London Eye: 1 (Toxic City)(66)

Beyond the door was a small metal landing, then a staircase that spiralled down into the darkness. Its walls moved, flexing in the flickering light from candles placed on every third or fourth riser. Jack went first, and the candlelight moved even more.

He heard Emily descending behind him.

He was nervous, and scared, and his heart beat so fast that his vision seemed to throb. We're going to see Mum, he thought. In his memory she was always alive, but in his mind's eye he sometimes found her dead. This descent felt so surreal and unbelievable. He paused on the spiral staircase and breathed in deeply, and Emily did not ask why he had stopped. He heard her taking in a big breath as well.

The staircase ended, and Jack ducked through a narrow doorway. They were at the end of a very long room, twice the length of the platform up above. It had a similar vaulted brick ceiling and tiled walls. A generator hummed somewhere, and strings of light bulbs were suspended from the ceiling. There were three lines of beds, maybe fifteen in each line, and at the far end of the room, two curtained areas. Along one wall stood metal storage cabinets, desks and shelving, and two doors leading away into other rooms beyond.

About half of the beds were taken. Several people wandered from bed to bed, giving drinks, touching patients, and Jack spotted his mother immediately.

“There,” he said, grabbing Emily's arm and pointing.

“I see her,” his sister said, and her voice broke.

They watched their mother for a minute, remembering the way she moved, brushed her hair back from her forehead, and laughed, and then it was too much and Emily dashed forward, unable to call out through her tears.

The sobbing was enough. Jack saw their mother stiffen, her back to them, and her stillness told him that she already knew.

“Mum,” he said.

It was stranger than he'd ever thought it could be, because his mother had changed so much. She was thinner than before, her hair shorter, an ugly scar beside her nose, and though he knew it was impossible, her fingers seemed longer and more delicate. She had aged ten years in the two since they had parted.

But she was still their mother, and as she hugged them both and Jack smelled her familiar smells, he realised that this reunion must be even stranger for her. Emily had been seven when they'd come to London, now she was nine. The change in her was greater than all of them, and that showed in their mother's eyes as she kept pulling back and staring at her daughter.

They went into one of the side rooms, which was stacked all around with towels, beddings, and bags of medical supplies. There was a space in the middle with a large table and several chairs, mugs, and plates scattered across its surface. More tears and hugs were inevitable, but eventually the talking had to start. There were two years and a whole new world to catch up on.

So Jack told his mother how he had been looking after Emily, living in the house they'd shared ever since he was born, and how Emily had helped him as much as he had helped her. He said he'd always tried to keep the faith that she and his father were still alive somewhere in the Toxic City. He told her about the doubts he and others had about the government's lies, but that the general populace believed that London was now a city of deadly, toxic monsters. He had met his best friends—Sparky, Jenna, and Lucy-Anne—through the growing certainty that they were all being lied to.

His mother said how proud she was of her brave children, and how not a day had gone by since Doomsday when she had not thought about them and felt desperate for them to be together again.

Whenever Jack mentioned their father, she changed the subject. For now, he allowed her that.

He and Emily took turns relating their journey into London, and when he mentioned Rosemary, his mother smiled and shook her head. “She's become a good friend. As good as any friend can be in this place, at least.”

“She came to get us because of Reaper,” Jack said.

She stared at him for a while, then turned to Emily, speaking past her constant veil of tears. “How are you doing in school, my darling?”

Their mother told them how unbearable it was being separated from her children. Soon after Doomsday, when London stank with the dead and resounded with the agonised cries of those unfortunates still alive, many had attempted to make their way back to family and home. The slaughter had been terrible. She'd seen five people pulled from a car and executed outside a church in Holborn, the military still wearing their bulky NBC suits, still uncertain about what had happened. Every survivor could relate tales of killings from that time. Since then there had been fewer and fewer efforts to escape.