Tim Lebbon: Reaper's Legacy

They moved cautiously but quickly along the Thames’s south bank, passing the National Theatre. Hills of litter had blown against its walls and slumped there, dampened and hardened again into a permanent addition to the building. Windows were smashed. Lucy-Anne had no wish to see what might be inside.

She wondered where her friends were now. Rook had told her they had not been caught by the Choppers, knowledge presumably imparted to him by his birds. She hoped they had escaped London. But at the same time she realised that was unlikely, because Jack would never leave without his mother and Emily. A pang of guilt hit Lucy-Anne again, the same guilt that had plagued her on and off since she’d met Rook and realised that she had abandoned her friends back in that hotel.

She’d been mad, for a time. Driven to distraction by the sudden news of her parents’ demise. She should have controlled herself and borne the news better, but after two years of hope, and loneliness, and their journey into London with fresh hope drawing them all the way in, the information had been just too shattering. Somehow in her madness she had managed to sneak out of the hotel while the Choppers had been infiltrating it, and then out into the streets of London, shouting and raging at the unfairness of it all until Rook had found her. Even now she felt the dregs of that madness at the edges of her perception, and it was being nurtured by the new, terrible dreams she was experiencing. She had dreamed of Rook, and he had dreamed of her, and however much she tried to deny it she could not escape this fact.

I’m not special! she had thought, again and again. But Rook called her pure, just like his dead brother, possessing an ability unconnected to what had happened to toxic London. And in truth, she’d always known there was something different about her.

When she was younger, she had experienced frequent moments of what her parents had called déjà vu. Mummy, this has happened before…you picking up the phone, Daddy walking in the door, next door’s dog running across the road…

Déjà vu which, over time, Lucy-Anne had come to realise were dreams relived. It had troubled her little, because they had rarely concerned anything important—a phone call, a running dog. Perhaps exposed to such wonders in London, her talent was now somehow given free rein. Allowed to grow.

As for her friends…Her madness had given way to determination—to find Andrew—and hate it though she did, that meant that her friends were not her top priority. They would look after themselves.

“And when I’ve found Andrew, I’ll go back to them,” she said. Rook glanced back at her, but she did not elaborate. Whether he’d heard or not, he did not pass comment.

He paused by a set of stone steps, head tilted as if listening. Then he nodded and climbed, and Lucy-Anne followed. As they started crossing the long bridge spanning the Thames, Lucy-Anne could not figure out why so many people had discarded their clothes here, leaving them in rumpled piles that all seemed to trail away from a common point. Then she saw the first flash of white, and the first spread of damp dirty hair, and realised her mistake.

There must have been a hundred bodies on the bridge. They had all been running north when they fell, and some even had their arms stretched out as if to grasp the northern shore. The breeze lifted strands of hair and the flaps of rotting clothing. The corpses were mostly rotted away, leaving bones and shreds of dried skin behind.

Lucy-Anne found it sad more than shocking. So many husbands and mothers and brothers lay here, so many children, and all of them had left someone behind.

“It’s horrible,” she whispered. Rook seemed surprised, but said nothing.

They crossed the bridge, and until they reached the northern shore Lucy-Anne did not look along the river at all. She glanced at the bodies she passed, and the abandoned vehicles, and imagined what those bereaved believed about the deaths of their loved ones. At the beginning they had been told the truth about the explosion at the London Eye and the release of some unknown toxic agent. But very soon after that the lies had begun. Now they were told that London was filled with the dead and would not be habitable again for a thousand years.

London Eye , Lucy-Anne thought, and then leaned against the bridge’s parapet and stared along the river.

There it was. Perhaps she’d known since first stepping onto the bridge, and had been unwilling to look. But now she could see the remains of the great London Eye, the giant Ferris wheel that used to carry more than a million people annually, giving them a stunning view of London. Motionless now, the Eye was a sad echo of great, past times.

She fisted her hands, doing her best not to look away. It did not look familiar. That was a blessing, at least. In her dream, the Eye had been a mass of tumbled metal and shattered pods, but in reality it was surprisingly intact, bearing a scar towards the top where several pods had fallen away and some of the structure was bent and charred with fire.

“It’s not what I saw,” she whispered.

“What is it?” Rook asked.

“The Eye.” She suddenly had no wish to tell him about her dream of the woman and the explosion. It felt private.

“Where it all began,” he said. But he sounded uninterested, and a moment later she heard his footsteps retreating across the bridge.

Lucy-Anne looked the other way along the river, northeast towards St. Paul’s. She kept her eyes wide open until they started to sting. There was no flash, no mushroom cloud consuming London. She listened to Rook retreating across the bridge behind her, knew that he would wait, and no one else appeared.

For now, Nomad remained locked away in that strange dream.

A rook landed on the parapet close to her. She took a good look at the bird, breathing softly and feeling a strong sense of purpose. She was more settled than she had been since first undertaking their journey into London, because now she knew where she was going, and why.

“Come on, then,” she said to the bird. She turned to follow Rook and the bird took off, dipping low across the bridge and plucking a morsel from the gutter.

Rook was waiting at the end of the bridge, crouched low to the parapet and looking around. As she approached Lucy-Anne became more cautious, but there was no danger in his stance.

“So where are we going?” she asked.

“A museum.”

“Right. Cool.”

“We need to see someone.” He stood from his crouch, and suddenly seemed taller than he had before, darker. I have no idea who he is , Lucy-Anne thought, and for the first time since fleeing her friends at the hotel she was truly afraid for herself. There was no one else around. Rook could do whatever he wanted to her, here and now, and if she fought back, he had his birds to fight for him. She had dreamed of them attacking her. Not all dreams come true!

“Who do we need to see?”

“Oh, her name doesn’t matter. Come on.”

“My brother! Andrew! You said we’d be going north to find him, and—”

“North is a big place,” Rook said. “And if you think what you’ve seen so far is dangerous, and awful…well, get ready to have your eyes opened.”

Unsettled by this strange boy, and with her brief madness now diluting to allow true fear to settle, Lucy-Anne followed.

Rook led them inside the London Transport Museum, looking casual but alert, and he held an entrance door open long enough for a dozen rooks to drift in past him. They moved silent as shadows, echoing his caution.

The huge building was quiet and cavernous. Rook surprised Lucy-Anne by taking her hand and guiding her across a wide walkway, glancing back and putting a finger to his lips when she tapped him on the shoulder. His grin troubled her. Not because it was frightening, but because it was…