Our Lady of the Streets

by Tom Pollock

  The six men fled.

  Beth came to her shoulder. ‘You okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Pen replied, unclenching her fists and letting the blood tingle back into her palms. ‘I’m just adjusting.’

  She walked over to the bank of TVs and one by one flicked them back on, then picked up the remotes and held down the channel scroll buttons until they were showing the BBC, ITV and Sky news channels.

  Beth stood in front of the screens. She pulled her hood down and her sleeves up. From this little distance, the tiny tiles that covered her skin looked like reptile scales. Her dad stood beside her, a protective hand on her shoulder.

  ‘What are we looking at, Pen?’ Beth asked.

  ‘It’s more what we aren’t looking at,’ she replied. ‘What haven’t we seen at all?’

  They went back to watching the screens. One of them showed a satellite image of London, a red line demarcating the affected area. A government phone number was scrolling continuously across the bottom of the screen. Another showed the acting Prime Minister barking something; the volume was too low to let them hear it clearly. The third replayed the footage from the previous night’s disaster. Pen’s gut twisted as she watched the Sewermanders fly into the helicopter again and again in slow motion.

  Beth shook her head slowly. ‘Still not getting—’ she began, but Paul Bradley interrupted her.

  ‘Refugees,’ he murmured.

  Pen snapped her fingers and pointed at him. ‘Right?’ she asked him. ‘I mean, look at that map.’ She pointed to the leftmost TV screen. ‘Something like fifteen per cent of the country used to live inside that red line. The streets are empty now. I know some people died in the symptoms, but we’re not exactly hip-deep in corpses, are we? So’ – she spread her arms – ‘where did everybody go? They can’t all be hiding out in the Clapham Junction Asda.’

  ‘They got evacuated,’ Beth said. ‘Like your mum and dad. They got out.’

  ‘Then like your dad says, where are the refugees? It ought to be bloody chaos out there, B. We should be seeing pictures of tents and trucks and food shortages and who knows what else. When that hurricane hit New Orleans a few years back, they ran out of food, water, medicine – the works. They were living in stadiums. It was bedlam. Do you know how many people lived in New Orleans back then?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Me neither, but I bet it’s a hell of a lot less than the eight million who used to live here.’ Pen was pacing, buzzing with energy as she talked it out. She waved her hands agitatedly, and it was only when she saw the wild way that they were looking at her that she realised the wire strands trailing from her back were mimicking the motion. She dropped her hands back to her sides.

  ‘It’s been bugging me for ages, but it wasn’t until I saw what I saw yesterday that I put my finger on it.’

  Beth looked at her sharply. ‘Until you saw what, yesterday, Pen?’

  ‘At the synod’s factory – one of Mater Viae’s Masonry soldiers took a child.’

  ‘A child? I don’t understand.’

  ‘The synod must have abandoned the place because there was this kid hiding out there. A clayling reached right out of the floor and dragged him back under. At first I thought it had killed him, but it hadn’t. It took him alive, Beth – the way I’ve seen them take people before.’

  And with that, she was back in that huge dark room beneath the palace in London-Under-Glass, her feet crunching the broken bottles strewn over the floor and knowing that for every bottle there was a victim: a scared, lonely human, kidnapped, their memories stolen and their body executed, weighted and dumped in the river.

  She couldn’t keep the shiver out of her voice as she said, ‘I think I know where the missing people went.’ She walked to the wavy, frosted window and opened it out onto the night. Canary Wharf pierced the darkness in the distance, the only tower in London where the lights were still burning.

  ‘She took them.’

  For a long time, no one spoke.

  ‘I don’t know, Pen,’ Beth said at last. ‘There’s a lot of assumptions there.’

  Pen nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, there are,’ she admitted, ‘and maybe they’re wrong, but they fit, and I don’t know what else does. And what if they’re right?’

  She felt the hum in the barbs over her diaphragm as urgency entered her voice. ‘I know Her, B – I’ve seen Her do this before. People aren’t people to Her. She doesn’t care about them. She wouldn’t be taking them if She didn’t plan to use them. And there are thousands, and thousands missing, so—’ She hesitated, licked her lips. ‘So whatever that use is …’

  ‘… it’s big.’ Beth finished the sentence for her.

