by Tom Pollock
The wind gusts and snaps at the hem of my jeans. I sit down cross-legged between the lampposts. And the rain comes down hard.
The Whitey danced for his life. He snaked and jerked, trying to dart between the raindrops. He could feel his magnesium bones tingling, stretching out to the water, almost like they wanted to react with it and burn. His frantic speed made him brilliant, and his light reflected off the concrete walls of the estate, leaving ghostly after-images. The grass underfoot was wet and he throbbed off shrieks of pain as he ran, scrambling to find shelter.
The Whitey found a slick black tarpaulin crumpled into a corner by an outbuilding. He threw it over himself, but the rivulets of water that ran off it made him scream, so he stood and ran again, his light beaming out from the treacherous holes in the tarp. Curls of hydrogen twisted wherever the rain struck home.
Suddenly the wind changed and a puddle rippled, splashing a curl of water against the Whitey’s leg. He blazed in pain and the metal in his ankle reacted: his foot vanished in a flare of light and gas and he fell awkwardly by a barbed-wire fence. He crawled in agony over the wet tarmac. The world around him was bright with lit windows, safe, dry lights, but there was no way in.
A jag of concrete snared the edge of the tarp and it was dragged from him. The Whitey lay there, unable to crawl further. He spasmed and his knee scraped over the concrete. A spark caught and he was bathed in flame as the hydrogen cloud around him ignited. The heat soothed him for alltoo-brief a moment and then burned out.
It was only the needles of pain rippling over him that kept him conscious. He thought of his home, wondering how he had got so far from the bright gas-white globes on their posts over the Carnaby Street market. His brothers and sisters would be there now, with the rain ricocheting harmlessly off their bulbs. One orb would be dark, empty; where he ought to be.
Something moved above him, a thin, dark shadow, and the Whitey looked up. A skein of barbed wire was coming off the fence towards him, twisting and coiling like a snake through the air. It shivered along its length and the barbs gave off a rattling hiss.
‘ No,’ he strobed. Even in his agony, a deeper fear gripped him. ‘ No, get back. I’m not yours. I can’t sustain you. ’
But the eyeless thing kept coming and in the flickering light of his words he saw a tendril slither off the ground to caress his face. The moisture on it burnt him.
‘ Please,’ he whispered, a dim flicker, ‘ please, not me. I can tell you things — there are threats, threats to your master. The Viae Child, he’s raising an army against him, against Reach. I saw him — I hid and read his very lips- ’
But the thing kept coiling lovingly around him, tighter and tighter. Metal thorns clasped hungrily at his scalp, seeking a way in, as though they could plunder straight from his mind the information he was trying to bargain with.
Cracks started to spread through him and he shrieked brightly as the barbs pierced his glass skull and let the water in.
CHAPTER 10
Beth sat on the bus to Bethnal Green. She looked around, but she couldn’t see a wet dog so she was forced to conclude that the smell was coming from her. Strange blots were dancing at the edges of her eyes and it felt like a gnome in lead boots was tap-dancing in the back of her head.
She managed to doze off between ringing the bell and the bus hissing to a stop. Jerking awake, she leaped to her feet and shouldered her way through the closing door. A thunderclap echoed somewhere to the west and the rain redoubled, greeting her with soaking enthusiasm, plastering her hair flat against her skull.
Beth sighed and squelched onwards.
At first she thought he was a hallucination, just sitting there cross-legged, despondently getting drenched. The streetlamps were flickering on and off in some sort of sequence, making his shadow jump in a weird staccato dance.
‘Hey!’ she yelled. Relief and excitement fizzed through her. ‘Hey, you! Guy!’ She didn’t know what to call him. ‘Urchin!’
He looked up and his grey eyes widened as Beth came down the steps of the bridge three at a time. He scrambled to his feet. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.
Beth grinned. ‘You told me to look for you under broken light.’
She was buzzing: to have found him again, to have him be real. The tower blocks reared vastly against the sodium-soaked clouds and the way they dwarfed her was suddenly thrilling. ‘Is this your home?’ she asked.
