'I don't like this, Evie,' Jace said, squatting down beside me, careful not to disturb the barricade of rubble in front of us. 'I don't like it one fucking bit. We haven't had one sniff of Lena's crew for days now and those bastards always have a habit of turning up like a bad bloody smell.'

I nodded, letting my gaze sweep once more over the deserted square. I'd scanned the ruins of Trafalgar so many times already, spying nothing but a solitary pigeon, pecking away at dust as if it hoped it might magically transform into food. Ivy always said that once London was wiped out and the people with it, the pigeons, rats and cockroaches would outlive us all and I was starting to believe she was right. It was hard to think about the city housing nothing but vermin and bones, but with every scouting mission encountering less survivors each time, I was losing hope that London was becoming anything but one huge, crumbling necropolis for a conquered species.

Lena's crew, once a massive thorn in our side that had a nasty habit of turning septic, would usually have been crawling all over the east side of Quadrant Two. When we'd first moved into the old Aldwych station – or fucking trespassed, as Lena had told us – their territory had covered Trafalgar, Piccadilly, up to Soho and stretching all the way over to the Strand, and we couldn't move two paces without running into them. In those early days, confrontations had always been swift and violent, until they realised we were too established and too well-organised to move us on or wipe us out altogether.

Since then, we'd lived an uneasy truce, taking over the whole of the Strand, the area immediately south down to the river and all the way over to Chancery Lane. Unfortunately, truce was the loosest of terms and any chance meetings were still often violent – the angry laceration on my shoulder and the ache in my collarbone evidence enough of that – which was why it was unsettling that we hadn't come across a single one of Lena's crew in five days now, despite our blatant trespass on their side of the Quadrant. It was never a welcome sight to see Lena, despite my grudging respect for the tough Norwegian police officer who had been stranded here when the War began and the Americans had dropped the bombs, but I found myself practically praying for her to turn up now, just so I knew they were still alive and we weren't all alone in the northern zone.

Of course, I was also praying that she'd turn up with that scrappy ferret bastard Rico by her side, so I could plunge my blade right up into his ribcage and twist the knife until I saw the life drain out of his beady, little eyes.

Instinctively, my hand went to the dressed wound on my shoulder, my palm covering the square of bandage taped there. The gauze was slightly damp to touch, and I knew without looking that I was bleeding again. I saw flashes of Rico's sweaty face as he bent over me, his booted foot pressed against the wound he had just made with a sweeping arc of his machete, slicing through the skin like butter. Snapshots of him dropping to his knees and pressing his thigh hard between my legs, his hand fumbling at my belt buckle as I bled out onto the debris-covered stage of the Shaftsbury Theatre. I shouldn't have been surprised really. I'd heard the rumours about Rico. About how he wasn't that bothered whether his victims were alive or dead when he fucked them. Necrophiliac Rick, as Jace called him, was having the time of his life in the New World with the abundance of fresh corpses it provided for him. Planning how slowly to sink my other blade into his tiny infected balls while he was still alive was one of the only things that had kept me going these past couple of weeks.

At least it had been until I'd set eyes upon Tom.

I winced inwardly. Not Tom. Not fucking Tom. His killer.

Seeing the creature yesterday had thrown me so far off kilter that I wasn't sure how I would ever get back on course. Not only had I almost run us straight into a Greys blockade, which had earned me a rare bollocking from Taj, but I'd hardly slept a wink all night. When I had finally fallen asleep not long before sunrise, fractured dreams had brought nothing but images of Tom sleeping next to me, his eyes opening to reveal nothing but an inky blackness, his skin grey and oily, his voice replaced by that strange clicking noise they made in the back of their throat.

When Jace had said he wanted to scout the area again today, I'd been the first to volunteer despite the fact I felt like shit and my collarbone was throbbing like a bastard. It had seemed like the perfect distraction to stop me thinking about Tom. I didn't want to think about him, in fact I'd made a conscious effort to push all thoughts of Tom away for so long now, immersing myself in the New World, not in same the way Rico was obviously, but by freeing myself from old ghosts and the shitstorm my life had become before the Greys came. Seeing him, it, that thing – not Tom – I found myself right back there again, remembering not only his death, but everything that came after and I hated that. I hated being reminded of the blame and suspicion and hatred that I had carried everywhere with me in those days.

Strange that it had taken the world to be enslaved for me to feel free again.

'You're bleeding,' Jace said, matter-of-factly pointing out what I already knew, when I removed my hand from my shoulder. 'Must have popped the stiches when we climbed out from Charing Cross.' He paused, looking away, a small smile pulling on the corner of his mouth. 'You know, if this is getting too much for you...'

'Piss off,' I replied with a grin, nudging him with my elbow. 'You wouldn't last a day out here without me, and you know it.'

The truth was, I wouldn't have been surprised if Jace out-lived the pigeons, rats and cockroaches. He was the only one I knew who seemed more at home walking the mortuary streets of the London than I was. He'd been living with his brother Felix – or what he thought had been his brother – over in Wood Green when the Final Wave hit, dragging an ignorant and soft-around-the-edges world into a harsh reality that had seen most slaughtered and the rest cowering in whatever hiding place they could find. Jace had been neither of the two, but after what he'd endured, after what he'd had to do to survive, it was no wonder really that the North Londoner had thrived in the ruins, as I had. He was also the one I trusted above all others, in a world where trust seemed like nothing but a memory that died when we realised just what had been living among us for so many years.

