“What happened?” she asked.
“You fainted,” the woman said. “I took you in.” She was sitting on the stairs heading to the top deck, gun leaning against the wall beside her. She stared intently at Lucy-Anne.
“Took me in?” Lucy-Anne looked around, more to escape the woman's gaze than out of curiosity. It took only a moment to ascertain that the woman lived here. One double seat was piled high with a ragged assortment of clothing, another with blankets and pillows. There were plastic bottles filled with water, tins of food, and farther along the bus she thought she saw a pile of stuffed toys peering over the metal railing of a seat's back.
“Yeah,” the woman said. “Hey.”
Lucy-Anne looked back at her.
“You're seventeen,” the woman said. “Looked after yourself since Doomsday. No virgin, but you haven't loved for a while. Time of the month in…” she shrugged. “Six days.” Her eyes narrowed and she glanced aside, displaying the first sign of emotion. “You just found out your parents are dead.”
“And my brother's alive!” Lucy-Anne said. “That's why Rook brought me here, because you can help.”
“Somewhere to the north,” Rook said.
“Yes. The north. And you'll not want to find him,” the woman said. “Better off dead. Ever heard that saying, girl? I think it all the time, but don't have the fucking guts. Huh.”
“Lucy-Anne, meet the charming Sara.”
“I do want to find him!” Lucy-Anne said. “And if you know where he is you have to—”
“Have to nothing,” Sara said. She stood and climbed the stairs, disappearing quickly from sight.
“What is this?” Lucy-Anne asked.
“She can scent information,” Rook said.
“So she can sniff out Andrew?”
“I think she already did.”
Lucy-Anne stood and started up the stairs, ignoring Rook's half-hearted attempt to call her back. He fell he was down the hole he wouldn't listen when I called. On the top deck she paused and looked around in surprise.
Every seat was taken by a shop mannequin. They were all dressed, some extravagantly, others in jeans and tee shirts. She couldn't help feeling every eye upon her.
“You met Nomad,” Sara said. She was sitting three seats along the bus, a plastic man beside her sporting a running top and waterproof coat.
“No,” Lucy-Anne said.
“Sounds like you did. Smells like you did.”
“Only in my dreams.”
“Hmph.” Sara looked her up and down. “You're an odd one. That hair, those clothes. And from outside. I didn't think…didn't let myself believe that outside existed anymore. There's just London, and death, and sometimes one becomes the other. Interchangeable. It's not a nice place.”
“Tell me about it,” Lucy-Anne said. And when Sara seemed to take that as a cue to talk, she did not interrupt.
“He is to the north. Hampstead Heath, or whatever it's called now. But, girl…that's a dead place. You think London's bad, that's somewhere else. Removed by what it's become.” She nodded at the stairs. “Even those so-called Superiors don't venture there. It's a no-go place, and if you go there, you'll die.”
“What's there?”
“Bad people, hungry and cruel.”
“I'm going anyway.”
Sara watched her, suddenly growing immensely sad. “I had a daughter, few years older than you. She'd moved away a couple of years before Doomsday, we'd had a row, hadn't talked in over a year. I wonder…” She stared into space, then turned to look at the mannequin beside her. Perhaps she talked to them. Maybe they were her family now.
Unable to think of anything comforting to say, Lucy-Anne descended the stairs to find Rook still sitting where she'd left him.
“Hampstead Heath,” she said, and his dark expression only echoed what Sara had said. Lucy-Anne didn't care. She was going, and she knew that Rook was intrigued enough to accompany her.
She tried to forget seeing him fall. Not all dreams come true.