Without warning Nomad flipped back, and Jack had to follow. The world came to life around them. Movement, sound, smells, much of it unnatural and strange. Jack grabbed Nomad's arm and ran.
Through the gates into the museum grounds, and something came at them from the left. Jack raised a hand to halt it, but the shape skidded to a stop and backed off. Other creatures moved aside. Perhaps these amazing, wretched things were scared of Nomad. Maybe they perceived some kind of hope in their sudden arrival.
Or perhaps it was simply that they had already eaten.
Nomad ran with him, grunting at every footfall. She was more human than he had ever known her.
“The doors?” Jack asked.
“Safe,” she said. “The traps begin inside.”
Jack knew it was a terrible risk, but he used Reaper's power to grunt the doors open. They fell back, hinges twisted and lock shattered, and he and Nomad ran inside. He had no wish to give those creatures time to rethink, so he skidded on the marble floor, turned, and breathed a gush of white flame at the opened doors. Glass cracked and shattered in the inner vestibule walls, and the flames lit the area as bright as daytime.
Jack shoved forward with both hands, feeling his power surge through the air and catch the doors, slamming them against the darkness of London. He kept them closed and melted their hinges, twisting the lock back into place and melting it into one piece. It might not withstand a sustained assault. But it would have to do.
“Show me,” he said to Nomad. She was staring at him with those glazed eyes, and he saw the respect and wonder. But he could not pander to that. “Show me!”
“This way,” she said. He followed her into the main hall where machines of war stood on pristine plinths or hung from the ceiling. She held up a hand and they came to a halt. She pointed. In the darkness Jack saw the fine tendrils of lasers crisscrossing the large space, and the glimmer of trip wires. Then she touched his arm and pointed at the hulking shadow of a tank at the other end of the hall.
There, she said in his mind.
Jack could see that she was getting worse. That did not concern him now. It would help when the time came.
“We don't need to get too close,” he said.
She was looking at him wide-eyed. “I've brought you as far as I can,” she whispered. “I can't stay here, Jack. I know you must, and I won't change that. But what I have is too precious and it has to be preserved.”
“No.”
“Yes. It has to be spread.”
“No! It's not precious. It's poisonous. And you're staying here with me.”
Every scrap of her illness—the weakness, the blood, the distant glaze to her eyes—vanished in an instant. She seemed to expand as she took in one huge breath, and Jack wondered at the effort and energies it took to drive down that sickness.
“Nomad—” he began, but then she turned and ran for the doors.
He followed. The bomb behind, Nomad in front, both were terribly destructive, but Nomad was probably worse. The bomb could end London and all the history of that great character city. Nomad, and the contagion she carried, would change the world. Some of the change might be good, but the possibility was too great that much of it would be bad. In London she had been her own person, but out there in the wider world, she would be precious. Sought-after. Jack tried not to imagine Nomad weaponised. He tried not to imagine an army of a thousand Reapers.
She shoved at the doors and they flexed in their frames, creaking and breaking. Jack dipped into her mind and broke her link with the doors. She stumbled forward, as if a great barrier had been removed before her.
“You'd dare enter my mind?” she asked.
“Please listen to—”