A grin to match hers sneaked onto his face. ‘Home? Well, part of it, I guess — I could bed down in any square inch of London town. Welcome to my parlour.’ He stretched his arms out as though to take in the entire city. ‘Make yourself comfy.’ He laughed, and then seemed to remember who he was talking to.
He folded his arms and looked at her suspiciously. ‘Who are you? Why are you following me?’
Beth crossed her arms too. Her stance was pugnacious but she could feel herself trembling with the adrenalin racing through her. ‘Who are you?’ she countered. ‘Why did you save me?’
‘My name is Filius Viae,’ he said. ‘It means the Son of the Streets. My mother is their Goddess.’ He took a step towards her, his shadow slipping over her face. ‘She laid the foundations of the streets you walk on, and the bones of the roads buried under them. She stoked the Steam-wraiths’ engines and gave the lamps their first sparks. She forged the chains that hold old Father Thames in place.’ He smirked at her.
‘And I saved you ’cause anyone mental enough to ride one Railwraith and stand in the way of another shouting needs all the help they can get.’
‘O- kay,’ Beth muttered. She drew a deep breath. ‘My name is Beth Bradley,’ she said. ‘It means — well, it means Beth Bradley. My dad’s a journalist — a redundant one. I got kicked out of school and he didn’t care. My best friend was the one who grassed me up. I suppose the reason I’m following you is because — I like your answer better.’ She tried a smile and added, ‘’cept for the name, obviously. I didn’t realise you were called “Phyllis”. I don’t blame you for not telling me that before.’
This time the boy laughed. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure my answer’s better; right now it mostly boils down to my arse being hunted all over The Smoke.’
‘Someone’s trying to kill you,’ Beth said. ‘I remember.’
‘Oh, that’s good of you,’ he said, sarcastically tugging a forelock. ‘Ta.’ He settled himself back down onto the wet tarmac.
Beth’s jeans were drenched anyway, so she slumped down next to him. The wind sculpted half-seen bodies in the rain. ‘But if you’re the son of this kick-arse goddess,’ she said, ‘what are you scared of? Surely she could take whoever’s trying to mess with you?’
His smile never reached his eyes. ‘She’s not here,’ he said. ‘I’ve never met her.’ Beth made to apologise but he waved it away. ‘I was raised by her seneschal, Gutterglass. I ran in the shells of her temples on the river and played with the fossilised entrails of the sacrifices the Green Witches made to her.’
‘There are actual Green Witches in Greenwich?’ Beth was astonished.
‘Nah, Sutton — what, you think there’s a sea of eggs and flour in Battersea?’ His face was deadpan; she couldn’t tell if he was joking. Then his voice took on a hard, brittle edge. ‘I learnt no ritual, no doctrine — nothing to prepare me, not for Reach.’ The fingers of his left hand crooked into a claw.
‘ Reach. Is that what’s hunting you?’
He nodded unhappily.
‘So what is it?’
‘He’s urban sickness,’ he said in a dead tone, ‘and greed, and cannibal hunger and-And I don’t know what else. I’ve never seen him up close, but I’ve seen the aftermath of him. He is the Crane King; and the cranes are his fingers and his weapons. He uses them to carve himself deep into the city and when he does, everything around him dies.’ He snorted. ‘He’s vain, too; he keeps building glass towers to look at himself in. My mother was his only rival; every generation he appeared, and she beat him back, over and over again�
� but then she disappeared, and ever since then he’s been growing in that black pit of his under the Cathedral.’
He looked up at Beth. ‘But now she’s coming back, to reclaim the Skyscraper Throne, and Reach can’t wait any more. He wants to weaken her, wants anyone who could fight for her dead. Starting with me.’ He looked down and muttered, ‘She’s nearly here, but I might never meet her.’
He looked so lost that, on impulse, Beth reached out and pulled him close. After a second’s hesitation, he yielded. It was frightening and thrilling to hold this hunted boy against her. As though the very act of it put her under the eye of a monster.