  ‘We have to find out what she’s up to. And if I’m right – if she does have them, we have to help those people – we have to try at least. B, there’s’ – Pen spread her hands and a helpless laugh burst out of her – ‘there’s no one else who can.’

  Beth stood motionless for a second, arms folded. The green light from her eyes spread over the floor. She looked troubled. ‘Maybe there’s no one who can at all.’

  She met Pen’s gaze then, and Pen shrank away, shriven by how sick her friend looked, how tired. Beth’s folded arms suddenly didn’t look defiant but like they were all that was holding her together.

  ‘You saw what happened when we went after Timon,’ she said. ‘We could barely handle one of their patrols. We would have been swamped by the Sewermanders and reinforcement Masonry Men if we’d hung around any longer.’ The city-voice sounded parched and weary, and Pen began to understand just how much yesterday’s battle had taken from her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Pen. I believe you, and I want to help, I really do. But we won’t even get close.’

  Pen held her gaze, but Beth’s green eyes burned sadly in front of her until she let her head drop.

  Pen turned and pulled the window shut.

  ‘There … there might still be a way.’ Paul Bradley’s voice was shaking.

  Pen looked around, startled.

  ‘W-w-w—’ he started, then he stopped, wet his lips and tried again. ‘We can’t get in through force; Beth’s right about that, but there might be another way?’ His eyes, very wide, darted between the two girls’ faces before settling finally on Pen’s.

  ‘They’re … they’re taking people, you said. Taking humans. Well … ’ He smiled nervously and gestured to himself in a bashful Ta-dah!

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Beth snapped, rolling her eyes.

  ‘It might work, Beth,’ he insisted. He spoke very fast, his words running into each other, as though afraid that if he paused for too long he might lose the courage to speak. ‘It might be the only way. Humans, right? We don’t have many, and it can’t be you’ – he gestured to Pen, who was staring at him. ‘She knows you – you said that. She’d spot you straight away. But she doesn’t know me. It has to be me.’ The truth of the words seemed to dawn on him even as he spoke them. ‘It’s like Parva said: there’s no one else.’

  ‘This. Is. Ridiculous,’ Beth snapped harshly. ‘Even if I was willing to consider it, which I’m not, how would you get back to us, genius? How would you get the word out? In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s kind of a shortage of people coming back out of Canary Wharf with stories to tell. Now, I don’t know why that is, but if they’re in there I doubt it’s ’cause they’re having too much fun!’

  He flinched, but he didn’t look away from the architecture of his daughter’s face. Then he said what Pen had been afraid he was going to say from the moment he opened his mouth. ‘Maybe I don’t need to come back.’

  ‘What?’ Beth demanded bluntly.

  ‘Gutterglass,’ he answered, ‘Gutterglass could give me a – a rat, or a beetle or a Ribena carton or something to carry with me. She could watch, listen through it … I don’t know, but that way if I – even if I don’t … ’ He tailed off and then muttered, ‘Well, either way, you’d know.’

  But Beth was already shaking
her head. ‘Glas doesn’t have that kind of range,’ she said.

  He frowned at this immediate dismissal. ‘You could at least ask her. How do you know?’

  ‘I. JUST. KNOW.’

  Beth’s shout was like a building collapsing, and Pen wondered if somewhere in the miniaturised architecture of her body, some tower had given way to generate it. Beth slumped, breathing heavily. ‘Let’s just drop it,’ she muttered.

  Pen eyed her. She wanted so badly to do what Beth said. She wanted to tell Paul his plan was brave but unworkable. She wanted to forget she’d ever brought it up.

  But the serious face of the little boy at the synod’s factory stared at her from her memory, and in her ears she heard the crunching of glass beneath her feet.

  She met Beth’s gaze, but only for an instant. I’m sorry, B, she thought. ‘There might be another way,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Beth’s voice was deadly quiet.

  ‘There might be another way,’ Pen repeated, ‘even without Glas: there might be a way to do what your dad’s talking about.’

