Title: Not Waving but Drowning
Fandom: Being Human
Spoilers: General for series 4
Warnings: Nothing graphic, but contains violence and character death, including major character deaths.
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Title taken from Stevie Smith. Quote lifted from Walt Whitman. Lyrics taken from Oasis.
Feedback is love. :)
Summary: They try to stop Eve seeing the prisoner. They worry he's been sent there to kill her, and she's not sure that they're wrong.
A/N: AU – diverges from canon around the start of series 4. Could be read as a sequel to my "Circling the Drain", or as a stand alone.
They catch up with Eve down by the railway tracks and bundle her into the back of a truck. She's led them a merry chase, and they're not exactly gentle, but no one wants to damage her. They're pleased, of course – they'll be the ones who found her, who brought the War Child in – but their conversation barely rises above a whisper and none of them will meet her eye. She refuses to beg, so she sits between them as they bump through potholes and skid across dirt tracks.
They take her straight to headquarters, and when the truck jolts to a stop Eve clambers out with her head held high. She'll take whatever's coming. But they don't drag her in front of the commander; the troops disperse once they're safely inside the compound. It looks as though she won't be punished, after all, so she runs straight to the dorms. The warm, animal fug envelops her: she's home.
"Why the hell did you run off like that?" Annie shouts when she walks in. "What if you'd been killed? What if the vampires had caught you and taken you off to London – do you have any idea what Lord Hal would do to you?" Annie's got that look on her face: it's going to be bad this time, worse than when she caught Eve smoking. "Do you know how dangerous it is out there?"
"Yes mum, I do," Eve snaps. "Better than you." Annie hasn't been outside for months. "I want to fight," Eve tells her. "I want to do something useful."
"Oh, and this isn't good enough for you? Fixing the equipment and looking after the wounded. I suppose it's not as noble as getting yourself killed."
Eve bites her tongue. Tom would have understood; Tom would have backed her up. But Tom's gone now, and Annie – Annie's starting to remind her of the burnt-out cases, the ones who can no longer fight, so they use them to cook and clean, to scavenge for food, for weapons, for fuel. They're ghosts, too, and they're not even dead.
Eve is the saviour and they keep her out of danger when they can. It's the only luxury they can give her; it's more than she's ever asked for. Eve wants to be useful; they keep her busy, and maybe that's the next best thing. She's the War Child, after all, and she needs to be seen. She gives a little speech to the squad who volunteer for the raid on the new detention camp. When they pick the candidates for the werewolf recruitment programme, they send her to shake a few hands. Sometimes it seems like the only human touch she's ever felt is the fleeting press of a hand against hers.
"God bless you, ma'am," barks one scarred veteran with tears in his eyes.
But Eve is tired of saying goodbye. She wants to go with them, to fight with them. To be one of them. They treat her as something more than human, and she ends up feeling like less. But she has Annie with her, so she can't complain. The two of them sit side by side one evening, sorting through a box full of broken radios. Eve prises the cover off one and extracts the transistors. She throws the rest into the scrap, and when she goes to retrieve the next, Annie drags her into a hug.
"I love you," Annie tells her, holding her close. And Eve loves her too, but she has to finish her work before the power goes off for the night, and she doesn't get around to saying it.
When Eve wakes in the morning, her mum is gone. She races through the corridors, but Annie's nowhere to be found. She bursts in on people sleeping, eating, working – but they're only human and they haven't seen her. There are werewolves stationed here, but it was the full moon last night and they were all deployed. It takes Eve a long time to realise what's happened, that Annie won't be coming back. She shouldn't let it get to her: everyone has lost someone, and crying doesn't do any good. But Annie was the only mother she's known, and Eve can't help thinking that she could have done more to make her stay.
They assign Eve a bodyguard. Foster is older than her; he's seen more and done more than she has; he almost treats her like a real person. But he isn't Annie.
"Can you fight?" he asks: the assassination attempts have slowed but not stopped.
"Of course I can." It's not exactly a lie – she's picked up a trick or two – and it's not her fault she's never been given the chance.
