Tim Lebbon - Contagion

Of them all, it was Rhali who walked with the most composure. For the first time since they’d rescued her, she seemed at peace.

They crossed what had once been Camp Hope and passed into the cool shadows between piled containers. When they emerged from the container park and started back towards the river, Lucy-Anne looked around for Andrew. But he was nowhere in sight. She felt a momentary panic, a sense of utter loneliness. Then a hand rested on her shoulder. Rhali.

“Bloody excellent punch,” the girl said, grinning from ear to ear.

“Classic!” Sparky said. “I taught her everything she knows!”

“ She taught you , more like,” Jenna said.

“I was always scared of her,” Jack said. “It’s the purple hair, I think.”

Lucy-Anne gave Jack the finger. “Eat me.”

Her old boyfriend raised one eyebrow, and Sparky started making some rude gestures behind his back.

Lucy-Anne laughed a little. And she also cried gentle, thankful tears, because she was back with her friends, and they were as close to family as she had left anywhere in the world.

Keen to get away from Camp H and the horrors it still contained, they decided to cruise upriver again towards where they had embarked. There was the silent understanding that they had talking to do and decisions to make, but for now putting distance between them and the camp was the priority.

Fleeter had not reappeared. Jack said she was probably following them, and that made Lucy-Anne uncomfortable. But at the same time she was returning to herself, feeling stronger, and grasping a new purpose—to help her friends survive.

“Are you sure they won’t just let us out?” Lucy-Anne asked Jack. They were sitting in the open at the boat’s bow, watching the serene Thames ahead of them awaiting the boat’s disturbing wash. The others were under cover back towards the cabin. Jack looked sad and lost.

“They’ve kept everyone in London for this long,” Jack said. “I’ve heard plenty of stories about escapees being murdered. Bodies put on display, sometimes, to dissuade others from trying to break out. Why would they change their minds now? Their problem of London is about to be solved once and for all, so they’ll do more than ever to keep anyone from getting out.”

“But they’ll be retreating,” Lucy-Anne said. “Pulling back, if they know what’s about to happen.”

“Not until the last minute, I doubt. They’ll have trucks, helicopters.” He shook his head.

“It’s not hopeless,” she said, sensing the despair in him. He only looked at her. “Really!” she insisted. “We’ve got nine, ten hours yet. We’ll find a way.”

“I don’t see how,” he said. Lucy-Anne reached out and held his hand, and a rush of memories of her and Jack assaulted her. Most of them were good. He was above all her friend.

“We stop the bomb or get out,” she said. “Anything else is not an option.” She was proud of herself. Saying that whilst remembering her dreams—the blast, the flames, the heat-flash blanching everything that London had become into a white-hot mess—took some effort.

Jack smiled, then sat back against the bench. “We thought we’d lost you,” he said. “So what happened?”

“Rook found me,” she said. She leaned back next to Jack, and with the sun on her face and the gentle movements of the boat, she felt almost relaxed. London could almost have been its old self again.

“A Superior,” Jack said.

“No, not at all. Rook was all on his own. He went with Reaper because it suited his purpose.”

“Which was?”

“Revenge. He was in a dark place. Such a…sensitive boy. He and his brother survived Doomsday and lived together for a while, but then the Choppers took his brother, and the birds showed him what happened. They slaughtered him. Took his brain.”

“They’ve experimented on so many,” Jack said.

“But he saw something in me. We connected, I guess. And maybe fell for each other, just a little.” It seemed strange talking like this with Jack, because until recently they had been a couple. But she sensed no hostility from him, and no surprise. Their relationship had been strong from the moment they’d met, marred only by the weight of expectation between them—that they should be together. They were much better together as friends. Anything else just got in the way.

“I saved him,” she said. She sensed Jack’s confusion.

“I thought he was gone?”

“He is, now. But I thought I’d saved him. I’ve got something too.”

“The dreaming? Nomad touched you?”

“I’ve met her, Jack. Seen her in my dreams, and met her for real, and sometimes both are the same. But the thing I’ve got is all my own. Something I’ve always had, when I think back to when I was younger, but always a more subtle thing than it is now. More gentle. Nomad told me I was what she’s been looking for forever. And Rook too, he told me his brother had something of his gift even before Doomsday.”

“So what does that mean? And what can you do?”

“I think it might mean that everyone left alive had something beforehand that Evolve caught onto. And I can dream. At first I thought I was seeing the future, or forms it might take. I dreamed of meeting Rook and his birds attacking me, and they did, briefly, after he died. I dreamed of Nomad and the bomb. I dreamed of meeting you by the river and the Choppers waiting there, but I didn’t know how that one turned out, and didn’t have a chance to change it.”

“Change?”

“I think I can…I thought I could change events in my dreams. Lucid dreaming, guiding things. Rook died and I dreamed him alive again, and for a while he was.” She looked at the scratches on the back of her hand, put there by Rook’s nails as he fell into the hole. “But then fate caught up with him, exactly as I’d seen it before. I might have stretched things a little, but I don’t think I really changed anything.”

“That’s amazing,” Jack said. “I had nothing before. Don’t think so, anyway. But Nomad’s touch has given me…” He trailed off, looking into a distance no one else could see.

“What?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“So much,” he said. “So much that I really don’t know what I might become.”

“So we’re special,” Lucy-Anne said. She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice, because being special hadn’t done much for her thus far. “My talent’s not caused by Doomsday, and it’s grown just by being here. And you’ve been touched by a freak.”

“We’re all special,” Jack said, looking along the boat at his friends. Rhali smiled. Sparky gave them the finger. “Differentiating between who has a gift and who doesn’t—who’s normal, or Irregular, or Superior—loses sight of everyone’s uniqueness. We do that, and we might as well sink the boat and drown right now.”

Lucy-Anne thought of Rook and how conflicted his gift had made him. She’d seen him cold-bloodedly killing Choppers out of a burning need for revenge. She had also seen his more vulnerable, needy side, and the part of him that was still a child. And she realised that the Rook she’d fallen for had been the human boy, nothing more or less.

“We’re all special,” she said, nodding.

“And we always were.”

“So we stop the bomb or get out.” She smiled at Jack, her special friend. “Sinking the boat is not an option.”

“Right.” He smiled back. For a moment too brief to measure but too precious to ignore, all was well with the world.

“On the bridge,” Sparky said. “I’d recognise that spooky bastard anywhere.”

Jack turned and looked ahead of them, certain he was about to see his father again and unsure what he thought about that. He felt sick and excited. Outwardly he’d disowned him—Reaper was a murderer and exuded little hope of redemption. Inside, Jack still remembered the kind man he used to love so much.