Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne)

by Tom Pollock

  Gutterglass was beckoning to them in alarm, calling, ‘Lady Bradley! Miss Khan, come! Please.’

  Pen swallowed hard, still hesitating. Beth squeezed her hand, but didn’t pull away. Pen turned her gaze back onto the mirror and looked straight at the space where she knew the Faceless stood.

  ‘There’s a bathroom,’ she said, ‘in a school – your boss will know which one. If she …’ She hesitated. ‘If she feels the way I feel, tell her to be there the night after next.’

  Tonge twitched away from the invisible knife. ‘She says she’ll deliver the message.’

  Pen felt the strength drain out of her. She let Beth’s arm turn her and guide her away. A twitch in her own muscles echoed the movement of the wire coils as they unwound from the mirror and let it fall to shatter in the dust.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Beth walked the streets of her dreams alone.

  She could feel the rhino behind her, staring down from tower-block walls and billboards. Its acrylic-white eyes burned into her back, but she didn’t look round. A breeze picked up. It penetrated the fabric of her hoodie and made the hairs on her arms stand up. She hugged herself and hurried onwards.

  The buildings were taller here than she remembered, and closer together, hemming her in. She heard a snort behind her and she started to run, taking turnings at random: left, now right, now right again. She could feel the beast behind her, the hammer of its hooves not quite drowning the hammer of her pulse. The wind picked up, blowing harder down the narrow concrete ravines, pressing against her face and chest. She bent her head and forced her way onwards. The wind redoubled again. She ducked into another side street to try to get out of it, but no matter which way she turned it was always blowing right into her face, so hard it snatched the air from in front of her lips. She heard another snort, this time in front of her, and the breathy spray of aerosol-paint spattered over her clothes and into her hair. She knew the wind was the rhino’s breath; that the animal was somehow in front of her as well as behind. The gale shrieked full into her, burning her skin, making her eyes water and sting. Every step was slower than the last, like pushing through dense, invisible bracken, until she could no longer force herself onwards. She stood for a second, knees bent, leaning into the wind’s fury. The effort of resisting seared the muscles in her calves and her back. Then, slowly, she began to slip backwards.

  Her heart sped up, and so did the sound of the rhino’s hooves. She could feel it stampeding up behind her. Her feet skidded on streets slippery with wet paint. Her stomach lurched and she was blown backwards, tumbling like a leaf towards the beast. Her heart seemed to stop altogether …

  … and then sputtered back to life as her fingers snagged a doorway. The door was open, dark, inviting shelter. Her fingers gouged the wood of the frame, pushing splinters under her nails, and she hissed with pain as, drawing on her last strength, she pulled herself in.

  At first the darkness inside seemed absolute, then Beth became aware of a single bulb recessed into an oval fitting in the ceiling, shining with a dim green light. She blinked the tears from her wind-stung eyes. The light strobed off and on again and she saw that she wasn’t alone.

  Dark figures lined the walls of the room. They didn’t move as she approached them. They stood stiffly to attention: figurines, life-sized clay models of men and women, lovingly detailed, with brick-red veins protruding from clay skin, strands of clay spittle stretched between motionless clay lips.

  She knew them, she realised. She knew them all. She hurried around the room, putting her hands to their cheeks as she examined them. This was the one she’d tried to summon when the Street-Serpent had attacked, and this one and this one: this squat one here who looked a bit like her dad was exactly who she’d pictured and fought futilely to shape from the kitchen floor at Selfridges. They were all here, she realised, every single avatar she’d ever tried and failed to conjure.

  And then, with sudden, startling clarity, she knew more – that every thought she’d ever had and believed she’d forgotten was somewhere in the streets of this city.

  Something moved in the dust, a coiling, snapping thing, and Beth jumped, suddenly aware of the vulnerability of her soft bare feet. The thing on the floor flickered like a snake’s tongue, but it didn’t come for her; instead it wound its way around the leg of the nearest body, its barbs leaving sidewinder track-marks in the clay.

  Beth stared at the wire, hypnotised by its motion. When it gained the figure’s face, it began, as carefully and methodically as an artist’s pencil, to mark out scars on the clay features, scars that Beth knew as well as her own face. The clay eyes just stared at her, dead. The wire snaked and coiled around the figure’s limbs, hooking itself into joints and pores.

  ‘Beth—’ Her name came as a hissing rattle, metal over clay, metal over skin. ‘Bethhhhh.’

  With sinuous speed, a clay hand flashed out and grabbed her throat.

  Beth’s eyes snapped open. She gasped for air that wouldn’t come. She tried to scream, but no sound came out. There was something on her throat, something sharp. She swatted at it and it tumbled onto the floor with a static crackle. Beth leaned over the edge of the bed after it.

  A spider the colour of fibreglass stared up at her with eight coal-black eyes. Its mandibles were coated in brick dust. Beth put her hand to her throat and felt two tiny holes either side of her larynx.