  Beth didn’t say anything, but Pen really believed that that was hope in his voice as he said, ‘What?’

  ‘Hold out your hand.’

  He obeyed with a puzzled frown. Pen took his hand in both of hers and turned it gently over so the palm was towards the floor. She plucked a half-inch-long piece of wire with two barbs, one at either end, from the back of her own hand. It writhed and twisted in the air like a worm.

  Paul’s eyes widened. ‘Will it hurt?’ he whispered.

  Pen shook her head and smiled as best she could. ‘Like a jab at the doctor’s,’ she reassured him. ‘No worse than that.’

  He swallowed hard, screwed his eyes closed and nodded. Avoiding her best friend’s burning green gaze, Pen laid the strand gently on his skin. The wire coiled, flopped restlessly, and then the barbs bit.

  Pen felt a jolt. A shiver ran through her. In its wake another layer of sensation overlaid her skin, dulled as if by morphine but there. She felt the prickle of two-day stubble on her neck, the drag of an extra three stone of stomach around her waist. She smelled the anxious fug of his sweat, suddenly close, as if it were coming from her own pores.

  ‘Mr B,’ she said, her voice a little unsteady, ‘open your eyes.’

  She felt the reluctance in her own eyelids as he obeyed.

  Pen blinked and inhaled sharply. It was vague, a hazy extra layer just beyond her own sight, but she could focus on it if she tried. Blurred by Paul Bradley’s frightened tears, she saw her own face.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  With her back to the sunset, Pen clambered across the broken city. Dust and fumes had soaked into her clothes. Every fold of her skin felt gritty, the dirt cemented onto her with her own sweat. The city’s convulsions had shattered Southwark; its warehouses and viaducts lay in tumbles of brick and sheared-away iron. Pen scrambled up the dunes on all fours, wary of slipping masonry and the blade-like stubs of shorn girders that lurked like traps beneath them. The air was parched. She paused, panting for breath, and then pressed on. It was still a long, long way back to Frostfield.

  An alien thought burst into her head, a voice that sounded like her.

  Uncoil! Uncoil! Ease your toil!

  The Wire Mistress had latched on to the bit of her brain where her poetry lived, speaking to her in half-nonsensical rhymes. There was something about the tangled, twisting language that bent back on itself that the steel creature seemed to recognise.

  ‘Shut up, would you?’ Pen muttered.

  She knew what she wanted; she could feel the Wire Mistress, itchy and impatient, dripping the urges into her through the back of her neck. The cramps in her coils were aches in Pen’s own muscles and she couldn’t stop herself from thinking how good it would feel to let the wire stretch out and bear her up on spindly legs, to luxuriate in the cool night air far above the surface of the city.

  But even as she imagined it, her heart stuttered and memory assaulted her: barbs burning in her nerves, her skin sticky with her own drying blood as she was carried away, with no way to know where – no way, and no say: no say at all.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not yet. Not again. I’m not ready.’

  The wire whined, but she felt it coil back up quietly in her skull.

  ‘Just as well B and her dad aren’t here. Talking to you out loud like this would freak them out no end.’

  She’d left them arguing: Mr B adamant that he could help, that he had to help, Beth just stubbornly shaking her head. Nothing would be done, she insisted, until they had a plan to get him back. Pen hadn’t contributed much. The face of the boy in the factory had hovered in front of her, needling her to speak, but every time she’d opened her mouth, Beth’s expression, frantic with the premonition of bereavement, had shut it for her.

  Brick shale slid from under her foot. Her breath stalled, restarted. She found a new footing and reached for another handhold. She crested the masonry ridge and looked over.

  Heat slammed into her like an invisible wall.

  ‘Crap,’ she muttered.

  A Fever Street cut through the sprawl below her like a lava flow. Black smoking stains on the surface of the asphalt marked where something unfortunate had fallen onto its surface. She scanned left and right, anxiously looking for a break or crossing, but all she could see was shimmering tarmac. She had no way of knowing how far the pyrexia stretched.

  Behind her, the sun was already low and bloody.