"Then show me what you've got."
He pins her easily, and he grins at her when she squirms and bucks beneath him. "Teach me," Eve pants.
Foster isn't Annie, but he shows her how to fight.
"Always check the exits when you walk into a room," he tells her, "even when you're on the base."
They've had their problems with traitors. Not vampires who've infiltrated their ranks – they're far too careful for that – but they've learnt the hard way that there are people who can be bought, and people with loved ones who can be used against them. Someone leaked their plans for the raid on the detention camp, and the vampires were able to take most of the squad alive. Lord Hal declared a public holiday, and he made the executions last all day.
It's not entirely one-sided: there's a vampire resistance of sorts. They plan a few assassination attempts of their own, but Lord Hal has bodyguards, too. A few of the vampires have genuine human sympathies; others simply disagree with the current regime, and their numbers have been growing since the purges. It wasn't only humans and werewolves in that camp.
It's the vampires who send word that Mr Snow is back in London. He's close, too close for comfort, and Eve waits to be told that they're moving her to safety, but the order never comes. Sometimes it's less dangerous to sit tight. So Eve's right there at headquarters when the first reports come in. It's supposed to be secret, of course, but rumour spreads as fast as lice and dysentery in such close quarters. It sounds too good to be true, and no one can believe it, but the reports keep coming: Buckingham Palace is a smouldering ruin; all of London is in chaos. Mr Snow has not appeared to frighten the city back into line.
"The commander wants to see you," Eve's informed, and Foster has to jog to keep pace with her.
The room is empty: the council isn't in session. It's just the commander – no, not just him, there's a vampire too, and he must be one of the resistance or they wouldn't have let him anywhere near her. Behind her Foster clicks the safety off his gun, but Eve doesn't spare him a glance: it's the first time she's really seen the enemy this close. The vampire blinks and looks away.
"Mr Snow is dead," he. "Proper dead. All the Old Ones are. Even Hal." There's something like grief on the man's face.
"Tell her about the scroll," Commander Yousuf says.
The scroll: it's in her room, along with her gun, her fake id, her emergency rations: everything she'd need for a hasty departure. But this is something new, something about the prophecy.
"Mr Snow turned up last week with some sort of parchment. He was all worked up about it. I would've got in touch but Hal was twitchy, watching me all the time. Then Mr Snow brought the Old Ones back from all over the world. I mean, I tried to tell him about conference calls, but he never listens to me – listened to me." The man stares down at his shoes with watery eyes, and Eve sees his Adam's apple bob convulsively. "I wasn't there when the bomb went off. It took a while to piece together what had happened. And I never did find out what was in that scroll." Who knows what secrets it might have held – might still hold, if it has somehow survived.
"Not now." Yousuf waves Eve away. "We need to strike before the vampires get a chance to regroup."
If this is real, then it's big – the biggest thing that's happened since Snow killed the Prime Minister and started this whole nightmare. And if that monster really is dead, then this is the best chance they're going to get. There are troops to be mustered, supply lines to be diverted. Eve steps aside and Yousuf's already striding for the door.
"Wait," she calls out. "It wasn't our bomb." The vampire fidgets damply when she turns to him and asks, "So who did it?"
None of them can quite believe his answer.
They advance on London. Eve hears more laughter in those few days than she has in her previous eighteen years. Eighteen years of running, of hiding, of being herded like cattle – but not any more. The Old Ones are dead, Mr Snow is dead, and it doesn't matter that Fergus has managed to hold the London garrison together. They let Eve ride up near the head of the column.
They get careless. They push too far too soon, and in the counterattack Eve finds herself cut off from the convoy. She runs, away from the gunfire, back towards the safety of their lines. Her boots thud on the tarmac, too hard, too loud: they're going to hear her – and now there's another set of footsteps chasing her own. She's been taught to duck, to hide, to use the available cover, and she squeezes beneath the shell of a burnt-out car. She grabs for the stake in her belt but her hands are shaking so badly she can't pull it free, so she clenches them into fists and pounds them on the concrete. Here it is at last, her chance to fight, and all she's done is run. She's managed to outrun Foster, too.
