by Pollock, Tom
Beth had been trawling London’s sewers for five straight nights now and this was the first sign she’d found. Her pulse quickened. She tightened her grip on her spear and picked up her pace, all the while straining to listen past the swish of the water across her ankles.
The stream widened and deepened and she began to wade. The rich sewer gases fugged around her and she shook her head, trying to clear it. To her right, two vaguely human-shaped lights, one orange, the other white, flitted across the mouth of an access tunnel, safely away from the water. There was a flushed excitement in their glow which made Beth smile. Mixed-spectrum couples were still rare, but more and more had got together in the months since the war – those few brief days when Blankleit and Sodiumite had fought side by side against the Crane King had unlocked something. She wondered just how many of them were sneaking around down here while their disapproving elders dozed in the daylight. These two were late getting back.
Lamp-crossed lovers, she thought, and her smile stretched to a grin.
The last of their light faded and the darkness crowded back. A few months earlier Beth would have been blind down here, but now she saw the brick tunnels in new colours: bruise and thundercloud hues. She remembered the boy, cocksure and scrawny and loose-limbed, who’d possessed the same spear she now carried.
Is this how you saw the city, Fil? she wondered. Is this how you saw me?
The thought was like being stabbed in the heart with a safety pin.
She took another corner, and came face to face with her prey.
The lizard didn’t look like much, but, to be fair, it seemed equally unimpressed with her. It clung to the bricks, an inch and a half of greenish-brown leather. It rolled a black, liquid eye to track her, but otherwise didn’t move.
Without realising it, Beth held her breath.
Slow now, B, she told herself, slow as a sloth with a hangover. Remember what Candleman said: don’t piss it off ’til it’s pinned.
She didn’t so much walk as allow herself to accrete towards it. The hairs were standing up on her neck and her forearms and she was aware of every single one of them.
The unimpressive lizard blinked slowly. Not only did it make no sound, but Beth could hear the sounds in the tunnel bending themselves around it. Dripping water and scurrying rats struck countless echoes from the sewer’s brick walls, but none of those echoes penetrated the tiny reptile’s cocoon of silence. Its tongue glinted like metal as it tasted the air.
Just stay there, just a few more seconds …
She reached over her shoulder into her backpack and drew out a lidless glass jar. The lizard stared at her.
She stared back.
It blinked again.
Beth lunged.
Glass clinked on brick and she pressed the jar down hard. The lizard scrambled around the inside of it.
Got you! Beth crowed inside her head. She could hear the clicking of its claws now its sealed bubble of gas was broken. She clung to the base of the jar. Her fingers were sweaty. The muscles in her arm felt as taut as guitar strings and she realised she was actually trembling.
The creature froze. It glared at her through the glass with a single, furious, magnified eye.
Well, she thought, thank Thames for th—’
A heavy guitar riff crackled from the phone in Beth’s pocket and she jumped. Her fingertips slid greasily over the glass; she tried to clutch it again, but it was too late. The ringtone cut off just in time for her to hear the jar splinter on the floor.
Beth just had time to wonder how in Thames’ name she had a signal all the way down here, and then the lizard dropped off the wall.
Oh shit.
The reptile fell for a split second, and then it stopped in mid-air. It lashed its little tail in a corkscrew-like propeller motion and lazily, like a crocodile in the water, the lizard began to spin.
Double shit.
It spun faster and faster until it blurred. Beth felt the foetid air in the sewer begin to move. The edges of her clothes rippled. The atmosphere thickened, clinging to her lips as the sewer gases flew in. The lizard’s tail dipped and twisted, mixing methane and ammonia like an artist mixing paint. Beth tried to reach for it, but her hand kept slipping off the air currents. The tendrils of gas were flowing so fast around her that they were dragging vacuum. Beth couldn’t smell anything; she couldn’t hear anything. She was caught in skeins of silence. She gritted her teeth and hooked her fingers, but she was trapped in the coils of swiftly moving gas and couldn’t even lift her arm.
Not coils, she thought, uneasily eyeing the spinning lizard. Claws.
Her stomach lurched as her feet left the floor.
Supersize buy-one-get-one-free bargain buckets of shit.
Abruptly, it stopped spinning and hung motionless in the air, though the gas continued to rush around it, pummelling Beth even as it held her suspended. The lizard bobbed gently in the eye of the miniature storm it had created. It tasted its handiwork with a flick of its tongue. It rolled an eye to look at Beth and she could’ve sworn she saw a self-satisfied smirk on its reptile face.
It cracked its tail once and shot down the tunnel like an arrow from a bow. Beth’s stomach plummeted as she was dragged in its wake.
Bricks whipped past, skinning her fingertips where she touched them. Pain flared, oily blood bubbled out and coagulated with cement speed. She could barely breathe. Her internal organs felt like they’d been crushed to the back of her ribcage.
They were flying too fast and the light was too meagre for her to see anything. Desperately she clicked her tongue, but the rushing air stole the sound and she got no echoes back. As they twisted and jack-knifed around corners her spear struck the walls, jarring her arm, but she clung to the iron railing – drop it here and she might never find it …
… I don’t know where I am.
The realisation shuddered through her. London was her city – she could touch any inch of it and know right where she was. But she wasn’t in contact; she was cut off, trapped in empty space. Disorientation welled up in her like nausea.
A little more light bled into the tunnel and glimmered in the lizard’s eye. The floor dropped away suddenly and Beth saw the sewer stream crash into a waterfall beneath her feet, its base lost in darkness. She craned her neck upwards, but she couldn’t see the roof of the tunnel either. They were flying down the centre of a brick-sided gorge, capped and shod in shadow. Light shone from tiny alcoves gouged into the wall on her right – thousands of them, irregularly spaced embers, networked like stars in constellations. Beth peered into one of the crevices as they passed and saw a stoppered glass flask, shining with a queasy phosphorescence.
Something flapped past her face and she recoiled sharply. The winged thing settled on the lip of the one of the alcoves and cooed softly. A pigeon, down here? Beth thought incredulously, craning to watch it as it shrank behind them. It cleared its ragged wings – its feathers were coated in some liquid that gleamed in the dim light. An acrid smell stung Beth’s nostrils: oil.
Memories surged up, triggered by the scent: her, immersed in a polluted pool, where the chemicals and city essences clawed at her skin, invading her and changing her while oil-soaked men in oil-soaked suits waited for her on the bank.
She thought of the price those oil-soaked men had exacted for granting her that transformation: the scrawny, city-skinned boy they’d mined for the essence that made him human. Panic stabbed her in the gut as she imagined falling into the darkness below her, and wondered what price those men might extract to guide her out of it again.
At last she knew where she was. But this was not her place; this place belonged to the oil-soaked men of the Chemical Synod.
Away. Away. The thought pounded urgently around the inside of her head. We have to get away.
But she had no voice to sound her plea for she’d already sold that.
The lizard kept its diamond-shaped head pointed straight as it flew, dragging her at breakneck pace. Beth thrashed, and she
felt its claws of ammonia and methane flex around her. Take us—
She kept wriggling, and managed to free an arm. She flailed, and without even meaning to, she brushed the belly of the tiny lizard itself.
—away!
Its head twitched and it looked upwards, as if it had scented something: only a tiny movement, but Beth saw it.
Hardly daring to hope, she stretched out her fingers again – but it was no good; she couldn’t reach. Straining every joint against the flowing gas that held her, she just managed to lay a finger on the little reptile’s skin.
In the wall above them she made out the mouth of a tunnel.
Please, she thought again, please, take us away from here.
Something like a static-electric shock rippled from her forehead to her fingertips. The reptile’s head swung upwards and she felt its invisible methane wings beat as it fought to gain height. Beth’s heart leapt in incredulous relief, but then it stuttered.
The lizard couldn’t get enough lift …
I’m too heavy. A hot shiver broke over her skin. It can’t climb—
The lizard banked to the right, hard and sudden, and Beth’s stomach flipped. Its metallic tongue lashed out and struck sparks from the brick walls. The heat as the gas ignited was like a punch.
