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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They say that you don't truly appreciate what you have until it's gone, and I never felt that so deeply until the first day I ventured out into the city after the Final Wave, when all the humans had either been slaughtered, taken or had crawled into whatever hiding place they could find.
To us New Worlders, the silence of London had been deafening.
None of us realised how loud silence could be until we took those first tentative steps out into the open.
Footsteps. Cars. The rush of air and roar of engine as a bus swept by, too close to the kerb. Voices. The sound of a tube train hurtling through a tunnel. Doors slamming. The clink of glasses held aloft in celebration. Laughter. When all that was gone and there was nothing left but silence, the thunderous quiet of the city boomed in our ears. I'd seen people cry at the burden of it all. I'd seen people brought to their knees, cradling their head in their hands, unable to process how the Greys had even taken sound from us.
Not only had they left London an empty shell of skeletal buildings and corpses, but they had taken its lifeforce, its buzz, the undeniably tenacious bubble of noise in which it existed.
As the team and I crept through the silent streets of London to Lancaster House, I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if the Greys eventually caught us all. Would they leave behind a ghost planet so they could conquer another broken world? Or make this world their own, until all traces of humanity were gone, and it was as if we had never existed and were nothing but a whisper lingering in the far reaches of space?
Standing alongside Jace, I'd never felt so much like a whisper in his world as I did then.
If it wasn't for the fact I could feel the tension balled around him like a fist, I would have thought one slight breeze might have blown me away, just like the ash which had settled on London's streets after the bombs had fallen and reduced flesh and stone to dust.
I hated this. I hated this mission, I hated what we were about to do, but most of all, I hated the distance that had stretched our friendship to the limits, and I hated that I had done this.
My secrets had done this.
Unease crept along my collarbone as I thought of that secret being out here somewhere. Watching me. Waiting. But, for what?
Looking up, I searched the windows of the surrounding buildings, squinting where the sun's glare hit any glass that had somehow remained unshattered. Could he be hiding there now? Watching us as we walked willingly into what could be nothing but a hornet's nest and not the bounty of treasure that Taj believed it was?
Most of the journey had been spent navigating the underground tunnels all the way to Green Park, one of the few tube stations mostly untouched by the war, but even the arduous trek through the dark, shifting shadows of the tunnels couldn't rival the dread I was feeling up here on the surface. I felt exposed and vulnerable, and it wasn't just the thought of being within the outer limits of the Black Zone that was bothering me, but the thought of that creature out here watching me through Tom's eyes.