  ‘Deal’s a deal,’ the spider said. Its voice was hijacked from a TV game show host, bracketed with static. ‘One human voice, harvested free-range, in the wild. That’s what you promised, that’s what you pay.’

  Beth fought to recover her breath before she answered it. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Bad dreams.’

  ‘No problem,’ the spider replied in its breezy American accent. ‘Got what I needed anyway.’ It scuttled across the floor to a strand of hanging silk and scrambled up it. The silk raced up behind it like a disappearing fuse, faster and faster until both spider and web vanished in a crackle of bad reception.

  Beth exhaled and collapsed back on her bed. She stared at the patch of green light her eyes cast on the ceiling; it was dimmed and refracted through dirty tears. The dorm around her was dark, and quiet but for the gentle snoring of a man opposite. She thought back to before all this, when she didn’t know how strange the world really was. How many exchanges like that had she slept through? she wondered, and then decided it didn’t really matter.

  All that mattered was that she wasn’t sleeping now.

  She forced herself to count her breaths until she felt back under control, then she let herself rise. The sheet pulled tackily away from her back as she sat up, and when she turned around she smelled tar. There was a black sticky patch on the sheet, and her T-shirt was gummed to her skin with half-dried tarmac.

  No wonder she felt so dizzy: her scars had opened in the night.

  She looked around furtively, but everyone else was still asleep, so she struggled out of her T-shirt, yelping despite herself when it pulled at the still-healing scabs. Then she tugged on her hoodie and went looking for Pen.

  She found her on the roof, staring out at Canary Wharf. Her chin was resting against her arms where they lay folded on a gargoyle’s head. The moonlight made the steel coils on her neck and back glimmer and Beth felt a little hitch in her chest at the sight of them. Part of her had believed she’d get to leave that thing in the dream.

  She stepped cautiously out from the fire escape, making her footsteps as noisy as she could. ‘That’s some pretty serious bling you’ve got going on there, Pen,’ she ventured. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure it suits you.’

  Pen didn’t look round. The light wash from a Sodiumite encampment on the street below showed her breath fogging as she sighed. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and since you did work as a professional style icon in the most image-obsessed city in the universe, I suppose I’d better listen to—Oh no, wait – that was me, wasn’t it? So hush.’

  Beth came to stand beside her. ‘Pen, th
at was for less than two weeks.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It was under false pretences – they thought you were your mirror-sister!’

  ‘Even so.’ Under her barbed exo-skeleton, Pen sucked her scarred lip. ‘It’s a better track record than your concrete skincare routine, so …’ She gestured.

  ‘Hush?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Beth fell silent. She saw the way the veins of silver wire mimicked the twist of muscles as they snaked over Pen’s back and shoulders and slipped in below her headscarf. It wasn’t all one length of wire, she realised; the metal web encasing her best friend was made of dozens of strands, carefully plaited together.

  As if she had anticipated the question, Pen reached back and lifted the hem of her hijab. There, to her appalled fascination, Beth saw four barbs, resting in neat, red-rimmed puncture wounds at the base of Pen’s neck. The wire flexed gently in a steady rhythm, like it was breathing.

  ‘It’s the only place she’s under the skin,’ Pen said quietly. ‘Unless I need her to lend my muscles more power; in that case she can latch into them too.’

  Beth started to speak, but before the voice could rise off her skin, Pen cut her off, her voice hard. ‘I know what you’re about to say, B, and don’t you dare.’ Behind the wire cage, her eyes swivelled to look at Beth. ‘Don’t you dare judge me. You gave your voice to the spiders and your life to the street, so think very carefully about your next few words, okay?’

  Beth swallowed and nodded. ‘Okay, Pen.’

  ‘Okay. So what do you want to know?’

  Beth floundered, unsure where to even begin. ‘Does it hurt?’

  The wry quirk of Pen’s lip was just visible under the metal. ‘Why? Does it look like it hurts?’

  ‘Yeah, Pen. It looks like you have a load of barbed wire wrapped round you.’

  ‘Then let’s assume it hurts. Next question.’

  Beth blinked at Pen’s abruptness. ‘Can you control it?’

  ‘No, but on the plus side, she can’t control me either. We weakened her at St Paul’s, badly. She hasn’t recovered. I can … negotiate with her.’

  ‘Negotiate?’ Beth was appalled.

  ‘Sure,’ Pen said calmly. ‘Our current deal is: she comes with me where I say, and I let her use me to keep herself alive. You said we were out of allies, B. I found us another one.’

  Beth gaped at her. ‘Pen, you didn’t have to do this for me!’

  ‘I didn’t, Beth,’ Pen said flatly. ‘I did it for us. I did it so we could win, not just you. Learn the difference, would you?’

  ‘Pen, please, I’m only trying to—’

  ‘Oh, I know you are, B, but frankly, I’m mad as hell at you. I’m trying not to be because you’re all’ – she flapped her hands irritably – ‘dying and everything, and I feel like a terrible bloody person, really I do, but there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  She looked right at Beth. ‘Beth, you cannot ever, ever try and throw me out again. Do you understand?’

