Contagion

What is she—? Jack thought, and then Nomad brought her fist down and punched a hole in Lucy-Anne’s throat.

“What?” Jack whispered. His voice was a calm breath amongst the burning and crashing and the breaking of things.

Lucy-Anne arched her back and shuddered. Nomad raised her hand again, splashing blood across the road, blood also dripping from her hand. Lucy-Anne’s blood.

Yet again, Jack’s instinct took over.

And here she comes, Nomad, another movement in the chaotic street and yet the focus of everything. Flames lean away from her. She is the centre. She runs and jumps a burning motorcycle and her feet barely seems to touch the ground, and then she knocks Lucy-Anne down.

Lucy-Anne draws in a breath to scream, but blood floods into her lungs.

She tries to punch at Nomad, but her limbs do not obey her commands.

Pain rings in, but it is the ice-cool pain of trauma and shock. Her chest is heavy. She cannot breathe past whatever has happened to her face.

And then Nomad punches straightened fingers down at her throat, and Lucy-Anne feels the hot, painful rush of air into her lungs once more.

He saw Lucy-Anne shudder as a breath flooded in, and somewhere inside, somehow, he sensed the relief bleeding through her shock and pain. Other, more destructive powers reined in, and his skin tingled from his ears to the tips of his toes.

Nomad looked at him and almost smiled. Jack wondered what would have happened had he unleashed any of those powers. She looked weak and was bleeding from her nose and the corners of her eyes, yet she was still strange, almost alien, and removed from what was happening.

“Jack,” a voice said. Jack frowned, but could not take his eyes off Nomad and Lucy-Anne. Maybe she’s dead anyway, he thought, but he saw his friend moving as she struggled against the pain coursing in. She’d been shot in the face.

“Jack!”

Jack turned, and Reaper was behind him. “Not out of danger yet,” the man who had been his father said. “And I…” He touched his throat, as if to signal what was wrong. Behind him stood Haru, blinking rapidly, seeming exhausted. For the first time Reaper looked weak, uncertain, as if something had been stripped away and he had been lessened. Was he scared? Jack wasn’t sure about that. But he did see something in his father’s eyes that gave him a moment of satisfaction in this terrible time—respect.

“Sparky?” Jack called. The boy was sitting against a shop front across the street now, Jenna beside him. He raised a hand and waved. Bloody but alive, Jack thought, and that was as good as he could hope for right now.

Fires crackled, glass broke, metal buckled. The street was a symphony of destruction. The helicopter was settling into the sagging roof of a jeweller’s, lying on its side with rotors snapped off, fuel gushing down the shop’s facade. Two Choppers had climbed from the wreck and were trying to crawl across the rooftop to an adjoining property.

Jack’s heart sank, so quickly and deeply that sour sickness rose in his throat. I’ve done it again. He could see a burning corpse tangled with the wreckage of a motorcycle, and the stench was terrible. He looked at the climbing, scrambling Choppers and wondered who they were. There must have been more in the helicopter, dead or dying.

“I’ve done it again,” he said aloud.

“She’s…” Hayden said. He was climbing from the restaurant window, pale and shaking. “She’s…”

“Fleeter?” Jack asked. Hayden nodded.

There was no sign of the evolved humans, creatures, monsters. Survival was their sharpest instinct.

It was becoming Jack’s as well. Now that everything had gone bad, and people were dying, and he was killing again, survival was all that mattered. And Hayden was key to that.

“Come here,” Jack said. “Quickly. Carefully.” He reached out one hand.

Hayden started towards him, looking down at Lucy-Anne and Nomad, then at the ruins and wrecks of machines and people across the street. Shade burned and sizzled, no longer casting shadows. Now he was just another dead man.

“He’s our hope,” Jack said, nodding towards Hayden. He did not even glance back at Reaper to see if the man was listening. Jack knew it, and that was all that mattered. Everything rested in this man’s hands.

“Jack,” Reaper said, panicked, “quickly, I can’t, I can’t do it, but you have to look now!”

Lucy-Anne felt apart from herself. The unbearable pain was borne by someone else. She might have been dying. Nomad knelt beside her and she looked different somehow, less than what she used to be. She was bleeding.

I came here for you, Nomad said in her mind, but Lucy-Anne could not be sure whether the woman had really said it, or if she’d imagined those words.

Lucy-Anne tilted her head to the side and tried to scream at the agony, but she could make no sound. Her body was no longer hers; pain was its master now.

There, she thought, returning Hayden’s gaze as he stared down at her in frank fascination. There’s our only hope. And I’ve never dreamed this far.

And Hayden’s shocked expression vanished in a haze of blood and bone as he danced to gunfire’s tune.

“No!” Jack shouted.

Instinct—

He crouched and turned, reaching out and lifting the two surviving Choppers from the rooftop. Even as he was suspended in mid-air one of them swung his rifle, and Jack super-heated the weapon, melting it and the man’s hand to a slick mess. The man screamed.

Jack heaved them over the rooftop and they disappeared beyond, falling and dying out of sight.

Jack dashed past Lucy-Anne and Nomad and knelt beside Hayden, reaching out ready to clasp and heal, hands heavy with powers he had only just begun to understand. But there was no healing these wounds. No powers on earth could gather these scattered brains, bring them together, make sense of them again. Their chance at stopping the bomb—their hope for the future—lay dead in a bloody mess across the road’s surface.

Jack closed his eyes and searched, harder than he ever had before. But there was no trace of Hayden. He had been living and now he was dead, and there was no point in between from which Jack could gather any knowledge that might help.

It had all gone to shit.

The taint of pointless deaths forever staining his soul, he slumped down in the street, lost.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN TWO

“They did something to us,” Reaper said. “At the edge of London. Crossing the Exclusion Zone. They fired several artillery shells. I thought they were just bad shots, but then I smelled something, felt strange. Tired. It must have been some sort of gas to knock us out, but Haru froze the worst of it into ice. I didn’t know what they’d done until I tried to…to shout.” He was struggling to sound strong, as dismissive as he’d always been. But his fear was leaking through. Jack didn’t think it was fear of death. He thought that Reaper was more scared of losing his destructive power for good and being normal again.

“They stole his shout,” Haru said. “They stole my cold.”

“Miller’s last revenge?” Jenna suggested.

“He’s dead?” Reaper asked.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “The Choppers know what’s happening, so when you went to them it was a gift. Their last chance to trap you Superiors so they still have someone to experiment on when everything’s blown wide. And they wouldn’t want such murderers breaking out of London.”