A scuff of feet; a bruising grip on her ankle. Eve scrabbles for purchase, but she's dragged out into the sunshine. Black eyes, glistening fangs, closer and closer – and then she's twisting and parrying, and the stake is in her hand. It feels surprisingly solid, surprisingly human, when it goes in, but there's nothing human about the way the creature falls to dust. The shaking gets worse; Eve wants to retch. The blood is burning in every cell of her body, and she's never felt more acutely, more gloriously, alive. Footsteps again: Eve whirls, lifting the stake, ready to take them on, to take them all on.
"Easy," Foster smiles.
But she's tired of being cautious, and she digs her fingers into the back of his neck and drags his mouth to hers. For a moment she thinks he's going to kiss her back, then the others are shouting, and they have to retreat to the vehicles, and Foster says nothing but "Yes, ma'am" and "No ma'am" for the rest of the journey. Eve never finds out what he'd have done if she wasn't the War Child.
They take Eve back to the camp, and she bares every inch of skin for the necessary inspection: modesty is a concept known only to those who grew up before the war. Yousuf checks her over personally.
"Do you know," he asks as she pulls on her clothes, "what persuaded me the prophecy was true? It was nothing you did. It was the fact that the vampires put so much effort into trying to kill you." That must have been a long time ago: Eve can't remember him as anything other than a believer.
"Let me help," she asks him.
"You are helping," he says – and that's the problem with believers – but Eve wants to be more than just a figurehead. "Don't worry," he tells her. "I'm not going to stop until London is ours."
They take their time; they learn from their mistakes. They discuss siege tactics – after all there can't be enough humans left to feed the entire city – but they've learnt that vampires don't actually die from lack of blood, and the hunger only makes them fight more savagely. So they work their way through, street by deadly street at first. But they build momentum and for the first time the enemy falters and, when the vampire resistance betrays Fergus into their hands, the whole thing tumbles like a house of cards.
"It's not over," Fergus spits, battered but defiant. "There are too many of us, and you're too weak. We'll win in the end."
Buckingham Palace lies untouched: a wreck of rubble and gilt and velvet. It's the perfect location, a sort of memorial, a symbol – just like Eve herself, and the crowd cheers as she climbs onto the hastily-constructed stage. She's never seen so many people together in her life, and the weight of them seems to press in on her, tightening her chest so she can hardly breathe. They're all there – the troops, the veterans, the remnants of the civilian population – and all of them are shouting for revenge. Eve looks away from those contorted faces and her eyes are drawn to the space where the surging crowd pulls back, the place where the sacks of bones huddle together, unable to stand. So few of them survived the camp.
Fergus sneers when they drag him up onto the platform, and his last words are, "Tell that traitor Cutler that I'll see him in hell."
"I'm proud of what I've done," Cutler tells Eve later. "I want you to write me into the history books." But he refuses to attend any of the executions.
When the city is secured, Eve is sent to the base at Stevenage. It ought to feel dull after the dangers of the capital, but they have milk and eggs, and sometimes fresh bread, and it almost feels festive. A constant stream of troops passes through, hurrying to their new postings, and the place comes alive with news, with laughter, with the moans of a hundred fleeting encounters.
Eve wakes to the buzz of voices. Nothing unusual there – some new piece of gossip doing the rounds – but there's fear trembling beneath the excitement. And a name, repeated over and over. Eve stamps her feet into her boots, and she pulls on her blouse as she runs. One look at Yousuf and she knows that the rumour is true.
"I want to see him," she says.
"What the hell for?" He's as rattled as she is, or they wouldn't even be talking about it. "I shouldn't let you stay in the same building as him."
"I want to see him." She's tired of being dismissed. "We have enough guards."
They do: a dozen of them line the stairs, and there are more in the basement, clustered around the machinery, fidgeting with their weapons. The generator pulses with a thump-thump-thump, and Eve's heart is hammering nearly as fast, but she marches up to the door.
"You shouldn't be here, ma'am," the guard gasps. "We don't know what he might do." His voice drops to a whisper. "He's an Old One."
And nobody is quite sure about the Old Ones. They've all heard stories about their powers, but it's hard to sift through the exaggerations and the propaganda. The soldier fumbles with the keys, and suddenly Eve has no idea what she's doing, but Yousuf is right behind her and there's no way she's going back. She'll be safe: Foster is hurtling down the steps behind her and, besides, it's not like the prisoner knows who she is.
He's wearing a suit. An actual suit, with a white shirt, and she has no idea how he evaded the patrols so long in something like that. She recognises his face, even in profile: it stared haughtily from every street back in the early days of his rule. Then he turns towards her and she gasps: she's seen her share of injuries, but no human could have survived that.
"Why did you do it?" she blurts. "Why did you kill Mr Snow?"
Lord Hal sneers – as well as he can, with only half a face – but he doesn't answer. Maybe he can't speak, and Eve calculates how long she can stand there before she starts to look a fool.
"It was personal." His voice is surprisingly soft; he almost sounds bored.
"Why kill the others?"
"Collateral damage." He says it so matter-of-factly it might just be true.
"That's it?" Eve asks. There's more – there has to be more – but the vampire is turning away from her again. "You really expect me to believe that's all there is to it?" That gets his attention, but Eve won't meet his stare just in case it's true, in case he can hypnotise a person with a glance.
"Your men think this is all some sort of elaborate trap." His voice is still soft, but there's a coldness to it that prickles the hairs on the back of Eve's neck. "They think that I let myself be captured." He takes a limping step towards her. "They think I'm here to kill the War Child."
"And are you?"
Another step, faster now. One of the guards leaps between them, holding out a crucifix, but Hal brushes it aside, brushes him aside, and keeps on coming. Eve flinches at the charred-meat nightmare of his face; she grabs for a stake. But Foster is ahead of her, and a kick to the back of the knee sends the vampire sprawling on the floor.
He rolls onto his back and his mouth winces into a smile. "I'm not making a very good job of it, am I, Eve?"
A babble of voices – he knows, he knows who she is, and they need to get her out of there – then hands clutch at her arm, pulling her back. Lord Hal just lies there and watches as they drag her out of the room. Later, she remembers that his one remaining eye is a golden hazel. That it was always hazel.
They argue over what to do with their prisoner. He's a vampire, an Old One – the last of the Old Ones. Whatever he may have done, he's the enemy. But he killed Mr Snow and all the others, and he wouldn't have done that if he wasn't on their side. Unless he wanted the power for himself. They talk in circles until Eve's head spins, and there's only one thing they all agree on: Lord Hal can't be trusted.
"Do we torture him?" Yousuf asks the group. "He's a mess already, and we don't want to kill him before we've found out what he can tell us."
They don't ask her opinion; she wouldn't have stopped them.
Eve listens outside the door. Sometimes she stays only a few minutes; sometimes she's still there when they hose the cell down at the end of the day. When she finally goes inside, she finds they've moved one of the wolf cages into the room.
"My apologies for not standing," Hal says. "But … well, you can see why."
She can: they've taken away his clothes and she can see the full extent of his injuries, the old ones and the new.
"Please, have a seat," he tells her, as though he isn't the one behind bars. Whatever else he might be, he's as arrogant as the rest of them.
"I thought you might want to talk," she tells him, but she doesn't, not really. She's not fool enough to think that she's better at this than the interrogators, that Lord Hal is going to fall for a pretty face.
"What would you like to talk about? Art perhaps, or music?"
"How about why you killed your friends. And what you're planning." This time she looks him in the eye. He's studying her too, and it's more than just idle curiosity: there's something, something he's not saying, something she needs to know. "We've got people who –"
"You have ways of making me talk?" He has a grating, high-pitched laugh. "They already tried that."
They have, for the last three weeks. Lord Hal laughed, and screamed, and belted out something called Sinatra at the top of his lungs, but he didn't tell them a thing. Three weeks, and his injuries still look fresh.
"You didn't just plant that bomb," she says, "you were in there when it went off." He shrugs: he's never denied it. "That was nine months ago, and we didn't take London for another six. You should have healed." Unless there's something wrong with him.
Eve scrambles back, her chair crashing to the floor, her hand clamped over her mouth. The vampires have tried it before – biological warfare: refugees infected with influenza, botulism in their tinned food – but whoever heard of a vampire carrying disease? Eve sets the chair back on its feet and moves a little closer. There is another explanation, and if this were anyone other than the notorious Lord Hal –
"When they questioned you, that would have been one of the first things they tried. Withhold blood for a few days, and most vampires will tell us anything we want to know. But not you. The others thought it was because you're an Old One, but I'm not so sure. If you'd been feeding back in London, those injuries would have healed months ago."
"Bravo," he smirks. "You're quite the detective. In fact, I think you're wasted as a human." It's a weak attempt to goad her; she's onto something, she knows it.
"What did it say on that parchment?" she presses.
He doesn't answer, and she can't read anything in that frozen half-smile.
They're scared of letting the Old One live; they're scared of killing him. They settle for leaving him under guard at Stevenage when they mobilise. Eve goes with them, not quite leading the troops into battle, but always one crucial step behind. They advance cautiously at first, still expecting some leak, some betrayal, and it's summer by the time they reach Oxford. Eve stands on top of the hill overlooking the city, and spreads her arms wide to let the breeze dry her sweat. She listens to the distant thump of mortars; she watches as the domes crumple in on themselves and pillars of smoke rise up to replace the spires. Eve moves through a world of rubble.
Their campaign gathers speed. Birmingham goes by in a rattle of gunfire, and then they're pushing north across the moors. No vampire army ambushes them, and they start to think that Lord Hal was exactly what he claimed: a lone vampire caught in the chaos when London fell. Winter closes in; they slog along treacherous, washed-out roads, across heathland powdered with snow. There's little shelter, and blankets are in short supply, but the troops laugh around the campfires at night. One of the women hums a tune, and someone starts to sing: "Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back to you."
"It's Oasis," Foster explains. "We're nearly at Manchester."
Manchester: the toughest battle yet. Night after night, Eve tracks the progress of the fighting as the orange glow moves across the skyline. Day after day she makes her rounds, visiting the the wounded, the dying. And the ones who seem fine apart from a suspicious scratch on their throat or wrist, the ones they can't quite trust any more. They stare at her accusingly before they're dragged outside and … well, they can't waste ammunition, so at least it's quiet.
Their victories send ripples around the globe, and before the year is out it seems as though the whole world is following their lead. Europe is a battlefield; Africa is in flames. The Americans think they have a fighting chance, so Yousuf gathers everyone he can spare and they march on Liverpool. The vampires make a stand down by the docks, but the humans stake them, shoot them, drive them into the river. They seize the ships and load them with people who haven't left the country in years – or in their lives – and Eve waves them on their way. The party goes on all night.
Eve heads back to Stevenage, and after all those months on the road it feels like a homecoming of sorts. The place is almost empty: she could have a room all to herself, but it doesn't seem right. The quiet stops her sleeping, and she finds herself walking down the stairs to the basement. She doesn't know why she's there – has no intention of going inside – but the guard tosses her the keys and she can't very well hand them straight back.
There's no light in the cell: as a punishment, or to save the energy, she has no idea. The vampire is whistling a jaunty tune, and he smirks at her when the fluorescents flicker on.
"Would you prefer it," he asks, "if I lay awake in the dark and wept for my sins?" He's laughing at her. She can hear in the tone of his voice that there's some other meaning beneath his words, but she has no idea what it is.
"I'd prefer it if you gave me some answers." But of course he doesn't.
She leaves the light on when she walks away.
Eve goes back. Hal is exquisitely polite; he avoids the awkward topics. Which doesn't give them much to cover, so he quotes poetry and novels, and sometimes she's even heard of the authors. If he's here to kill her, then he's certainly taking his time.