‘Look, we’ll sort him,’ she whispered: comforting, nonsensical bravado. The rain turned the dust in his hair to mortar that clung to her cheek. ‘He won’t know what’s hit him.’
He pulled away from her, brushing rainwater off his face. ‘You’re very free with that “we”,’ he said, ‘and that’s kind and all, but what makes you so sure? I saw how you were with the Railwraith — I don’t mean to be rude, but you were crappin’ yourself.’
‘I was not!’ Beth protested. ‘I was-’ but there was no point denying it. ‘Well, yeah, okay, I was: I was terrified. Happy? But you know what? I’d rather be that scared, every bloody day of my life, than go back to the way I felt before I met you.’
A silence followed, long enough and deep enough for Beth to begin to truly appreciate the extent to which that statement made her sound like a stalker.
‘But not in a creepy way or nothing,’ she added, far too late. He was staring at her like she was a different species.
Embarrassed, Beth looked away, and her eyes fell on the nearest streetlight. The rain had started to let up, and now individual drips were slowly becoming distinct. As she watched the sodium light flared and guttered, then started flashing more violently.
‘Oh, Thames, here we go,’ the boy muttered under his breath.
The light stretched and distorted in Beth’s eyes like a captive yellow star, and then the burning rays reshaped themselves, the liquid light melting together into limbs and shoulders, a torso, a face — a young woman. She was naked, and Beth could see brightly burning filaments twisting like arteries under her transparent skin as she flowed down the lamppost to the ground. She walked towards them with a sensuously arrogant stride.
The urchin stood, apparently reluctant. ‘ This should be fun,’ he muttered.
The glowing woman opened her mouth and a light flashed on and off in the back of her throat. She pointed to Beth.
‘Just someone I met,’ he replied out loud, innocently.
The light-woman burnt a deeply unimpressed orange. More glowing speech issued from her mouth.
‘What did she say?’ Beth asked.
‘Yeah… I don’t think you want to know,’ he murmured.
‘Oh, I think I do.’
He winced. ‘She called you the daughter of a forty-watt bulb.’
‘She what?’
‘It — uh, it doesn’t really translate.’
The light-woman moved to stand in front of Beth, who could feel some kind of force pulling at the hairs on her skin. She curled her toes inside her trainers. Every molecule of her was thrumming with how strange this was.
The woman took another step forward. Beth smelled something she strongly suspected was her own eyelashes singeing. She smirked, quite deliberately, and the woman smirked too and strobed off a word.
‘Lec!’ The urchin sounded shocked.
The light-woman turned and blazed furiously at him for a moment before running off up the steps and over the bridge, the only sound the hissing of water evaporating away from her feet.
‘We’ll see who’s ungrateful!’ he shouted after her. ‘Remember who got you that treaty in the first place!’
‘What was that all about?’ asked Beth.
He rolled his eyes. ‘She’s just being dramatic. But never mind her-’ Using his iron railing like a shepherd’s crook he guided Beth back towards the footbridge. ‘I told you once, and I’m telling you again: go home.’
Beth opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off. ‘I’m not joking. Maybe I never acted like my mother’s son before, but I can start now. Reach’ll kill me, Beth Bradley.’ He spoke evenly, pragmatically. ‘And if you’re with me, he’ll kill you too. I’d hate to have to explain that to your redundant journalist dad.’
‘How’re you going to explain anything when you’re dead?’ Beth asked before she could stop herself.
He glared at her. ‘Yeah, because being bloody pedantic is so going to change my mind,’ he snapped.
Beth said stubbornly, ‘Look, I know there’s a risk. I know I might-’
‘It’s not a question of might. ’ He sounded exasperated. ‘For me, maybe, it’s a question of might: I might be able to run far enough and fast enough to keep ahead of him. But for you it’s a question of will — I don’t mean to be rude, but is there any way in which you wouldn’t be a liability? Can you climb the outside of a skyscraper? Can you run the wire ahead of a Pylon Spider?’
