“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.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE HOLLOW GIRL
“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.