Eve goes back, and she isn't sure why. Maybe she likes the way her pulse speeds up, the way she feels more alive being so close to death. Or maybe he's just a distraction from sitting by the radio, waiting for news from across the Atlantic. Hal doesn't give her answers; he doesn't try to tear her throat out. One thing is certain: Eve doesn't like puzzles.
Hal looks much better now there's skin and flesh on his face again. "They wouldn't trust me with scissors," he says, brushing his fringe out of his eyes.
Eve pulls a crumpled cigarette from her pocket, and waits for the reflex twinge of guilt to pass. It's been years since she had someone to tell her off. Hal watches her suck the smoke into her lungs; he's always watching, always waiting. Eve has no idea what he's waiting for. She stands just beyond an arm's length from the cage, and the generator throbs like a heartbeat in the space between them. Eve steps into that forbidden territory. The vampire's hand darts out, fast enough to make her gasp, but he only wants the cigarette after all. Eve watches him smoke it right down to the filter.
"Are you ever going to tell me?" she asks. He hesitates, and Eve waits, afraid to even breathe in case she interrupts his answer.
"You're winning, aren't you?"
Sometimes Eve is not quite sure if he's talking to her, or if he's holding a different conversation entirely.
"Eve, ma'am." It's Jono, the radio operator. "Come quickly." He's panting, can't tell her more, but it can only be one thing: the battle for New York is on.
The speakers crackle and hiss: Jono might be able to improve reception, but he hasn't caught her up yet. They all gather closer. At first they can only pick out random, disjointed words, then the static clears.
"We sealed the subways so they couldn't escape. We penned them into Manhattan, and started working our way through, block by block."
The door bangs open. Eve whirls to see Hal running into the room – no, not running: falling, with Jono behind him, pushing him to his knees.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"I want him to hear this," Jono says, and he yanks the vampire's head back by the hair.
But there's no time to argue. Tinny cheering heralds a new announcement: "We did it! New York is ours. I repeat, New York is ours." The others grin and clap each other on the shoulder, and Eve wants to join in – she's happy, of course she is – but all she can feel is a sort of wobbly relief: the war might finally be over.
"Look at Lord Hal," Jono sneers, and he hauls the vampire to his feet. "He's scared of us." Hal's knuckles whiten, but he keeps his head bowed. "I say we stake him, right now."
Clearly the others agree: one of them presses a sharpened length of wood into Eve's hand. She places the point against Hal's chest. She knows what to do, how to crunch the thing up between the ribs and pierce the heart. Tom would have done it without a second thought.
"I always knew you had it in you," Hal dares her with a grin. But she doesn't, not like this, in cold blood and for no good purpose.
"I'm not going to make this about him," she says. The stake clatters on the concrete. "This is about the people we've lost. This is for them. For Annie."
The little crowd stands silent. Then a voice at the back whispers, "For Kayden."
"For Lilly," Foster says. His sister died in the flu epidemic of twenty-nine.
As easily as that, it echoes around the group and becomes a chant, a ritual. Eve sees their eyes brim with tears and turn in her direction, and she knows that they'll tell others – and they'll tell others in turn, and so the story will spread: how the War Child was merciful and spared the life of an enemy.
"You could say thank you," she tells Hal as she unlocks his cage.
"For what," he spits, "delaying my death?" He slams the door shut behind him.
Things turn sour surprisingly quickly. An outbreak of cholera hits the garrison in Liverpool, and when their troop ships return there's a welcoming committee of vampires on the dock. They hadn't realised there were so many of the enemy gathering in the wilds of Yorkshire and Northumberland; they lose Manchester in the space of one bloody, disbelieving week. It it takes seven months of bitter fighting to win it back.
And so it goes on. The humans need their saviour, now more than ever: at least, that's what Yousuf tells Eve, but they no longer queue in the same numbers to shake her hand. Although it could just be that there are fewer of them left.
"When are you going to save us?"
It's a lone voice in the crowd, someone who won't step forwards and say it to her face, but a year or two ago they'd have been hauled out and disciplined for it. Now Foster simply glares and Eve pretends that she didn't hear. But she can't pretend to herself, and she's been wondering the same thing: when is it going to happen, that miracle they're all waiting for? She has no more idea than the rest of them.
