider her a myth! Your powers might be—”

Jack slammed his hand on the table. Cups jumped and spilled water, a plate shook to the floor and shattered. The impact echoed around the office, a haunting sound that slowly faded before anyone spoke.

“I didn't come to start a war,” Jack said. “I'm no leader, and whatever's happening to me…” He was both angry and scared, so he concentrated on something solid that he felt could hold him firm—love. “I'm going for my mother and sister. They're what matters to me. And perhaps at the same time we can stop the girl. Blind the Choppers. Then you won't need
anyone
to lead you out.”

“But no one knows where Camp H is,” Breezer said. “And even if you did, there's no way—”

“There
is
a way.” Jack thought of Reaper, and the sense of fatherhood he'd sensed still within him. He had shunned Jack and sent him away to be hunted by Choppers, and yet Jack would as much give up on his father as he would his mother and sister, Emily.

He stood, and his friends stood with him. “We need to rest,” Jack said. Breezer nodded. But the air had chilled, and the silence that accompanied them back to their room was loaded.

“Are you
crazy
?” Jenna said. “He abandoned you, Jack. Sent you and us away, a ten-minute head start before he let the Choppers come after us again. He doesn't give a shit about you or us. And you want to go out there and find him again?”

Jack nodded.

“Maybe he'll just kill us next time,” Jenna said. “And do you think he'll be that easy to find?” She was standing by the closed door to the small office. Jack leaned in the corner, and Sparky had taken the only seat, plate balanced on his lap with the remains of another burger cooling on it.

“I think I can find him, yes,” Jack said. He breathed deeply, trying to open himself up and not fear anymore. And with the memory of Nomad's finger on his tongue came a rush of startling sensations. Seeds of potential sparked in his mind like stars being born to an empty universe. He let them shine, and chose one.

The ability was shocking and felt unreal, not his to own. And yet one look at Sparky set his friend sweating, gasping for air and loosening his collar. Sweat dribbled down his forehead and cheeks, and as his eyes drooped Jack pulled back, not wishing to make his friend faint.

Sparky spilled his burger to the floor. “That was you?”

“Yeah.” Jack closed his eyes and glimpsed his expanding universe. It was utterly terrifying, and exhilarating. Nomad's touch had been the big bang, and now his inner perception was shatteringly huge, filled with swirling clouds of light coalescing into points of potential. He could move in the blink of an eye, and from one moment to the next he would be orbiting one power, or another. He knew them, and knowing scared him. This was so new. Still chaotic. Dangerous.

“Well, I'm with Jack,” Sparky said.

Jenna looked frightened, uncertain.

“Don't be scared,” Jack said, moving towards her.

“I'm not,” she said, but she waved her hands at him, urging him back. “Well, I am, I
am
scared. But we're together. That's it, I suppose. We're together, and nothing comes between us. So if you think you can find him and get him to help, that's what we do.”

“Yeah!” Sparky said. “Friends forever! We should cut our thumbs and be blood brothers. And sister.”

“Oh, Sparky,” Jenna said, shaking her head.

They just smiled at each other instead.

I see a woman laughing in the face of a mushroom cloud
. Lucy-Anne wished she could say this to Rook, and make him understand her confusion and desperation. But it was only a dream. And surely not
all
dreams could come true.

Besides, it was thoughts of her brother that drove her. With her parents dead, and likely buried in those mass burial pits that she and the others had walked across only days ago (and
that
was something she'd dreamed as well), he was all she had left.

Andrew. Five years older than her, he'd always been the sensible one, the apple of her mother's eye even though Lucy-Anne knew that her father had a soft spot for her own mild rebellious streak. When Andrew was revising for his exams, Lucy-Anne would be out with her friends, choosing makeup her mother never liked her wearing and clothes that were really too adult for a thirteen-year-old. He played football for his school. She played hooky
from
school. Deep down he'd made her jealous, and she'd annoyed the hell out of him. But she'd never loved him as much as she did now that he was gone.

Rook had taken them down to the river, and now they were working their way west. He'd told her there were easier routes north from that direction. The Thames was sluggish and thick as gravy, and Lucy-Anne tried to see aspects that did not remind her of her dream. There were no bodies floating in the river today, for a start. It was also unmarred by fallen buildings. There were several half-sunken boats, and in the distance she could see a logjam of ruined craft piled against a bridge's central upright. But it was the movement
of water that troubled her. Unstoppable, uncaring of what had happened in London, the water flowed towards a future she hoped she did not know.

“When do we go north?” she asked again. She'd been asking Rook the same question for the last hour, and after the first couple of times he'd stopped answering. Now he turned around and sighed, and for a moment his eyes were as black as the rooks that followed him.

“Soon,” he said. “Need to see someone first.”

