London wasn’t always a dusty, ghost-filled monument to the dead. It was once an intense city with toxic air and the constant din of millions of people talking, consuming, shoving past each other. Perhaps it’s impossible for you to imagine so many people alive in this place but, I assure you, it’s true. After all, where do you think all the bones littering the streets came from? Each one of the skulls you step over every day was once a person, alive as you are now, and that skull was filled with dreams and fears just like yours. Terror was probably the last thing all those poor souls felt. God knows it was for me.
I can only guess that you’re in London, unless this book has had its own adventure too. For a moment more, indulge me, I like to try to imagine who you are. Of course, I can only make some educated guesses. It’s likely that you’re older rather than younger, as so few children read now. But perhaps you are young, and if so, you must have one of the survivors caring for you, someone kind enough to teach you how to read now that there are no schools. I hope so, it makes you one to treasure.
Perhaps you’re trying to decide whether to burn this book now or read it first. Are you weighing up which is more important to you: a few more minutes of heat or the hours of another person’s voice reaching up to you from these pages?
Wait! Let me speak to you, let me tell you this tale! Don’t you want to know about the Red Lady’s rise to power, or perhaps how she fell? Have you heard the name “Joshua” whispered in dark places and wondered what exactly he did? Or is it David the King who fascinates you? No, what am I thinking? It must be the Four you want to know about, the four who changed the world. Well, I was there, watching as it all happened, so if you burn this now, you’ll never know.
I shall start after It happened, some twenty years later, when London was divided between the gangs: the Gardners, the Bloomsbury Boys, the Red Lady’s Hunters, to name but a few. Yes, I shall start in the place where it all began: Miri’s garden.
You may not have heard of her, but one of the most important people you need to know about is Miri. In the year I begin this account, she was in her forties. I’d like you to try to picture her, hair long and dark with some silvered strands. Some of the lines around the edges of her large brown eyes were no doubt left by the horrors she experienced when It happened, but most of them were carved by smiles.
Miri’s garden, at the centre of Queen Square, Blooms-bury, was one of the most beautiful places in London. Not dangerous and wild like the big public parks with their beasts and thorns, and not overgrown like the small house gardens are now. Well kept and orderly, Miri’s garden kept her and many others alive.
Her home was part of an old school with arched windows where the housemaster once resided. The other choices were old offices (too impersonal) or one of the hospitals that surrounded the square, but nothing on this earth would make Miri step into a hospital for a second time since It happened, let alone live in one.
The old schoolmaster’s house was where her son, Zane, was born and raised. Ah! I can imagine your eyes widen and hear you say: “Yes, I’ve heard of him!” Well, yes, of course, everyone alive has but, at this point, very few knew of Zane. He learnt about the healing arts at her side, which is why I start with her. Without Miri, there would have been no Zane as you know of him.
Zane was always a sensitive child, with his mother’s dark, soulful eyes and the thick brown hair of her youth, uncut since the day he was born. At the time I have in mind, he was almost fifteen and his hair reached his lower back. He was becoming a handsome young man, so yes, everything you might have heard about him in that regard is certainly true.
At that age he knew very little of life outside the garden, but despite everything his mother did to protect Zane, his innocence was still taken from him. Not by one dramatic event, but gently, like each day steals one’s youth. The first little piece was stolen the night the Giant came.