“Stop right there!” Across the clearing, men and women brought up their weapons and pointed them at the intruders. Some of them edged sideways until they aimed from behind vehicles. Others went to their knees, rifles propped against shoulders.
Sparky, Jenna, and the others had emerged from the maze of containers and now stood at the edge of the open area. Breezer glanced back, and Jack realised for the first time how nervous the man was. He'd spent the past two years trying to avoid Choppers. Now he was offering himself to them, in full knowledge of what they did.
“Stay strong, not long now,” Jack muttered. Beside him, Fleeter giggled. He ignored her.
The man next to Breezer lowered his head and looked at his feet, and Jack just caught his words. “Drop your weapons.”
From across Camp H, the clatter and clash of guns being dropped.
“That's us,” Jack said, turning to Fleeter. She raised an eyebrow at him, licked her lips as she looked him up and down, and then vanished with a crack! and a swirl of dust.
Jack concentrated, grasped the talent, and did the same.
“You don't seem surprised,” Rook said.
“Seen it before.”
“On TV or something, yeah?”
Lucy-Anne shook her head. Rook frowned, but said no more.
The sculpture was huge, outlandish, and it seemed even stranger now that there was no one left to appreciate it. The table was thirty feet tall, plain, square-edged. An equally plain chair was tucked halfway beneath it, and together they dwarfed the landscape. Lucy-Anne couldn't shake the unsettling conviction that she, Rook, and the surroundings were too small, rather than the table and chair being too large. It was dizzying and unreal, but she was not too concerned with what she saw now.
It was what might come next that concerned her.
“Nomad's here,” she said. Farther up the slope, shadows moved slowly uphill.
“So did you dream that as well?” Rook's voice was loaded with doubt, and she looked at the boy who was barely older than her, his dark beauty belying the dreadful things he was capable of. I saw him having his face eaten off, she thought, but already she could not recall whether that had been a dream and what came after was real, or the other way around. Had she really dreamed to re-imagine reality? Or had reality merely followed the course of her dream?
“I'm so glad you're alive,” she said, realising how strange that must sound to him. She hadn't told him. How could she? The worm monster ate you, but I dreamed it all differently and now you're not dead.
“You're strange,” Rook said. For an instant his voice sounded almost childish—as it should sound coming from a boy his age, when adulthood and childhood still crossed paths—and Lucy-Anne laughed out loud. A killer and an innocent, perhaps Rook was no longer capable of subtleties of emotion.
At the edge of the tall tabletop, a silhouette shifted.
“There,” Lucy-Anne breathed, laughter ceasing.
“Oh,” Rook breathed.
Nomad stepped from the table and fell softly to the ground, landing on her feet without causing an impact. Lucy-Anne wondered whether the grass even bent beneath her feet. She looked like a special effect, superimposed on the strange reality of London without any influence on the surroundings. It's like she's too real and everything else is a shadow, Lucy-Anne thought, and the idea disturbed her terribly.
“Is that you?” Rook asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You. Is that you doing that?” He was looking at Lucy-Anne, not at Nomad. Denying her presence, not wishing to see her.
“No,” Lucy-Anne said. “Who do you think I am?”
“I don't…” Rook said. He was confused and vulnerable. She didn't like him like this. Not one bit.
Nomad was watching them. Her hair shifted to an absent breeze, her clothes were old and tattered and yet suited her perfectly. Her eyes were piercing. She might have been mad, or scared.