And she dreamed.
She runs along the South Bank and sees Nomad before her. Calls her name. Nomad turns, and smiles, and then it is not Nomad at all, but Jack smiling back at her. She can see the pain in his eyes, both the good and the bad one, because his injuries are apparent in the dream. As is his tiredness, and his strain. His smile is pure and unforced, but Lucy-Anne can tell that it is taking every ounce of physical and mental strength for him to hold the dream together, in peace.
She smiles back, her expression conveying so much. She tells him that they are safe and he can let go now. He can let go.
And then there is light.
Lucy-Anne jerked awake, breathing hard, gasping for breath. “Bad dream!” she said. “I had such a bad—”
But then she realised that she could see everyone's faces, even though it was the dead of night. And they were all looking back the way they'd come.
A false dawn rose over London as the city became truly toxic.
“We're safe,” Lucy-Anne says. “Jack, you can let go now.”
He smiles. Relaxes.
Light and heat sear across London, and as Jack starts seeing paint singeing and flaking on the ruin of the London Eye, he closes his own eyes.
He plunges into his huge universe of potential, a place filled with endless possibilities of human evolution plumbed far too early. He floats for a while, content. The red star of contagion no longer pulses for release.
As the points of light begin to grow, the red shifts to white.
And each star explodes, continuing to expand until they banish the darkness and join forever in one incredibly bright, cleansing light.
TIM LEBBON is a New York Times–bestselling writer from South Wales. He's had almost thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories. His most recent releases include Star Wars: Into the Void (Dawn of the Jedi) from Del Rey, Coldbrook from Arrow/Hammer, the Toxic City trilogy from Pyr in the United States, and Nothing as it Seems from PS Publishing, as well as The Secret Journeys of Jack London series (coauthored with Christopher Golden). He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards.
ABC Network is currently developing the Toxic City trilogy as a TV series, and 20th Century Fox acquired film rights to The Secret Journeys of Jack London series, for which Tim and Chris Golden wrote the first-draft screenplay. He is working on new novels and screenplays.
Find out more about Tim at his website, www.timlebbon.net.