Beth screwed up her eyes against the glare. Beads of oily sweat stippled her forehead. Every muscle clenched as she waited for the flames to engulf her, but no coruscating tide consumed her. Seconds passed until, slowly, she eased her eyelids apart.
For the first time, she saw the whole of the creature that held her.
The little lizard was swimming through the boiling air at the centre of a far vaster ghostly reptile, an exo-self, outlined in blue fire where the methane burned. The zephyrkinetic creature wriggled its muddy toes and Beth saw massive fiery claws curl in answer beside her. It swayed its head and the burning muzzle swung, puppet-like, with it. It twitched the little nubs on its back and the fiery wings responded.
Talons like torches pincered Beth’s waist. The flames burned holes in her hoodie and left sooty marks on her arms, but they didn’t hurt her; her concrete skin was equal to the flame.
The sewermander beat its burning wings, the updraught took them and they surged into the tunnel mouth. Beth crowed silently, cocooned in blue fire in the tunnel’s confines. They zigzagged through junctures, left, right, left again, then a different kind of light permeated the space. Fresh air washed over her as they burst from an archway in the riverbank.
They soared straight up. Beth risked a look over her shoulder and saw the industrial porcupine of the Millennium Dome shrinking into the distance. Night-time London stretched out below them, streets lit like rivers of magma running between rooftops.
Beth’s fingers were still on the soft scales of the lizard’s underbelly. An idea struck her.
Left, she thought at it, and the sewermander dipped its left wing and they banked westwards.
Right. The long neck curled the opposite way. The heat of the fire washed back over Beth’s face as the drake corrected. She stared at the reptile, unnerved and awed by its obedience.
Okay, why are you doing what I tell you?
Her pocket buzzed – then again, and again: three messages. Only one girl was likely to be texting her in the middle of the night.
Beth tucked the spear under one arm and tugged her phone out. She scrolled down and read, Can you come tonight?
Then, I want to ask you something.
Please … ? Tonight. P
Beth grinned wickedly and felt the flames on her teeth.
Yeah, Pen, she thought, I can come. I’ve got a ride.
The sewermander banked and twisted on its own thermals, finding its new heading. Beth looked down into the dark mirror of the Thames and saw a winged streak of fire, heading north.
*
Pen was just beginning to doze again when her phone went off. Blearily, she checked the display.
Pen? The one word was all Beth had texted. Pen frowned.
Beth, she thumbed, and hit ‘send’.
An instant later, the device buzzed in her fist. Pen? it buzzed again and again, in quick succession, like an insistent child:
Pen?
Pen?
Pen?
She sighed. For a girl steeped in all the strange powers and essences of the city, Beth loved to abuse an unlimited text package.
What? Pen texted back irritably. It was five a.m. She’d stayed awake, trying out the conversation over and over in her head, honing the words she’d use to reveal Parva to Beth, to explain why she’d kept her secret – but B had kept her waiting and she’d felt her concentration slip as the sky paled. Anxiety swilled around in her gut: she was sure she was going to screw this up. Part of her hoped Beth was texting to say that she was off chasing railwraiths on the other side of town and couldn’t make it. Pen’s phone buzzed once more:
Open your curtains.
Pen clambered off the single bed and stomped over to the window. She dragged the curtain aside—
The floor had jolted her tailbone before she’d even realised she’d fallen down. She stared upwards, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Beth was squatting on the windowsill, impossibly balanced with only the very tips of her grey toes on the ledge. Hovering behind her, its wings spread like a heraldic beast, was a monster made of fire.
Beth grinned. She thumbed her phone, and Pen’s own buzzed once more. Numbly, she lifted it between her eyes and the monster.
I ONLY WENT AND GOT A BLOODY DRAGON!
Pen shook her head like a fly was spinning round it. There was a high-pitched sound in her ears. Slowly she leaned forward and slid up the sash window.
