Reaper's Legacy

same malady killing the Irregulars in the underground hospital where he’d found his mother. An incredible man— Jack hoped he could still use his gift—he was suffering from the mysterious illness affecting more and more of London’s survivors.

He was mad, first of all. Sitting in an old shopping trolley in the shattered entrance to a once-posh store, scrunched up like a skinny rag doll, the man seemed to be snatching at unseen flies bothering him. He stared, motionless, and then a hand would lash out, fist closing on nothing.

“What’s he doing?” Sparky asked.

“Don’t know,” Jenna said. “Same when I found him. I thought he was eating flies, but I don’t think there’s anything there.”

“Just cos you don’t see nothing, don’t mean there’s nothing there.” The man glared at them, his wide white eyes startling, dreadlocks gathered across his shoulders, chest, and drawn up knees like a hundred twisting snakes. Although sitting in the trolley, he seemed animated with constant movement.

Deeper in the ruined store, Jack could see the shadows of other people observing them. The glint of light on metal—a gun? Something about that comforted him. These weird powers were troubling, and beside them a gun was almost mundane.

They’d been told that this man would be able to tell whether they were being followed or spied upon, and whether the Choppers could trace them. Jack had found the tracking chip in the photo of his mother, but perhaps there was something more.

“So can you do it?” he asked.

“Kids,” the man said. His age was ambiguous; he could have been forty or sixty. “Just not polite anymore.”

“Can you do it, please?” Sparky said.

The man’s hand snapped out, arm surprisingly long, and he clenched his hand close to Sparky’s face. Drew it in close to his nose, eyes rolling slightly, trolley wheels squeaking with movement. His dreadlocks shimmered and squirmed, and his shoulders shook. He inhaled and closed his eyes.

“You’re all right,” he said.

“Good,” Jack said. “Thanks. So now—”

“Didn’t say you,” the man said. “You, you got more about you.” He wasn’t quite staring at Jack. All around him, but not quite at him. “Doubts, and hidden things. Weird.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Tell me about it.”

The man turned suddenly and reached for Jenna, stretching out from the trolley and almost tipping it over. She flinched back, but his fist closed and plucked several dark hairs from her head. He drew them quickly to his face and breathed in. Wheels squeaked.

“Shit,” Sparky said, glancing at Jack. “We could’ve just run.”

“We’ve been running all night,” Jack said.

“You’re fine,” the man said to Jenna. He turned back to Jack, letting Jenna’s plucked hair go to float down around him. “Now, back to you. To you. You.”

“What do you need?” Jack asked.

The man was frowning. His eyes grew wider, and he started keening, crunching up in pain.

Someone emerged from the shadowy shop. The short woman glanced at Jack and his friends, and Jack saw a look in her eyes that he recognised from his mother. She had been made some sort of a healer by the effects of Doomsday, but she was someone who had always cared.

“He’s very sick,” the woman said. “You should leave him now.”

“I can’t,” Jack said. “He hasn’t checked me yet. I need to know if I’m being watched.”

“He’s weak and needs rest,” the woman said. She sounded so weary and sad.

“Is it the same as the others?” Jack asked.

The woman looked at him in surprise. “You’re outsiders. You’ve seen others suffering from this?”

“My mother worked in a hospital under Stockwell tube station,” he said.

The woman sighed, nodded. “The same. It affects the mind, and the body, and withers them both. So sad. Such a loss.”

“Especially with the powers they all have,” Jenna said.

“No,” the woman said. “It’s such a loss because they’re people, and I can’t do a thing to help.”

“You’re watched,” the man said. His voice was incredibly low, almost vibrating through the ground. Even the carer stepped back. “You’re known. You’re…observed…by…her.”

By Nomad, Jack thought, but he did not speak her name.

“Take him away,” Jack said. But the man had stopped shaking and was looking at Jack now, one long, thin arm raised, fingers clawed as if to tear something out of the air.

“She’s waiting to see,” he rumbled. Pigeons took flight at his voice, and Jack felt the words resounding in his chest, his belly. “See if the…seed…took…” He sighed and slumped down, muttering something as his hair closed across his face as if to hide him from view.

“What was that all about?” Jenna asked. She came close to Jack, Sparky standing behind her.

“Maybe he meant Nomad,” Jack whispered.

“Right,” Sparky said. “Great. So now what do we—”

A whistle, a whisper, a piercing pain in Jack’s neck. As his vision quickly clouded he saw more shapes emerging from the shop and coming towards him. His friends fell. And he fell too, watched all the way by a presence inside that was so very far from human.

And so he sleeps. The gravity of his future draws him onward, and it frightens him. But that’s fine. It should frighten him, for a time. But soon it will entrance him as well.

Nomad moved from one street to the next, casting her senses about now that Jack was asleep. If danger rose she would go to him, but not unless it was extreme, and not unless he could do nothing to counter it himself. He had to learn, and she was afraid of steering him the wrong way.

Afraid of encouraging in him the same madness that had taken her.

But I was different. I am the first vector, and I was there at the beginning. Evolve was so much stronger then, so much a concentrated mass of change. Confused, like an infant unsure of its abilities and potentials. Now, I am sure. I’ve been practising.

From where she rested, she saw.

In Peckham, a man smashed his way into a locked house and rifled through a dead family’s photograph album. He cried, even though he did not know them. Nomad felt his sadness and cried with him, and the man’s head snapped around as he heard the sound of a weeping woman.

In Soho, three women used their combined powers to stalk a deer. There were only seventeen wild deer left in London—Nomad knew every one of them, and could place them all given the time and peace to concentrate. But she could not deny these women the fresh meat they craved. They were all pregnant, and their children would be important. Nomad knew that, and she tried to tell the embryos so. The women paused and gasped as their children kicked against the unfairness of things, and the mothers all felt a brief, intense moment of wretchedness.

The deer escaped.

She tasted blood on the air, and traced it back to a pub in the East End. An empty bottle of whiskey, a smoking cigarette, the taste of hopelessness on the air and the tang of sharpened steel, a knife on the floor, a man bleeding his last. Another precious one gone, and Nomad’s fresh tears matched his own.

Deep underground, a group of people were trying to make a home.

Seven miles to the north, a spirit haunted a deserted tower, and wondered why it was there.

Nomad moved on, passing through the toxic city she had brought into being. Every now and then she paused to lean against a wall. Inside her, something else was growing. This sickness was the only thing she could not touch or smell, see or know.

It was a mystery to her, and Nomad was no longer used to mysteries.

Jack thought perhaps they had blinded him. There were Choppers in the shop! But that did not make sense. The people in the shop had been Irregulars, their rendezvous had been arranged, and now he was bound and sightless, yet moving.