“Who?”

“You want my help?”

Lucy-Anne nodded.

“Then let me do it my way. You don't know London, and have no idea of the dangers.”

“Oh, I do have an idea, you know what happened—”

“You have no idea.” He spoke softly, the words filled with such dread and certainty that Lucy-Anne could not reply.
What has he seen? What does he know?
Rook had been trapped alone in London for two years, surviving, living with the strange gift thrust upon him, and she knew so little about what his life had become, and what had come before. She silently vowed that she would find out.

“This way.” Rook nodded along the embankment path, then glanced up at the summer-blue sky. Rooks floated on air currents high overhead. Others fluttered from building to building. Lucy-Anne could only see a dozen birds, but knew there must have been many more out of sight.

“Don't they give you away?” she asked.

“Most keep their distance until I need them.”

“Most?”

Rook nodded up at the birds circling high overhead. “Some become so…obsessed that I can't shake them.”

“Obsessed with you?”

Rook smiled. It was the dangerous and deadly face she had first seen, and somehow it comforted her more than the Rook mourning his lost brother. It made her feel safer.

They moved cautiously but quickly along the Thames's south bank, passing the National Theatre. Hills of litter had blown against its walls and slumped there, dampened and hardened again into a permanent addition to the building. Windows were smashed. Lucy-Anne had no wish to see what might be inside.

She wondered where her friends were now. Rook had told her they had not been caught by the Choppers, knowledge presumably imparted to him by his birds. She hoped they had escaped London. But at the same time she realised that was unlikely, because Jack would never leave without his mother and Emily. A pang of guilt hit Lucy-Anne again, the same guilt that had plagued her on and off since she'd met Rook and realised that she had abandoned her friends back in that hotel.

She'd been mad, for a time. Driven to distraction by the sudden news of her parents’ demise. She should have controlled herself and borne the news better, but after two years of hope, and loneliness, and their journey into London with fresh hope drawing them all the way in, the information had been just too shattering. Somehow in her madness she had managed to sneak out of the hotel while the Choppers had been infiltrating it, and then out into the streets of London, shouting and raging at the unfairness of it all until Rook had found her. Even now she felt the dregs of that madness at the edges of her perception, and it was being nurtured by the new, terrible dreams she was experiencing. She had dreamed of Rook, and he had dreamed of her, and however much she tried to deny it she could not escape this fact.

I'm not special!
she had thought, again and again. But Rook called her pure, just like his dead brother, possessing an ability
unconnected to what had happened to toxic London. And in truth, she'd always known there was something different about her.

When she was younger, she had experienced frequent moments of what her parents had called déjà vu.
Mummy, this has happened before…you picking up the phone, Daddy walking in the door, next door's dog running across the road…

Déjà vu which, over time, Lucy-Anne had come to realise were dreams relived. It had troubled her little, because they had rarely concerned anything important—a phone call, a running dog. Perhaps exposed to such wonders in London, her talent was now somehow given free rein. Allowed to grow.

As for her friends…Her madness had given way to determination—to find Andrew—and hate it though she did, that meant that her friends were not her top priority. They would look after themselves.

“And when I've found Andrew, I'll go back to them,” she said. Rook glanced back at her, but she did not elaborate. Whether he'd heard or not, he did not pass comment.

He paused by a set of stone steps, head tilted as if listening. Then he nodded and climbed, and Lucy-Anne followed. As they started crossing the long bridge spanning the Thames, Lucy-Anne could not figure out why so many people had discarded their clothes here, leaving them in rumpled piles that all seemed to trail away from a common point. Then she saw the first flash of white, and the first spread of damp dirty hair, and realised her mistake.

There must have been a hundred bodies on the bridge. They had all been running north when they fell, and some even had their arms stretched out as if to grasp the northern shore. The breeze lifted strands of hair and the flaps of rotting clothing. The corpses were mostly rotted away, leaving bones and shreds of dried skin behind.

Lucy-Anne found it sad more than shocking. So many husbands
and mothers and brothers lay here, so many children, and all of them had left someone behind.

“It's horrible,” she whispered. Rook seemed surprised, but said nothing.

They crossed the bridge, and until they reached the northern shore Lucy-Anne did not look along the river at all. She glanced at the bodies she passed, and the abandoned vehicles, and imagined what those bereaved believed about the deaths of their loved ones. At the beginning they had been told the truth about the explosion at the London Eye and the release of some unknown toxic agent. But very soon after that the lies had begun. Now they were told that London was filled with the dead and would not be habitable again for a thousand years.

London Eye
, Lucy-Anne thought, and then leaned against the bridge's parapet and stared along the river.

