The City's son st-1

by Tom Pollock

  But there’d been no marauding horde of Whities behind that door, just dim shapes that turned out to be glass bodies, stacked head-to-toe alongside the walls with horrible neatness. In death they shone no colour, so it wasn’t until Luma had recognised her cousin that they knew they were theirs. The Whities had retreated, but they’d killed their prisoners first. The young Sodiumites had looked down at their sisters and cousins and aunts, at the pucker-burn marks around the holes in their foreheads where their captors had dripped the water through. At that moment Lec had really understood what her grandmother meant when she told her you couldn’t trust the Whities, or Blankleits, or whatever name they went by. They were pale, treacherous killers.

  She thought of Filius, capering absurdly around her lamppost, trying to protect the Whitey that had trespassed there, and the flash of annoyance that swept over her surprised her so much she almost fell off the roof. Not that she wasn’t used to being annoyed by Filius — wanting to wring his scrawny neck was one of the anchors of their friendship — but she felt so charred and used-up that she was a little shocked she had the energy to be irritated with him.

  Still, if she was honest, the urge to smack the little guttersnipe God around the ear was comforting. He’d embarrassed her in front of her sisters, and many a Streetlamp Daughter less proud than her would’ve danced a lethal measure for that — or at least that’s what she’d tell him.

  But then he was always doing thoughtless things like that. When they were really tiny it had rained and he’d run straight out into it and Lec’s heart had almost sparked out. She’d thought the water would kill him, like it would her, and as she’d imagined it, it had felt like the fright would shatter her.

  That same vein-darkening, skin-chilling fear entered her now; fear at the memory of the Wire Mistress flexing around the flesh of her new host, squeezing her skin obscenely through the gaps in the steel, and at the way she had uncurled the poor girl’s finger and forced her to ask Where is he?

  The creature had destroyed her family. Now it wanted to do the same to a thoughtless, hopelessly naive boy with no sense of rhythm, always half a beat too late. A boy who was the only living thing left she cared about.

  An empty streetlamp poked up above the roofscape a couple of houses away. The bulb was cramped and old-fashioned, but Electra squirmed inside anyway. She couldn’t get comfortable, but she flexed her fingertips and then, gradually, she began to push her fields outwards. She stretched the magnetism further and further, groping with it over the textures of brick and concrete and windowglass, slipping it over the mouths of alleys and doorways and manhole covers until at last she’d covered every opening into the Demolition Fields she possibly could. Her muscles tingled. She knew she couldn’t burn this bright for long. In time that tingle would become an ache, then the ache would start burning until she was in exhausted agony, but this was all she could think of to do.

  The magnetic blanket she draped over Reach’s kingdom was so thin that a wireworm could push through it and not even feel it, but Electra would perceive the ripple when the field was broken. She’d know when and where her prey had emerged.

  She closed her eyes as exhaustion washed through her. Somewhere beyond the low rubble of London’s horizon the daylamp was coming, but she wouldn’t sleep, not while the glittering pieces of her family waited behind her eyelids. The creature that had shattered them would come hunting again, sooner or later, seeking the son of the streets.

  It would be ready to kill.

  And so would she.

  CHAPTER 21

  Beth and Fil looked at their new recruits. A hundred walking lightbulbs, ragged and disorganised, looked back.

  For a moment the street prince flinched under their gaze. Then he drew himself up and reached for his spear.

  ‘Victor, will you hang around?’ he asked. ‘Help us translate?’

  ‘Da.’

  ‘We won’t be taking you away from anything important?’ Beth put in. She’d taken a liking to the old Russian.

  He smirked under his beard, stepped out of his rumpled sleeping-bag and scuffed his shoe over the cobbles, sweeping a crisp packet out of the way. ‘I think housework can wait for few days.’

  Beth laughed, then a thought struck her. She rummaged in her backpack for her torch and offered it to Victor.

  ‘Can you use this to talk to them?’ she asked. ‘In their language I mean?’

  Victor snapped the light on and off in a strange syncopated pattern a couple of times. The nearest Blankleit nodded and flashed a response. The tramp pursed his lips.

