Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(47)

I'm steering this, she thinks. Already this dream is not progressing like it ever has before.

She moves forward and looks for the man, but he has scrambled higher into the tree and is hidden from view.

She sees the dog-woman sniffing along at the foot of a tree farther away.

She'll piss, and then Rook will fall into the pit, I'll hear him scream and then look and that horrible worm-thing will be chewing at him, and he'll be dying.

“Rook, wait!” she shouts, and it is the first time she finds her voice.

Rook hesitates, then runs faster towards her.

Not long now. He'll fall.

“Stop running!” she screams. Rook's expression falters, and he skids to a stop twenty feet from her but not far enough away. He slips forward as the ground gives way.

“Grab something! Don't fall! Don't let yourself fall!”

Lucy-Anne is running forwards in her dream, in full control. She feels a gleeful rush of power, and even as Rook is scrabbling for his life she glances to the left. A tree explodes into colour, raining down a thousand fat red blooms that splash across the ground. She looks right and imagines a fully-laid dinner table, and there it is, meats and vegetables steaming all across the crisp white tablecloth.

She screeches in delight, and when she reaches Rook he is hauling himself from the edge of the pit. Something crawls around down there. Something hisses.

“I did it,” she says. Rook is silent, almost not there. “I did it.” But then she realises that this is a dream, and remembers what she has already seen in real life. She looks sadly at Rook, and he sees his own death reflected in his eyes. He starts to fade away.

There is a jump. Her surroundings change, and though there is no external jolt, inside she feels the shock of displacement. It is a blink between dreams, but Lucy-Anne now knows that she has some say in what she is seeing and experiencing, and that makes the change so much more shocking.

She and Rook are on a wide area of scrubland. London is in the distance so this is still the Heath, but a part of it she has never seen before. It is surreal. A huge table and chair stand before them, fifty times normal size, with long grasses growing around the legs and creeping plants trying to gain the tabletop.

What once were people move across a tree line farther up the hillside. They seem to be crawling on all fours, but she can't quite tell, because there is something so alien about their movements.

So what's this? Lucy-Anne thinks. She urges herself to wake—actually pinches herself in the dream, feeling the sharp sting of pain—but the dream still has more to show her.

Rook says something she can't quite hear. His voice is distant, and she experiences a moment of complete panic. Perhaps he really is dead, and this dream is simply an unconscious wish.

Of course he's dead! I saw him fall, saw that thing eating at him, so he must be dead, and now—

Nomad appears. She steps from the top of the huge square table and drops to the ground, landing with knees slightly bent and yet seeming to cause and experience no impact. The grasses around her feet barely move.

“You,” Lucy-Anne says, fear cooling her blood.

“And you,” Nomad says. She looks at Lucy-Anne sadly and raises her hand, and Lucy-Anne senses the staggering amount of power held in Nomad's fist. Going to blast me scorch me burn me, she thinks, and between blinks she sees the nuclear explosion that has accompanied every other dream of this woman.

“I'm sorry,” Nomad says.

Lucy-Anne steps back. She's here to kill me! The scene freezes, filled with potential. “This is my dream,” she says aloud, but her voice sounds muffled and contained. “You can't kill me here.”

Movement begins again, and everything has changed. Rook is sitting in the long grass, and Nomad is squatting close by, frowning, shaking her head, and looking at Lucy-Anne as if she has seen a ghost.

“But no one knows me,” she says.

Lucy-Anne goes to speak, but there the dream ends. Her senses fade back to herself. She feels grass against her cheek, smells the freshly turned mud and foul sewage stench of the pit, and remembers the last time she had really seen Rook.

“Oh, Rook,” she said without opening her eyes, and she cried because the dream could not be real.

“It's okay,” Rook said. “You fainted. No wonder. That thing stinks.”

Lucy-Anne's eyes snapped open and Rook was there, kneeling by her side and resting one cool hand on her brow. He was shaking.

“Thanks,” he said. “One more step and I'd have gone right in.”

She lifted herself up on one elbow and looked past Rook towards the hole in the ground. The branches that had been laid over it to disguise it stuck up like broken ribs, and from deep in the dark pit she could hear a sickly, wet sound of movement.

“You didn't fall in,” she said.

“No. Well, not quite. Almost.” Above him his birds were sitting on branches and circling higher above the trees. They seemed calm, watchful.

“But…” She did not know what to say, nor how to explain.

“You okay?” he asked. “I mean, you hit the ground hard.”

“Yeah, I'm fine. I think.”

“Sure? Feeling exhausted, maybe.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, shrugging off his hands, standing. She actually felt better than fine. She felt energised. “I think I did something,” she said.