Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(53)

Fleeter grabbed his hand and pulled, edging into a much narrower gap. Then she started to climb. He followed, glancing up and then looking away, embarrassed, when he realised he could see up her short skirt. He heard her chuckling above him, and he concentrated on handholds and footholds. In places it was easy, and elsewhere he had to prop himself across the gap and edge upwards an inch at a time. After a few minutes Fleeter's hand reached down and helped haul him up, and they emerged into sunlight.

Jack rolled onto his stomach and looked around. They'd climbed four containers, and around them many were stacked only two or three high. Fleeter pressed her finger to her lips and pointed, and thirty yards away Jack could see someone lying on a lower box, rifle resting before them. They had one hand pressed to their ear, listening to some sort of communicator. Binoculars sat beside them. Fleeter gesticulated “wanker,” then nodded in the opposite direction. To the east the wide, open area where there were no units at all was obvious. They crawled across the roof of the container, keeping as low as possible, and looked down onto a large expanse of concrete.

There were several Chopper vehicles parked there, Land Rovers and a few of the powerful motorbikes they'd seen only recently. People rushed around, weapons on display. They exuded an aura of confidence. Good, Jack thought. We'll soon change that.

Fleeter tapped his arm and pointed. Across the other side of the open area, which must have been the size of a football pitch, several metal containers seemed somehow out of place. They'd been placed side to side in two distinct arrangements, one consisting of four units, the other three. Electrical cable was strung around them, and around them were the signs of a well-used compound. Oil drums were stacked beside one, pallets held plastic containers of food and water. Spare tyres, a row of portable toilets, stacked bags of rubbish, and there were even several large, open tents.

They're settled, Jack thought. Safe. At ease. He could not hold back the smile. And then from below, a shouted warning.

“Stop right there!” Across the clearing, men and women brought up their weapons and pointed them at the intruders. Some of them edged sideways until they aimed from behind vehicles. Others went to their knees, rifles propped against shoulders.

Sparky, Jenna, and the others had emerged from the maze of containers and now stood at the edge of the open area. Breezer glanced back, and Jack realised for the first time how nervous the man was. He'd spent the past two years trying to avoid Choppers. Now he was offering himself to them, in full knowledge of what they did.

“Stay strong, not long now,” Jack muttered. Beside him, Fleeter giggled. He ignored her.

The man next to Breezer lowered his head and looked at his feet, and Jack just caught his words. “Drop your weapons.”

From across Camp H, the clatter and clash of guns being dropped.

“That's us,” Jack said, turning to Fleeter. She raised an eyebrow at him, licked her lips as she looked him up and down, and then vanished with a crack! and a swirl of dust.

Jack concentrated, grasped the talent, and did the same.





“You don't seem surprised,” Rook said.

“Seen it before.”

“On TV or something, yeah?”

Lucy-Anne shook her head. Rook frowned, but said no more.

The sculpture was huge, outlandish, and it seemed even stranger now that there was no one left to appreciate it. The table was thirty feet tall, plain, square-edged. An equally plain chair was tucked halfway beneath it, and together they dwarfed the landscape. Lucy-Anne couldn't shake the unsettling conviction that she, Rook, and the surroundings were too small, rather than the table and chair being too large. It was dizzying and unreal, but she was not too concerned with what she saw now.

It was what might come next that concerned her.

“Nomad's here,” she said. Farther up the slope, shadows moved slowly uphill.

“So did you dream that as well?” Rook's voice was loaded with doubt, and she looked at the boy who was barely older than her, his dark beauty belying the dreadful things he was capable of. I saw him having his face eaten off, she thought, but already she could not recall whether that had been a dream and what came after was real, or the other way around. Had she really dreamed to re-imagine reality? Or had reality merely followed the course of her dream?

“I'm so glad you're alive,” she said, realising how strange that must sound to him. She hadn't told him. How could she? The worm monster ate you, but I dreamed it all differently and now you're not dead.

“You're strange,” Rook said. For an instant his voice sounded almost childish—as it should sound coming from a boy his age, when adulthood and childhood still crossed paths—and Lucy-Anne laughed out loud. A killer and an innocent, perhaps Rook was no longer capable of subtleties of emotion.

At the edge of the tall tabletop, a silhouette shifted.

“There,” Lucy-Anne breathed, laughter ceasing.

“Oh,” Rook breathed.

Nomad stepped from the table and fell softly to the ground, landing on her feet without causing an impact. Lucy-Anne wondered whether the grass even bent beneath her feet. She looked like a special effect, superimposed on the strange reality of London without any influence on the surroundings. It's like she's too real and everything else is a shadow, Lucy-Anne thought, and the idea disturbed her terribly.

“Is that you?” Rook asked.