“It’s not hopeless,” she said, sensing the despair in him. He only looked at her. “Really!” she insisted. “We’ve got nine, ten hours yet. We’ll find a way.”
“I don’t see how,” he said. Lucy-Anne reached out and held his hand, and a rush of memories of her and Jack assaulted her. Most of them were good. He was above all her friend.
“We stop the bomb or get out,” she said. “Anything else is not an option.” She was proud of herself. Saying that whilst remembering her dreams—the blast, the flames, the heat-flash blanching everything that London had become into a white-hot mess—took some effort.
Jack smiled, then sat back against the bench. “We thought we’d lost you,” he said. “So what happened?”
“Rook found me,” she said. She leaned back next to Jack, and with the sun on her face and the gentle movements of the boat, she felt almost relaxed. London could almost have been its old self again.
“A Superior,” Jack said.
“No, not at all. Rook was all on his own. He went with Reaper because it suited his purpose.”
“Which was?”
“Revenge. He was in a dark place. Such a…sensitive boy. He and his brother survived Doomsday and lived together for a while, but then the Choppers took his brother, and the birds showed him what happened. They slaughtered him. Took his brain.”
“They’ve experimented on so many,” Jack said.
“But he saw something in me. We connected, I guess. And maybe fell for each other, just a little.” It seemed strange talking like this with Jack, because until recently they had been a couple. But she sensed no hostility from him, and no surprise. Their relationship had been strong from the moment they’d met, marred only by the weight of expectation between them—that they should be together. They were much better together as friends. Anything else just got in the way.
“I saved him,” she said. She sensed Jack’s confusion.
“I thought he was gone?”
“He is, now. But I thought I’d saved him. I’ve got something too.”
“The dreaming? Nomad touched you?”
“I’ve met her, Jack. Seen her in my dreams, and met her for real, and sometimes both are the same. But the thing I’ve got is all my own. Something I’ve always had, when I think back to when I was younger, but always a more subtle thing than it is now. More gentle. Nomad told me I was what she’s been looking for forever. And Rook too, he told me his brother had something of his gift even before Doomsday.”
“So what does that mean? And what can you do?”
“I think it might mean that everyone left alive had something beforehand that Evolve caught onto. And I can dream. At first I thought I was seeing the future, or forms it might take. I dreamed of meeting Rook and his birds attacking me, and they did, briefly, after he died. I dreamed of Nomad and the bomb. I dreamed of meeting you by the river and the Choppers waiting there, but I didn’t know how that one turned out, and didn’t have a chance to change it.”
“Change?”
“I think I can…I thought I could change events in my dreams. Lucid dreaming, guiding things. Rook died and I dreamed him alive again, and for a while he was.” She looked at the scratches on the back of her hand, put there by Rook’s nails as he fell into the hole. “But then fate caught up with him, exactly as I’d seen it before. I might have stretched things a little, but I don’t think I really changed anything.”
“That’s amazing,” Jack said. “I had nothing before. Don’t think so, anyway. But Nomad’s touch has given me…” He trailed off, looking into a distance no one else could see.
“What?” Lucy-Anne asked.
“So much,” he said. “So much that I really don’t know what I might become.”
“So we’re special,” Lucy-Anne said. She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice, because being special hadn’t done much for her thus far. “My talent’s not caused by Doomsday, and it’s grown just by being here. And you’ve been touched by a freak.”
“We’re
Lucy-Anne thought of Rook and how conflicted his gift had made him. She’d seen him cold-bloodedly killing Choppers out of a burning need for revenge. She had also seen his more vulnerable, needy side, and the part of him that was still a child. And she realised that the Rook she’d fallen for had been the human boy, nothing more or less.
“We’re all special,” she said, nodding.
“And we always were.”
“So we stop the bomb or get out.” She smiled at Jack, her special friend. “Sinking the boat is not an option.”
“Right.” He smiled back. For a moment too brief to measure but too precious to ignore, all was well with the world.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NINE
“On the bridge,” Sparky said. “I’d recognise that spooky bastard anywhere.”
Jack turned and looked ahead of them, certain he was about to see his father again and unsure what he thought about that. He felt sick and excited. Outwardly he’d disowned him—Reaper was a murderer and exuded little hope of redemption. Inside, Jack still remembered the kind man he used to love so much.
But it was not Reaper standing in the centre of Tower Bridge looking down at the approaching boat.
“Puppeteer,” Lucy-Anne said. She more than anyone had cause to remember him; he’d almost killed her back in that hotel, just before the Choppers arrived and everything went to hell.
“Thought we’d seen the last of them,” Jenna said.
“What shall I do?” Breezer sounded scared, and Jack could not blame him. Any time the Superiors intruded in their lives, it meant that either they wanted something, or that things were about to get much worse. Perhaps both.
“Carry on,” Jack said. “Let’s see what happens.” He looked around the boat, trying to make out whether Fleeter was with them or not. He thought she’d gone, but it was possible that she’d come along for the ride, sitting quietly flipped out. Twenty minutes on the river for them would have felt like twelve hours for her, but she was inscrutable. He had no idea what her aims were.
“I’m going to see if Fleeter’s with us,” he said. Sparky and Jenna nodded.
“What do you—?” Lucy-Anne began.
“Blink and I’ll be back,” he said. He leaned closer to her. “Trust me.”
Lucy-Anne grinned. It was her cheeky, mischievous grin that he’d fallen for, and he felt a moment of nostalgia for the time they’d spent as an item.
Then he closed his eyes and grasped the talent, and before anyone spoke again he flipped.
The impact of changing his pace with the world thumped him in the gut and chest. He opened his eyes and looked around, and for a moment he knew he could take a breath. The world took on that surreal, deadened sheen he’d already become used to, and everything was still…almost. There was movement all around, but because it was barely noticeable it felt like a fluid, dizzying sensation. He could not see anything moving. But everything was.
Fleeter was nowhere to be seen.
His friends on the boat were stuck where he’d left them. Breezer drove, eyes dead ahead. And Lucy-Anne looked at him with wide, fluid eyes. If he could wait here motionless for long enough, he’d see her eyes growing wider and her mouth falling open as she realised that he’d gone. But even here, out of phase with the world, the
