there was nothing superior about that idea. It was a fact, and even entertaining the idea that he could help Miller was proof of that.
“Help?” Miller said, and then he laughed again. He slumped in his chair as he did so, as if each time he exhaled he shrank a little more.
“I can’t help him,” Rhali said. Jack wasn’t aware that she’d advanced with him, but he would not tell her to wait. She’d been through too much for that. There was no violence in her, but she still had rage to expend somewhere, somehow.
When they drew close to Miller, and he threw back the jackets and hoods covering him, everything seemed to change.
There was barely a human left. Reaper must have worked on Miller for some time after Jack and his friends and family had left, and perhaps some of his Superiors had taken a turn as well. The woman who could freeze flesh with a breath. The knife man. Perhaps someone who could pin life to something that should be dead.
He wore a white surgical mask across his face, but it could not hide the mutilation. His ears had been torn off. One eye was missing, and both eyelids had been sliced away, leaving his remaining eye wide and white and frantic, and flowing with moisture. His nose was broken and caked with dried blood, and beneath the mask his jaw seemed to protrude too far to the left. It moved constantly, as if he were chewing cud.
“Oh, my God,” Rhali whispered.
Miller chuckled. “Like what you see?” He moved more clothing aside.
Reaper had taken more from each of his legs, removing the left all the way up to the groin. His left arm was twisted and broken, thumb and three fingers removed so that only the middle finger remained. Perhaps Reaper had thought it an amusing gesture, though Jack doubted he had any humour left in him at all. Miller’s shoulders were bruised and lacerated. There was nothing visible that was untouched, and no telling what horrors the bloodied, fouled clothing still hid. He stank. It was pitiful and sickening, but Jack looked deep for any shred of sympathy.
“No,” Rhali said. “No, I don’t like it. But you deserve it. Every cut and stab and gouge you’ve made on another innocent has been visited upon you. I could never hurt you, Miller, much as I want to. I kept my humanity, even through everything you did to me. The starvation, the deprivation. The
“Okay,” Jack said. He nodded at the ruined shell of the vivisection suite. “I think in there would be an appropriate place to talk.”
“You’re going to torture me?” Miller drawled, totally unconcerned.
“No,” Jack said. “No, probably not.”
There were still bodies inside. They might have died when Jack and Fleeter first pushed them over—when flipped, gentle movements would translate as incredibly fast, violent actions in the real world. But he thought it likely the Superiors had returned to finish the job. Jack averted his eyes, but the stench of rot was cloying.
He wheeled Miller into the vivisection room. The metal table was stained with dried blood, and more blood was puddled where buckets had been kicked away from the drainage points. Walls were deformed, the ceiling crushed down, tools of torture scattered across the floor. Jack thought perhaps Miller had spent some time on this table at Reaper’s hand.
Breezer came with him and stood with arms folded across his chest. He could not hide his disgust at the man in the wheelchair, and it was not only at his appearance. Jack had not asked Breezer how many Irregulars he’d known who had been taken by the Choppers, but it was a fair bet that parts of some of them resided in sample jars in the next room.
“So all this torture and pain and death, and what did you find out?” Breezer asked. “Was it worth it? Has any of this been worth anything?”
“I’m too tired to talk about it,” Miller said. “We’re so close to the end that none of it matters anymore. Big Bindy will blow in…” He turned his mutilated left arm, pretended to look at a watch that was not there, giggled. “Hours. Or minutes. Or…” He tilted his head, his exposed eye watering constantly.
“In about ten hours,” Jack said. “And the bomb’s in the Imperial War Museum.”
Miller’s one good eye swivelled and settled on Jack. Then he shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re probably right. But what does matter is helping anyone left alive in London. You can do that.”
“Me? You see what’s left of me, boy? I’m barely human anymore.”
“You haven’t been human for a long time,” Breezer said.
“I’m a scientist, and—”
“You’re a murderer!” Breezer stepped forward, and Jack was surprised to see Miller jerk back in his chair. Filled with bravado, still he was in pain, and scared. Good. That might make what came next much easier.
“I’ll only ask once,” Jack said. “We need you to provide a safe route out of London. We know if we just storm the Exclusion Zone it’ll be a massacre. We’ll be cut down, bombed, slaughtered. But you can call them off. You can tell the Choppers to stand down and let us out.”
“I could,” Miller said. “And then all this would be released to the outside world.”
“The only thing released would be human beings with remarkable abilities,” Jack said. “All this murder and chaos and hatred…that’s
Miller chuckled again. It shook his body, and his pain was obvious. “I don’t care anymore,” he said. “I want to die. Look at me! Look what he did to me! My only wish now is for your bastard father to die with me.”
“You might want to die,” Breezer said, “but what about—”
“You’re all monsters,” Miller said. “The Evolve was my creation, so you’re all my children. And I condemn you to death.”
“That’s…” Breezer shook his head, then looked at Jack.
Jack nodded.
Breezer turned Miller’s chair and wedged it against the metal examination table, locking its brakes, holding Miller’s one good arm down against the side of the chair. The mutilated man laughed, but Jack could not tell whether he was afraid or purely mad. His remaining, lidless eye was wide open, either way.
“Like father, like son,” Miller said.
“No,” Jack said. “Not at all.”
He stepped forward and pressed his hands to Miller’s face.
The same ruins, the same day, the same tumbled wreckage of the London Eye. Lucy-Anne has seen the Eye since her last dream, so this time it is different—less damaged, only scarred high up with the impact site, with charred and broken pods further down where the helicopter tumbled and exploded. The aircraft’s blackened remains straddle a safety barrier next to the burnt-out ticket office. Lucy-Anne cannot understand how Angelina Walker survived that wreck to emerge as Nomad. Perhaps she also dreamed herself to life.
As she thinks of her, Nomad appears. She climbs from the helicopter’s ruin and jumps down to the ground, landing with barely a touch. She starts to walk away from Lucy-Anne, and it is the dream of destruction once again. In the distance the light will soon bloom, a bright flash that for an instant will look like creation, but will bring destruction.
But Lucy-Anne wonders,
But there is a difference. The bomb about to erupt is meant purely for destruction, and in its place it will leave a sterile, dead place.
Lucy-Anne follows Nomad, frantically trying to shout for her, but she has no voice. Any time now, any time now…
And then Nomad turns back to face her and lifts her hand, points, two fingers aiming at Lucy-Anne like a gun. “You and me,” she says. “You and me together.” She starts running at Lucy-Anne and the surroundings change in the blink of an eye.
A street, burning, shooting, screaming, bodies, flames and smoke, and Nomad leaps a burning motorbike and drives Lucy-Anne to the ground, straddles her, and drives her pointed fingers down into her throat, silencing the words that were building there—a cry for mercy, a scream of anger, and a question:
