Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne)

by Tom Pollock

  The old woman’s gaze was sharp. ‘She couldn’t pronounce your name?’

  Pen nodded slowly, remembering. ‘Something about the wide mouth shape for the “e”. “Parva” was as close as she could get. She tried not make a big deal out of it, but you could see how much it upset her, so—’

  ‘—so you changed it.’

  ‘Dad and I started saying Parva too.’

  ‘So she wouldn’t be wrong any more.’

  Pen sipped her tea and didn’t answer.

  ‘Was that your idea, or your father’s?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Pen asked sharply.

  ‘Yes, I think it does.’

  ‘It was mine.’ She looked into the woman’s eyes, feeling almost belligerent. So what of it?

  The old woman tapped her fingertips on her glass for a few seconds. ‘So now people call you Parva.’

  ‘Some people do. Some people call me Countess – really, don’t ask – and some people, well, one person in particular at least, calls me Pen. I like Pen best, I think.’

  ‘Well, then, I should like to call you Pen,’ the woman said, and added courteously, ‘if it’s not imposing on that one person in particular.’

  Pen smiled. ‘It’s not. And I think I’d like that too.’

  ‘And I’m Nabila.’ She extended a hand and Pen shook it; the grip was gentle, but warm.

  ‘Would you like some more tea?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Pen said reluctantly. ‘I still have one more place to get to and I think it’s time for me to go.’ The hot tea sat in her stomach, settling her.

  ‘I understand,’ the woman said.

  ‘We’re gathering at Crystal Palace. Gutter—A friend of mine is organising food and shelter, and he can get pretty much anything, anywhere. Are you sure you won’t come? I really believe you’d make it.’

  Nabila smiled and shook her head. She didn’t look at the photos on the mantelpiece, but she did clasp her hands together and squeeze until the knuckles paled. ‘I believe I would too,’ she said. ‘But I’ll stay.’

  ‘Thank you for the tea.’ Pen drained her glass, stood and, a little absurdly, looked around for somewhere she could wash it up. Failing to find anywhere, she put it on the shelf next to the carving.

  For some reason Nabila nodded approvingly. ‘Thank you for the visit, Pen.’

  *

  Pen blew through the Clapham Junction Asda in about three minutes flat. The two dozen or so men and women camped out there listened in silence, their eyes as wide as ten-pence pieces, as she explained to them what was going on. Then they got up and left; whether they were making for Crystal Palace or just trying to get as far away as possible from the barbed-wire-wrapped girl, Pen didn’t know, nor did she have the time to care. The light of sunrise was already showing through the windows.

  She’d turned back towards the doors, ready to head for home, when she felt a twitch through the wire.

  ‘Oh for mercy’s sake!’ she yelled at the empty shelves. Her instincts told her to just keep walking, to leave the store, head for the radio mast and not look back.

  She wavered for a moment, and then …

  ‘Fine!’ She turned around, kicking out as she did so and sending a couple of unoffending tins of baked beans rolling across the floor. Pain flared in her toe and she limped for a moment, her ears burning. Muttering furiously, she headed out to the car park.

  A pair of massive steel industrial bins had been pushed up close against the store’s back wall, and on the rim of the rightmost one, a little two-link strand of barbed wire perched almost coyly.

  She took a breath to steady herself, clapped her hands over the metal lip and pulled herself up. ‘Up,’ she snapped. ‘Out.’

  Salt gawped up at her from the bottom of the bin. The black plastic bags he was cowering against had split open and were seeping milky fluids that smelled of spoiled fish and liquefying vegetables. Pen crouched on the edge; looking down she felt the familiar fury rise in her stomach. Yes, she still hated him, and there was still a tremor of anxiety in her knuckles and jaw. But at least looking at him didn’t make her hate herself as much as it used to.

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Of all the places to hide, you couldn’t pick one that didn’t smell like a landfill site? I get enough of this with bloody Gutterglass—’

  He gaped up at her.

  She was babbling, covering for the old fear. Still, it was a small satisfaction – but satisfaction nonetheless – to see that fear reflected back in his face. She sucked her teeth and sat back on her haunches.

  ‘To be honest, I’m surprised you’re still here,’ she said. ‘I expected you to try and run for it.’

  ‘I … I tried, but—’ His eyes darted to the little strand of wire sitting on the edge of the bin. She imagined the tiny thing inching gamely after him. He’d given up almost as soon as he’d begun.

  ‘—I didn’t know where else to go.’

  His voice shocked her. He didn’t even sound like the Salt she remembered. He’d always been so harsh, so certain, as though the entire world stood behind his words and he knew it, but now …

  ‘The city’s so strange now. It’s not safe.’

  Pen flashed him a humourless smile. ‘You don’t know the half of it. You’re making me late, Dr Salt, so get up.’

  He went back to gaping at her, so she hissed impatiently and saw him flinch.

  ‘Believe it or not – and I scarcely believe it myself – but I am trying to do you a favour. In a couple of hours this place will be a battleground. This is me saving your life.’

  He locked his jaw and looked her in the eye. ‘Why don’t I do you a favour and just stay here and die then,’ he muttered.

  ‘Don’t be such a fucking child,’ Pen snapped scornfully. ‘If that’s what I wanted, I’d kill you myself. You’re going to do what you’re told, and right now, I’m telling you to live. If I change my mind, trust me, you’ll be the first to know.’

  He scuttled back on his arse, pressing his back to the metal. Pen rolled her eyes.

  The wire whipped around his wrists in an eye-blink and he shrieked as it tightened, even though she kept the barbs out of his skin. With a light tug, she sent him flying out of the bin, screaming. He hit the tarmac with a hard, flat sound and lay there, wheezing and staring at her with panicked eyes.

  ‘Get up,’ she snapped at him.

  ‘I … I think you dislocated my arm.’ His skin was pale with the pain of it.

  ‘Good thing you don’t walk on your arms then, isn’t it? Get up.’

  Gingerly, he pushed himself up, cradling his right elbow against his chest. He stared at her sullenly.

  ‘Walk,’ Pen said flatly, ‘or I can drag you. Which will hurt, a lot. A fact which, I promise you, causes me no hesitation whatsoever.’

  He exhaled and his shoulders dropped. He wouldn’t run for it, Pen realised. He was too scared of her. For some reason she couldn’t put her finger on, she felt sick, deep in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘Walk,’ she said anyway, and he walked.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ‘You have got to be kidding me. Him?’

  Beth was standing under the radio tower, rubbing her face like she’d just woken up and staring suspiciously, first at Salt, then at Pen, then back to Salt again. A knot in Pen’s stomach came apart at the sight of the city-skinned girl on her feet, even if she was leaning on the spear like it was a crutch. She threw her arms around Beth and gave her a tight, exhilarated hug, though the slate and asphalt of Beth’s skin felt uncomfortably hot against hers.

  It had taken them two hours to walk back, with Pen pacing behind Salt all the way. The shadow she cast across him grew slowly shorter as the sun rose. She could have snatched him up in her steel coils and covered the distance in a quarter of the time, but the Mistress was raging in her head about the delay and with the barbs that close to Salt’s neck, Pen wasn’t sure she trusted her control.

  They’d struggled up the hill and found
hundreds of people, those she’d warned, already here, and her heart leaped despite her exhaustion. A few of them were standing around gaping at the hulking metal forms of the Scaffwolves, but most were engaged in work of some kind – building fires, scraping the mould off potatoes, soaking clothes in scavenged washing-up tubs. Every few minutes another flock of pigeons flew in, struggling under the weight of a sack of rice or corn gripped in their collective claws. She looked around for Gutterglass and found him a few feet away, muttering to a young black kid who was skinning what looked like a fox with one of the trash-spirit’s scalpels. When Glas saw Pen, he beetled over immediately.

  ‘Wow,’ Pen murmured, ‘respect, Glas. You got them working fast.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Gutterglass said shortly. ‘They can’t stay here.’

  ‘What are you talking about? This place is perfect – there’s plenty of space, there’s no concrete for the Masonry Men to come up through, and it’s miles away from where the fighting’s going to be.’

  ‘It was perfect,’ the trash-spirit murmured testily. ‘Now it’s a death-trap. Some of them were keeling over from hunger so I’m organising a meal, but after that they’re going to need to march straight away.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Pen protested blankly.

  Gutterglass lifted his cardboard chin in the direction of the kid he’d just been talking to. ‘Angelo,’ he called. ‘Come here.’

  The kid left his half-skinned fox carcase in the grass and ran over. He looked about ten. His face was neutral, his hands covered in blood. With a little jolt, Pen recognised him: he was one of the brothers of the girl with the cornrows, the one who’d begged her to guide them out of Liverpool Street.

  ‘Tell Miss Khan what happened to your sister,’ Gutterglass told him.

  ‘She got snatched,’ Angelo said woodenly. There was no emotion in his voice at all, and he didn’t meet Pen’s eyes. She wondered if the same thing had happened to his parents. ‘Grey man came up through the pavement and took her. We had to run.’

  It was all Pen could do not to scream.

  Beth must have read her expression because she said, ‘Thanks, Angelo. How ’bout you carry on getting that fox ready.’

  The kid kissed his teeth and glared at her for dismissing him like that, but he ran back to the corpse he was skinning.

  ‘I …’ Pen was stuttering, ‘she – she asked me …’

  Beth took her hand. ‘You did your best; you did really well.’

  ‘I could have taken longer. I could have taken the time. I could have …’

  ‘Those Fever Streets are almost at Birmingham, and Reach is champing at the bit as it is. His wolves have been prowling like they’re caged. You did the right thing, Pen. It’s not your fault it went bad. You did the right thing …’

  Pen met her gaze and felt tears fill her eyes. ‘How?’ she asked. She knew Beth understood her: how on earth could she know that? How could either of them know that? For Heaven’s sake, they were seventeen years old – how could they do this?

  ‘We do what we can,’ Beth said, her voice a soothing traffic purr. ‘It’s all we can do. And right now, that’s finding somewhere new for these people to go.’

  Pen shook her head stolidly. ‘I met the girl – she was tough, and she has her family to think about. Maybe she won’t give us up …’

  ‘You want to take that risk?’

  Pen sniffed back her tears and tried to gather herself. Do our best, she thought. Okay.

  ‘Further southeast,’ she said. ‘Outside the M25, if they can get there, but as far out of the centre as possible, either …’ But she tailed off, because Gutterglass was already shaking his head, an alarming motion that made rats’ tails show in the gaps between the crushed cans of his neck.

  ‘What?’ Pen asked.

  ‘That won’t cut it any more, Miss Khan. They’d have nothing to protect them.’

  ‘Protect them from what?’ she asked.

  ‘From Mirror Mater.’

  ‘But as long as they’re not with us, why would She bother?’

  ‘Because now She knows more than just where these people are,’ Beth cut in, her green eyes were full of sympathy. ‘She knows we care about them.’

  A weight hit Pen’s gut.

  ‘You trust Her not to try and use them against us?’

  Slowly, reluctantly, Pen shook her head. ‘So they don’t just need evacuating,’ she said. ‘They need guarding.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And we don’t have any guards.’

  ‘No.’

  Pen tapped her fingers against the wire on the back of her palm as she thought about it. There had to be an answer; there must be. She glanced back up at Angelo, busy skinning his fox, and her nails latched into the skin on the back of her palm. There had to be.

  Alarmingly, the idea that came to her wasn’t any worse than most of the ones they’d put into action over the past few days.

  ‘Maybe we don’t send them out of the way of the city after all,’ she said. ‘Maybe we send them right into it.’

  Gutterglass’ cardboard cheeks crinkled until he looked interested. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  Pen blew out her cheeks. ‘St Paul’s.’

  ‘St Paul’s?’ He sounded perplexed.

  ‘Reach will fight to defend that place like nowhere else, and his cranes are better protection than anything we could give them.’

  Beth cocked her head to one side as she considered it. She winced. ‘If we lose, it will be the first place She hits.’

  ‘If we lose, the fever will catch them anyway. Let’s at least give them a chance of surviving the fight.’ Pen looked at Beth. ‘Like you said, we do all we can.’