At last she found her voice. ‘Um, B—? That – uh … Is it yours?’
Beth’s grin widened. She shrugged, a happy ‘Looks that way’ gesture. She texted rapidly, Think I’m gonna call him Oscar.
‘Well, do you reckon you could back Oscar up a bit before it sets fire to my house?’
Beth’s grin vanished, replaced with alarm. She turned somehow on that tiny ledge and reached into the fire. There was a dark shape in middle of the monster, like the little patch of black at the heart of a gas flame. As Beth’s fingers brushed that shape, the fire abruptly flickered out. A tiny lizard scrambled up over her arm and perched on her shoulder. If flicked its tongue and blinked its little black eyes at Pen.
Beth was texting again.
He’s a sewermander, he can manipulate gases … Like methane and stuff. I think he can suck them out of the mains too – play havoc with your gas bill. Isn’t he cool!?!
Pen looked at her best friend. ‘Sewer gases?’ she said levelly. ‘Seriously? You found a fart dragon?’
Beth’s face fell a little, then she grinned. She showed off her hand with its concrete-and-oil complexion as if to say, Who am I to judge?
Pen backed away from the window and Beth wriggled inside. She moved differently now, insinuating herself around the corner like a street rat. She left oily thumbprints on the white paint. Once inside, she let the little lizard move from hand to hand, stroking it with her fingertip. The rasps of pleasure the reptile made were almost cat-like. As Pen looked at the two of them, she felt a pebble of frustration settle in her diaphragm.
Beth pulled out her phone again and Pen watched the screen over her shoulder: It’s amazing. I went for it in the tunnels and it totally had my arse kicked but the minute I touched it … It just changed – like it wanted to protect me. Like it wanted to do what I wanted it to do. It—
‘B.’ Pen stilled Beth’s hand with her own.
Beth lowered her phone and raised her eyebrows expectantly.
‘Sometimes I just wish you’d use the front door, you know?’
Beth assumed an expression of mock scandal. She gestured to the lizard in her palm and out of the window at the city. With all this at my disposal, she seemed to say, the front door would be criminally boring.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Pen snapped, her temper risi
ng. ‘You’re the princess of the city, you’ve got your fancy grey skin and your metal rod and your big chair on top of Canary Wharf and I’m happy for you, I really am, but I don’t need it in my face every minute of the damn day.’
Perhaps she’d leaned a little heavy on the word ‘face’ – she wasn’t sure. She didn’t think she’d meant to, but Beth blanched, her pavement-skin lightening a couple of shades.
‘I’m sorry, B.’ Pen let her tone soften. ‘I’ve just – it’s been heavy at school, and what with …’
She tailed off before mentioning Dr Salt. Beth still didn’t know what the maths teacher had done. She was all but nocturnal now, and with her out in the streets most of the time, the secret hadn’t been hard to keep.
‘… it’s been hard, you know?’
Beth raised a hand to protest, but Pen gathered herself and went on, ‘Listen, I know you’d come with me if I asked, B – I know you would, but you can’t, can you? Not without bringing that world with you. It’s who you are now, and I won’t have it there, B. I won’t. I carry enough of it with me every day.’
She touched her cheek. She’d stripped away the makeup. Beth held her gaze for a moment, a pained expression on her grey features, and then she went to the window. For a moment Pen thought she was going to leave, but instead she leaned out, hoisted herself up onto the sill and started rooting about under the eaves.
When she swung back inside, she dropped a fragile object into Pen’s outstretched hand.
It was an eggshell, stippled white on red, one end of it crumbled away. For a second, Pen thought it was just a pigeon’s egg, but then she felt the texture of it, coarse against her palm.
It was made of brick; the stippling was tiny flecks of mortar. Something rattled around inside as she turned it, and she shook it out onto her palm: a tiny wisp of feather nestled against her skin. It was made out of roof slate.
Beth picked up her phone, hammered out a message and turned the display towards Pen.
Tilequill pigeon. It was under your eaves, Pen. Your roof. There is only one world, and you live in it every day.
