Tim Lebbon: Reaper's Legacy

“You need normal people,” Jenna said.

“Yes,” Breezer said. “The world has to know the truth, because we need their help.”

“Then our plan stands,” Jack said. “Escape London, expose the lie that everyone outside has been told. Reveal the truth.”

“Tell everyone that London isn’t just inhabited by monsters,” Sparky said.

“Well, mostly,” Jenna said.

“We’ll help you in any way we can,” Breezer said. “But the sickness is spreading, and more and more people are succumbing. Everything’s against the clock now, Jack.”

“Not without my mother,” Jack whispered. “And not without my sister.”

“But you can lead us! No one has ever been touched by Nomad. Few people have even seen her, and most still consider her a myth! Your powers might be—”

Jack slammed his hand on the table. Cups jumped and spilled water, a plate shook to the floor and shattered. The impact echoed around the office, a haunting sound that slowly faded before anyone spoke.

“I didn’t come to start a war,” Jack said. “I’m no leader, and whatever’s happening to me…” He was both angry and scared, so he concentrated on something solid that he felt could hold him firm—love. “I’m going for my mother and sister. They’re what matters to me. And perhaps at the same time we can stop the girl. Blind the Choppers. Then you won’t need anyone to lead you out.”

“But no one knows where Camp H is,” Breezer said. “And even if you did, there’s no way—”

“There is a way.” Jack thought of Reaper, and the sense of fatherhood he’d sensed still within him. He had shunned Jack and sent him away to be hunted by Choppers, and yet Jack would as much give up on his father as he would his mother and sister, Emily.

He stood, and his friends stood with him. “We need to rest,” Jack said. Breezer nodded. But the air had chilled, and the silence that accompanied them back to their room was loaded.

“Are you crazy ?” Jenna said. “He abandoned you, Jack. Sent you and us away, a ten-minute head start before he let the Choppers come after us again. He doesn’t give a shit about you or us. And you want to go out there and find him again?”

Jack nodded.

“Maybe he’ll just kill us next time,” Jenna said. “And do you think he’ll be that easy to find?” She was standing by the closed door to the small office. Jack leaned in the corner, and Sparky had taken the only seat, plate balanced on his lap with the remains of another burger cooling on it.

“I think I can find him, yes,” Jack said. He breathed deeply, trying to open himself up and not fear anymore. And with the memory of Nomad’s finger on his tongue came a rush of startling sensations. Seeds of potential sparked in his mind like stars being born to an empty universe. He let them shine, and chose one.

The ability was shocking and felt unreal, not his to own. And yet one look at Sparky set his friend sweating, gasping for air and loosening his collar. Sweat dribbled down his forehead and cheeks, and as his eyes drooped Jack pulled back, not wishing to make his friend faint.

Sparky spilled his burger to the floor. “That was you?”

“Yeah.” Jack closed his eyes and glimpsed his expanding universe. It was utterly terrifying, and exhilarating. Nomad’s touch had been the big bang, and now his inner perception was shatteringly huge, filled with swirling clouds of light coalescing into points of potential. He could move in the blink of an eye, and from one moment to the next he would be orbiting one power, or another. He knew them, and knowing scared him. This was so new. Still chaotic. Dangerous.

“Well, I’m with Jack,” Sparky said.

Jenna looked frightened, uncertain.

“Don’t be scared,” Jack said, moving towards her.

“I’m not,” she said, but she waved her hands at him, urging him back. “Well, I am, I am scared. But we’re together. That’s it, I suppose. We’re together, and nothing comes between us. So if you think you can find him and get him to help, that’s what we do.”

“Yeah!” Sparky said. “Friends forever! We should cut our thumbs and be blood brothers. And sister.”

“Oh, Sparky,” Jenna said, shaking her head.

They just smiled at each other instead.

I see a woman laughing in the face of a mushroom cloud . Lucy-Anne wished she could say this to Rook, and make him understand her confusion and desperation. But it was only a dream. And surely not all dreams could come true.

Besides, it was thoughts of her brother that drove her. With her parents dead, and likely buried in those mass burial pits that she and the others had walked across only days ago (and that was something she’d dreamed as well), he was all she had left.

Andrew. Five years older than her, he’d always been the sensible one, the apple of her mother’s eye even though Lucy-Anne knew that her father had a soft spot for her own mild rebellious streak. When Andrew was revising for his exams, Lucy-Anne would be out with her friends, choosing makeup her mother never liked her wearing and clothes that were really too adult for a thirteen-year-old. He played football for his school. She played hooky from school. Deep down he’d made her jealous, and she’d annoyed the hell out of him. But she’d never loved him as much as she did now that he was gone.

Rook had taken them down to the river, and now they were working their way west. He’d told her there were easier routes north from that direction. The Thames was sluggish and thick as gravy, and Lucy-Anne tried to see aspects that did not remind her of her dream. There were no bodies floating in the river today, for a start. It was also unmarred by fallen buildings. There were several half-sunken boats, and in the distance she could see a logjam of ruined craft piled against a bridge’s central upright. But it was the movement of water that troubled her. Unstoppable, uncaring of what had happened in London, the water flowed towards a future she hoped she did not know.

“When do we go north?” she asked again. She’d been asking Rook the same question for the last hour, and after the first couple of times he’d stopped answering. Now he turned around and sighed, and for a moment his eyes were as black as the rooks that followed him.

“Soon,” he said. “Need to see someone first.”

“Who?”

“You want my help?”

Lucy-Anne nodded.

“Then let me do it my way. You don’t know London, and have no idea of the dangers.”

“Oh, I do have an idea, you know what happened—”

“You have no idea.” He spoke softly, the words filled with such dread and certainty that Lucy-Anne could not reply. What has he seen? What does he know? Rook had been trapped alone in London for two years, surviving, living with the strange gift thrust upon him, and she knew so little about what his life had become, and what had come before. She silently vowed that she would find out.

“This way.” Rook nodded along the embankment path, then glanced up at the summer-blue sky. Rooks floated on air currents high overhead. Others fluttered from building to building. Lucy-Anne could only see a dozen birds, but knew there must have been many more out of sight.

“Don’t they give you away?” she asked.

“Most keep their distance until I need them.”

“Most?”

Rook nodded up at the birds circling high overhead. “Some become so…obsessed that I can’t shake them.”

“Obsessed with you?”

Rook smiled. It was the dangerous and deadly face she had first seen, and somehow it comforted her more than the Rook mourning his lost brother. It made her feel safer.