  ‘Pick and play, pick and play, bear you on your tick-tock way,

  Up across the burning street, oh so many dainty feet.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she muttered, her stomach swimming. ‘Right.’

  She exhaled and closed her eyes.

  It was like stretching a limb she’d been sitting on for hours: she felt pins and needles ripple through the wire strands as the Mistress’ magnetic muscles flexed, unrolling a tendril and sliding it down into a hollow in the brickwork. Another followed it, then a third, and then more, until seven strands connected Pen to the earth.

  Sweat spotted her hijab where it lay against her forehead. She felt sick. ‘Me,’ she whispered through gritted teeth. ‘I’ll do it. Let me.’

  She concentrated, trying to feel the shape of the wire, the weight of it where it lay wrapped around her torso. She traced it in her mind: how each severed strand connected to the next until, finally, they punctured her neck, plugging into her.

  At her command, and with an ease that astonished her, another wire tendril unravelled, wavered in the air, then planted itself into the bricks.

  Direct control, she thought. She had direct control. The swimming in her stomach calmed a little. It can’t be that easy, can it? The Wire Mistress coiled in the back of her mind, purring, too damned quiescent. Pen didn’t trust her, but the creature put up no resistance as she pushed her consciousness back along the metal, groping again for the wounds in it, reassuring herself with the Mistress’ weakness.

  She was tentative at first. She leaned forward into the cage of wires across her chest, then, very slowly, straightened the tendrils underneath her. Her toes dragged in the dust as they came off the floor.

  She hung there for a moment: a barbed-wire spider on eight legs of twisted steel burnished by the sunset. For a single dreadful instant, she couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t stop the thought that the wire had been lying in wait for just this moment to crush her.

  You’re just panicking, she scolded herself. Breathe, Pen. Breathe. Stop fighting it. You don’t need to fight it—

  —not now.

  She tried to slow her lungs, tried to breathe normally, and found she could. She burst out in a laugh so loud it shocked her.

  She waited, but the Mistress didn’t move, though Pen could feel her savouring the stretch, the feeling of her weight in her strands. She sat quietly, in abeyance, not even talking to her as the coils gently contracted and expanded in time with her breathing.

  With an unsteady kind of awe, Pen realise
d the Mistress was waiting for her to take the first step.

  She focused on the foremost strand, lifted and planted it on the far side of the Fever Street. It reached easily across the hot tarmac, shuddered a little bit, but held firm. She planted another next to it. When her front four legs were firmly planted she pushed off hard with her hind ones and sailed over the Fever Street like a pole vaulter, its heat briefly stroking her face.

  Her arc carried her too far and she overbalanced; her stomach flipped over and she screwed up her eyes. The rubble on the far side rushed up fast—

  Pen bounced, but not as hard as she had expected. She opened her eyes again and saw in astonishment that the wire was cradling her; it had balled up around her in a cage, flexing and absorbing the impact. They rolled to a stop at the bottom of the hill and there they lay while the Mistress waited for Pen to make the first move.

  ‘Okay, then,’ she muttered.

  A few moments later, they were up again and crossing the city with a swaying gait, unsteady as a baby giraffe at first. Her confidence grew with each step and soon the bricks began to flow away in a blur under her. The Mistress began to drip in quiet, unspoken suggestions; Pen could feel her, like a stabilising hand, guiding but never pushing her influence. The air flowed faster and faster past her face and secretly, behind her mask of wire, Pen let herself smile a little.

  Is this how it was for you, Es? she wondered, the smile tugging a little wider. What will you make of me?

  Something snagged her attention.

  She stopped sharply. Her new legs bent, and slowly flexed back as she lost momentum. She frowned. They’d passed something significant; she’d felt it. She focused, groping for the sensation. She felt more pins and needles: the sense of another wire limb waking up – but this one wasn’t attached to her. It was Out There.

  In the night.

  Pen gasped. Her eyes stretched wide and the lashes tickled wire strands as she realised the scale of what she was connected to. She concentrated harder. She felt the distant wire in her mind, focused on it and felt it flex in response: a remote limb. The more she shifted it, the more the magnetism flowed, the more she felt, sensing its shape, and where it lay on the ground.