We ran on and at some point it switched from me leading Nat to him choosing which turns to take, which side streets to disappear down. I could no longer hear a pursuit of any kind.
"Need a break," I gasped. Now that the immediate danger was behind us, I was very aware that it'd been quite some time since secondary school gym class.
Nat slowed to a stop on a lonely street lined on either side with abandoned flats, gap-toothed where the bombs had made their selections. He waited for me as I doubled over to catch my breath, but couldn't stop his head from swiveling left and right and left again, looking for any sign from our pursuers.
I gathered myself enough to rasp out words between breaths, "What. The hell. Was that?"
"Not here," was all he said. I followed him down the broken street.
After checking once again that no one watched us from the lattice of shadows, Nat pulled me into a gap between the shelled out buildings. I stumbled as my foot caught on rubble hidden in the darkness. Nat caught my arm. "Careful."
The flat that had been here was nothing but a foundation and a few piles of broken furniture. Where the bottom floor was still intact, you could see the impressions of where the walls had been. We passed through them like ghosts and Nat found the place he was looking for. He crouched down to feel around on the floor. There was a, "Ah!" when he found what he was looking for, a bit of rope among the broken bricks and glass.
He tugged on it and with it came part of the floor— a door that opened onto a set of fully intact stairs. It must have been the cellar. I was surprised to see the faint glow of a light or flame at the very bottom. Nat started down the stairs and then turned back to offer me his undamaged hand.
I didn't move.
Less than an hour ago, I had been standing behind the ancient bar in my uncle's pub, serving Ernest and Frank and the rest. Now I'd been chased through said pub by a woman with a gun and a man throwing fire, seen the fellow I'd been flirting with for weeks electrocute someone with his bare hands, and been led to some bombed-out flat in a part of London I didn't recognize, being asked to follow him down some godforsaken hole in the ground.
"I won't shock you, if that's what you're worried about," he said. I thought I caught the barest smile on his lips.
I placed my hand gingerly in his. This might be the last decision I ever made, but at least I made one.
We made our way carefully down the tunnel-like staircase towards the light. I could hear voices now as we emerged, echoing against the brick walls of the cellar. They belonged to a group of people I wouldn't think normally spent much time in each other's company.
There was a young boy, no older than eight or nine tilting back in a chair so that it balanced on two legs. His mop of curly dark hair was interrupted by an ugly scar the length of a pencil behind his ear.
He was speaking to a woman who could've been around my age. She drank something dark and foamy from a chipped glass. In the corner sat an old man doing nothing but staring at the wall blowing smoke rings of differing sizes. It took me a moment to realize he wasn't holding a cigarette.
The woman and boy turned as we rounded the corner.
"Nat! Where've you been?" said the woman. She wore an expensive looking coat but the fur trim looked a bit ratty in places.
"I got into a spot of trouble, but no worries. We're all right."
"Who's this? Did you find someone else? Was she part of the program?" she asked. They boy leaned further back to get a look at me and had to catch himself before he tipped over.
"This is Lydia. She's not from the program. She's—" he glanced at me and hesitated, "— not Blitzed."
"What?!" Lydia eyebrows shot up. "Nat! Why did you bring her here? What does she know?"
"She's the barmaid at—"
"The barmaid?!"
"Listen, Sam, it couldn't be helped. Croft and Odella were on my tail so I ducked into her pub for a few minutes to try and lose them. Only, they must've seen me go in because they showed up not long after." He looked at me guiltily.
Sam crossed her arms. "And I assume that didn't go too well."
"Let's just say Lydia saw some things you can't exactly unsee."
You better believe it, I thought. I glanced at his hands.
"Did you get the files?" Sam asked. In answer, Nat pulled out the folder from his coat. I'd almost forgotten about it. He dropped the stack of papers onto the foldout table. The boy dropped all four chair legs to the ground and leaned over to look at the folder.
"Did you see her?" The boy asked.
Nat shook his head. "Once I had the files, I had to get out quick." The boy tried unsuccessfully to hide his disappointment. The old man in the corner paid no attention to us whatsoever, but continued to blow smoke in more and more intricate patterns.
Sam looked at me. "I take it if I asked you to forget what you saw tonight and go home quietly, that wouldn't have much chance of happening."
It wasn't a question.
"Well, you're in it now. Should you explain or should I?" She directed this question at Nat.
"Here," he said to me, "you should probably have a seat." He pulled over one of the dusty looking chairs.
"I'd prefer to stand, thank you." I felt off balance in this damp room full of strangers that obviously knew more than I did. I felt like I was meeting Nat for the first time. If he felt hurt by my cold formalities, he didn't show it.
"It might take awhile. Really, sit. We've just had a rather exerting jaunt through the city." I couldn't argue with that. My legs had started to feel an awful lot like jam.
"Sam, do we have any water down here?"
She reached into a rucksack and pulled out a dented, dark green canteen. She handed it to Nat who passed it over to me, allowing me the first sip. The water had a tang of metal to it but I was grateful. Something about an act as normal as drinking water grounded me when everything else seemed to be coming loose at the seams.
Nat sat across from me, taking a swig once I was done. He tapped the folder between us. "Maps," he said. "Maps of every bomb dropped during the Blitz."
He opened the folder and pulled out a map of Greater London. It was covered in a dizzying amount of red x's. My stomach lurched. I'd never seen such a comprehensive account of the horrors of those months. "Ah, Union Street." There was a big red X penciled over the street in question. "The street I grew up on."
He traced the grid to find the coordinates and then rifled through the stack of papers left in the folder. The boy and Sam leaned over to watch him. The papers were organized by the coordinates on the map, followed by a list of addresses and bomb shelter locations. Nat found an address and turned the papers toward me so I could see.
"203-B Union Street. Mr. Richard Harker, deceased. Mrs. Mary Harker, deceased. Nathanial Harker, L&R."
"L&R?" I asked.
"Located and Retrieved."
I looked at him, puzzled. He looked up Sam's address and the boy's, whose name was James and had been living in a house for children of Jewish refugees. They both had the same L&R signifier next to their names.
"But what does it mean?"
"The government has been very interested in finding survivors of the Blitz, anyone near a bomb site, ever since their intelligence found out that the Germans were doing some experimental things with a fraction of their bombs. The Blitz was a sort of lab test of what the bombs could do. But what the Germans don't know is that some of their science projects had... unintended consequences."
I looked over at the old man with his never-ending smoke supply. "Is that why you... how your hands...?"
Nat turned his palm over and a spark arced across his fingertips.
"Stop showing off," said Sam, though she smirked.
"Can you all do that?" I asked.
"It has manifested in different ways for each of us," she said.
"But that man, Croft— he had it too. He was catching things on fire with just his hands!"
"Yes," said Nat, "He's been Blitzed too. But I wouldn't call him one of us, exactly."
"What do you mean?"
"He buys into the whole "it's our national duty to become the new modern weapon" rubbish they want us to believe."
"What about that woman that was with him?"
"Odella? She's not Blitzed. She's sort of what you would call Croft's handler. They pair you up when— "
"What in the hell is this?"
Everyone turned to the man who'd spoken. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, his long army-issued trench slick with rain. His sandpaper jaw was rigid with anger as he stared straight at me.