Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City) (17 page)

Fleeter tapped his arm and pointed. Across the other side of the open area, which must have been the size of a football pitch, several metal containers seemed somehow out of place. They'd been placed side to side in two distinct
arrangements, one consisting of four units, the other three. Electrical cable was strung around them, and around them were the signs of a well-used compound. Oil drums were stacked beside one, pallets held plastic containers of food and water. Spare tyres, a row of portable toilets, stacked bags of rubbish, and there were even several large, open tents.

They're settled
, Jack thought.
Safe. At ease
. He could not hold back the smile. And then from below, a shouted warning.

“Stop right there!” Across the clearing, men and women brought up their weapons and pointed them at the intruders. Some of them edged sideways until they aimed from behind vehicles. Others went to their knees, rifles propped against shoulders.

Sparky, Jenna, and the others had emerged from the maze of containers and now stood at the edge of the open area. Breezer glanced back, and Jack realised for the first time how nervous the man was. He'd spent the past two years trying to avoid Choppers. Now he was offering himself to them, in full knowledge of what they did.

“Stay strong, not long now,” Jack muttered. Beside him, Fleeter giggled. He ignored her.

The man next to Breezer lowered his head and looked at his feet, and Jack just caught his words. “Drop your weapons.”

From across Camp H, the clatter and clash of guns being dropped.

“That's us,” Jack said, turning to Fleeter. She raised an eyebrow at him, licked her lips as she looked him up and down, and then vanished with a
crack!
and a swirl of dust.

Jack concentrated, grasped the talent, and did the same.

“You don't seem surprised,” Rook said.

“Seen it before.”

“On TV or something, yeah?”

Lucy-Anne shook her head. Rook frowned, but said no more.

The sculpture was huge, outlandish, and it seemed even stranger now that there was no one left to appreciate it. The table was thirty feet tall, plain, square-edged. An equally plain chair was tucked halfway beneath it, and together they dwarfed the landscape. Lucy-Anne couldn't shake the unsettling conviction that she, Rook, and the surroundings were too small, rather than the table and chair being too large. It was dizzying and unreal, but she was not too concerned with what she saw now.

It was what might come next that concerned her.

“Nomad's here,” she said. Farther up the slope, shadows moved slowly uphill.

“So did you dream that as well?” Rook's voice was loaded with doubt, and she looked at the boy who was barely older than her, his dark beauty belying the dreadful things he was capable of.
I saw him having his face eaten off
, she thought, but already she could not recall whether that had been a dream and what came after was real, or the other way around. Had she really dreamed to re-imagine reality? Or had reality merely followed the course of her dream?

“I'm so glad you're alive,” she said, realising how strange that
must sound to him. She hadn't told him. How could she?
The worm monster ate you, but I dreamed it all differently and now you're not dead
.

“You're strange,” Rook said. For an instant his voice sounded almost childish—as it should sound coming from a boy his age, when adulthood and childhood still crossed paths—and Lucy-Anne laughed out loud. A killer and an innocent, perhaps Rook was no longer capable of subtleties of emotion.

At the edge of the tall tabletop, a silhouette shifted.

“There,” Lucy-Anne breathed, laughter ceasing.

“Oh,” Rook breathed.

Nomad stepped from the table and fell softly to the ground, landing on her feet without causing an impact. Lucy-Anne wondered whether the grass even bent beneath her feet. She looked like a special effect, superimposed on the strange reality of London without any influence on the surroundings.
It's like she's too real and everything else is a shadow
, Lucy-Anne thought, and the idea disturbed her terribly.

“Is that you?” Rook asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You. Is that you doing that?” He was looking at Lucy-Anne, not at Nomad. Denying her presence, not wishing to see her.

“No,” Lucy-Anne said. “Who do you think I am?”

“I don't…” Rook said. He was confused and vulnerable. She didn't like him like this. Not one bit.

Nomad was watching them. Her hair shifted to an absent breeze, her clothes were old and tattered and yet suited her perfectly. Her eyes were piercing. She might have been mad, or scared.

“You,” Lucy-Anne said.
She came to kill me, but that was before my dream. Or is this my dream?

