It's both, Jack thought. Just like everything these London survivors can do, it's both.
Rosemary waved them all over and shone her torch at a metal door in the wall behind the twins. “In there,” she said. “Down a spiral staircase to an old deep level shelter. They built it during the Second World War, and now it's found its use again.” She smiled at Jack and Emily.
“Does she know we're coming?” Emily asked.
“No. I never told her I was going for you. It was a secret, and…I didn't want to raise her hopes. It'll be a nice surprise.”
A nice surprise. It was the phrase Jack and his friends used for something amazing. He was certain it was going to be just that.
He and Emily went alone, the others remaining up on the platform to give them their moment. He glanced at Sparky as the metal door closed behind them, feeling awkward and embarrassed, but his friend beamed a smile and gave him a big thumbs-up.
Beyond the door was a small metal landing, then a staircase that spiralled down into the darkness. Its walls moved, flexing in the flickering light from candles placed on every third or fourth riser. Jack went first, and the candlelight moved even more.
He heard Emily descending behind him.
He was nervous, and scared, and his heart beat so fast that his vision seemed to throb. We're going to see Mum, he thought. In his memory she was always alive, but in his mind's eye he sometimes found her dead. This descent felt so surreal and unbelievable. He paused on the spiral staircase and breathed in deeply, and Emily did not ask why he had stopped. He heard her taking in a big breath as well.
The staircase ended, and Jack ducked through a narrow doorway. They were at the end of a very long room, twice the length of the platform up above. It had a similar vaulted brick ceiling and tiled walls. A generator hummed somewhere, and strings of light bulbs were suspended from the ceiling. There were three lines of beds, maybe fifteen in each line, and at the far end of the room, two curtained areas. Along one wall stood metal storage cabinets, desks and shelving, and two doors leading away into other rooms beyond.
About half of the beds were taken. Several people wandered from bed to bed, giving drinks, touching patients, and Jack spotted his mother immediately.
“There,” he said, grabbing Emily's arm and pointing.
“I see her,” his sister said, and her voice broke.
They watched their mother for a minute, remembering the way she moved, brushed her hair back from her forehead, and laughed, and then it was too much and Emily dashed forward, unable to call out through her tears.
The sobbing was enough. Jack saw their mother stiffen, her back to them, and her stillness told him that she already knew.
“Mum,” he said.
It was stranger than he'd ever thought it could be, because his mother had changed so much. She was thinner than before, her hair shorter, an ugly scar beside her nose, and though he knew it was impossible, her fingers seemed longer and more delicate. She had aged ten years in the two since they had parted.
But she was still their mother, and as she hugged them both and Jack smelled her familiar smells, he realised that this reunion must be even stranger for her. Emily had been seven when they'd come to London, now she was nine. The change in her was greater than all of them, and that showed in their mother's eyes as she kept pulling back and staring at her daughter.