She cleaned gently, lovingly. Jack shuddered.
“Come on, mate,” Sparky said. He held Jack’s hand and squeezed, moving his arm up and down, slowly so as not to shift him too suddenly.
“He’s just knocked out,” Rhali said. “That’s all. The thing banged his head.”
“It’s really hard to be knocked out,” Sparky said. “Not like in the movies. You have to do damage to knock someone out.”
Oh no, oh no, Lucy-Anne thought. She had to lean against a table to prevent herself from slumping to the floor, biting her lip and drawing blood. She briefly considered letting herself drop into dreamland, dreaming Jack well again. But it might never last. And her wider fears included not only Jack.
She looked around at the others. Sparky and Jenna at least were thinking the same thing. They’d only known each other for two years, but they’d been through a lot, and she thought they were brothers and sisters. Family. The only family she had left, and she could not bear to mourn any more.
“We’re wasting time,” Lucy-Anne said. “You know that, don’t you?”
None of them answered. Rhali looked up at her, about to speak, but she bit back the words. Hayden shuffled his feet. Jenna paused in her cleaning of Jack’s wounds.
“We can’t just leave him here.”
“I’ll stay,” Rhali said.
“And it wasn’t Nomad’s to give either,” Jack said, and they all held their breaths, ready for him to open his eyes. But he remained unconscious, shuddering occasionally. His skin was growing pale.
“Right,” Sparky said. He stroked Jack’s hand, eyes turning left and right as he thought something through. “Right. How long?”
“About five hours,” Hayden said softly.
“Long enough,” Sparky said. “You said you needed an hour.”
“And peace and quiet. And the right tools.”
“Tools,” Sparky said. “Okay. You and me, we go and find the tools. We’re close to the museum, so the others can rest here, and we go and find what you need.”
Hayden seemed uncertain but he nodded.
“I’ll come with you,” Lucy-Anne said.
“Didn’t for a moment expect you to stay sitting on your arse,” Sparky said, grinning. He knelt beside Jenna. “Half an hour,” he said. “Stay quiet.”
She nodded.
“Stay safe!” Sparky said. He pulled her close and kissed her cheek roughly. “I love you.” There was not a shred of embarrassment to his words.
“We’re going to have to leave him,” Lucy-Anne said as they emerged onto the street. Sparky held a hand up as he checked both ways, then waved them forward. They slipped from doorway to doorway, using parked cars and vans as cover.
“Yeah,” Sparky said at last. “If he doesn’t wake.”
“Even if he does he’ll be weak and have a monstrous headache,” Lucy-Anne said.
“But it’s Jack,” Sparky said. “You know what he can do, how special he is. We need him. Don’t you think? We’ll need him to even get close to the museum, and here we are looking for bloody tools?”
“We have to do our best.”
They never stopped walking. Sparky scanned their route, Hayden between them, and Lucy-Anne kept glancing behind them to make sure they weren’t being followed. Or stalked. But she could sense a hopelessness in Sparky’s movements. He was desperate, and that same desperation was manifesting in her.
She nudged Hayden. “See anything useful?”
“We need a hardware store,” he said. “Maybe a repair shop. You know, washing machines, that sort of thing. A garage. Anywhere that might have a well-equipped toolbox.”
“You were coming to defuse an atomic bomb without a toolbox?”
“The Superiors wiped out our vehicles,” Hayden said. “Me and two others survived, ran, didn’t have time to grab anything. We were lucky to get away with our lives, let alone any equipment.”
“So where the hell are the other two?” Sparky asked.
“Spooky guy told me they were dead.”
“You’re risking your life when you could be running,” Lucy-Anne said.
Hayden glanced back. “So are you.”
“Okay,” Sparky said. “Keep looking. Everything we’ve been through, I don’t want to mess up now ’cos we didn’t have a screwdriver.”
“Let’s cross over,” Hayden said. “Take that side street. I spent some time around here couple of years before Doomsday. I think there’s a locksmith’s down there.”
“That’d suit?” Lucy-Anne asked.
“That’d be perfect.”
They crouched and crossed the street, pausing behind a van that had been turned onto its side. Listening. Watching for movement, and any signs of pursuit. There was a rattle of gunfire far in the distance, and Lucy-Anne glanced at Hayden. His eyes had gone wide and his head was to one side, listening.
“Your lot popping off a few more survivors?” Sparky asked.
Hayden did not rise to his bait. “No. Everyone’s had the evacuation order, far as I know. That’ll be something else.”
“Yeah, guess who,” Lucy-Anne said.
They turned a corner and moved along the new street, and five shops along was the locksmith’s that Hayden remembered. The front door was open.
Sparky and Lucy-Anne waited close to the front of the shop while Hayden disappeared into the workshop at the back. As they kept watch they heard him rooting around for tools, dropping them into a metal box and mumbling to himself.
“Maybe we should just go,” Lucy-Anne said. “Take him to the museum and leave Jenna, Jack and Rhali where they are. Pick them up on the way out, after it’s done.”
“No,” Sparky said. “No way.”
“But with Jack like that—”
“It’s nothing to do with Jack,” he said. “I want to be with Jenna, and I know she wants the same. When the end comes, you know?”
“But we’re doing our best.”
“Can’t you feel it?” Sparky said. “The hopelessness of all this? Night’s falling on London, Lucy-Anne. The end’s close. Everything feels doomed, and what we’re doing just feels so pointless. Clutching at straws.”
“You’ve got to have hope.”
“I do. I have hope that I can die with Jenna. With the girl I love. And all of us together, too, when the time comes. We got more than we ever dreamed really, didn’t we? Always wanted to expose the truth of what London had become, reveal the lie being told to everyone. And here we are in the middle of it all. I never thought…” He chuckled wryly, shook his head.
“That doesn’t sound like the Sparky I know.”
“Not sure I’m him anymore.”
She wanted to rage, and cry. Instead, she pulled Sparky close and gave him a hard, quick kiss on the lips. Then she gripped his lapels.
“There’s still hope,” Lucy-Anne whispered. After everything, she was surprised that she was the one to say that. She thought of Nomad, and the explosion, and Rook falling and being killed even though she had dreamed him surviving. And the refrain repeated again and again in her mind as Sparky stared at her, unable to respond. There’s still hope…
For a while Jack believed himself dead, because when he tried to rise from his star-speckled darkness he could not. Reality remained obscure and difficult to find. Like some people’s idea of Heaven, it was beyond the universe he now knew.
But then he touched on a talent and plunged inside, and his perception changed. He floated in a blue sea that surrounded him on all sides and in all directions, and in places the sea was marred with frozen places, the ice a deep green colour, cracks seeping pain, sharp surfaces brushing against the sea and spreading more cold.