My smile faded as I looked back at the dormant square.

The Column had been the first to fall when the first missile strike hit Trafalgar, pulverising Nelson and his lion guards to dust and leaving an impact crater the size of an Olympic swimming pool. What was left of the other plinths were more reminiscent of aged tombstones now and the one remaining fountain was thick with the stench of putrid, stale water and death. There wasn't much left about the nightmare of the New World that turned my stomach anymore, but there was something about the watery graveyard that still chilled me. I remembered all too clearly the bloated faces. The flies that had crowded over the half-submerged dead, pushing their fat, fuzzy bodies into open wounds. The tiny blood-stained child's shoe on the edge of the fountain that had made me finally turn away because I'd seen the bright daisy print of the other one just under the surface.

It wasn't the dead that bothered me today. It was the silence. The stillness.

In the early days after the Final Wave, the Greys had swarmed over the city picking off the dregs of what was left, the elderly, the infirm, those unlucky enough or not smart enough to find a hiding place, those who foolishly thought they still had the strength to fight. Now, they still marshalled the city, sweeping the streets with regular patrols, but the volume of their presence was not what it once had been. Gav believed it was the fact there were so few of us humans left that it just didn't warrant the numbers anymore, but I couldn't help but think it was something else. Like the calm before the inevitable storm. The invasion army had scared the shit out of me, but the quiet city seemed more alien somehow.

'Let's move to the meeting point,' I said. 'Abby and Gav must almost be there by now. This place is giving me the bloody creeps.'

Jace silently nodded his agreement and we began to move through the square, sticking as close to the outskirts as we could where we were able to use the buildings, or what was left of them, for cover if need be. My skin prickled the whole way. The glassless windows of the National Gallery, like vacant black eyes set into a stone skull, stared at us as we approached, creeping past the skeletons of burnt-out double-decker tourist buses and Hackney carriages.

Picking our way through the rubble, we reached the entrance to the Gallery building, where the once starkly-contrasting monochrome tiles of the Portico were now stained with ash and blood. With one last sweeping reconnaissance of the square, we slipped inside.

The shadowy confines inside the Gallery entrance did little to lift my unease. Being out in the open was always risky, but there was something about our secret short-cut through the Gallery that sent a chill burying deep into my bones. After Tom had been killed, the idea of leaving my home – our home – and facing anyone I might meet outside had seemed like nightmare piled on top of nightmare, and crowds were a sure-fire way to trigger an anxiety attack that left me struggling to breathe, but strangely, the crowds inside the Gallery had never affected me in the same way. Strolling through the exhibitions and rooms, I could almost forget that anyone else was there, as I wandered, lost in the beauty of the paintings, letting the art soothe my heart. Back then, Hogarth and Van Gogh and Raphael – although not Rembrandt, I'd never much cared for Rembrandt – had been the air that filled my lungs. Back then, I found my calm in the delicate turn of a brush, in the breathings of oil paint and canvas. Now, without the tourists and art-enthusiasts, the Gallery seemed as cold and empty as a mausoleum and the portraits seemed like cruel reminders of a world we had lost.

We made our way quickly through the building – the stench of death and rotten food in the restaurant and cafeteria that pervaded up from the ground floor was enough to keep us moving – taking a left in the Central Hall to avoid the horrors still sealed up inside the Sunley Room. The air inside the Gallery felt more oppressive the further inside we went, too many windowless rooms holding warm, stagnant air fuelled by the August sun, merciless in its attack upon the city. I could already feel the sweat trickling down my spine where my SA80 hung over my back, plastering my vest top to my damp skin. Jace turned back to look at me as we walked, his eyes automatically glancing to where my hand rested on the Glock in my utility belt.

'Easy, Lara Croft,' he said, shooting me a knowing grin.

Despite the fact I was the one who'd initially suggested the route through the Gallery long ago when we'd been trying to find ways through Lena's territory without being detected, Jace knew I hated it in here. I'd never told him why, just as I'd never told him or any of the others what had really happened to Tom, but Jace and I had learned to read each other well during our time patrolling the Quadrant. We worked together almost instinctively, often not even needing to speak to communicate. He breathed, I breathed. I moved, he moved. I knew when something was bothering him, just as he knew that I wouldn't let the tension roll out of my muscles until we'd found Gav and Abby at the meeting point, by the entrance to the Educational Centre on the other side.

'Funny,' I remarked, dryly, with a roll of my eyes. 'If I'm Lara, what does that make you? Jason Bourne?'

'I was thinking Jason Bourne with a touch of Daniel Craig's Bond and Christian Bale's Batman all rolled into one,' he said, looking as if he had actually been thinking seriously about the comparison. 'Although, far superior than all three, obviously.'

'Well, sure... goes without saying, mate,' I said. 'All those roles were totally miscast. Should have been you...'

I stopped abruptly as we rounded the corner into the room where Claude and Turner's works still hung on the walls, untouched by the looters who had stripped the place of the Monet's and Van Gogh's and Picasso's. Jace had come to halt too, his gaze instantly locking towards the direction from which we'd both heard the same sound. I slipped the Glock smoothly from my belt, one hand on the grip, the other wrapped around it to steady my aim.

We waited, ears pricked, alert. 

A clicking noise echoed faintly through the rooms.

A clicking noise that only they made, deep in the back of their throat. A noise that still anchored my heart in ice, no matter how many times I heard it. 

We weren't alone in the Gallery today.

A Grey was here.