Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(23)

Whatever these Choppers might do, they were still people, each with families and individual stories to tell.

“Why would he worry about me?”

The woman who had called herself Fleeter shrugged. “I just do as he tells me.”

“Just following orders, eh? That's what these Choppers do. Hey. Hey!” She was approaching more of the soldiers and raising the stolen pistol.

Fleeter turned and looked over her shoulder, eyebrows raised in surprise. “What?”

“Don't,” Jack said.

She pulled the trigger. The sound was a crushing impact and then an extended, deafening roar, like a train bursting from a tunnel and then receding. He saw the bullet leave the gun and strike a woman in the eye.

“Don't!” he shouted. He ran at Fleeter and she stepped aside, tripping him up. As Jack struck the ground his anger grew, and the pain from knees and elbows fed it. He delved deep and stood again, turning to the woman, sending a thought, spasming her thigh muscles so that she groaned and stumbled, dropping the gun and hitting the road.

“I said don't,” Jack said. The gunshot's roar was a grumbling echo, fading, fading. “Now you can help me get my friends away from here.”

“Can't,” Fleeter said through gritted teeth.

“Why not?”

“I don't move people. I just speed myself up.” She looked up at him, still trying to massage the cramps from her muscles. “Like you.”

“You're nothing like me,” Jack said. As he went to Sparky and Jenna he could feel the flow of time all around, moving like random currents in thick soup. I'll carry them, he thought. Away from danger, hide somewhere, and then—

Something slipped. Everything fluttered and blinked, and then noise and chaos burst around him—gunshots, shouting, someone screaming one name over and over again: “Peter! Peter! Peter!”

“—ack!” Sparky finished shouting, and his eyes went wide.

“What the bloody hell?” Jenna asked. “How did you get from there to—?”

Jack fell into the doorway with them, overcome with sensory input after that brief respite. Everything felt wrong—the air, the noise, the feel of concrete pavement against his hands. He looked around quickly for Fleeter, but saw only the crashed Jeep and the Choppers now advancing quickly from behind it.

“They'll kill us,” Jack said, because it was inevitable. They'd seen their comrades ambushed and murdered, and here were the kids they'd likely been looking for all across London. Shoot now, ask questions later.

The Choppers fell one after another, legs kicked from beneath them. They hit the ground hard as if shoved from above by a massive weight. Bones broke.

With a clap of displaced air, Fleeter appeared before them. She looked angry.

“Well, come on then,” she said. “Or I will have to finish them off.” She limped along the street without looking back, and Jack grabbed his friends’ hands.

“Come on!” he said, ignoring their questioning looks. “No time to lose.” He and his friends followed the woman along the street.

Moments later the shooting began. Bullets ripped into parked cars and across storefronts, ricochets sparking from the road, and Fleeter led them between two buildings, protected from the shooting but nowhere near safe. She skidded to a halt and looked back, angry.

“You'll get me killed!” she said to Jack, and her fear was obvious. Desperate to use her ability to flit away, she had also been tasked with protecting Jack. By my father, Jack thought. But now was not the time to dwell on what that might mean.

“If you'll trust me, we'll be safe,” Jack said.

They heard cautious footsteps and whispered orders, the crackling of radios, and in moments the Choppers would storm the alley. There would be no demands to raise hands, give in, kneel down. Only bullets.

“Safe here?” Fleeter said, gesturing around at the alley.

“There,” Jack said. He pointed at a door alcove, where two red-painted fire doors were locked shut.

“Yeah,” Sparky said. Jack could have hugged his friend for remembering, and Sparky's confidence seemed to change something in Fleeter.

“You can do other stuff,” she said, surprised.

Sparky and Jenna were already in the alcove, squatting, nowhere near out of sight but ready for Jack to save them. He joined his friends there, already floating through his cosmos of fledgling abilities, reaching for one blazing star he already knew.

“They're brothers and fathers, daughters and mothers,” he said softly. Fleeter seemed to vibrate, shimmering as though seen through a heavy heat-haze as she struggled with doubt—disappear into her own slowed-down time and continue with her cold-blooded slaughter; or trust Jack?

As Jack held his friends’ hands and breathed deeply, Fleeter joined them, pressing one warm hand to the back of his neck. It was sticky with blood, and when she whispered to him, her voice was heavy with the threat of more.

“This goes wrong, I'll only save myself,” she said.

“Clear!” a voice shouted, and Jack and the others turned slowly to look along the alley.

Two Choppers stood just beyond the entrance, one crouched down and aiming a machine gun, the other peering around the wall. We're in plain sight but a world away, Jack thought. The woman with the machine gun swung the weapon back and forth to cover the alley, its barrel drifting past the alcove where they squatted and back again. The barrel did not waver.