“And you,” Nomad said. She started walking forward, raising her fisted hand as if ready to open it palm-up, presenting something
for Lucy-Anne's perusal. But this was death she brought with her. She could scorch Lucy-Anne to a cinder with a gasp, blast her apart with a blink, crush her into a smear across the wild landscape with one stamp of her boot.

“I'm sorry,” Nomad said, and the wretchedness did not sit well with her strength.

But things had already changed.

“I dreamed of you,” Lucy-Anne said, “and you won't kill me here.”

The woman frowned, then—

—she opened her hand. But everything had suddenly changed. The power she had been nurturing in her fist ready to blast the girl and her bird-boy to nothing but memory had become something else; a swarm of flies, flitting to the air and dispersing from view. And Nomad was glad.

The fear she had felt whenever she thought or dreamed of the girl had changed into a stunned fascination. And she was pleased.

The girl has to die
, she thought. She closed her eyes briefly and recalled the visions from her dream—the mushroom cloud, the blast-wave levelling what was left of London, and her boy Jack meeting his end before he had even touched a fraction of his potential.

She felt herself steered towards other actions. She experienced a flush of déjà vu, as if she had dreamed this same scene a thousand times.
Now I walk forward and squat in the grass, the boy cannot accept me because I trouble him so, but the girl talks to me. We exchange information, discuss plans. We are like friends
. Yet she had never dreamed of this meeting before. Not like this, and not with this result. The girl had been a horror in her imagination, but now she was rapidly becoming something else.

Nomad lowered her hand and walked towards the girl. She was confused, frowning. Shaking her head.
I am my own woman
, she thought, but the startling déjà vu remained. She grasped onto it for as long as she could, because for the first time in years Nomad did not feel responsible. She was not master of her own actions, and she could allow a small weight, at least, to lift from her shoulders.

In that moment of clarity she understood that her guilt would have killed most people, but she had borne it with madness. Perhaps because she sought a way to put everything right.

Maybe she is the way
.

“But no one knows me,” Nomad said.

“It doesn't matter,” the girl said. “My name is Lucy-Anne, and I think you can help.”

Nomad went to her knees and ran her hands through the long grass, really connecting with the world. Heat grew behind her face. For the first time since she had become Nomad, she began to cry.

Rook stayed close to Lucy-Anne for a few more moments. She could hear his heavy breathing, sense his fear, and when he reached for her hand she took it and squeezed. His rooks were circling high above, and many had landed in the tree bordering this open land to the north. She had never seen them so far away from him.

“I need to…” Rook said. He let go and turned his back on the woman, retreating a dozen steps before sitting down and looking out over London.

“He doesn't believe in me,” Nomad said. Her voice was smooth, authoritative, even though Lucy-Anne had seen the glimmer of tears.

“I'm sure he does, otherwise he wouldn't be scared.”

“I saw you,” Nomad said. “In dreams.” There was more, but the beautiful, terrifying woman frowned and fell silent.

“Me too,” Lucy-Anne said. “And every time I saw you, the world blew up.”

“Yes,” Nomad breathed.

Lucy-Anne went almost close enough to touch and then kneeled before her. They breathed the same air. She could smell fire and death, and the scent of London turned to dust. But she could not be afraid.

“I don't know if this changes anything,” Lucy-Anne said. “Don't know if I can alter something that big.”

“Alter?”

“In my dreams.” Lucy-Anne blinked and caught a brief, terrifying image of the world behind and around Nomad aflame, rolling waves of fire and destruction sweeping across Hampstead Heath and reducing the weird sculpture behind her to splinters, and ash.

“You're very special too,” Nomad said.

“That's why you came to kill me?”

“I came to…I did. But no more.”

“It's bigger than us both,” Lucy-Anne said. “But where does it come from? What is it? Is that their final way of getting rid of their London problem forever?”

“It's
my
London problem.”

“Don't kid yourself. While you wander around being all new-age, the Choppers are using everyone and everything. Maybe the bomb…maybe it's what happens when they've nothing left to find out.”

“They'll always have more to find out,” Nomad said, voice strong with certainty. “They've barely scratched the surface.”

“Maybe they've scratched it and not liked what they've found.”

“And you,” Nomad said, looking her up and down. “What about you? Came in from outside. Weren't here. Untouched by my Evolve.”

“I've always had strange dreams,” Lucy-Anne said. “Since coming into London, they've been growing stronger.”

