Ruben surprised them all with sudden movement, tugging his hands from Jenna's stomach, flinging them up above his head and speckling the ceiling with rosettes of blood. Something bounced from the wall and fell behind the sofa. The fat man tried to stand but he seemed weak, and instead he slipped from the sofa and sat on the floor, breathing heavily. “It's out,” he said.
Jack rushed to Jenna, kneeling beside Sparky and Emily and looking at her wounded stomach. The tear from the bullet was still obvious and horrific, but there were no other wounds to show where Ruben's hands had entered.
Ruben was looking at his hands, gently dabbing the smears of blood that speckled them like liver spots. There was nowhere near as much as there should have been.
“Where's the bullet?” Sparky asked. He crawled around the end of the sofa and looked behind it, stretching his arm into the gap between sofa and wall. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, standing with the prize in his hand. The bullet was half the size of his thumb, squashed and distorted by the impact on Jenna's flesh.
“Move aside, please,” Rosemary said. She nudged past Jack, waited while Ruben crawled across the floor, and knelt beside Jenna.
The girl screamed, hands pressing down onto her wound once more.
Rosemary put her hands on Jenna's stomach, grew very still, and her face went blank.
“That was incredible!” Sparky said. He'd hardly left Jenna's side since Rosemary had healed the wound, and now he sat at one end of the sofa with the girl's head in his lap. She seemed to be asleep now rather than unconscious, and she had already stopped moaning from the pain. “She was dying in front of us, and now…” He shook his head.
“It's just what we can do,” Rosemary said, but she was smiling.
“It's a miracle! No bloody wonder the Choppers are hunting you all.”
“Yes, well, I'd rather not be hunted,” Ruben said.
“They told us you were all monsters,” Emily whispered. “They showed pictures on the telly and the Internet. Pictures of…monsters.”
Ruben smiled and motioned for Emily to go to him. She sat beside him on the other, smaller sofa in the room.
“Do I look like a monster to you?” he asked.
“Of course not. You look like my friend Olivia's dad.”
Jack laughed, and Ruben honoured him with a smile as well.
“And is Olivia's father a monster?”
“No,” Emily said. “Though he's a bit gruff sometimes. And he smells of smoke.” She frowned. “I've always known they were lying, because Jack made sure I did. But they still tell everyone else that anyone left alive in London is a mutant. Dangerous.”
“Some are,” Ruben said, smiling ruefully. “Some are.”
“They met some Superiors back at the hotel,” Rosemary said.
“But they helped us,” Jack protested. “If it weren't for them…” He thought of Lucy-Anne, and the guilt cut in again, harsh and sharp. Is there someone that can heal me of this? he wondered, and he thought there probably was. But some things needed to be suffered.
“And if the Choppers hadn't turned up,” Rosemary said, “there's no saying what Puppeteer and Scryer would have done to us.”
“Maybe Lucy-Anne is with them!” Emily said. “Maybe they rescued her, and—”
“If they had, they'd have let her go again,” Ruben said. “Even we're looked down upon by them, but you…”
“We're normal,” Emily said.
“My girl,” Ruben said, “I'll tell you something, and whether or not your brother or friends agree, you listen to me because I know: there's no such thing as normal.”
“So maybe she went north to look for her brother?” she said.
“She's dead,” Sparky said. “She was mad, grief-stricken, no way she'd have come to her senses quick enough to hide or get out. No way.”
“We can't know that for sure,” Jack muttered, but a voice inside was whispering we can, we know, we're sure. He turned to Rosemary. “How safe are we here?”
“As safe as anywhere,” Rosemary said. “We use a house a couple of times, then abandon it. I hid here for a week a few months ago when the Choppers did a sweep through this part of town.”
Ruben grunted. “They took Horace, Pat, and Bethany, that time.”