‘GO!’ I shouted down at her, moving in to grab Shackleton again. ‘Get out of here!’
Shackleton stepped back. Too far. His boot crunched down on the glass sticking up from the edge of floor and he slipped backwards, spinning his arms in a vain attempt to regain his balance.
Instinctively, I reached out to grab him, like I’d blanked out for a second and forgotten who he was. My hand came down around the front of his shirt before I’d even realised what I was doing.
Shackleton glared into my eyes with a look of absolute disdain. He kept falling, feet teetering on the edge. My arm jerked out, straining under his weight but somehow still not letting go.
The wind and rain drove at us from all sides. My shoes skidded on the glass-strewn carpet and I felt my whole body pulled closer to the edge. But just as the signal finally got through from my brain to let go of him and save myself, Shackleton’s hands came clamping down around my arm. His fingers dug into me, clawing up my sleeve like it was a rope.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
Gunshots echoed up from across the street. Jordan screamed, and I felt my guts turn to liquid inside me.
‘What was that?’ I demanded, neck straining to see past him.
‘That,’ said Shackleton, a grim smile stretching across his face, ‘was the end of you.’
He flung himself forward, head-butting me in the face. I screamed, crashing to my knees as he dealt a savage blow to my stomach.
‘Luke Hunter,’ he said between breathless gasps.
I opened my eyes and saw him standing over me, legs planted firmly apart against the wind.
‘You will never know how very close you may have just come to –’ He broke off, his whole body shuddering, as a roar of machine gunfire rose up from somewhere out of sight.
Something wet splashed across my face.
Shackleton’s eyes bulged in surprise. He unclenched his jaw, like he wanted to finish his sentence, but all that came out was a mouthful of blood. His body arched backwards, legs slowly folding, like he was jumping off a high-dive. Then he finally tumbled out of sight, crashing down to earth with the rain.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 4.54 P.M. 6 MINUTES
The whole world slowed to the pace of a dream as I watched Shackleton fall. His body sank through the air, limbs splayed, head-first by the time it disappeared from view.
A dull thump floated up through the rain, followed by a high streaking sound, like a hand dragging across glass.
Time quickened again, and I knelt at the ledge, needing to know I hadn’t just imagined it. I stared over the side of the building, scanning the warzone below.
The shield grid antenna was still stretched out across the street like a barricade. Shackleton had landed right on top of it, then slipped down the side to the ground. He lay face-down on the cracked concrete, legs still propped up against the antenna, blood pooling out beneath him.
Dead.
I stood up again, trembling, leaving the scene behind. And only then did I wonder where the shooting had come from.
I turned around and saw Officer Reeve stretching slowly to his feet at the top of the stairs, fists tight around his rifle. He looked stunned. As unsure as I’d been that what had just happened was real.
Footsteps hammered up the stairwell behind him. Reeve barely had time to look back before my dad charged past him, running to meet me.
Tobias’s weight seemed suddenly to double. I stumbled towards my dad, all the relief I wanted to feel drowned out in the dread of what he was going to do when he reached me.
But then his arms came crashing down around me, wrapping me into himself for the first time in weeks and weeks, and I knew that somehow the love was still there, big enough to cover even this. He pulled my head into his shoulder, grunting with the pain of some awful injury, stroking my filthy hair, and I broke down all over again, the cold lump of Tobias’s body caught up awkwardly between us.
‘I killed him …’ I sobbed. ‘He was supposed to save us, and I –’
‘Shh,’ he breathed, choking back his own tears. ‘Shh … It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.’
‘Jordan.’ Reeve put a hand on my shoulder, suddenly right behind me.
Dad loosened his grip and I twisted around. ‘Where’s Galton?’
‘Bottom of the stairs,’ said Reeve. ‘Unconscious.’
He held something up into my field of vision and I flinched, thinking it was another gun. On second glance, I realised it was some kind of injection device, pistol-shaped, but with a syringe in place of the barrel and a vial of orange-ish liquid where the chamber would have been.