Beth glared at him. ‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about now.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’
She gritted her teeth. ‘I did understand one thing you said though: run.’ She almost spat the word. ‘Is that your plan? Is that how you’re going to live up your mum’s legacy? By running?’
‘You have no idea what you’re saying-’
‘ Then teach me! I’m smart, all right? I can learn — and maybe I can help. Or are you so damned arrogant that you think you’re better off alone?’
He opened his mouth, but Beth cut him off. ‘What, you counting on your little streetlight girlfriend? Unless I very badly misread her bloody body language, you’ve got some chilly nights coming up.’
‘Lec’s not my-’
‘Yeah, whatever.’ Beth snorted. ‘Is there anyone else? Anyone else who’s willing to stand up to this Crane King you’re so scared of?’
As he stared at her she could feel the anger and embarrassment and loneliness coming off him like heat. ‘Well, I am,’ she said quietly. ‘Maybe I don’t know, but I saved your life once, and you saved mine. I want to help you.’ She only realised quite how true the words were as she spoke them. ‘Let me help you do more than just run.’
His grey eyes searched hers. ‘Why?’
‘Because I’m alone, too,’ Beth said softly.
They fell silent then. The clouds had blown over and the night was clear and cold. Beth started to shiver.
‘No, you’re not,’ he said at last. ‘Hold out your arm.’ And without warning he slashed the razor-sharp tip of his railing across her wrist.
Beth didn’t know why, but she didn’t jump back or yelp. She held herself completely still as he scratched her again and again, and she felt the blood welling up and dripping onto the wet ground.
She didn’t take her eyes from his. ‘And that was?’ She kept all but a tiny tremor from creeping into her voice.
He shrugged, almost shyly. ‘If you’re going to be a soldier in the army, girl, you need to wear the mark.’
She looked down at her wrist. Through the smeared blood she could just make out the fine lines of the cuts: buildings, arranged into a crown.
A tight, exhilarated pride welled up in her.
‘It’s also a warning. The blood’s the reminder: this is real, Beth. These things will hurt you, and there’s no magic door you can run back through and slam shut to get away from them. You can never go home again, understand? Because they’ll follow you — if you do this, if you draw Reach’s eye, you give up safety. You give up home. For ever.’ His voice was as flat and cold as an open heath in a harsh wind.
Beth put her wrist to her cheek, then stared at the crown: immutably and irreversibly cut into her.
‘Then I’m ready.’ Her heart was turning mad somersaults. ‘Son of the Streets.’
II
URBOSYNTHESIS
CHAPTER 11
‘So.’ The pavement-skinned boy leaned against the wall, hands thrust into his pockets. ‘How do you like our ride?’
Beth gave him a flat stare. ‘Our ride? It’s a giant spider.’
He pursed his lips and shrugged in a ‘can’t-deny-the-obvious’ kind of way.
‘Is it dangerous?’ Beth asked.
‘Does it look dangerous?’ he countered.
‘Yeah: it looks like a giant spider.’
‘Wow, that’s some impressive power of observation you got there…’
‘I’m not finding this reassuring, Fil.’
She’d taken to shortening ‘Filius’ to ‘Fil’ — as though being on single-syllable terms could tame this wild boy with the sharp bones and the soot-smeared skin. He’d led her into an ordinary scratched-to-hell BT Payphone on the High Street, picked up the handset and hesitated. When she’d asked him if he needed change, he’d given her a half-smile, as if at her naivete. ‘That’s not how they’ll want payin’,’ he’d said.
He had put the receiver to his mouth and then somehow imitated the clicks and buzzes that you got on a line with really bad reception. He’d stopped and listened for a bit, then hung up, looking satisfied.
Then he’d led her around the corner into the alley and here she was, eyeball to eyeball with a spider the size of a small car.
‘Remind me why we have to do this again?’ she said. The thing’s eyes were like glittering pits of ash.
‘Communications.’ He didn’t look away from the creature as he answered. ‘There’s no point having an army if you can’t talk to it.’ He edged closer towards it.