London Eye: 1 (Toxic City)(14)

“Why?”

Rosemary frowned, and Jenna and Lucy-Anne aimed their torches at her face. Jack held back a laugh; it was like an interrogation in some crappy movie.

Cringing against the light, Rosemary turned away. “It's a secret,” she said. “This way, this route, no one knows about it. No one but Philippe and me, and now you.”

The torches lowered, giving light to Sparky and Emily once more.

“Everything's a secret,” Rosemary continued. “We're going towards a place where secrets are currency, and survival means stealth. I never liked London before Doomsday, to tell the truth, but these days, I like it much less. It's as if in moving on, we've also regressed. Trust is a thing of the past.”

“Tell me about it,” Lucy-Anne said, and Rosemary looked at Jack's girlfriend, her eyes sad and heavy with the terrible things they had seen.

“We trust you,” Jack said, surprising himself. Lucy-Anne glanced at him, eyebrows raised. “We do. We trust you. You lead us in, and we'll help however we can.”

Rosemary smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “All of you. But sometimes…” She drifted off and stared at the concrete wall.

“Sometimes what?” Sparky said, panting. He stood, face grimy and hands filthy from the dirt.

Rosemary sighed. “Sometimes, I think we've passed the point of no return.”

Rosemary went first. Sparky offered, but she insisted, waving away objections and borrowing Sparky's torch. Maybe Jack's statement of trust had given her strength, or perhaps it made her want to prove herself more.

Lucy-Anne felt a begrudging admiration for the old woman. But trust? Not yet.

“Only a few feet,” Rosemary said. They watched her crawl into the narrow crack at the base of the wall, pulling with her elbows and pushing with her booted feet, and the light she carried threw back curious shadows, as though there was something down there with her.

“I'm through,” Rosemary called. Her voice was muffled, and came from miles away.

Sparky went next. In his enthusiasm he banged his head on the concrete, cursing and touching his scalp to check for blood. Lucy-Anne giggled, but only briefly, because no one accompanied her.

Fair enough, she thought. Yeah, we all know how serious this is. Rosemary can stop the bleeding, but we're out of the world we know, now. We're facing danger and challenging it to bite back.

Jenna went after Sparky, then Emily, pushing the camera bag before her.

“You okay?” Jack asked. They were alone here now, with only the muffled sound of their friends chatting with Rosemary. Lucy-Anne could not quite tell in what way their voices had changed.

“I'm fine. Just…you know.”

“Bit scary, yeah?”

“I guess.”

They stared at each other, knowing that perhaps now there should be a kiss or a hug, or at least something more than this.

“You next,” she said, to break the silence more than anything. Jack smiled and nodded, reaching out towards her and barely managing to touch her hand with his.

She watched him crawl into the hole and, alone at last, she closed her eyes and gave way to a sob that had been building in her throat.

She could remember a dream she'd had weeks ago, when dogs were attacking her in the dark, biting her, eating her, even as she tried to fight them off. The body they'd seen…that had been like a trigger, throwing the dream back at her. She knew it was stupid. She knew they'd say she was a fool. But for a while back there, she'd been terrified.

At least now they were moving on.

She turned around slowly and shone the torch back the way they had come. Its beam did not reach very far. Such old, thick darkness, she thought, not sure where the idea came from. She suddenly felt like an invader down here.

The gap was much narrower than she'd expected, so much so that she could not even raise her head without bashing it as Sparky had done. So she stared at the gravelly ground beneath her, pushing with her feet and crawling through on her elbows. It was only as light fell upon her that she realised she was through.

Sparky helped her to stand, playfully brushing dust and dirt from her clothes. “Welcome to the Mines of Moria!” he said, in the gruffest voice he could manage.

Lucy-Anne looked around. “Bloody hell!”

“I think it's an old church basement,” Rosemary said.

The room was twenty steps across and thirty long, supported at regular intervals by thick stone columns. There seemed to be nothing stored down here, and it had the feel of being long-abandoned; dust had drifted against the base of walls, and in one corner an impressive array of spider webs formed grubby curtains. They shone their torches around, searching but not finding a way up into whatever building had once stood, or still stood above them.