by Pollock, Tom
It’s all you, B, she thought. They just rearranged you a little bit.
She wished she could be like Beth’s dad. When he’d opened the door to them that morning he’d stood staring open-mouthed at his daughter’s sheepish smile for a full thirty seconds, but then he’d embraced her fiercely.
‘And I just bought you that electric toothbrush too,’ he’d muttered with a laugh that was worth five times more for being forced, and ushered them inside.
Pen was proud of Paul Bradley for that, but he hadn’t seen what she’d seen. It must have been tough for him to see the face he’d given his daughter swallowed up by city streets, but at least when he looked at her, he didn’t see a basement floor covered in empty bottles.
We’ll find her, Pen told herself again. We. Beth had always been the other half of that word.
Pen steeled herself, and then stretched out her spare hand on the table. With a grateful and slightly surprised smile, Beth took it. Their fingers interlocked, skin to skin, scar to scar.
It’s all you, B.
‘Oh lord.’ Mr Bradley ambled in blearily, tying the cord on his dressing gown. He eyed the feline brigade on his kitchen floor. ‘This is because I told you couldn’t have a kitten when you were eight, isn’t it?’ He yawned around the back of his hand and said. ‘You two never were much for keeping conventional hours, were you?’ Beth squeezed Pen’s hand a little conspiratorially.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if we’re all up, I may as well make cocoa. Would you like some, Parva?’
Pen considered how distraught Mr Bradley had looked the previous day when she’d told him she wasn’t hungry. It appeared he’d gone to the same school of crisis-management as her mother, and had learned the same universal strategy: combine heat, sugar and dairy products in the magnitude required until evil is defeated. Paul had started off with a relatively mild mug of sweet tea, but then, as Pen told her story, he’d rapidly escalated, finally reaching the point where he had all the ingredients out for a DEFCON One banoffee pie. He’d looked totally at a loss when it became apparent that neither of the two girls was in the mood to eat anything.
‘That’d be lovely, Mr B,’ Pen said carefully. ‘Thank you.’
Mr Bradley lit the gas under a saucepan of milk and then joined them at the table. His eye fell on the glass marble in Pen’s hand.
‘Parva, you know you can stay here for as long as you’d like. You know there’s nothing either of us would like more—’ He hesitated, and rubbed at the stubble-speckled skin of his neck. ‘But … you are going to trade that, right? I mean, you’ve still got two weeks on the deadline you agreed with the synod. Your parents’ memories – you can get them back.’
Pen looked at the little sphere – the window she couldn’t see through. The window she’d never be able to see through. It shouldn’t have been a hard decision.
‘I’ll—’ She broke off, staring at the hob.
Tendrils of blue fire were curling out from under the saucepan.
Beth jerked her head round to stare at Oscar, but the sewermander just kept snoring and for once the burning gas wasn’t reaching for him. Instead it twisted and writhed its way through the doorway into the hall, towards the front door.
Pen looked at Oscar, looked back up at Beth’s softly glowing eyes, then she gave a startled yelp and scrambled after the flames. Beth and her dad both raced after her.
The skeins of fire were threading themselves under the brass flap of the letterbox, staining the metal where they touched it. Pen yanked the door open, swerved round the tail of the fire and ran into the freezing street. She halted there, astonished by what she saw.
Fine threads of blue flame were pouring from every house on the terrace. They pooled together in the middle of the street, like tributaries joining a great river. A fat tongue of azure fire warped and surged in the air above the road.
On Beth’s shoulder, Oscar woke and started to keen. Pen watched the muscles tense under the little lizard’s skin, but the flame stemming from the house barely flickered.
‘Mr Bradley,’ she said, her voice very cold. ‘Get your car.’
Without a word he ran back inside for his keys.
‘Beth—’ Pen turned and felt the green light of her best friend’s gaze on her face. ‘She’s coming.’
Beth swallowed, and nodded. A procession of cats emerged from the doorway, the iron railing balanced across their backs. Beth seized it in one hand and then dissolved into a blur like petrol on the wind as she started to run.
