The staircase ended, and Jack ducked through a narrow doorway. They were at the end of a very long room, twice the length of the platform up above. It had a similar vaulted brick ceiling and tiled walls. A generator hummed somewhere, and strings of light bulbs were suspended from the ceiling. There were three lines of beds, maybe fifteen in each line, and at the far end of the room, two curtained areas. Along one wall stood metal storage cabinets, desks and shelving, and two doors leading away into other rooms beyond.
About half of the beds were taken. Several people wandered from bed to bed, giving drinks, touching patients, and Jack spotted his mother immediately.
“There,” he said, grabbing Emily's arm and pointing.
“I see her,” his sister said, and her voice broke.
They watched their mother for a minute, remembering the way she moved, brushed her hair back from her forehead, and laughed, and then it was too much and Emily dashed forward, unable to call out through her tears.
The sobbing was enough. Jack saw their mother stiffen, her back to them, and her stillness told him that she already knew.
“Mum,” he said.
It was stranger than he'd ever thought it could be, because his mother had changed so much. She was thinner than before, her hair shorter, an ugly scar beside her nose, and though he knew it was impossible, her fingers seemed longer and more delicate. She had aged ten years in the two since they had parted.
But she was still their mother, and as she hugged them both and Jack smelled her familiar smells, he realised that this reunion must be even stranger for her. Emily had been seven when they'd come to London, now she was nine. The change in her was greater than all of them, and that showed in their mother's eyes as she kept pulling back and staring at her daughter.
They went into one of the side rooms, which was stacked all around with towels, beddings, and bags of medical supplies. There was a space in the middle with a large table and several chairs, mugs, and plates scattered across its surface. More tears and hugs were inevitable, but eventually the talking had to start. There were two years and a whole new world to catch up on.
So Jack told his mother how he had been looking after Emily, living in the house they'd shared ever since he was born, and how Emily had helped him as much as he had helped her. He said he'd always tried to keep the faith that she and his father were still alive somewhere in the Toxic City. He told her about the doubts he and others had about the government's lies, but that the general populace believed that London was now a city of deadly, toxic monsters. He had met his best friends-Sparky, Jenna, and Lucy-Anne-through the growing certainty that they were all being lied to.
His mother said how proud she was of her brave children, and how not a day had gone by since Doomsday when she had not thought about them and felt desperate for them to be together again.
Whenever Jack mentioned their father, she changed the subject. For now, he allowed her that.
He and Emily took turns relating their journey into London, and when he mentioned Rosemary, his mother smiled and shook her head. “She's become a good friend. As good as any friend can be in this place, at least.”
“She came to get us because of Reaper,” Jack said.
She stared at him for a while, then turned to Emily, speaking past her constant veil of tears. “How are you doing in school, my darling?”
Their mother told them how unbearable it was being separated from her children. Soon after Doomsday, when London stank with the dead and resounded with the agonised cries of those unfortunates still alive, many had attempted to make their way back to family and home. The slaughter had been terrible. She'd seen five people pulled from a car and executed outside a church in Holborn, the military still wearing their bulky NBC suits, still uncertain about what had happened. Every survivor could relate tales of killings from that time. Since then there had been fewer and fewer efforts to escape.
“It became like another world,” she said. “I convinced myself that London was a different place entirely, a different reality, not just the ruin of a city so close to home. I missed you both terribly, but thinking that way made it somehow easier.”
“It's not so wrong,” Jack said. “We've only been here for two days, but it is somewhere else.”
Their mother told them about the hospital, and how difficult it was gathering medicines, bedding, towels, and food without being caught by the Choppers, the problems of sanitation, wild animals, rats…
Emily asked why they needed medicines when there were healers. Their mother replied that most healers’ powers were very specific, and that illnesses and injuries in the Toxic City were much more diverse.
They were talking around so many important subjects, and the more they talked, the more Jack began to fear they would never discuss what was important.
“Rosemary says you're a healer like her,” he said. And here it was. The subject of their mother's change, that in turn would lead on to what had happened to their father.
“Not like her,” she said. “Not exactly. None of them…none of us…are exactly alike.”
“What was it like, Mum? When it happened?”
She shook her head slowly, her face grim. She looked between Jack and Emily and into the past, seeing scenes which Jack guessed she had tried her best to bury. But her daughter had asked, and the good mother would answer.
“It was like living a nightmare. First the rumours of explosions and a terrorist attack, and then…Your father and I were just coming out of the Natural History Museum. There wasn't panic, but police cars were tearing along the roads in every direction, sirens everywhere, and people…” She shook her head, smiling. “People were standing with their phone cameras, ready to catch something amazing. A few were watching the news on their phones, and as we stood on the pavement we could almost see the ripples of panic spreading out from these people. That was the first time we heard talk of a biological attack, and your father and I started to worry.
“The first people I saw die were coming out of a restaurant on a street corner. Maybe the breeze blew whatever was in the air along the street, and it hit them just as they emerged. They fell, hard and quick. I knew they hadn't just fainted. You could almost see the life going from them.”
“They died that quickly?”
“Everyone did. The breeze carried the change through the streets, and one breath was enough. They fell in waves, and the sound was…horrible. Heads striking pavements. Mothers dropping their dead babies, falling dead themselves. Cars crashed. There were explosions, fires. There was screaming.”
“But you and Dad?”
“We ran. We thought we were running away from it, but then they started dying all around us. And then we fell.” She was crying now, but these tears were far different from those she had already shed. They glimmered on a sad face, not a happy one, and they did not seem quite so bright. “We lay together on the pavement, side by side, looking into each other's faces. I saw his eyes go red as the veins in them gave out, and I felt a stab of pain in my own head, and I thought, That's it. The last thing I thought about was…was you. I think I spoke to you both, as I lay there. I closed my eyes, waiting…And when I opened them again it was night, and your father was gone.”
Jack had a million more questions, but he could see that his mother was finding this difficult.
“I never saw him again.” She shook her head, smiled at Jack, and hugged her daughter for the hundredth time.
“And when you woke up, you were changed?” he asked. Meeting Rosemary and the others, seeing what they could do, had been incredible. But sitting here now and realising that his mother was one of them shocked him to the core.