  ‘Da,’ he said.

  Fil gave Beth a quizzical look. ‘What made you do that?’ he asked.

  ‘I–I just thought it’d be nice, you know, for us to talk to ’em in their own lingo, you know, more respectful.’

  He gave her a small half-smile, and Beth could see he was trying to look amused. She thought she could see a hint of admiration there too.

  Victor grinned broadly and slapped Beth on the back. ‘You are sweet girl, I come to make sure you not get too horribly killed.’

  Beth was jubilant. Lucien caught her eye and she did a small air-punch for his benefit, which he loftily ignored. It didn’t matter that there were only a hundred of them; what mattered was that she’d won them over. She was proving she belonged here in this strange city.

  As Fil led them into the maze of alleyways, the glare of the Blankleits sprang back at them off the bricks, mingling with their shadows: soldiers of light and darkness on the march. Small sounds — London sounds: the growl of a night bus down a deserted road, drunken whoops, bass thumping — echoed distantly. They walked a fine tracery of reality inlaid in the streets. It was a groove worn by centuries of magic, a groove anyone might stumble into.

  Anyone might, Beth thought, but I did.

  Victor prattled as they walked, ‘I was colonel in KGB. No worry, I have this rabble kicked into shape in no time.’

  ‘KGB?’ Beth said. ‘I thought you were in the army.’

  ‘Was in both, my little Tsarina, in Moscow-’

  ‘You said St Petersburg.’

  ‘Moskva first.’

  ‘You in the Russian Ballet and all?’ Beth asked, suddenly sceptical.

  ‘ Niet, but had girlfriend once who was.’

  Beth laughed at the tramp in his musty greatcoat. ‘This girlfriend, was she a much prettier sane girl?’ she asked.

  ‘Prettier, da. Sane, niet, crazy as squid in vodka. All ballerinas are.’ He chuckled.

  They turned onto a narrow road lined with small steel-shuttered windows and battered stairwell doors. Something about it nagged her, striking a dim spark of recognition off the inside of her head, something more than the sense of anonymous familiarity that she got from almost every London street. Then they passed a graffiti’d wall by a corner shop and all of sudden she knew why.

  She stopped and stared. Nestled unassumingly in amongst the brighter, brasher graffiti was a patch of writing in black marker pen, so badly faded that only three letters were still legible: o n e.

  ‘What’cha looking at?’ Fil came strolling up behind. ‘One? One what?’

  A little ‘oh’ slipped from Beth’s lips. She felt like someone had slid a fine blade into her chest. It didn’t say ‘one’, not really. She knew exactly what had been written there.

  She’d watched Pen do it.

  It had been one of those warm September afternoons that summer drags behind it like a lame leg. The sun had pounded down from an infinite sky, and the street had smelled of trees and baking pavements. The two of them had sat on the wall, kicking their heels and watching traffic as they listened to the radio on Pen’s phone, one set of earphones between both of them, alternately singing along and cracking up.

  The tracks switched, a ballad crackled through.

  ‘ You saved me! ’ Beth had crooned daftly into the empty air, recognising the tune, ‘ Girl, your love saved my liiiife- ’

  She’d sensed Pen’s mood as it we
nt, an instant before the slim Pakistani girl snorted and yanked the earphone free. ‘What a load of bollocks,’ she’d said.

  Beth had sighed and snapped the ring-pull on a can of Coke. There was pretty much only one thing that could get Pen’s mouth into the same postcode as a swearword, even one as mild as that. And if they were having this conversation again, Beth was going to need caffeine.

  ‘Bollocks love songs with bollocks lyrics, that mean bollocks all!’ Pen snapped.

  ‘Leon ignored you again, huh?’

  ‘No.’ After a few seconds silence Pen conceded, ‘Well, okay, so maybe he did kind of blank me after assembly, but-’

  ‘Pen, you could just ask him out — I mean, I know it’d lead to the eternal shaming of your ancestors, or whatever. But at least it would get it over with.’