“You're in a place where you don't have to hold back anymore,” Nomad said.

“I've never held back. Not consciously. Just…never really understood.”

“You've been scared of what you can do. Now you're not so scared anymore. You're…" She leaned forward, breathing in as if smelling Lucy-Anne. “You're amazing. Everything I wanted to find, before this. Everything I wanted people to be. I knew you were out there, and those like you. With Evolve, I wanted to change everyone.”

“Without even asking them if you could.”

Nomad glanced away, perhaps distracted, perhaps shamed.

“I saw someone living in a pit in the ground, like a giant worm. A dog-woman pissing against a tree. And there must be others.”

“Other monsters, and so many dead.”

She carries such weight
. Lucy-Anne could hardly question the woman's madness, because how else could she cope with the scope of what she had done?

But this was not about Nomad.

“I'm looking for my brother. Andrew. I've been told he's here on the Heath, and I need to find him. He's all I have left.”

“All? What about…?” Nomad pointed to Lucy-Anne's head, waved a hand around her own.

“The things we see?” Lucy-Anne asked. “They're just…things we see. Not all dreams come true.”

“But this one is dreamed by us both.”

Yes
, she thought.
I wish I could change my dreams
.

“Please help me find Andrew. He'll be my strength. Then together, maybe we can find out what it means.”

“I'll do everything I can to stop it,” Nomad said. “Everything. I have to make amends, and my London needs to remain for me to do so.”

“Your London?”

They stared at each other for a while, both strong and determined, both troubled by visions neither of them really understood.

“Andrew,” Nomad said. “Let me see him.” She reached forward for Lucy-Anne's face, fingers splayed.

“You'll find him?”

Nomad touched her. Lucy-Anne felt a rush of memories of Andrew, from when they were younger all the way to the last time she had seen him. They fought and argued and loved like brother and sister, and her tears came strong and unbidden.

“I've
found
him,” Nomad said. She stood, turned, and before Lucy-Anne could say any more, she was gone.

Nomad ran. Flowed. Drifted. London moved beneath her, and she crossed the Heath like a memory.

Lucy-Anne's brother was a warm point in her mind; a collection of senses and echoes, a smear of colour, a splash of light. She was already closing in on him, and knew that he would be easy to find. Of course. She was Nomad.

As she moved, it began to feel like something fundamental about her had changed. In the girl, she had encountered something she did not understand, a talent she could not ascribe to the Evolve she had released across London.
I went to kill her and came away her friend
, Nomad thought. Though inexplicable, that was something that pleased her. But the change seemed deeper, and she extended her awareness to analyse it.

All around, the monsters moved. She saw them and felt them, and sensed how troubled they had suddenly become.
What's this?
she thought. She passed a gathering of shadows hiding beneath a copse of trees, and though they watched her, she was not the cause of their turmoil. There was something else, deeper.

They are not such monsters
, she thought. And it came as a shock.
Something else she had learned today, another surprise, and Nomad felt suddenly more human than she had for some time. There were things she did not know. Assumptions she had made. She slowed her run and spread her perception, and beneath the wild veneer she discovered a world of complexity and intelligence surrounding her, and echoes of continuing agony at the radical changes that were still taking place.
Not such monsters at all
.

She wanted to stop and examine. Their minds were suddenly deep and expansive, their thoughts and aims open to view, as if she had broken through the crust of their monstrousness to discover endless potential beneath.

Even Nomad, it seemed, was guilty of preconception.

But she did not have the time. Their true natures were open to her because something troubled them deeply, and their defences—that crust of camouflage—were down. They ebbed and flowed across the Heath, and she passed through the tides of their discontent, closing on the sharp image of the girl's brother. He suddenly seemed so very important, and this all felt connected.

“Everything is changing,” Nomad said. Something called out loud in agreement. Another voice added a growl. She saw the source of neither, and did not seek them out.

Soon, Andrew was close. She closed on a dilapidated folly tower on top of a gentle rise, and though the door had been bricked up decades ago, she knew that he was inside.

“Andrew,” she said, standing at the foot of the tower.

Andrew emerged from the folly. He stepped through the solid stone blocks filling the doorway and dropped gently to the ground.

“You're dead,” she said, wondering how this could be. Nomad had been a scientist, and she had never believed in ghosts.