Tim Lebbon - London Eye

“And Mum heals them?”

“She looks after them. They can't be healed because there's nothing wrong with them. It's just that their bodies and minds can never accept the sudden change.”

Jenna stirred. Everyone froze. She smacked her lips, and frowned. “Did someone put a dead rat in my mouth while I was sleeping?”

“Hey, Jenna!” Sparky squealed, leaning down and kissing her hard on the lips.

“Oh, gross,” the girl said, but she smiled as she tried to push herself up on her elbows. Sparky helped, lifting her into a sitting position and placing a couple of cushions behind her back.

“Welcome to the land of the living!” Jack said without a trace of irony. “How do you feel?”

Jenna paled and her hands flew to her stomach. “I've been shot!”

“You're all better now,” Emily said.

“Better?”

Jack nodded at Rosemary and Ruben, both smiling as the girl came around.

“Rosemary,” she said. “Again. Thanks.”

“Ruben took the bullet out,” the woman said, nodding at the fat man beside her.

Sparky produced the bullet from his pocket. “Kept it for you. Maybe it'll make a nice pendant, or something.”

Jenna frowned at the bullet as he dropped it in her hand. She looked around, confused, and her gaze settled on Sparky. “You kissed me?”

“Er…sorry,” he said. “But if it makes you feel better, you're right. You tasted like dead rat.”

“Where's Lucy-Anne?” Their silence was no real answer, so she asked again.

“We don't know for sure,” Jack said. “She never came back.”

“Where are we now?”

Rosemary filled her in on their flight from the hotel, through the streets to this place. She left out the discussion they'd had, leaving that for Jack.

“We have to go and look for her,” Jenna said.

Jack shook his head. “It's too dangerous, and now it's getting dark-”

“She's our friend,” Jenna said, her voice weak but firm. “She's your girlfriend, Jack. We can't just abandon her because she ran away.”

“I've gone through all this,” Jack said, and the guilt came in yet again.

“She could be lying injured somewhere. Shot, like me.” She looked at Rosemary. “Do you know anyone that can find her?”

“Not now Gordon's dead,” she replied. “But that doesn't mean there isn't anyone else.”

“Then we all go and look, starting at-”

“It's impossible,” Rosemary said. “If she'd stayed in or around the hotel, the Choppers would have her by now. If she ran further, then we have no clue as which way she ran. And it's not as if we can walk through the streets calling her name.”

“So we just give up on her?”

Nobody answered for a while, until Emily went and sat beside Jenna. “I think she's gone to find her brother,” she said. “Alive somewhere, in the north. In fact, I'm sure of it.”

“How can you know?” Rosemary asked.

“Because that's what I'd have done.” Emily grinned at Jack, and he smiled at his little sister.

“Maybe,” Jenna said. “I hope so. It just feels so bad…so unfair. God, I need sleep.” She slid down until her head rested against Sparky's shoulder. He froze, delighted, and she grinned, pushing his shoulder around as if fluffing up a pillow before closing her eyes.

Jack smiled. He'd wanted to see these two getting it together for a while. Sparky would be a challenge for anyone, but perhaps being attacked by dogs, chased by government soldiers, blown up, and shot in the stomach was all Jenna had needed.

“We all need sleep,” Rosemary said. “It's been quite a day. There are two bedrooms upstairs. Ruben and I can sleep down here.”

The mention of beds and sleep got them all yawning. Jack and Emily went up first. They used bottled water and toothpaste from Emily's backpack to clean their teeth, then they chose the twin room and closed the door. Emily fell asleep almost before her head hit her pillow, and Jack sat up for a while, staring at his little sister. Tomorrow we're going to see Mum , he thought. He was excited and afraid in equal measures.

He lay down, but was not surprised when he could not sleep. A rush of memories came back to him, good times with his parents that he had long forgotten, and he wallowed in them, smiling at some and crying softly at others. He'd never really known nostalgia as a powerful emotion, but he did now. Before today he'd laboured under the belief that things could, by some miracle, go back to normal. Find his mother and father, escape the Toxic City, go home, live together again as they had been more than two years before. But now he acknowledged the firm reality that his family had changed forever. Nostalgia, as he experienced it there in a stranger's bed, could not allow for things ever being the same again.

He heard the stairs creaking and Sparky and Jenna talking in subdued tones. They went into the double bedroom next door, and for a while he heard their voices, Sparky's low and deep, hers soft and sad. There were tears as well, and then talking again, and after a period of silence he heard the first gentle moans of pleasure. Sleep came to Jack at last, giving privacy to his friends.

Whatever had broken in Lucy-Anne's mind was trying to fix itself. She could feel it like an itch, a tickle so deep inside her that it could never be reached, and she shook her head now and then to try and dislodge it.

Her run slowed to a fast walk, and that was when she started to see people. The first was a face in a window, pale and sickly, and when she did a double-take the face was gone. There was no expression to read there at all, and she purposely got lost in a network of streets and alleys in case the person decided to follow.

North, ever northward, and between every blink she saw the faces of her parents from her nightmare.

I'm never going to sleep again , she thought. Though she was in this terrible place, it was the blank plane between sleeping and waking that horrified her now. There had been the dogs, though her memory of them had grown indistinct, and other memories were even vaguer, so distilled through whatever had snapped in her mind that she could not tell whether they were real events or dreams. Perhaps the distinction no longer mattered.

Lucy-Anne knew that something had snapped inside. Hers was a conscious madness, a waking breakdown, and when she dwelled on it her head hurt as though physically injured. North was all that mattered, because somewhere in that direction would be Andrew.

Someone walked into the street ahead of her. The figure paused, turned her way, froze.

Lucy-Anne ran between buildings, stumbling over a pile of refuse, ducking through gardens, rushing past a Tube station with a pile of skeletons wedged in its entrance gates. She hit a main road and quickly turned left, welcoming the shadows cast by the large buildings to her right. There she slowed, listening in case she had been followed but never willing to stop her forward momentum.

The first black shape passed behind her with the sound of a whisper in the night.

She spun around, skidding to a halt in the middle of the wide residential street. Her hands came up, but there was nothing there. She fumbled the knife from her pocket and held it out before her, but it felt pitiful against the world. There were tall four-storey buildings on one side. Behind her was an overgrown park at the centre of what must be a large square, and staggered along the road were cars. Many of them were still parked in an ordered row along the pavement. There were Porsches, BMWs, Mercedes, Bentleys, and the buildings stared at her with rich, dead eyes.