Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(60)

“We're the New,” Jack said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “The fighting stops now. The killing ends here. You, Miller…you're the old. History. The past. And you know how the saying goes.”

Beside him, Sparky chuckled softly then shouted, “Out with the old!”

“And in with the new,” Jenna said.

“You really think we'd stay in London, here, without protection?” Miller said. “Without an insurance policy?” Jack was sure he could detect a note of resignation in the Chopper's voice.

“No good when you're dead,” Reaper shouted.

“No more killing unless we have to, Dad,” Jack said. Reaper did not even glance at his son as he started forward.

Puppeteer moved Choppers aside. Others backed away of their own accord, leaving their weapons where they had fallen. Jack and his friends followed, Breezer with them, and the New moved across Camp H unopposed.

Yet Jack felt no sense of victory. Something was wrong. The girl by his side was a living expression of Miller's inhumanity, and those rooms he had seen in the container buildings, the jars, the smears of blood and chunks of something—of someone—being cleared away….

With all that, could he ever really hope for peace?

As they approached the three joined containers, a door creaked open at the top of a gentle wooden ramp. Miller appeared strapped into a wheelchair, his terribly mutilated legs resting on footplates, his left arm ending in a stump just above his elbow. He looked thin and drawn, corpselike and lessened. Yet it was his smile that shocked Jack the most.

“Like your new chair, Miller,” Reaper said. “Maybe this time I'll take your other arm, and your cock, and one of your eyes. Then how will you—”

Miller started laughing. He tilted his head back and guffawed at the sky, and Sparky and Jenna shot Jack a glance that said everything he was already thinking.

Something terrible was about to happen.





“We need to leave,” Rook said. “Really. Now. We're going the wrong way, Lucy-Anne!”

“Leave if you want, I'm going the right way.”

They had been following Nomad since she had left. At least, Lucy-Anne had been leading them north. And soon after the strange woman had seemingly abandoned them, things had started to change. The wilderness around them had grown wilder, and more shapes and shadows made themselves known. They darted across hillsides and huddled beside lush growths of shrubs, and though the two of them kept to the open spaces, Lucy-Anne feared that soon they would meet more residents of the Heath.

Dusk approached, crawling across the hillsides like a living thing and driving the sun into the western expanses of London. Rook's birds drifted along above them like echoes of night, turning and spiralling up into the sky before swooping down again. Lucy-Anne was becoming used to their constant flap and swoosh, and she feared not hearing that anymore. He's scared, he's terrified, and if he leaves me I'll be just as scared.

Something burst from the trees ahead of them and came rapidly down the slope. Rook grasped her shoulder and pulled himself in front of her, squatted down, ready for a fight. He sent his birds and they angled in towards the shape, but then veered away at the last moment. Their caw-caws sounded panicked to Lucy-Anne, and she dreaded meeting what could scare them so much.

But it was Nomad, only Nomad, and she grew from shadows to meet them.

Lucy-Anne went to her knees. I've found him, Nomad had said, and if that were the case, where was Andrew now?

“I'm…sorry,” Nomad said. It was the most emotion Lucy-Anne had heard in her voice.

She took the gold chain and signet ring from Nomad's hand. Their parents had bought Andrew the ring for his eighteenth birthday, and the chain had been a present from one of his first girlfriends. His parting with her had been difficult, yet for some reason he'd still worn that chain, and treasured it. She'd once asked him why, and he'd told her it was because it reminded him of good times, not bad. She loved that about him—his positivity, and optimism.

“Where…?” she asked.

“It doesn't matter,” Nomad said. “You don't want to see.”

I'll sleep, she thought. I'll fall asleep and dream him alive and fine and laughing, and when I wake up…

Lucy-Anne could not find her tears. She realised that she had not even cried for her parents, because from the moment their deaths had been confirmed to her everything had been Andrew, Andrew, all Andrew. And now…

“I've got nothing left,” she said. She felt Rook's hand on her shoulder and remembered his dead brother, but it was Nomad she looked at. “Nothing. Nothing left at all. And…and you killed him. You killed my parents, and my brother.”

Nomad's expression barely changed, but she did not look away.

Lucy-Anne knew she should be feeling rage at Nomad, and the Choppers, and everything that had happened to steal away her family. She should be grieving for her brother, who she had hoped would still be alive so that she was not now alone in this cruel new world. But she felt only a peculiar emptiness. Everything was distant to her, and she was a hollow girl.

“We need to get away from the Heath,” Rook said. “Night's falling, and it feels strange. Like something terrible's about to happen.”

“Something already is,” Nomad said. And she told them.