When Earth is conquered by the sinister Greys and the alien who killed Evie's husband returns seeking her help, she must find a way to enact her revenge and fight the growing feelings for the creature who is an exact replica of the man she loved.
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Taj Varma, leader of our ragtag group of survivors - a mixture of the physically competent and the just-plain-fortunate, or unfortunate, depending on your point of view – was talking in low, hushed whispers with his brother Vik, when I found him in the old manager's office.
Despite there being just two years between them, the differences between Taj and Vik couldn't have been more vast. If Taj was the human equivalent of an Olympic Gold Medal, Vik, was a plastic five-a-side football trophy which had lost most of its plating and had been chucked in a box destined for a car boot sale.
Vik was the older of the two, short, balding, and had a tendency to sweat profusely, but fortunately had been blessed with the trademark Varma teeth that would have been good enough for a toothpaste commercial, even if the rest of him wasn't. He had also worked for TFL before the Greys came, and it was thanks to him, that we had managed to locate the secret TFL rooms hidden away beyond the train platforms and collapsed tunnels.
Taj, on the other hand, had been a flashy banker in the city before the Final Wave. Weirdly, he was probably one of those blokes I would have disliked with a passion – a smarmy city-boy with his flash suits, a nice car, a bloody great apartment with a desirable balcony view, and more irritating fast-track patter than a real estate agent on amphetamines.
Taj had lived the life. Not a superstar life, like Gav, but definitely a life that I couldn't have identified with, even if you'd suddenly given me a shit-load of cash and thrown me slap-bang into the cosmetic surgery chaos of Knightsbridge. Not only was Taj a wealthy banker (successful fella, city dweller, sings Tom), but he was also an adrenalin junkie, one of those mad bastards who spent their weekends hanging off the side of a mountain using just their mega-strong index finger or jumping out of a plane, ingratiating Instagram with one of those super-annoying thumbs-up-aren't-I-just-living-my-best-life selfies that made you want to throw up in your sad little microwave meal for one.
Ironically, it was that fake James Bond wannabe lifestyle that had given Taj the strength and determination to survive and, I had to admit, he was a highly proficient leader of the group. He had a strategic mind to rival even that of Jace's, was a skilled fighter and strangely, for a banker and former Insta-addict, was also a really good listener. Everyone in the group trusted him implicitly, which I always found interesting since I knew Taj had a secret.
A pretty bloody big one at that.
A secret that only I knew.
Taj rarely cracked under the burden of the New World, but the one time he did, I just happened to walk in at the wrong moment, ready to talk to him about how someone had been raiding the rations – there's only fifteen tins of beans, there should be sixteen, or something banal like that – and finding him with his face pressed against the wall, the stifled sobs wracking his whole frame.
An insistent declaration of just having a weak moment, turned into a confession I never expected in a million years, and, it turned out, meant that Taj and I had a connection that I never would have expected in a trillion years.
