“We're not going either, Jack,” Jenna said.
“Jenna—” Jack began, but Sparky grabbed him in a neck-lock. Jenna stepped forward and dragged her knuckles back and forth across his scalp, and Jack snorted in pain and pleasure. They were playing.
“Well, now, you gonna use your special powers to make me go?” Sparky asked.
“I could,” Jack wheezed.
“Yeah. I don't doubt that.” Sparky let him go, and Jack rubbed his neck as he looked around at them all.
“You're special, too,” Jack said to Sparky and Jenna. “Both of you. It's both of you who've stopped me going mad with all this. You're my…reality.”
They were all silent for a moment, and then Sparky said, “Pussy.”
Jack grinned, then turned to his sister. “Emily, you need to retrieve that camera you hid before you were caught. Start spreading the news. Mum, don't go home. Cornwall, West Wales, somewhere like that. Be careful whom you tell and how, but start getting those pictures out onto the net. Emily is…well, you'd be surprised at how good she's become at computer stuff.”
“I'm not at all surprised,” his mother said, smiling lovingly at her daughter. She was thinner than she'd ever been, face drawn, and she'd aged ten years in two. But she was filled with love for her children, and that made her glow.
“What about me?” the girl said. She'd recovered her strength quickly as the drugs had started working from her system. Her name was Rhali.
“You're welcome to come with us,” Emily said.
Rhali looked back and forth between them, but her eyes always settled on Jack.
“I think perhaps I'll stay with you,” she said. Jack nodded. He would take any help he could get.
“Jack—” his mother began.
“Mum, I'll be careful,” he said.
“I wasn't going to say that, son. I was going to tell you how proud I am.”
Jack pursed his lips and nodded, trying not to cry. There had been too many tears. They all hugged silently, and then it was time.
He, Rhali, Jenna, and Sparky watched Fleeter leading Emily and his mother through the darkness and underground. Jack felt an awful tug watching them go. He had been desperate to find and rescue them, and now that he had he was letting them go again. But he also had every confidence that Fleeter would see them safely through and out of London. Outside, they had their own work to do. And in London, he had his.
“Right then,” Sparky said, clapping his hands together. “Reaper's at war, Miller's pushed the button on a nuclear bomb that'll explode at any time and flatten London, any Choppers left are out to avenge their dead friends. And I'm bloody staving. So what's next?”
The four of started walking back the way they'd come, but no one answered Sparky's final question.
None of them could know.
Thanks as always to my agent Howard Morhaim, and to my editor Lou Anders.
TIM LEBBON is a New York Times-bestselling writer from South Wales. He's had almost thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories. His most recent releases include Coldbrook from Arrow/Hammer, London Eye (book one of the Toxic City trilogy) from Pyr in the United States, Nothing as It Seems from PS Publishing, and The Heretic Land from Orbit, as well as the Secret Journeys of Jack London series (coauthored with Christopher Golden), Echo City, and the Cabin in the Woods novelisation. Future novels include Into the Void: Dawn of the Jedi (Star Wars) from Del Rey/Star Wars Books. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards.
Fox 2000 acquired film rights to The Secret Journeys of Jack London, and he and Golden wrote the first draft of the screenplay. A TV series of his Toxic City trilogy is in development with ABC Studios in the United States, and he's also working on new screenplays, both solo and in collaboration with Stephen Volk.
Find out more about Tim at his website, www.timlebbon.net.