Contagion (Toxic City, #3)(37)

It was her friends who connected her to reality now. She was aware of them close behind her, all of them so pleased to see her again, their love for her uncomplicated by London and what it had become. With the city about to be turned into an atomic wasteland, she felt safer with them than anywhere else.

“How far?” she asked.

Andrew answered, “Maybe a mile,” and Lucy-Anne was not sure whether he'd spoken the words or answered in her mind.

Gunfire crackled in the distance. They all dropped, huddling against a timber builders’ hoarding. Lucy-Anne looked back at Jack. He was frowning, and there was something about his eyes that scared her. They looked empty. More vacant than Andrew's, less human than some of those creatures’ eyes she had seen in the north.

“Reaper,” Jack said. “He and his Superiors are hunting.”

More gunfire, and then they heard the strained sound of a helicopter in trouble. About a mile to the east the aircraft rose above rooftops, spinning slowly as if piloted by someone unused to the controls. As it levelled at last and dipped its nose to power away, something struck it from the sky. The blast wave was not visible, but the helicopter's rotors were stripped away and flung behind it, its shell deformed, and it dropped quickly. In seconds it had disappeared from view, and a dull crump was followed moments later by a slowly expanding smudge of smoke.

“If Fleeter did go to him, maybe he didn't bother listening,” Sparky said. None of them had suggested that she'd gone back to the Superiors, but they'd all been thinking it.

“Or maybe he's just having some fun on the way here,” Jenna said.

“We just saw people die!” Rhali said.

“We've seen a lot of people die,” Jenna said, not unkindly. “Come on. I don't want to stay on the streets. It's spooky, like someone's watching me.”

“That'll be me,” Sparky said. “Watching your arse.”


Andrew had been motionless throughout the exchange, and he headed off again without a word or a glance at Lucy-Anne. I'll be with him, she thought. When my time comes I'll be with him, because I'll dream myself to never die. But she was not sure his was any sort of existence. She'd never believed in God or an afterlife, but surely true death would be preferable to whatever he had now.

They weaved through the streets, past traffic stalled for two years, seeing evidence here and there of more recent activity, and all the while the weight of Lucy-Anne's gift—or curse, she had yet to decide—pressed upon her.

She remembered those dreams she'd had of Nomad. The first was close to the London Eye, seeing Nomad and then the flash of the explosion silvering the scene, heat singeing trees to stark black sculptures and stripping her flesh away, while Nomad turned and smiled, untouched. And another dream of meeting her in the park and the same flash, the same skeletal outcome.

Reliving them now, Lucy-Anne tried to change them. Nomad turns to smile at her, and the explosion does not come. Instead, Lucy-Anne invites her to sit and talk, and they discuss Rook and what might have been.

Lucy-Anne caught Jack looking at her strangely, and she realised she was smiling. But changing her memory of dreams was nothing like changing the dreams themselves. It felt random and ineffectual, whereas lucidly altering her own dreams felt…godlike.

“What?” Jack asked.

“Just thinking,” she said.

“What about?”

“The future.”

They walked on in silence, and she knew that they'd all heard the brief exchange. She wondered what they were thinking right then, of a future that seemed so short.





“Six hours,” Jack said. “We'd better hope this is all true.” It had not escaped him that they had put their futures in the hands of a ghost. And that they were following him, or it, to where he said the saviour of that future now hid.

“Yeah,” Sparky said. “We'd be hard pushed to get to a safe distance now, anyway.”

“Jack could,” Jenna said. There was no accusation in her voice at all, but Jack knew exactly what she was insinuating: that he could pass on a power to help them all escape.

And he was still fighting with that. He wasn't sure exactly what delving into that bright red star of potential would do. He was fairly certain that he could bestow powers, though he was not sure how he could choose which ones to give, nor the control he'd have over them. But he also thought it likely that he would pass on the contagion itself, just as Nomad had to him. Even thinking about it planted the taste of her finger on his tongue. In him, the threat of contagion was a bright red promise, yet it was contained. If two people possessed it, that containment was no longer assured. And if he passed it on to all of his friends…

That red star could change the world, and Jack did not feel that he had any right to do so.

But would he let his friends die? If it came down to it and they were an hour away from the explosion, would he not touch them all, give them Fleeter's power, and flee from London with them?

He wasn't at all sure. He saw the way Lucy-Anne looked at Andrew's wraith, and knew that there were some things worse than death. And if all went well, he would not even be faced with such a decision.

“We're close,” Andrew said.

“Look,” Rhali said. She had been silent since crossing the river, almost ghostlike herself. Now she pointed along the road, and only then did Jack see the movement. Perhaps Rhali had sensed it for some time.