  ‘This isn’t about Leon!’ Pen had protested hotly. ‘It’s just — “ you saved my life ” — Seriously? Who talks about being in love like that? Love isn’t the NHS or the bloody Samaritans; it’s not about saving lives. Love isn’t about keeping people whole. It’s-’ She tailed off, flailing her hands in disgust.

  Beth gestured for her to go on. She didn’t often get a chance to hear Pen rant, and it was kind of entertaining.

  But a thoughtful frown had crossed Pen’s face and instead of speaking she’d pulled a marker pen from her pocket. She’d jumped off the wall and scrawled on it:

  The one you love is the one who breaks you

  The one you owe, and the one you own

  The one who shatters and remakes you

  Sets you crooked as a broken bone.

  ‘ It’s more like that,’ she’d said at last, lamely.

  Beth had read it, and promptly burst out laughing. ‘That’s cheery. Pen, if Leon’s making you feel like-’

  ‘It’s not about Leon,’ Pen had insisted again, her voice hard. She’d blushed deeply, not meeting Beth’s eye. It was only now that Beth realised she should have stopped laughing then.

  The image in Beth’s mind changed to the headmistress’ office, to Pen hugging herself tight, like her arms were all that held her together. Like she’d been shattered and needed someone to remake her.

  And Beth had been too full of fury to even try.

  She shook her head hard, bringing herself back to now and the autumn night, their regiment of glowing glass soldiers. Their war.

  She looked at Fil. ‘My best mate wrote it.’ She was a little surprised at the tears she was sniffing back. ‘It doesn’t say “one”. It’s the end of this poem, it says-’

  But he wasn’t listening, he was looking past her, and so was everyone else.

  A tall figure was coming up the middle of the deserted road towards them, past the empty restaurants and the window displays of gaudy, mile-high shoes. It lurched with a peculiar, rounded gait, as though one leg was a lot shorter than the other. It was dropping rubbish; scraps trailed behind it like it was shedding them. The figure was too far away to see clearly, especially with the flaring of the Blankleits in her eyes, but the smell…

  Beth looked at Fil. His nostrils twitched as an odour of rotting fruit and mildew gusted up the street. He didn’t take his eyes off the man-figure as it stumped into the light. She swallowed hard; she’d never seen the figure before but she knew who it was.

  ‘Filius.’ The garbage-built man’s voice was weak, squeezed from punctured football lungs. ‘I’m so proud of you.’ Gutterglass tottered forward two more steps, then his lips slipped across each other, giving his jaw a dislocated look. An eggshell slipped from his eyesocket. His body disintegrated from the head down, collapsing into a heap of rubbish on the tarmac.

  CHAPTER 22

  Down the roads of roof-slate, over battlements of brick,

  My lord wants you to come to him, quick! quick! quick!

  Across the Demolition Fields, where dozers plough the dead,

  Your fleshy body through the cracks, thread! thread! thread!

  Scale the tower, kiss the glass,

  Break the wood and burn the grass.

  Gaze across the barren beauty, Cranes construct and do their duty.

  Pen’s finger came away from the wall, the metal barb that surmounted it was caked in dust. She stared at the verse she’d carved — but had she written that, or had it, the wirething that had enveloped her? She was terrified and exhausted, but she couldn’t cry any more.

  She was so tired that without the wire holding her up she’d have fallen. The metal thorns had goaded her across rooftops and through backyards and down streets until the office blocks had reared up around her like the sides of a gorge. She’d barrelled into pedestrians, knocking them flying. One old woman had stared up in horror at her face, but the wire pushed her on so fast that she’d barely glimpsed herself in passing windows — torn nostrils, ripped cheeks, bloody teeth — before she went barrelling on.

  A wall had reared up in front of her and she’d ducked under a lintel and through doorways, clambering through tiny spaces into a labyrinth of tumbled-down concrete. The air stank of wet cement and she’d wriggled and wormed her way through in silence.

  Once the wire had gone suddenly still, freezing her in the dark, and Pen forgot herself and screamed. Her lips tore on the barbs and blood ran back down her throat. She mewled around her ripped tongue, afraid she was being kept here to die, but no, the wire twitched and shifted, piercing her skin in a new configuration, and resumed its sprint.