There it was. Perhaps she'd known since first stepping onto the bridge, and had been unwilling to look. But now she could see the remains of the great London Eye, the giant Ferris wheel that used to carry more than a million people annually, giving them a stunning view of London. Motionless now, the Eye was a sad echo of great, past times.

She fisted her hands, doing her best not to look away. It did not look familiar. That was a blessing, at least. In her dream, the Eye had been a mass of tumbled metal and shattered pods, but in reality it was surprisingly intact, bearing a scar towards the top where several pods had fallen away and some of the structure was bent and charred with fire.

“It's not what I saw,” she whispered.

“What is it?” Rook asked.

“The Eye.” She suddenly had no wish to tell him about her dream of the woman and the explosion. It felt private.

“Where it all began,” he said. But he sounded uninterested, and a moment later she heard his footsteps retreating across the bridge.

Lucy-Anne looked the other way along the river, northeast towards St. Paul's. She kept her eyes wide open until they started to sting. There was no flash, no mushroom cloud consuming London. She listened to Rook retreating across the bridge behind her, knew that he would wait, and no one else appeared.

For now, Nomad remained locked away in that strange dream.

A rook landed on the parapet close to her. She took a good look at the bird, breathing softly and feeling a strong sense of purpose. She was more settled than she had been since first undertaking their journey into London, because now she knew where she was going, and why.

“Come on, then,” she said to the bird. She turned to follow Rook and the bird took off, dipping low across the bridge and plucking a morsel from the gutter.

Rook was waiting at the end of the bridge, crouched low to the parapet and looking around. As she approached Lucy-Anne became more cautious, but there was no danger in his stance.

“So where are we going?” she asked.

“A museum.”

“Right. Cool.”

“We need to see someone.” He stood from his crouch, and suddenly seemed taller than he had before, darker.
I have no idea who he is
, Lucy-Anne thought, and for the first time since fleeing her friends at the hotel she was truly afraid for herself. There was no one else around. Rook could do whatever he wanted to her, here and now, and if she fought back, he had his birds to fight for him. She had dreamed of them attacking her.
Not all dreams come true!

“Who do we need to see?”

“Oh, her name doesn't matter. Come on.”

“My brother! Andrew! You said we'd be going north to find him, and—”

“North is a big place,” Rook said. “And if you think what you've seen so far is dangerous, and awful…well, get ready to have your eyes opened.”

Unsettled by this strange boy, and with her brief madness now diluting to allow true fear to settle, Lucy-Anne followed.

Rook led them inside the London Transport Museum, looking casual but alert, and he held an entrance door open long enough for a dozen rooks to drift in past him. They moved silent as shadows, echoing his caution.

The huge building was quiet and cavernous. Rook surprised Lucy-Anne by taking her hand and guiding her across a wide walkway, glancing back and putting a finger to his lips when she tapped him on the shoulder. His grin troubled her. Not because it was frightening, but because it was…

It was beautiful. Her heart skipped a little. She was confused. But in truth, perhaps someone like Rook was what she had always wanted. Jack was sweet and sad and would always be one of her best friends. But he was not dangerous.

Lucy-Anne's rebellious nature had only grown deeper after Doomsday, and Rook seemed to embody everything she had wished for.

A rook landed on the boy's shoulder. He tilted his head and listened to its call.

“She's still here,” he said. “Come on. Slowly. Stop when I tell you. Last time I came, she'd found a machine gun somewhere.”

Lucy-Anne, still full of questions, merely listened to what Rook said and let him lead her.

In the great display hall, they moved slowly between an array of old London buses until a shadow appeared in the doorway of one.

“You come back to taunt me again, you bastard?” the woman shouted. Her voice shocked the silence, and several rooks cried out and spiralled up into the high rafters. “I'll shoot ’em! I'll blast your birds from the sky, you freak!”

“Shoot away!” Rook said, and Lucy-Anne knew that he meant it. He seemed to have no love for the birds he was so close to. She'd seen him direct hundreds of them against a helicopter's blades and engines, the resultant stew of blood, bone, and feather dropping the aircraft heavily to the ground. He'd done so without compunction, and with no sign of regret.

“Who's that with you, bird boy?”

“A friend who needs your help.”

“Ha!” The woman stepped forward, and Lucy-Anne caught her first good look. She must have been fifty or sixty years old, short and thin, her hair bound with thousands of colourful beads. The gun in her hands looked ridiculously large. But she looked capable and confident, and nowhere near friendly.

“So…what can you do?” Lucy-Anne asked. Rook squeezed her hand hard, as if to say,
Shut up!
But the woman grimaced and raised the gun.

“Nothing for you Superior bastards,” she said.

“He's not one of them,” Lucy-Anne said, ignoring another squeeze from Rook. “And neither am I. I'm from outside, and I've come into London to find my brother.”