Tim Lebbon - London Eye

“What was it like, Mum? When it happened?”

She shook her head slowly, her face grim. She looked between Jack and Emily and into the past, seeing scenes which Jack guessed she had tried her best to bury. But her daughter had asked, and the good mother would answer.

“It was like living a nightmare. First the rumours of explosions and a terrorist attack, and then…Your father and I were just coming out of the Natural History Museum. There wasn't panic, but police cars were tearing along the roads in every direction, sirens everywhere, and people…” She shook her head, smiling. “People were standing with their phone cameras, ready to catch something amazing. A few were watching the news on their phones, and as we stood on the pavement we could almost see the ripples of panic spreading out from these people. That was the first time we heard talk of a biological attack, and your father and I started to worry.

“The first people I saw die were coming out of a restaurant on a street corner. Maybe the breeze blew whatever was in the air along the street, and it hit them just as they emerged. They fell, hard and quick. I knew they hadn't just fainted. You could almost see the life going from them.”

“They died that quickly?”

“Everyone did. The breeze carried the change through the streets, and one breath was enough. They fell in waves, and the sound was…horrible. Heads striking pavements. Mothers dropping their dead babies, falling dead themselves. Cars crashed. There were explosions, fires. There was screaming.”

“But you and Dad?”

“We ran. We thought we were running away from it, but then they started dying all around us. And then we fell.” She was crying now, but these tears were far different from those she had already shed. They glimmered on a sad face, not a happy one, and they did not seem quite so bright. “We lay together on the pavement, side by side, looking into each other's faces. I saw his eyes go red as the veins in them gave out, and I felt a stab of pain in my own head, and I thought, That's it. The last thing I thought about was…was you. I think I spoke to you both, as I lay there. I closed my eyes, waiting…And when I opened them again it was night, and your father was gone.”

Jack had a million more questions, but he could see that his mother was finding this difficult.

“I never saw him again.” She shook her head, smiled at Jack, and hugged her daughter for the hundredth time.

“And when you woke up, you were changed?” he asked. Meeting Rosemary and the others, seeing what they could do, had been incredible. But sitting here now and realising that his mother was one of them shocked him to the core.

“Not that I noticed right away. It took a while for whatever happened to us all to really come to the fore. That day I spent wandering the streets, trying to find help, trying to find somewhere not clogged with bodies. I called for Graham, kept calling. My phone didn't work, so I tried some of those I found dropped in the street. They were all dead, too. The electricity was already off. It's never been back on since. Later that day, the sounds of shooting began. I hid in a hotel, and I was there for several days. There was bombing, most of it far away, some quite near. I saw planes flying high overhead. I don't know what they were targeting, and for a while I was afraid they were going to just bomb the whole city.

“Some of the blasts blew glass from the window, and I got this.” She touched the scar beside her nose. “It hurt terribly, but as I touched it in front of the mirror…I knew I could do something about it. And it was as if knowing I could do something helped, because the cut started to heal. It took ten minutes. I wasn't surprised or upset, shocked or scared. It felt natural, and if anything, I was a little annoyed that I couldn't heal it any better. But that was right at the beginning, and my ability has improved with time.

“I waited, expecting help. But when I saw people moved through the streets, I was suddenly too scared to call to them. And it was Rosemary who found me.”

Emily seemed content to cuddle into her mother and hear the sound of her voice. She even seemed sleepy. But Jack was filled with more questions, many more, so many that he wondered whether they would ever be able to talk normally with each other again.

There was one question screaming to be asked.

“Dad. Reaper. Please tell me.”

She looked at him for a long time, studying his face. “I didn't know he was still alive until six months ago.”

“He didn't try to find you?”

She shook her head. “He's not Graham anymore, Jack.”

“Not my daddy?” Emily asked.

“No, baby. He's changed much more than anyone else I know, or have heard about. I saw Reaper once, from a distance, and though I recognised him, I also knew he was someone else. And everything they say about him…” She frowned and looked away.

“You're still wearing the locket he bought you,” Jack said.

His mother smiled sadly and fingered the jewellery. “Of course. My husband gave me this, and I loved him very much.”

“Rosemary left London to get me so that I could speak to Dad. Persuade him to join his Superiors with everyone else and fight their way out of London.”

His mother seemed genuinely shocked, and she sat back and stared up at the ceiling for a while. “Everyone's so desperate,” she said. “It's tragic. There's so much good in what's left of this place, but no hope at all.”

“I'll speak to him. I've already said I would, but I insisted on coming to you first.”

“I've no hope left for him, Jack. I've heard about the things he's done. He's very, very dangerous now. You understand? He's…” she trailed off again.

“He's killed people.”

“I cure, he kills.” She was going to ask him not to go, he knew that. The request would come soon. But the more his mother betrayed loss of hope for his father, the more determined Jack was becoming to talk to him.

“He won't hurt me,” Jack said.

“Your father died when I was lying beside him on that pavement. The man you might find, Reaper, is someone else. Please, son, don't-”

“Mum.” He noticed that Emily was asleep now, and he moved closer so that he could hug them both together. “I've got to try. You see that? I've spent two years trying to find my way here. I can't just abandon him now.”

“The Choppers, the soldiers, there's just no way out for any of us.”

“It's not for anyone else I'll be doing it,” he said. “It's for us: you, Emily, me. We need him. I need him. I need my dad.”

“He's not your dad anymore,” she said quietly. Then she sighed, put her arm around him, and hugged him back. The three of them sat there for a while, saying no more, content just to be with each other. Jack was overjoyed. But the joy was shadowed by the knowledge of what he had to do next and the terrible fear that he might fail.

Sparky and Jenna came down, and Jack introduced his mother to them as Susan. He told her they were his best friends.

Rosemary was with them, and when the women spoke it was with a reserve that perhaps had not been there before. That was not Jack's fault. And truly, he did not care. Rosemary had helped them and healed them when it was needed, but she had also led them willingly into danger and between the literal jaws of death. And the more he thought about how things had worked out so far, the more he believed she had used them all.

Jack took a moment to look around the hospital. After a few minutes, his mother finished talking with Rosemary and came to join him. Hidden away in the curtained area were several terribly sick people, and his mother said she had no idea what ailed them. Her gift was healing, but only physical alterations responded to her particular touch-wounds, cuts, and broken bones. Rosemary was slightly different in that she could also sense a sickness inside and, if it was something out of place, or something that should not be there, heal it. She had taken cancers from people, fixed faulty heart valves. But neither woman could combat the invisibly small invaders of infection.