  Beth hesitated, then she nodded curtly.

  Gutterglass took his cue from his Goddess. From somewhere under his voluminous layers of black plastic he produced a battered megaphone. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he called, ‘please finish your meals as quickly as you can. We will be departing in thirty minutes …’

  *

  They ladled soup hurriedly into mugs and ate it fast, burning their mouths. Pen didn’t taste a drop. Over the edge of her cup, she watched Salt sitting on the grass on the other side of the tower, shovelling hot potato mush into his mouth.

  Beth stumped over and sat down beside her. The green-lit gaze followed Pen’s own. ‘You let everyone else make their own way, but our dick of a maths teacher gets his own guard of honour? I never figured you had a soft spot for him.’ Even with the city-voice, Beth sounded worried. ‘What’s going on, Pen?’

  Pen hugged herself. Her thumb caught on a barb and she let the pain blossom through it slowly without moving it. ‘Let’s go somewhere private,’ she said.

  *

  They walked away from the camp, down towards the woods. The day was already heating up and London was a smudge of reddish-grey in the distance. Beth walked with one arm around Pen’s waist and used the spear to support her weight in the other. Oscar snored in little gusts inside her hood.

  There was a fallen log just inside the treeline. Beth lowered herself onto it gratefully and Pen sat beside her, elbows on her knees, head bowed. A woodlouse wriggled on a blade of grass between her feet.

  ‘B, do you remember the graffiti stunt we pulled, before’ – she waved a hand to take in the three prowling Scaffwolves, the fussing trash-spirit and the statues smoking under the radio mast – ‘all of this?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You remember I turned you in.’

  Beth looked at her sharply. ‘Yeah. I was pretty pissed off about it at the time.’

  Pen took a deep breath. ‘I did it because Salt said he knew your dad hadn’t been looking after you and that if I didn’t cooperate, he’d call in Social Services and get you rehomed.’ She snorted. ‘I don’t know if he really could have done it, but at the time, he sounded so sure …’

  ‘Pen, it was nothing – you really don’t need to explain yourself to—’

  ‘B,’ Pen said sh
arply, and the sounds of cars and diesel trucks and electric generators beside her died down, ‘it wasn’t the only thing. Turning you in wasn’t the only thing he wanted me to cooperate with.’

  Beth didn’t say anything. Pen couldn’t tell if she’d already guessed what she was going to say.

  ‘He put his hands on me.’ The air felt jagged in Pen’s throat as she swallowed. ‘And he made me put my hands on him. He kissed me …’

  She tailed off. Her neck felt like it was locked solid. Why was it this hard to look Beth in the face? Eventually she managed to turn.

  Beth’s expression was horrified. ‘Did you—? Did he—?’

  ‘No,’ Pen said. ‘But I think what he did was more than enough, don’t you?’

  Beth’s face set. Her eyes found Salt, moving amongst the distant crowd, and she snatched up her spear so fast that her tiled knuckles gouged sawdust from the log. She was halfway to her feet when Pen let a strand of wire uncurl in front of her face.

  ‘If I wanted him dead, B, don’t you think he would be?’

  Beth sat back down. Slowly she turned away from Salt and looked at Pen. ‘I’m so sorry, Pen.’

  ‘I hold the power of life and death over him. That’s not the power I want …’ Pen realised she was shaking.

  Beth pulled her into a hug.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ She murmured it into Pen’s shoulder. ‘What can I do? What do you want? We’ll make it happen.’

  ‘I …’ Pen faltered. It was the first time she’d ever put it into words, and for some reason it was hard to say. ‘I want him on trial. I want everyone who knew him and knew me to see. Does that sound stupid? It must do, after everything; it must seem so small. I mean, look at the world we’re living in, look at what we’re about to do, and yet …’

  She put her palms on Beth’s shoulders, and eased herself back so she could look Beth in the eyes. ‘It matters to me, B. I can’t tell you why, but it does. He made me keep it a secret, and this … it feels like the only way to break that.’

  It was only when Beth reached up to her cheek to thumb a tear away that Pen realised she was crying.