“You,” Lucy-Anne says, fear cooling her blood.
“And you,” Nomad says. She looks at Lucy-Anne sadly and raises her hand, and Lucy-Anne senses the staggering amount of power held in Nomad's fist. Going to blast me scorch me burn me, she thinks, and between blinks she sees the nuclear explosion that has accompanied every other dream of this woman.
“I'm sorry,” Nomad says.
Lucy-Anne steps back. She's here to kill me! The scene freezes, filled with potential. “This is my dream,” she says aloud, but her voice sounds muffled and contained. “You can't kill me here.”
Movement begins again, and everything has changed. Rook is sitting in the long grass, and Nomad is squatting close by, frowning, shaking her head, and looking at Lucy-Anne as if she has seen a ghost.
“But no one knows me,” she says.
Lucy-Anne goes to speak, but there the dream ends. Her senses fade back to herself. She feels grass against her cheek, smells the freshly turned mud and foul sewage stench of the pit, and remembers the last time she had really seen Rook.
“Oh, Rook,” she said without opening her eyes, and she cried because the dream could not be real.
“It's okay,” Rook said. “You fainted. No wonder. That thing stinks.”
Lucy-Anne's eyes snapped open and Rook was there, kneeling by her side and resting one cool hand on her brow. He was shaking.
“Thanks,” he said. “One more step and I'd have gone right in.”
She lifted herself up on one elbow and looked past Rook towards the hole in the ground. The branches that had been laid over it to disguise it stuck up like broken ribs, and from deep in the dark pit she could hear a sickly, wet sound of movement.
“You didn't fall in,” she said.
“No. Well, not quite. Almost.” Above him his birds were sitting on branches and circling higher above the trees. They seemed calm, watchful.
“But…” She did not know what to say, nor how to explain.
“You okay?” he asked. “I mean, you hit the ground hard.”
“Yeah, I'm fine. I think.”
“Sure? Feeling exhausted, maybe.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, shrugging off his hands, standing. She actually felt better than fine. She felt energised. “I think I did something,” she said.
“We should keep moving.” Rook stood protectively close. “I don't like it here.”
Of course not, you died down there, Lucy-Anne thought. She started laughing, and Rook looked at her quizzically.
“Huh?”
Lucy-Anne shook her head, and the laughter faded as quickly as it had come.
“You're sure you're okay?” he asked again.
Lucy-Anne pinched herself, hard, but so that Rook could not see. “Yeah. I'm good. So which way?”
Jack stood close by Reaper, ready for the interrogation to take place. He wanted to see and hear everything, he wanted to be close to his father, and most of all he wanted to make sure that no one else died.
The surviving Choppers were being kept corralled inside a ruined clothing store, guarded by Shade and a couple of other Superiors, including the blind knife-thrower Jack had seen in action before. They looked nervous but defiant, and Jack wondered whether they were resigned to death. There must have been so much conflict and death in London since Doomsday. He had only been here for a matter of days and he had seen plenty already…but there was also the painful idea that he was responsible for much of it.