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.”
“Outside,” the woman said. “Outside?” She raised her head and took in a deep, loud breath.
Lucy-Anne felt suddenly dizzy, leaning sideways against an old vehicle and blinking at stars bursting across her vision. In the distance she heard the woman saying something, and then hands grasped her beneath the armpits and she was lowered gently to the ground.
Don’t go don’t go, she thought, but then her vision darkened, and all sounds receded until they were little more than echoes.
She can smell blackberries, and she looks down at her hands, expecting the familiar purple stains from when she’d used to go blackberry picking when she was a little girl. That had been when Andrew was barely a teenager and her parents had loved them both equally. But her hands show no sign of berry juice, and the sun is scorching her scalp. It is still the height of summer, the wrong time for blackberries.
She cannot not see very far because of the bushes and trees. Her surroundings are wild and overgrown, yet there is a definite sense that this was once a maintained, ordered place. A large back garden, perhaps, or a park. There is a wooden bench subsumed beneath one wall of shrubs, and a spine of coiled wire splayed across the ground, once used to mark the edge of a planting bed.
Something swings down from one of the tall trees. It is a man, naked, smeared with some sort of dye, and wearing twigs and leaves in his hair. Plant fronds seem to turn towards him as if he is a new kind of sun. He swipes at her, she ducks, and then he is away through the branches.
A woman sniffs along the ground like a clothed dog. Her nails are incredibly long, and she squats by a tree and urinates. She glances up suddenly, growls, then lopes away.
Rook appears from the shadows and rushes towards her. She knows that he is in danger, she can sense it, yet when she raises a hand to warn him back he only waves. His birds flit around him. At the last moment she finds her voice, but what emerges is a name rather than a warning.
Nomad!
The ground crumples and Rook falls into a deep pit. She hears his cry, and knows as she rushes forward that he is already dead.
What she does not expect is the sight of what is eating him.
She screams—
—and jarred awake, sitting up, panting hard, hand fisted against her chest and feeling her heart’s terrified sprint.
“Calm down, calm down,” a woman’s voice said. It was loaded and distant.
Lucy-Anne was on the floor of an old bus, and in the seat beside her sat Rook. He only glanced at her as she caught her breath.
“What happened?” she asked.
“You fainted,” the woman said. “I took you in.” She was sitting on the stairs heading to the top deck, gun leaning against the wall beside her. She stared intently at Lucy-Anne.
“Took me in?” Lucy-Anne looked around, more to escape the woman’s gaze than out of curiosity. It took only a moment to ascertain that the woman lived here. One double seat was piled high with a ragged assortment of clothing, another with blankets and pillows. There were plastic bottles filled with water, tins of food, and farther along the bus she thought she saw a pile of stuffed toys peering over the metal railing of a seat’s back.
“Yeah,” the woman said. “Hey.”
Lucy-Anne looked back at her.
“You’re seventeen,” the woman said. “Looked after yourself since Doomsday. No virgin, but you haven’t loved for a while. Time of the month in…” she shrugged. “Six days.” Her eyes narrowed and she glanced aside, displaying the first sign of emotion. “You just found out your parents are dead.”
“And my brother’s alive!” Lucy-Anne said. “That’s why Rook brought me here, because you can help.”
“Somewhere to the north,” Rook said.
“Yes. The north. And you’ll not want to find him,” the woman said. “Better off dead. Ever heard that saying, girl? I think it all the time, but don’t have the fucking guts. Huh.”
“Lucy-Anne, meet the charming Sara.”
“I do want to find him!” Lucy-Anne said. “And if you know where he is you have to—”
“Have to nothing,” Sara said. She stood and climbed the stairs, disappearing quickly from sight.
“What is this?” Lucy-Anne asked.
“She can scent information,” Rook said.
“So she can sniff out Andrew?”
“I think she already did.”
Lucy-Anne stood and started up the stairs, ignoring Rook’s half-hearted attempt to call her back. He fell he was down the hole he wouldn’t listen when I called. On the top deck she paused and looked around in surprise.
Every seat was taken by a shop mannequin. They were all dressed, some extravagantly, others in jeans and tee shirts. She couldn’t help feeling every eye upon her.
“You met Nomad,” Sara said. She was sitting three seats along the bus, a plastic man beside her sporting a running top and waterproof coat.
“No,” Lucy-Anne said.
“Sounds like you did. Smells like you did.”
“Only in my dreams.”
“Hmph.” Sara looked her up and down. “You’re an odd one. That hair, those clothes. And from outside. I didn’t think…didn’t let myself believe that outside existed anymore. There’s just London, and death, and sometimes one becomes the other. Interchangeable. It’s not a nice place.”
“Tell me about it,” Lucy-Anne said. And when Sara seemed to take that as a cue to talk, she did not interrupt.