She wondered where her friends were now. Rook had told her they had not been caught by the Choppers, knowledge presumably imparted to him by his birds. She hoped they had escaped London. But at the same time she realised that was unlikely, because Jack would never leave without his mother and Emily. A pang of guilt hit Lucy-Anne again, the same guilt that had plagued her on and off since she'd met Rook and realised that she had abandoned her friends back in that hotel.
She'd been mad, for a time. Driven to distraction by the sudden news of her parents’ demise. She should have controlled herself and borne the news better, but after two years of hope, and loneliness, and their journey into London with fresh hope drawing them all the way in, the information had been just too shattering. Somehow in her madness she had managed to sneak out of the hotel while the Choppers had been infiltrating it, and then out into the streets of London, shouting and raging at the unfairness of it all until Rook had found her. Even now she felt the dregs of that madness at the edges of her perception, and it was being nurtured by the new, terrible dreams she was experiencing. She had dreamed of Rook, and he had dreamed of her, and however much she tried to deny it she could not escape this fact.
I'm not special! she had thought, again and again. But Rook called her pure, just like his dead brother, possessing an ability unconnected to what had happened to toxic London. And in truth, she'd always known there was something different about her.
When she was younger, she had experienced frequent moments of what her parents had called déjà vu. Mummy, this has happened before…you picking up the phone, Daddy walking in the door, next door's dog running across the road…
Déjà vu which, over time, Lucy-Anne had come to realise were dreams relived. It had troubled her little, because they had rarely concerned anything important—a phone call, a running dog. Perhaps exposed to such wonders in London, her talent was now somehow given free rein. Allowed to grow.
As for her friends…Her madness had given way to determination—to find Andrew—and hate it though she did, that meant that her friends were not her top priority. They would look after themselves.
“And when I've found Andrew, I'll go back to them,” she said. Rook glanced back at her, but she did not elaborate. Whether he'd heard or not, he did not pass comment.
He paused by a set of stone steps, head tilted as if listening. Then he nodded and climbed, and Lucy-Anne followed. As they started crossing the long bridge spanning the Thames, Lucy-Anne could not figure out why so many people had discarded their clothes here, leaving them in rumpled piles that all seemed to trail away from a common point. Then she saw the first flash of white, and the first spread of damp dirty hair, and realised her mistake.
There must have been a hundred bodies on the bridge. They had all been running north when they fell, and some even had their arms stretched out as if to grasp the northern shore. The breeze lifted strands of hair and the flaps of rotting clothing. The corpses were mostly rotted away, leaving bones and shreds of dried skin behind.
Lucy-Anne found it sad more than shocking. So many husbands and mothers and brothers lay here, so many children, and all of them had left someone behind.
“It's horrible,” she whispered. Rook seemed surprised, but said nothing.
They crossed the bridge, and until they reached the northern shore Lucy-Anne did not look along the river at all. She glanced at the bodies she passed, and the abandoned vehicles, and imagined what those bereaved believed about the deaths of their loved ones. At the beginning they had been told the truth about the explosion at the London Eye and the release of some unknown toxic agent. But very soon after that the lies had begun. Now they were told that London was filled with the dead and would not be habitable again for a thousand years.
London Eye, Lucy-Anne thought, and then leaned against the bridge's parapet and stared along the river.