“Hah!” Sparky laughed. “Sniffer!”
“Please don't call him that to his face,” Rosemary said, suddenly serious. “He knows what he can do, but…he doesn't like doing it.”
“Why not?” Emily asked. “That seems daft. If you can do something special, you should.”
“Well, dear, he finds it quite frightening.”
Emily looked at Jack and blinked, and he could almost hear the cogs turning in her mind. How awful to have something that scares you so much.
“But he'll help?” he asked.
“Oh, I'm sure. He wants things to change as much as any of us.”
They gathered some food and drink together and shared it around their rucksacks, then waited in the hallway behind the front door while Rosemary checked that the coast was clear. She'd told them that they would be staying to the side streets, alleys, and residential roads, as Chopper patrols concentrated more on the old shopping districts.
“It's quiet,” she said, clicking the door shut again. “I'll go first, you follow in a close line.”
“How far?” Jenna asked.
“A mile,” Rosemary said. “Maybe less.”
“What will we be seeing out there?” Lucy-Anne's voice was low and tense, as if she was waiting for something to happen. Jack had tried several times that morning to approach her, talk to her, but she had shrugged him off. He wondered whether they were even together anymore, and guessed not. Perhaps they never really had been.
His concern seemed so childish. And that made his sadness feel all the more indulgent.
“I know the route,” the Irregular said. “Hopefully, nothing.”
Hopefully. Jack squeezed his sister's hand and she beamed at him, full of the fresh new day. Kids. He wished he hadn't had to grow up so damn fast.
They walked the streets of London, past silent homes containing dark secrets, across roads that were already cracked with the soft green force of shoots tired of biding their time, passing shadows hunkered down in alleys and gardens like memories waiting to strike back at those who had made them bad, and for the first time Jack really understood the tragedy of what had happened. It struck him hard, and looking around at his friends he could believe that they were experiencing the same thoughts. Before today, back in Camp Truth, there had been mourning for their missing families and anger at the cover-up perpetuated by the government and military. That's where all their thoughts and emotions had gone, all their mental energy spent mourning and hating, grieving and conspiring—personal things, all tied to them.
None of them had ever really spared a thought for London.
This once-great city was now a ruin. True, buildings still stood straight and square, but the life was gone from here. Each darkened window in a house's fa?ade promised only sadness contained within. The streets showed their age, now, without people and vehicles to pin them to the present. London was London no more, but a fading echo of what it had once been. A dead city.
Feeling sad, sensing London's history growing wilder, older, and further beyond redemption with every missed heartbeat, Jack walked with the others and let the sights and sounds wash over him.
They saw a family of foxes sitting and playing beside a road. The adults looked their way, but they remained on the street, when two years before they would have scampered away to wherever the city foxes hid during daylight. The cubs yapped and rolled, snapping at waving fern fronds growing along the gutter. Emily turned her camera their way, and as if aware of what she was doing, the wild animals fled, and the street felt as though they had never been there at all.
“Lots more foxes,” Rosemary said. “And rabbits, badgers, weasels, squirrels, and rats.”
“Food for the dogs, at least,” Lucy-Anne said.