Paul’s Volvo chuntered up to the kerb and Pen jumped into the passenger seat.
‘Follow the fire,’ she said. He stamped on the accelerator before she’d pulled the door shut.
They had to dodge cars and pedestrians fleeing the other way as they swung out onto Hackney Road. The heat from the fire brought out beads of sweat on their heads. Pen’s heart slammed as she peered through the windows on either side. Stray cats slunk from alleys and from under parked cars. They walked with an unnerving, stately pace, hundreds of them, far more than Beth had ever commanded. They turned down Bishopsgate and Pen glimpsed a white enamel sign. The black letters on it were in no language she knew. They veered around buses and taxis and awestruck gawkers. Paul clung to the wheel like it was a life raft, wrestling with it to keep them out of the torrent of fire pouring down the centre of the road. He stood on the accelerator again, keeping the tip of the flame, its blind, wormlike nose, in sight. The Shard rose above the city’s lesser towers as they approached London Bridge.
‘Oh no – oh mercy, no,’ Pen whispered to herself.
There were no lights on in the northern side of the Shard. The glass that ought to have covered the side of the enormous skyscraper was no longer there. When Pen looked through the space it had left she didn’t see exposed, empty office cubicles. She saw distant, rippling towers, some of which were still on fire. She saw London-Under-Glass.
The skein of fire climbed sharply as it reached the South Bank of the Thames and rose over the low roof of London Bridge Station. Dozens of other fiery snakes breached the skyline alongside it, all converging on the Shard.
For an instant, she thought the flames would push through into the inverted city, but just before they reached that mirror-marked border they suddenly blossomed, splashing against some invisible barrier. The flames unfurled symmetrically, igniting massive wings.
Huge dragon shapes, outlined in blue fire, wheeled in the air over London.
A figure in striped pyjama trousers and a faded T-shirt stood on a bollard outside a construction site next to Borough Market. Londoners ran screaming past her, Londoners of flesh and of glass and of stone, but she didn’t flinch. Mr Bradley’s face was pale as he pulled the car up beside his daughter and got out.
Beth acknowledged neither her father nor her best friend as they came to stand beside her. Her eyes were fixed dead ahead, on the absent glass of the Shard. The lights of which were only an echo burned bright in the architecture of her face.
Grey figures erupted from the road like sharks from water, their thin bodies landing with deadly poise, and behind them, in the heart of the tower, something moved.
At first, all that was visible was a pair of green eyes, a mirror to Beth’s own, then a shimmer of skirts that caught the light like estuary water.
The lady of the streets smiled her church-spire smile as she stepped into the road in front of the Shard. Pen saw her ribs swell as she drew in a deep breath. She looked at Beth and frowned around her smile, as though pleasantly surprised. Then she turned her gaze east, towards Canary Wharf.
Mater Viae looked at her right hand and curled her fingers. Across the river, the cranes grasping at the sky over St Pauls began to move.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Once more, I’m hugely grateful to the team that made this with me: The peerless Jo Fletcher, Nicola Budd, Lucy Ramsey, Alice Hill, Tim Kershaw and everyone at Quercus; Don Maass, Cameron McClure and all at DMLA. Extra special thanks to Comrade-Conspirator
Amy Boggs for building me up, talking me down and taking no prisoners as my agent.
Thanks also to Sam Miles, Emily Richards, Den Patrick, Darren Hartwell, James Smythe, Kim Curran and Helen Callaghan for helping me make this a better book, and especially to Shahd Fouda for coming to the aid of a stranger in need.
As always, love and gratitude to Sarah Pollock, David Pollock, Barbara Pollock and all my family.
Finally to Lizzie Barrett, wife, thank you for your patience, your presence and your love.
I remain in awe of, and in debt to, those authors mentioned in the previous volume. To their number I would like to add Ursula le Guin, John le Carré, Frances Hardinge and Lewis Carroll. In the writing of reflections, conspiracy and counterparts, I have never known their equal.
Beth’s and Pen’s stories conclude in
Our Lady of the Streets