"Don't go soft on me," Yousuf says, when Eve tries to bring it up. But he looks worn out, every defeat scored into the the lines of his face.
The biggest miracle that Eve has seen is the fact that the resistance is still active within the enemy's ranks. And when Yousuf starts talking about a new, hard-line policy, about severing all connections with the vampires, they send a representative to try to patch things up. It's Cutler – she gets a glimpse when they escort him in – and he doesn't look a day older than when she saw him in London. Then she looks into the man's eyes and sees the mark left by the intervening years. She doesn't envy him.
There are talks. Cutler can be persuasive, and Eve thinks that maybe their fragile alliance will hold. But that night they find him standing over the body of a young girl, with the blood still dripping from his chin.
"It was an accident," Cutler stammers, as they drag him away. "I was hungry."
They stake him without ceremony, and all that Eve can feel is anger. Of course he was hungry – they're all hungry, these days – but being human is about learning restraint.
Everything is in short supply. At Swindon they run out of ammunition and turn to their knives, to baseball bats, to their rifle butts. It's close quarters, hand-to-hand, and it should be a massacre. But the vampires are weak – the living are a scarce commodity – and both sides end up forced to retreat. It's the last big battle.
While the presses are still running, they print posters of the War Child. Eve's face stares down at her from every dorm, every canteen, even in some of the towns where there are buildings still standing, pasted over the faded command "Obey". Eve hardly recognises herself: she's dazzled by her halo. So many of them still are.
The vampires still believe. They ambush her convoy and, afterwards, there are five frantic minutes – of shouting, of praying, of sluicing her down with water they can ill afford to waste – until the survivors are sure that all the blood that Eve is coated with is Foster's. Foster, who kept her safe across so many miles and so many years. Burial is a rare luxury these days, so her driver chops the man's head off with his machete, and they leave his body by the side of the road.
Eve is moved to their most secure base. It's just her and the women, their bellies swelling with the next generation of soldiers. Eve ought to be one of them, but she's still their symbol of hope and the mortality rates are too high to risk it. If she questions the value of a symbol that no one can see, then she does it when she's alone at night, listening to the isolated wailing. Not enough babies are carried to term.
They start to lose touch with the other bases, and they have no way of knowing if everyone is dead or if they're simply unable to communicate. Their horizons shrink: Europe, then Britain, then the south of England.
"The home counties," someone calls it. Home: the very word sounds odd to Eve's ears.
A messenger arrives, bringing Eve the news that Yousuf has been wounded. He's asking for her, and she knows it must be serious. She packs the scroll, her knife, a little food. She was given a new bodyguard when Foster died, but it's been a long time since she left the base and it takes her a while to remember the woman's name. Oh yes: Sasha – how could she forget? – the same as Annie's zombie friend. Eve thinks about the past a lot these days.
They've taken the commander to the old base at Stevenage. Eve hasn't been there for years, not since they captured New York. Like so much else, it's no longer what it once was. The room stinks of rotting flesh, and Eve knows that Yousuf is dying. He smiles when she walks in, but he's not smiling at her, at Eve. He's welcoming his saviour, come to see him through to the other side.
"Let me see it," he croaks, and he takes the scroll with trembling hands.
"We have to do something soon," she tells him, "or we're all just going to starve to death." The journey through the ravaged countryside is still vivid in her mind. "Maybe we could get into the camps, destroy their food."
"We can't kill our own people," he tells her.
"The what can we do?" What can she do? What has she ever done?
"They're still fighting in Wales," he mumbles. "They can't lose if you're there. We never lost when you were there." They've already started re-writing history.
The frustration wells up, choking her, and she wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. But it's already too late. He walks through his door and doesn't look back, and it's so unfair that he thinks his business here is finished. Eve looks at the scroll, the parchment that's as intimately connected to her as her own skin, and she leaves it behind, trapped in Yousuf's dead fingers.
