Contagion (Toxic City, #3)(2)

“Then let's get the hell out of here,” he said. “We need to hide low ’til daylight, plan what to do.”

“Finding Lucy-Anne is what we do!” Sparky said.

“Yeah,” Jack said. He looked at Rhali and smiled. She did not smile back. He wondered what damage she must have suffered, physically and mentally, at the hands of the Choppers and their sick leader, Miller. Perhaps soon he would ask. “But first we've gotta find somewhere to rest. We can't run into another Chopper patrol, not now. They're out for revenge for what's happened to their mates, and…”

“And you're tired,” Jenna finished for him.

“Yeah. Exhausted.”

“*,” Sparky said.

Jack smacked him playfully across the shoulder, and they hurried quickly along the street. He did not once look back. But that could not stop him from thinking of the people he had just killed.

During his brief time in London he had already witnessed so much violent death. One death was too many for someone of his age, but he had seen many more than that—Choppers killed by Reaper, and Fleeter, and other Superiors in their ongoing game of cat and mouse in the remains of London; Irregulars caught in the crossfire; and the shelved and jarred remnants in Camp H, grim evidence of Miller's inhuman vivisection of the Doomsday survivors.

But he had never killed. The very idea of it was sickening to him, and it was a line he had never dreamt of crossing. Now, he had. Minutes before, three people with memories and loves, lives and ambitions, fears and desires, had been alive in this world, and now because of him they were no more. They had ceased to be, and the consequences of their deaths would ripple outward beyond London, touching wives and husbands, children and parents. Jack had become a harbinger of tears.

Perhaps I'm like him now, he thought, picturing the man who had been his father. And yet Reaper was a monster, acting only upon his own selfish needs. Killing was a pleasure to him, and Jack had witnessed him delighting in it more than once.

Jack was different. He was trying his very best to save London, and everyone left alive in that once-great place.

He had to insist upon that—he was different.

The deaths weighing heavily, he led his friends deeper into the doomed city.

Lucy-Anne knows that she is dreaming. But this time she is a passive observer, and whatever strange power drives her dreams is cruel. It keeps her prisoner, frozen into immobility, eyes open, able only to watch as Rook falls again and again, trying to grab her and scratching three trails across the back of her hand with his nails. They will scar, if she lives long enough. Even without these nightmares, she will have a reminder.

She struggles to cry out a warning to him. But each time she does so it's too late, and he is already down in the pit. She hears his screams of terror and then agony again and again. The dreams give her that. I'm sorry, she thinks, but by then Rook is already falling once more.

She tries to wake, but in this dream she cannot pinch herself. Perhaps this is hell, she thinks. Rook falls again.

Pain cuts in across the back of her hand, a cruel heat. Lucy-Anne gasps, and then—

—the gasp came again, echoing back at her from the small room where she had taken refuge. It was a lonely sound, yet it made her feel safe. She was alone here, as she had been when she'd crawled this way, blood dribbling from the wound on her scalp, emptiness around her where Rook and his birds should have been. The scrapes across the back of her hand were already rough with dried blood.

Awake in the darkness, Lucy-Anne felt the warm comfort of fresh tears. She'd believed that she had saved Rook, dreaming away his fall into the pit and death at the jaws of the worm-thing. But fate had found him at last. Perhaps that was simply how it worked.

She sat with her back against the damp wall and looked around the dark room. Furniture hunkered, shadows frozen. Pictures on the walls reflected weak moonlight filtering through the net curtains. Close to the edge of Hampstead Heath, the house smelled like time stood still. She felt the same way, floating in that strange time between sleep and wakefulness when dreams still intruded, and reality was reforming around her. The more of the real world that flooded in, the more wretched she felt, because it was not only Rook who was dead.

“Andrew, my sweet brother,” she whispered, and then she heard a sound. She froze, holding her breath and her tears, head tilted. She started breathing out slowly, aiding her hearing, and then it came again—something in the next room, brushing against a wall. She stood, pain pounding through her skull. If she had to run, the front door was out in the hallway opposite the room where the sound originated. She could turn the other way, maybe, run towards the rear of the house, but she had not checked back there when she'd crawled in. She'd barely looked anywhere.

She stood as motionless and silent as could be, and something dropped into the doorway.

A rook. She knew it instantly, because she had been so close to them over the past couple of days. Her fear evaporated. She held her breath and her heart hammered as she listened for footsteps behind the bird. He'll saunter in now and smile at me, shrug when I ask what happened, and I'll dream us together forever.

But there were no footsteps. And after looking at her for a few seconds the rook skipped out of sight. She darted after it, reaching the corridor just in time to see it hop into the other room, and reaching the doorway to that room in time to see it take flight through a broken window pane. By the time she stood at the window the bird was gone. The darkness had swallowed it, just as it had the creature's master.