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.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
OTHER MONSTERS
“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.