Part of the dormitory block is still standing, and Eve drifts through the once-familiar corridors. A flash of colour amongst the grey: it's one of those old posters, her own face mocking her from the brightness. It hasn't changed like the real thing has; it shows no grey hairs, no wrinkles, none of the things she sees in the mirror. And that's one thing you can never get away from: mirrors.
It's quiet down in the basement now. The generator is dead, tools lying abandoned around it. At first, she thinks the door is locked, but when she puts her shoulder to it it screeches inwards. Darkness; scuffling. It might be a feral dog – there are still a few of those around – so she pulls out her knife. The light from her torch stutters across the bars of the cage. A white face; eyes, wincing shut; a hand jerking up to shield them.
"You!" She hasn't thought about him for a long time. "You're still here."
Hal croaks out an answer, but she can't understand him. She sheaths her knife and slides her water bottle between the bars. He fumbles with it, struggling to grip, and when he finally gets it open he empties it without stopping. He wipes the top of the bottle before pushing it back: a ridiculous gesture, and she wants to laugh, but the tears are sharp in her eyes.
"I said you're quite the detective."
She does laugh at that – or maybe she sobs, she can't quite be sure. The same words, the same voice, but Hal's face is gaunt behind the beard.
"Have a seat," he tells her. And Eve is weary, bone weary, so she sits. He leans against the rusted iron and studies her; he frowns at what he sees. "How bad is it?" Hal asks, but she can't tell him. She doesn't have the words.
"I'll show you," she says.
The lock is fused with rust, and Eve ends up having to wrench the door open with a crowbar. Hal drags himself to his feet and, when he stumbles, Eve slips his arm across her shoulders. He's no threat; he never was.
Eve expects to feel scared, to feel ashamed – to feel something – about running out on her people, but as they climb into the Land Rover all she feels is a niggling guilt over burning precious diesel.
"Where do you want to go?" she asks, as though this were his idea. As though it matters.
"London," he tells her. Back to where it all began.
Hal seems to have some sort of purpose, so they go: past blackened fields and through the skeletons of towns. They reach the outskirts of the city and they should slow down, should be more careful – a plume of smoke over Primrose Hill shows that the old city is not dead yet – but she just can't find the energy to care.
When they reach St James's Park they have to abandon their vehicle, and Eve helps the vampire negotiate the rubble, the overturned cars, an isolated tank. The palace looks just the same as ever. They clamber over the blackened masonry, and Hal lifts his head, and now Eve has to hurry to keep up. At the centre of the devastation is a crater, just a void, but Hal looks around and it's obvious that he he sees something she doesn't.
"This was my throne room," he tells her. "I was standing right here when the bomb went off. I never expected to survive." He closes his eyes for a moment. "This is where Mr Snow showed me the parchment and told me that we had to keep you alive."
"What?" Eve doesn't understand; she doesn't want to understand.
"That was the sting in the tail. The missing piece. The War Child dies, humanity lives. All we needed to do was – nothing."
It's not true, it can't be true, but there's a terrible honesty in his face, his voice, his words, and Eve's stomach lurches.
"Then all of this is because of me." But it wasn't her fault: she didn't know. He did, though, and her hands are clenching into fists and she's hitting him with enough force to make him stagger. She waits for him to regain his footing. "You could have stopped this. You could have stopped this years ago."
"Would you have listened?" he asks, and she doesn't try to lie. "You were winning. I thought it would be enough."
Voices: urgent, anxious, calling her name: Sasha and the others are scrambling towards them through the debris. All those long years, and now Eve is out of time.
"So you're the one who kills me, after all." She feels less bitter than she expected: at long last, she's finally going to make a difference.
"Get away from her," Sasha yells at the vampire. The sun glints on machetes, on a single gun.
"Go now," Eve hisses. "They might let you live." Hal shakes his head. "Then do it," she tells him, and she slaps the hilt of her knife into his hand.
Eve steps between Hal and the gun: it's just possible there's ammunition in it. She turns her back because she doesn't want to see it coming, doesn't want to flinch her way out of this world like a coward.
"Is it too late?" she asks, but there's no answer. Eve bows her head. "Do it," she says.
He does.