London Eye

the building. A large pane of glass in the window cracked.

“He's gone along the corridor,” Rosemary said. “Jack, a second?” She was waving Jack to her without taking her eye from the spy hole.

Emily squeezed his hand and nodded.

When he reached the woman, she was holding the gun down by her side. But she was still shaking. “Professor Miller,” she said without any prompting. “He's the head Chopper, from what any of us can make out.”

“He wants me and Emily.”

“What makes you think-?”

“I'm not bloody stupid, Rosemary.”

She sighed. “I know. I know that, dear.”

“What does he want with us?”

“Will you trust me, Jack?” She touched his shoulder, squeezing slightly as though trying to force trust into him.

“After this? After everything you've kept from us: the dogs in the tunnels; the Superiors; whatever it is you know about my father?”

“Yes, after all this, I still need you to trust me. There's plenty you don't yet know, but…it'll take some explaining. And now isn't really-”

More gunfire, this time from closer by. A door opened and slammed, followed by another, and then someone screamed in agony. The screaming went on and on until another gunshot shut it off.

“I've never done this before,” Rosemary said, nodding down at the gun. “I'm just an old woman, but I'm doing my very best for you, son. Now that it's all gone so wrong so quickly, I'm doing my very best. So please, until we get out of here and find somewhere safe to talk…trust me?”

She was pleading. She tried not to make it sound like that, but it was obvious.

Jack nodded. “Okay. But everything I do in here, and every decision I make, is for the good of my sister.”

Rosemary smiled and squeezed his shoulder again. “You're a good man, Jack.”

Man. No one had ever called him that before. No one but himself.

When they opened the door, all was silent. They crept out into the hallway, Rosemary going first with her gun, and the building sat around them calm and still. They moved quickly along the corridor. It wasn't until they were closing on the fire exit door at the end that the shooting began.

Jack dropped, turning as he did so to fall across Emily. Rosemary fell against the wall and slid down to the floor, and for a terrible moment Jack thought she'd been hit. He looked for blood, but saw none, and then she turned around, looking past him back the way they had come.

She sighed. “Not this floor.”

Jack shook his head. “This floor, but not this corridor. It's coming from the other wing. We need to go.”

They moved to the end of the corridor, passing doors that might not have been opened for the past two years. Are there bodies? Jack wondered. A sad story of lonely death behind each door? The hotel smelled musty, though not unpleasant, but he had no idea whether there would still be the smells of rot and decay after so long. He felt as though he were inhabiting two times: the here and now, with people chasing and shooting at them through a deserted building in the dead Toxic City; and the past, where people spent brief periods of their busy lives in a room in one of London's many hotels.

Rosemary reached the fire escape door first. She looked back past Jack and Emily again, but did not seem to see anything that alarmed her.

“I'll go first,” she said. “After I know it's safe…” She trailed off, her eyes went wide, and she brought the gun up in two hands. It was pointing directly at Jack's stomach.

“Wait!” he said, but she was not looking at him.

This time it was Emily who pulled Jack down. He turned as he fell, looking back along the corridor at the two Choppers who had appeared at its junction with the hotel's central core. They were the same man and woman he had seen talking to Miller outside the room door.

Bullets ripped along the corridor, slicing into the plaster walls, blowing jagged splinters from door frames, filling their world with violence and noise once more.

Rosemary braced herself against the wall, then looked down at her gun, turning it this way and that.

“Safety?” Jack shouted, because he really had no idea either.

The shooting stopped. “That's them!” a voice hissed.

“Okay,” the woman said. “Just get the old bitch.” The two soldiers ran along the hallway, guns raised, and when the woman stopped and braced into a firing position, the male Chopper jerked to a halt and shot his companion in the leg.

She grunted and flopped to the carpeted floor, dropping her gun and rolling immediately onto her back.

The tall soldier seemed to be fighting with his weapon, yanking it this way and that as if someone invisibly was holding the barrel. He pointed it at the woman writhing on the floor before him, shaking his head and moaning, “No, no…”

A shape appeared behind him at the corridor junction. Puppeteer.

“No!” the soldier shouted, and he shot his friend again.

Jack turned away, but he still saw her head whip back, and blood splash across the floor and up the corridor walls.

“Come on,” Rosemary said. She nodded briefly to Puppeteer, then pushed the fire exit door open.

Jack hustled Emily through first, following her and turning around. As Rosemary let go of the door and its closer pulled it shut, he saw Puppeteer approaching the remaining Chopper, right hand held out and fingers playing the air.

The soldier screamed as his feet left the floor and his head was crushed, slowly, against the elaborately corniced ceiling.

“Jack,” Emily said, “I should have got that on film.”

“Kids,” Rosemary said. “So resilient.”

Jack barked one loud, harsh laugh, and then followed Rosemary down the stairs.

“Safety catch,” he said.

Rosemary shook her head. “Dear, I honestly don't know if I could ever shoot another human being.”

“Even if they're trying to shoot you?” Emily asked.

They reached the ground floor and continued down to the basement level. There were no windows here, no viewing panels in the doors, and the stairwell was dark and functional. Jack took a small torch from his rucksack and lit their way.

“Something has to set us apart from them,” the woman said. And though Jack was still angry with her, his respect for her doubled.

The hotel's basement corridor was illuminated by a few narrow, dirty windows at high level. They looked out past iron railings at the street before the hotel. Something was burning out there, and Jack thought it was one of the Choppers’ trucks.

“What the hell are those two Superiors doing?” he asked. “How can they take on an army?”

“I doubt there were just two,” Rosemary said. “And they have such powers, Jack! I know of a fire starter, a woman who can confuse senses so that she's almost invisible, and someone who can change the colour of things.”

The sounds of fighting had ceased for now, but the air was heavy inside the hotel, as though people with death on their minds still stalked its corridors and searched its empty rooms.

“I hope Sparky and Jenna are okay,” Emily said, voicing a fear which Jack had been harbouring since seeing them exit the stairwell. Jenna had been wounded, and he hoped that Sparky would be sensible; no heroics, and no revenge for his dead brother. Not yet.

“They'll be fine,” he said.

“And Lucy-Anne,” Emily added, but Jack could think of no easy way to respond to that.

“We should leave,” Rosemary said. She was gasping for breath, but looked like she would never give up. “If