Lara and I had never spoken about this, but somehow we both knew that what she said was the truth. Our mother had abandoned us when Lara was just a baby. When Medusa turned up, I’d known it was my mother. I could not bring myself to put that beast down. Lara, I thought, could manage it more easily. She was more accustomed to this way of life than I could ever be. She’d grown up in a hard way and was hard herself. She’s never really known our mother, except as an aching absence. I’d known her, before the outbreak, and I’d seen the change that came over her. The memory haunted me more than anything else I’d seen. It had haunted my father too, and the ghost of her was what eventually took him, though I’d made up something else to tell Lara at the time. I regretted that now. She’d been so young.

An upwelling of memory overwhelmed and threatened to smother me. Images of the monster hunched over my father’s body swam before my eyes. Mercilessly, I shoved them aside and brought myself back to the room and the present moment. The last time I’d dwelled on that memory, Medusa had appeared at our gate in broad daylight. Three deep gashes left by her vicious claws testified as evidence for how dangerous it could be to think about the past.

“Well,” Luke said, “if it makes you feel any better, the demon is not really your mother. She is just a dream. And you must abandon that dream, because it’s what’s keeping you tied to the bones of this city.”

Lara and I looked at each other.

“Let’s go out now and find her, Shelby,” Lara said. “I hate this city. I want to go with Luke. There are other people there! Maybe Dad is there!”

“Dad’s gone, darling,” I said. “You know that. It’s best not to hope for impossible things, okay? Anyway, Luke hasn’t offered to take us.”

“Actually,” he interrupted, “I’ve come here to do just that…”

“What?” I asked. “You imply that you planned all this. You are making that up! There is no way you could possibly have known about us. I stumbled upon you this afternoon by complete accident.”

“You’re awfully sure that real things are imaginary and I can’t blame you for that. The line is so thin these days. You didn’t let me finish my story. You don’t know what happened after that. And I didn’t tell you how and why I came to Johannesburg.”

“Okay,” I said. “So get to the point.”

He shook his head slightly and raised his eyebrows. He laughed softly and looked away from me, almost shyly.

“Five years ago, I dreamed an impossible dream,” he began. “I had a dream about a family alone in a big, dead city. It was crazy, but I knew I had to find this family and bring them to the City, and I didn’t know why. Only I didn’t know which city they were in and became obsessed with finding out.”

He paused then and looked at me for a moment before looking away again.

“Why?” I asked.

He hesitated and I could see that he was struggling to come to terms with something.

“I dreamed about it when anything significant happened to you.” He paused. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” I said. He hadn’t answered my question, but I was glad he’d come so I let it rest.

“How did you find us?” Lara asked.

“It was the skyline,” he said, and smiled. “About a month ago, I had a dream about a girl on a rooftop taking aim at a buffalo. She was looking out over the city skyline.”

He smiled again, elation spreading across his features. He removed his hat, placing it on the bed next to him.

“I think that skyline may have been the second most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. Once I had that skyline in my head, I had you guys. It was burned into my mind in meticulous detail. I drew it on the wall of my house and I checked the pattern against all the skylines we have in the City archive. I ran a simple program—a program which searched for the same pattern of buildings. Of course, it took a while because it ran the skyline I gave it against all the skylines of all the cities in the world of a certain size and it had to do this for a 360 degree circle around each city. A week ago, the program told me it had a match for my pattern and that you were in the north of Johannesburg, South Africa, in a suburb called Linden.

“Before you ask, and I know you will, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen is that pair of green eyes staring down at me from the far side of the barrel of a nine millimetre. Then I knew I wasn’t just crazy. People back home told me I just dreamed you guys up, like demons. But you are real! Holy shit.”

I blushed, but felt defensive.

“So you’ve come to rescue two poor little girls,” I said.

Lara frowned at me. Maybe I was being unnecessarily harsh with Luke, but I disliked the notion that a stranger was more capable of helping us than we were of helping ourselves. Something about it went against the grain. It felt, I don’t know, just wrong. It was impossible, against the laws which governed matter, somehow. Intuitively, I felt it.

“No, Shelby,” Luke said. “I’ve come to show you how to get yourselves out of a dire situation. I can help, but you have to battle your own monsters.”

***

Tell us: Why do you think Luke can’t fight Shelby’s monsters for her?