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Jessica Drebin was in Epping Wood, but her father was in Manchester.
Before, she and Ken, who had been Kenny then, had gone there by train, on their own, to see him one weekend a month and on summer holidays. Longer before, she and Kenny had lived with Dad and Mum and hidden under the bed together while they fought.
Mum always won the fights, but she got tired of Dad arguing with her about what they should do, mostly about her and Kenny, and she won the last argument. So Dad had gone to Manchester, where there was a better job with more money, and Mum and Jess and Kenny had stayed in London, where Mum also had a good job that paid good money, and they got a divorce, because Mum said it was best for the family.
And then the world Changed, and Mum tried to throw a little kid to the monsters because he cried too loud, and Mo turned into a spider and killed her mum, and they fought monsters together instead of Jess ripping Mo to pieces because Jess couldn’t keep the younger kids safe on her own.
Probably.
Mo had the knack for being very convincing when they wanted to be.
Jessica was in Epping Wood with the hunters, but her brother and the spider who was absolutely not her best friend were in London.
Hunting, here, was about waiting. Her job was corralling the toddlers who wandered these woods, ignorant of any danger, while the adult hunters tried to corner and talk down the domain’s real victims, who were mostly people desperately looking for their own kids. Or for kids they thought were their own.
Jess missed school.
She’d been good at it, though not good enough to please Mum, who wanted her to be the best at everything, and she couldn’t be the best at everything as long as she was in the same maths class as Mo. She was, however, the best at some of the events in track and field, and good enough at football to make the team easy next year when she’d be old enough.
Mo didn’t get to do sport because, well.
After the change, they didn’t get to do sports because there weren’t any extracurriculars. Or curriculars. Or footballs that might not try to eat your foot if you kicked them.
So they decided to save the world. One kid at a time.
And six kids became eight, became twelve, became fifteen. And when the monsters came for one of them, they always hunted down whatever took them and got them back. She missed Dad fiercely, but she pretended not to because Ken missed him so much, and she needed to be there for him and be brave and strong for everyone.
But then everything Changed again. The tower on the horizon (always on the horizon, no matter where the Tapestry wandered) fell like Barad-Dur in Lord of the Rings, and they met the people who had done it, who reminded all of them enough of Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee that Norah had started to write an epic poem about it. It was a terrible poem, but no one told her so.
And then, in not so long a time at all, everything Changed again.
And Manchester didn’t seem impossibly far away anymore.
The Frodo Baggins guy, who was named Jon and wasn’t really a person with a proper body anymore, but was all eyes instead, probably knew if Dad was okay.
Or able to get to okay.
She hadn’t asked, even though Jon was always there, and always Watching, and tried to answer questions if you asked one of the little eyes that hovered in the air everywhere like green bumblebees with long lashes. If she decided to go to Manchester (or wherever Dad had ended up when all the people were put into Domains) she needed to know whether he was alive and where to look for him.
So she stalled about it, because if he wasn’t alive, or wasn’t somewhere he could be retrieved, she wasn’t sure she was ready to know that. Here, in Epping Wood, there were monsters to be fought and lives she knew could be reclaimed.
What right did she have to prioritize hunting down one person, just because he mattered to her particularly?
Back when she was a kid, Jess had responsibilities. Do well in school. Look after Kenny. Small responsibilities. Mum and Dad looked after the big stuff. When the old world ended and she grew her claws, there were no adults to tell her, or any of them, what their responsibilities were. It was all about surviving, helping each other, and finding other kids to help. It was hard, and scary, but their days belonged to them.
Now, she still had her claws, and her place of some power in this new world, which meant she still had all those huge, life and death and endless torment responsibilities she’d had when the Tapestry had roamed the wreck of South London.
But the world was also getting organized again, which meant there were adults with power who thought they could decide what she and Mo and Norah and the other older kids did—who they tried to save, when they got to rest, whether they ever got to do frivolous kid things.
She was never by herself, but she felt alone with all the thoughts in her head she didn’t feel like she could share without someone more responsible telling her off.
Basira, the grown-up Hunter who still looked exactly like a person instead of a bit of a catgirl (which, silver lining really), saw her sitting alone and waved at her, then jogged over to sit beside. “You look like you got a lot going on. Up there.”
Jess wasn’t in the mood.
Basira bumped her shoulder, trying to be Parental and Friendly.
“I’m going hunting,” Jess told her without looking up, then got up and walked away.
She didn’t care about starting local, or going after the easiest people to rescue so they could help with the ones that were harder to get out.
She wanted her dad.
“Hey, Eyeballs!” she said. The Watcher might be, technically, an adult, but Jess figured you lost your adult cred when you turned into a swarm of eyes.
A couple eyes hovered in front of her. Somehow, they managed to look long-suffering even without a face to stick into.
“You know my dad?”
A slow blink.
“Is he—” she took a deep breath. If she was going to be selfish, she ought to do it quickly. “Is he alive?”
The Watcher didn’t always talk. Sometimes you asked, and then you just knew the answer. Sometimes you Saw the answer, especially if it could get a good scare out of you by it.
She Saw her father. He was tangled up in something. Wire, and panels, and bits of screens, as though he’s gotten infected by a kind of computer virus that turned you into a computer. He didn’t look dead, or entirely alive, or at all comfortable. There were Things all around him made of ribbons of cable and still more screens, that screeched at him while what was left of his fingers flew over a keyboard and printed papers poured out of a slit in his chest.
“Thank you, Watcher,” she told it, hating the scratchiness of her voice.
But what now?
She played the probably conversation over in her head. We can get ten times as many out in half the time, Basira would say. Manchester is too far.
She was right of course.
But Jess felt like maybe she had earned the right to ask, and then to be mad about it for a bit after.
She grabbed one more kid (easy, since he ran full tilt straight into her shins), and carried him (?) to the collection point, where there were warm blankets and what passed for snacks on a bus that would eventually take them back to the London Enclave. “Ms. Hussain!” she called out.
Basira walked briskly over to Jess, almost as if she was glad to see her.
“My dad’s in Manchester. He’s alive, kind of stuck half inside a computer or something. I want to go get him out.”
Basira sighed heavily and turned half around to consider the project already underway. Then she turned back to face her.
Jess braced for disappointment.
“You’ll need a team. Ineffable or Vast for transport, Flesh to dig him out and heal him, someone with the Machine if they’re free.”
“But, I—” she started, then stopped, the heat of her frustration flashing through her body, fire with nowhere to spend itself.
She howled, an inhuman thing, and sobbed, human, until Basira dragged her close so she could bury her sopping face in the draping fabric of her clothes. After a minute, she said, “All right, then?
“All right.”
“Good. Now, go on. Bus is about full and Nicolas Believes it can get back to London on the gas it’s got left.”
Jess would ride a bus full of snot-nosed babies back to London, then she would ask Miss Janie and Pixel to come, and find a flyer who wasn’t too likely smash them all to bits on the landing.
Everybody had lost somebody. But today Jess was going to get somebody back.