Reeve pulled on my shoulder, eyes down on the sling at my chest. ‘I need you to –’
I reeled back, stumbling away from both him and Dad. ‘What are you doing? What is that?’
‘It’s –’ Reeve faltered, closing the gap again. ‘It’s me. My healing power. Galton was working on a way to extract it. To make it something you could use on –’
‘No!’ I said. ‘No – No more – I’m not putting anything else –’
‘Jordan, please,’ said Reeve, ‘you saw the state I was in after Shackleton put that Tabitha prototype into me.
I was a mess. No way could I have survived without –’
‘He’s not a mess!’ I said, hugging the body defensively. ‘He’s dead!’
Reeve hesitated, absorbing this, like he thought maybe I’d just been exaggerating before. ‘Okay. Okay, but –’
He faltered again as Dad took a sudden step towards us. He held up Ketterley’s phone to show the time.
4.56 p.m.
Four minutes.
‘Do it,’ said Dad. ‘Try. It’s not going to …’
I filled in the blank on my own. It’s not going to make him any deader.
I looked away from both of them, gaze drifting back to the other side of the street. Where was Luke when I needed him?
Dad moved closer, arms outstretched to take Tobias.
‘No!’ I said, backing off again. Then, as calmly as I could: ‘No. Let me do it.’
I’d already killed him. If anyone was going to bear the weight of further mutilating his body, it should be me.
I reached into the sling with shaky hands, the pain in my chest redoubling as my fingers slid down over his cold skin. A miserable gasp escaped from my throat as I slowly lifted him free of the blanket, and Dad couldn’t hide his distress as he got his first proper look at his baby son.
‘I’m sorry,’ I choked, staring down at the pale, lifeless thing in my arms and wondering at the stupidity of anyone who ever described a dead person as looking like they were just sleeping.
Tobias wasn’t sleeping. He was gone.
Dad steadied himself enough to put an arm around me, but the warmth of his body only made Tobias feel even colder. I shifted him into one arm, and Reeve slid the injector thing into my free hand, and it was so much like the release station all over again that my legs began to buckle.
BANG.
The door at the top of the stairs burst open again, and Luke came pounding out across the roof. He stopped right in front of me, almost falling, doubled over with exhaustion. ‘Do it,’ he said, nodding at the thing in my hand. ‘He was – Something just had Shackleton really freaked out. I think …’
He trailed off, looking right into my eyes, seeing all the anguish there, and I watched his face fill with a deep sadness that cut straight through the whole ugly mess.
He understood.
He saw it all, and he understood what I was going through. And even in the face of his own death, he still had empathy to spare for me.
I lifted the injector, needle hovering over Tobias’s rain-soaked body.
‘You just – stick it in his arm and pull the trigger,’ said Luke, the urgency slipping back into his voice.
I brought the needle to rest against Tobias’s skin, fist clenched to fight the shakes. Dad’s arm tightened around me.
I glanced up at Luke again. If there was ev
en a chance this could save him …
I pushed.
The skin gave under the pressure, and I guided the needle down into the flesh of his arm. I held my breath, pulled the trigger, and the liquid in the vial drained out into Tobias.
Luke looked on, face stretched with nerves.
Please, I begged inside my own head. I know it’s impossible, but please …
I eased the needle out again, dropping the injector to the ground.
The rain beat down on us, heavier now, but we just stood there, huddled around Tobias. Waiting.
And nothing.
Nothing.
No change.
‘Just – just give it a minute,’ said Reeve feebly, glancing at Luke. ‘Give it a chance to …’
But he couldn’t even bring himself to finish the sentence.
Silence fell again. Nothing but the patter of rain.
The seconds ticked past, and I felt what little hope I had left tearing away from me. I started shaking again, almost losing my grip on Tobias. Dad pulled me closer into him, but it did no good.
Finally, the last lingering thread of hope snapped inside of me, and I wrenched myself away from him, shoving Tobias into his arms and staggering out of the circle, a furious scream bursting out from deep inside of me.
