I'm drawing close to her again, Nomad thought. She's come to the north where the worst of my mistakes live out their lives. The north. I haven't been here for…
After Doomsday, when Nomad found herself wandering the ruined city and becoming something else—drowning in new abilities, and then drowning her past with them—she had gone to dwell in the north. It had felt sufficiently different from the rest of London to perhaps allow her some peace. But that peace had failed to manifest, because the north had shown her the worst of what she had done. The monsters had run, crawled, flown, and scampered there, hiding amongst the mazelike streets and parks, and she had wandered amongst them, never touching nor wishing to be touched.
And so Nomad had moved south and found the reality, though that was no less troubling. She had returned north occasionally since then, because her destinations were never purely geographic, and sometimes there was a randomness to her wanderings that made it inevitable. But she had never been comfortable there.
She seeks her brother, but if he is here, she will not want to find him. It was strange thinking of the girl in such terms. Nomad was going to kill her—she was certain of that, convinced, and ready for it—and yet the girl was very real in her mind, with aims and ambitions, fears and worries. Strange. She did not think of people like that anymore. Everyone was a ghost to Nomad because she dwelled somewhere so different.
Everyone but the boy, Jack. Her boy. In him she had planted the seed of her future and hope for redemption. And she would do everything she could to protect him.
“What?” Lucy-Anne asked as she ran. “Rook, what?”
“Hampstead Heath,” Rook said. “I never thought it would be so…” But she didn't hear what else he said because they were both running, pounding the pavement, and Rook's birds fluttered around their heads, their own evident excitement echoing his.
Lucy-Anne had never been to Hampstead Heath before. She was expecting a park, like any one of London's other large green areas. What she could not prepare herself for was the sheer scale of the place. One moment they were running along a residential street, aiming for a wide junction with shops on the other side of the road. The next moment, they turned a corner and wilderness confronted them. A landscape of greenery, much of it strange. A swathe of wild hillsides, a forest, a jungle of trees and creepers. The shock was immense, and she was almost winded by it. Then when she breathed in again she could taste the Heath, and it was both alluring and terrifying.
“They called it the Lungs of London,” Rook said as they jogged. “So big, it's like a different place. Countryside in the middle of the city. Sucks in a lot of London's pollution, pumps out oxygen. It did, at least. Who knows what it pumps out now?”
Lucy-Anne heard but could not respond. At the end of the street two roads led off, the main one on the left providing what was once a definitive demarcation point between green and grey. Now, that line had been blurred. The Heath was spreading, bleeding greenery from its previously defined borders. The buildings there sprouted grasses, wore climbing plants across their fa?ades, and several seemed to have trees growing through their slated roofs.
Nothing grows that quickly, Lucy-Anne thought. But every sense told her that the Heath no longer obeyed any natural rules she knew. While Evolve had acted upon the human population of London, perhaps here it had also touched the vegetation.
“How the hell are we going to find him in there?” she asked. Rook looked at her, eyes wide with excitement and fear. He could offer her no answer, no comfort. He only took her hand and pulled her along the street.
“The only way is to start looking,” he said. “I've sent my rooks ahead. They've been scouting the land while you rested.”
“And what have they found?”
“Wilderness. Strangeness. Danger.” He smiled at her. “All the usual.”
“And nothing to put me off,” she said.