Contagion (Toxic City) by Tim Lebbon

her dreams—the blast, the flames, the heat-flash blanching everything that London had become into a white-hot mess—took some effort.
    Jack smiled, then sat back against the bench. “We thought we'd lost you,” he said. “So what happened?”
    “Rook found me,” she said. She leaned back next to Jack, and with the sun on her face and the gentle movements of the boat, she felt almost relaxed. London could almost have been its old self again.
    “A Superior,” Jack said.
    “No, not at all. Rook was all on his own. He went with Reaper because it suited his purpose.”
    “Which was?”
    “Revenge. He was in a dark place. Such a…sensitive boy. He and his brother survived Doomsday and lived together for a while, but then the Choppers took his brother, and the birds showed him what happened. They slaughtered him. Took his brain.”
    “They've experimented on so many,” Jack said.
    “But he saw something in me. We connected, I guess. Andmaybe fell for each other, just a little.” It seemed strange talking like this with Jack, because until recently they had been a couple. But she sensed no hostility from him, and no surprise. Their relationship had been strong from the moment they'd met, marred only by the weight of expectation between them—that they should be together. They were much better together as friends. Anything else just got in the way.
    “I saved him,” she said. She sensed Jack's confusion.
    “I thought he was gone?”
    “He is, now. But I thought I'd saved him. I've got something too.”
    “The dreaming? Nomad touched you?”
    “I've met her, Jack. Seen her in my dreams, and met her for real, and sometimes both are the same. But the thing I've got is all my own. Something I've always had, when I think back to when I was younger, but always a more subtle thing than it is now. More gentle. Nomad told me I was what she's been looking for forever. And Rook too, he told me his brother had something of his gift even before Doomsday.”
    “So what does that mean? And what can you do?”
    “I think it might mean that everyone left alive had something beforehand that Evolve caught onto. And I can dream. At first I thought I was seeing the future, or forms it might take. I dreamed of meeting Rook and his birds attacking me, and they did, briefly, after he died. I dreamed of Nomad and the bomb. I dreamed of meeting you by the river and the Choppers waiting there, but I didn't know how that one turned out, and didn't have a chance to change it.”
    “Change?”
    “I think I can…I thought I could change events in my dreams. Lucid dreaming, guiding things. Rook died and I dreamed him alive again, and for a while he was.” She looked at the scratches on the backof her hand, put there by Rook's nails as he fell into the hole. “But then fate caught up with him, exactly as I'd seen it before. I might have stretched things a little, but I don't think I really changed anything.”
    “That's amazing,” Jack said. “I had nothing before. Don't think so, anyway. But Nomad's touch has given me…” He trailed off, looking into a distance no one else could see.
    “What?” Lucy-Anne asked.
    “So much,” he said. “So much that I really don't know what I might become.”
    “So we're special,” Lucy-Anne said. She couldn't keep the bitterness from her voice, because being special hadn't done much for her thus far. “My talent's not caused by Doomsday, and it's grown just by being here. And you've been touched by a freak.”
    “We're all special,” Jack said, looking along the boat at his friends. Rhali smiled. Sparky gave them the finger. “Differentiating between who has a gift and who doesn't—who's normal, or Irregular, or Superior—loses sight of everyone's uniqueness. We do that, and we might as well sink the boat and drown right now.”
    Lucy-Anne thought of Rook and how conflicted his gift had made him. She'd seen him cold-bloodedly killing Choppers out of a burning need for revenge. She had