‘Jordan …’ Dad choked, but I barely even heard it.
Luke was by my side in a second, arms around me, fighting my attempt to pull away from him.
‘Jordan,’ he said. ‘Come on. You’re not to blame for – Jordan, please. Please listen to me.’
I stopped struggling and looked at him, seeing the bitter disappointment etched across his face. He swallowed hard, pushing it aside, tears welling in his eyes.
‘Keep fighting,’ he said fiercely. ‘Shackleton’s gone now. Most of them are gone. You guys need to take charge. Make sure the world that’s left is a world worth –’ ‘I can’t!’ I wept.
‘I can’t do this without you!’
‘Yes you can,’ he said. ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course you can. You don’t need me.’
‘It was supposed to work!’ I sobbed. ‘He was supposed to save you!’ I slumped down, head on his shoulder, clinging to him for as long as I still could.
‘I – I know. I know he was, but listen –’ He lifted my head again. ‘Listen to me, okay? Whatever happens after this – Don’t let today be the end of your life. You did everything you could today. You – you were amazing. Don’t you dare blame yourself.’
I tried to answer him, but the words wouldn’t come.
He leant in to kiss me and I stretched to meet him, still sobbing, raking my fingers through his knotted hair. I closed my eyes, fighting back the sickening visions of him tearing apart in my arms, refusing to let my own mind drive me away from him before Tabitha did.
‘I love you,’ he breathed, breaking away, forehead resting against mine. ‘You’re –’
Luke jolted back, eyes wide, as a noise pierced the air behind me. A tiny croaking sound, almost like …
I whirled around, heart thundering.
Dad was staring down into his arms, his brow furrowed in –
In what?
Fear? Confusion?
What had he just seen?
Whatever it was, Reeve had seen it too.
I looked down at Tobias. His lips were parted. Just a fraction, but his mouth had definitely not been open before.
And his face. Surely I wasn’t just imagining that. It was darker than it had been, like the colour was seeping back into the skin.
‘Did –?’ I faltered, terrified of the warmth flickering to life inside of me, bracing for reality to crash in and snuff it out. ‘Did he just –?’
And then Tobias’s whole body tensed, and his face screwed up, and he let out a scream so loud that I swear they must have heard it all the way down in the bunker.
It was the most incredible sound I’d ever heard in my life.
We stood there dumbly for a long moment, listening to him scream, too stunned to move or breathe or say anything. Then Dad’s face lit up with a joy I hadn’t seen since we’d touched down here. He gaped over at me, lifting Tobias up into the air, then held him to his shoulder, gently bouncing him, straight into Dad mode.
The phone tumbled out of his hand and I dived to catch it, that flicker of warmth flaring up into a firestorm. My fingers scrambled on the phone, lighting it up again just as the time ticked over.
5.00 p.m.
The end of the countdown.
My eyes locked onto Luke, breath catching in my throat. I spun the phone around, showing him the time. For a long moment, neither of us moved, still too scared to believe it was all really over.
Luke caved first. He leapt forward, crashing into me, spinning me off my feet. I squeezed him back, and he was real and solid and still alive. Time stretched out and out and out, and my brain slowly began to allow the possibility that he wasn’t going to disappear on me.
Dad stepped in, throwing one big arm around the both of us. Tobias had stopped crying by now. He smiled at me, the colour flooding back into his face, and I felt tears stinging my eyes again. I lifted him up, holding him against me. He wriggled in my hands, warm despite the rain. Really alive.
‘We should get down there,’ said Reeve, coming up behind us. ‘Make sure the others are all okay. Let them know it’s over.’
‘Right,’ I said, handing Tobias back to Dad and clearing the rain out of my face.
Luke took my hand, fingers lacing between mine, and we started towards the stairs.
‘So,’ he said, gazing down into a sunset he’d never expected to see, voice lighter than I’d heard it in months, ‘what do you guys want to do tomorrow?’
THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 5.54 P.M.
It was chaos when the military arrived.
Not gun chaos – most of the guards laid down their arms as soon as the first choppers landed. People chaos. The giddy blur of a town set free after weeks of imprisonment and terror.
Not all of it was happy. Some people took one look at this new group of people with guns and freaked out all over again. Others started smashing windows and benches, looking for a way to vent, or maybe just needing to play some small part in bringing this place down. A little gang of kids ran off to trash the school, and came back disappointed that the fire had beat them to it. More than a few people found places to just sit and weep, mourning lost loved ones or simply overwhelmed by it all.
But none of that could shake the wild, unrestrained joy that coursed through the air all around us. It was like those photos of the end of World War II: people hugging and kissing and shouting from the windows and dancing in the rubble.
Day turned to night without anyone noticing. A couple of guys found some secret wine cellar or something in one of the Co-operative leaders’ houses and came trundling into town with a shopping trolley full of bottles to rapturous applause.
Jordan didn’t leave my side the whole night. We and the others kept to the edges of all the partying, as euphoric as anyone but with less energy to show it. A few kids from school came up to thank us or whatever, but mostly people just left alone, either oblivious to everything we’d done or too caught up in their own celebrations to even notice we were there.
Sometime after midnight, the military guys made a half-hearted attempt to get everyone back into the Shackleton Building for the night, but that fizzled out pretty quickly, and they settled for keeping us contained to the town centre.
I’m pretty sure we were the only ones in town who felt like sleeping.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 2.32 P.M.
‘Crazy how it all works together,’ said Reeve, cross-legged on the grass with his son in his lap. ‘I mean, even the stuff you’d think was completely irredeemable. Like that serum – If I hadn’t been captured and half-killed by the Co-operative, it never would’ve been made. We would’ve been sunk right there at the finish.’
I nodded lazily, soaking up the feeling of the sun on my face, of Jordan’s hea
d on my shoulder, of clean, dry clothes against my skin and a properly full stomach for the first time in weeks, my heart swelling with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the life that had been given back to me.
‘Not saying it didn’t cost us plenty,’ Reeve added quickly, glancing at the Weirs, ‘but …’ He sighed, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t pretend to understand it. But I have to believe that somehow it all becomes worth it.’
Mr and Mrs Weir smiled weakly at him, at least wanting to believe it. Jordan and I had spent an exhausting couple of hours this morning, piecing everything together with them. I was sure nothing could make losing your kid feel worth it, but the fact that Peter had died making sure we all knew about Tobias had at least given them something solid to hold onto.
We were sitting together in the park – Jordan and her family, Mr and Mrs Weir, the Reeves, my mum and me – one of dozens of little huddles spread out all across the grass. They’d moved us out here when the sun came up. Easier to keep us contained, I guess.
There were still a bunch of people missing from the fighting yesterday, and it would be a while before everyone was accounted for. Once that was done, they were taking us all back to the ‘facility’ where Dad and Kara had been yesterday for what was sure to be a long debrief.
Jordan smiled as Georgia got up from her lunch and started climbing her dad’s back, perching herself on his shoulders. She stared around the park, then back down at Mr Burke, ruffling his hair with both hands. ‘Okay, come on, it’s time to get up and play.’
‘Soon,’ said Mr Burke wearily. ‘Wait until everyone’s finished eating.’
Georgia sighed dramatically. ‘We have finished!’
‘Your brother hasn’t,’ said Mr Burke, waving a hand at Mrs Burke, who was feeding Tobias.
‘He’s not eating,’ said Georgia impatiently. ‘He’s drinking. Anyway, he doesn’t even know how to play. He’s just a baby.’ She started kicking her legs, digging her heels into Mr Burke’s chest like she was spurring on a horse. ‘Come on! Giddy up!’
‘Georgia, Dad’s very tired today,’ said Mrs Burke. ‘Just give him a few more minutes to rest, okay? I’m sure he’ll be ready soon.’
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