Tim Lebbon - Reaper's Legacy

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.”