  It was only when a police siren wailed far below that she realised how high she’d climbed.

  She’d burst out onto the top floor of a half-built tower. The concrete was bare, and one wall was missing. All that separated her from the construction site below was a thin tarpaulin and five hundred feet of empty air. Wind whistled and the tarp snapped aside.

  Neon lights mounted on cranes like eyes on stalks turned on her, bleaching her skin bone-white, whiter than a white girl. Her blood, where it caked the barbs in her arms, was black.

  Pen could feel herself slipping away. She wanted to vanish into herself, to feel nothing, to be dead — it would be so much easier. She wanted to close her eyes, so much…

  She started to let her eyelids drop, but a barb caressed the water on her eyeball, oh so lightly. She found new reserves of fear to keep them open.

  The wire wanted her attention.

  Machines raged in the building site, even in the depth of the night: cranes whirred, metal screeched on metal; bulldozers roared, and there was the distant, dreadful note of hammers.

  Why? She breathed the word up into her throat and felt her arm come up again. Pen was grateful — she didn’t want to be grateful to it, but she felt the hot wave of relief wash through her anyway: relief, because it didn’t seize her tongue and squeeze her like an accordion to make her answer her own question. Instead it took her hand and scratched its answer in the dirt.

  The crane’s clear cry, glass and steel

  In the shaking earth you feel

  Hear him, Hear him

  Love and fear him.

  Blessed, abased in holy waste.

  Pen didn’t understand. Frustrated breaths wheezed out of her nose. Was the wire mocking her with these stupid rhymes? How did it know about her poetry?

  Are you in my mind? The idea twisted her into even tighter panic. It was easy to believe, as the wire bent her neck to stare at its nonsense verse, that it was leaching her thoughts through her scalp, that even her mind was within the barbs’ reach.

  Reach.

  A scream of steel rent the air, a screech that echoed her own thoughts.

  Reach.

  The tower shook. A voice formed at the edges of all of the sounds carried on the tongue of the wind: bulldozers and jackhammers and the crackle of distant radios.

  The barbed wire gripped Pen tighter and she gasped. The barbs let her lips open and teased along her tongue. The words she’d scrawled stood out starkly on the naked wall.

  ‘Hear him,’ she whispered. ‘Hear him. Love and fear him.’
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br />   She looked down at the building site, a hive of frenzied construction and destruction, and felt herself retch. Cranes turned and diggers chewed at the earth like hungry dogs. Echoes crashed back off half-born architecture. Even from here she could see none of the machines had a human controller, but it wasn’t this that sickened her. It was the fact that things were dying down there.

  Screams rang out in the shriek of steel on rubble. She blinked, and in an instant she perceived the foundations and exposed pipes as bodies and bones. She saw the digger’s mouths opening wounds. These were people — maybe not flesh and blood, but people nonetheless, like the glass woman who’d tried to help her. People made of the city itself.

  From up here she could see patches of black across London, hidden amongst the winking lights: building sites, demolition sites — dozens upon dozens of killing fields: a hidden holocaust.

  Listen. She didn’t know where the thought came from.

  Needle-points squeezed into her chest and the breath rushed out of her. The wire exoskeleton bent into a ragged S-shape and she collapsed, coughing, onto her knees. Cold air stung her eyeballs. At the edge of her vision she could see her finger, scratching a word onto the floor.

  ‘ I am Reach. ’ The voice sang in the screech of the cranes.

  The word was next to her eyeball.

  Listen.

  CHAPTER 23

  Fil ran forward, unnaturally fast, his hands darting into the rain of rubbish as it fell. He caught some — a chunk of plaster in the vague shape of a brain, a mouldy carrot — and let the rest bounce off the cobbles. He crooked his ankle under the eggshells, braking their momentum so they tumbled whole onto the ground.

  Beth raced over to help, but the rubbish and insects flooded out in a puddle under her feet, the stench of rotting things washed up at her and her stomach flipped over. Disgruntled flies batted her cheeks.