“Sparky?” Jack called. The boy was sitting against a shop front across the street now, Jenna beside him. He raised a hand and waved. Bloody but alive, Jack thought, and that was as good as he could hope for right now.
Fires crackled, glass broke, metal buckled. The street was a symphony of destruction. The helicopter was settling into the sagging roof of a jeweller's, lying on its side with rotors snapped off, fuel gushing down the shop's facade. Two Choppers had climbed from the wreck and were trying to crawl across the rooftop to an adjoining property.
Jack's heart sank, so quickly and deeply that sour sickness rose in his throat. I've done it again. He could see a burning corpse tangled with the wreckage of a motorcycle, and the stench was terrible. He looked at the climbing, scrambling Choppers and wondered who they were. There must have been more in the helicopter, dead or dying.
“I've done it again,” he said aloud.
“She's…” Hayden said. He was climbing from the restaurant window, pale and shaking. “She's…”
“Fleeter?” Jack asked. Hayden nodded.
There was no sign of the evolved humans, creatures, monsters. Survival was their sharpest instinct.
It was becoming Jack's as well. Now that everything had gone bad, and people were dying, and he was killing again, survival was all that mattered. And Hayden was key to that.
“Come here,” Jack said. “Quickly. Carefully.” He reached out one hand.
Hayden started towards him, looking down at Lucy-Anne and Nomad, then at the ruins and wrecks of machines and people across the street. Shade burned and sizzled, no longer casting shadows. Now he was just another dead man.
“He's our hope,” Jack said, nodding towards Hayden. He did not even glance back at Reaper to see if the man was listening. Jack knew it, and that was all that mattered. Everything rested in this man's hands.
“Jack,” Reaper said, panicked, “quickly, I can't, I can't do it, but you have to look now!”
Lucy-Anne felt apart from herself. The unbearable pain was borne by someone else. She might have been dying. Nomad knelt beside her and she looked different somehow, less than what she used to be. She was bleeding.
I came here for you, Nomad said in her mind, but Lucy-Anne could not be sure whether the woman had really said it, or if she'd imagined those words.
Lucy-Anne tilted her head to the side and tried to scream at the agony, but she could make no sound. Her body was no longer hers; pain was its master now.
There, she thought, returning Hayden's gaze as he stared down at her in frank fascination. There's our only hope. And I've never dreamed this far.
And Hayden's shocked expression vanished in a haze of blood and bone as he danced to gunfire's tune.
“No!” Jack shouted.
Instinct—
He crouched and turned, reaching out and lifting the two surviving Choppers from the rooftop. Even as he was suspended in mid-air one of them swung his rifle, and Jack super-heated the weapon, melting it and the man's hand to a slick mess. The man screamed.
Jack heaved them over the rooftop and they disappeared beyond, falling and dying out of sight.
Jack dashed past Lucy-Anne and Nomad and knelt beside Hayden, reaching out ready to clasp and heal, hands heavy with powers he had only just begun to understand. But there was no healing these wounds. No powers on earth could gather these scattered brains, bring them together, make sense of them again. Their chance at stopping the bomb—their hope for the future—lay dead in a bloody mess across the road's surface.
Jack closed his eyes and searched, harder than he ever had before. But there was no trace of Hayden. He had been living and now he was dead, and there was no point in between from which Jack could gather any knowledge that might help.
It had all gone to shit.
The taint of pointless deaths forever staining his soul, he slumped down in the street, lost.