  Beth nodded, her lips tightly shut.

  ‘If I get killed next to you, you’re just going to have to live with that. And if you die next to me, I’ll have to live with that too. You can’t protect me from it. That’s who we are. That’s what this means.’ Pen held her gaze. ‘That whole “dying alone” thing? You don’t get to do that.’

  Beth closed her eyes and felt a shudder in her chest. She nodded again, more decisively.

  ‘Good.’ Pen exhaled explosively, then choked out a laugh. ‘That’s settled then.’

  It was only when she heard Pen sniff her tears back that Beth saw the streaks of wet mascara running out from under the wire mesh on her face.

  ‘Now all I have to worry about is whether my invisible girlfriend will turn up tomorrow night.’

  Beth smiled at that. ‘Tell me about her,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve told you about her loads of times already—’

  ‘You’ve told me about the last time you saw her loads of times already,’ Beth corrected her. ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘She’s …’ Pen hesitated, then sucked her teeth and gave Beth a wary, sidelong glance. ‘She’s like you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Parva Khan, we’re seriously going to have to talk about your taste in women.’

  ‘I know, right?’

  Beth saw a flash of a smile under the metal as Pen said, ‘It’s tragic.’

  ‘You’re meeting her in the Frostfield bathroom?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Then we’re also going to have to talk about your choice of date.’

  Pen laughed, and a knot in Beth’s stomach relaxed at the sound. They fell silent for a moment, side by side, looking out over the altered city. The night air was cold, but the heat coming off a nearby Fever Street touched their faces like a bonfire.

  ‘You think she’ll come?’ Pen asked eventually.

  ‘’Course she will, Pen.’

  ‘Why? It’s not guaranteed. For all I know, she hates me – I left her in pretty much the lurchiest lurch imaginable. Besides, she’s head of the Faceless now. She might be busy – I don’t know, blowing something up.’

  Beth snorted.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ Pen fretted, ‘even if she wants to come, I don’t know if she’ll be able to get there.’

  ‘She’ll find a way.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Beth looked up at Pen. Even under the wire cage the shape was still utterly, recognisably her.

  ‘Because she’s like me. And it’s you.’

  Pen looked at her then, and Beth knew she was utterly vulnerable to that gaze.

  ‘B, what happened with Timon – you know you had to, right?’

  Beth felt something stir in her gut. She thought of Timon’s pleading face the moment before her spear slammed into it. ‘Yeah,’ she said quietly.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re lying to me right now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ah – there you are!’

  Beth looked around sharply as her dad appeared ruddy-faced in the fire-escape doorway. He carried a tray laden down with three mugs and a teapot with a coil of steam writhing from the spout.

  ‘Somehow I knew,’ he said as he ambled over, balanced the tray on the gargoyle’s head and wiped his hands on his trousers, ‘that given the best opportunity we’ve had in ages to get some sleep, the two of you would be up somewhere nattering.’

  He poured tea into two of the mugs and Beth and Pen accepted them gratefully. He hesitated over the third, and Beth sighed and took the pot from him, filled the final mug and thrust it into his hands.

  ‘Only if you’re sure,’ he mumbled. ‘Don’t want to intrude.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Beth said. ‘We were only talking about what Pen’s going to get up to on her date tomorrow night.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ He grinned. ‘Where are you taking the young lady?’

  ‘A bathroom in Frostfield High that was condemned for asbestos,’ Pen said drily. ‘Romantic, huh?’

  Paul Bradley pursed his lips, considering it. ‘Positively upmarket compared to some of the dives in Deptford Beth’s mum dragged me to when we first met,’ he said finally. ‘She had this thing for punk bands.’

  ‘Things we do for love, eh?’ Beth smiled around the little dull thorn she always felt in her heart when her dad mentioned her mum.

  ‘B.’ There was a tightness in Pen’s voice that pulled the smile from Beth’s lips. ‘There’s something else we need to talk about.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘What’s going on?’ Pen asked as the three of them descended the stationary escalators that zigzagged through the men’s wear and women’s wear floors. Trash hands were crawling like spiders over the pillars, prising the mirrored glass from the walls and bearing it away past the mannequin’s blank gazes.

  ‘I told Glas to get rid of all the mirrors,’ Beth
replied. ‘If Mater Viae’s still holding the Mirrorstocracy’s leash, then it’s probably a good idea not to give them a hundred ways to look into our house uninvited.’ She winced. ‘’Course, it would have been an even better idea not to set up in a dress shop packed out with half of London’s reflective surfaces – but hey, we live and learn.’

  They reached the fourth floor and shouldered through the doors into the electronics section. The most hardcore half-dozen of Selfridges’ stranded tourists sat crosslegged on the floor, gazing despondently at the TV screens.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Pen said. ‘Sorry, but we need to borrow the room.’

  None of them looked round.

  ‘Hey!’ she shouted. A pouchy, middle-aged man put his finger to his lips and shushed her, but he didn’t take his eyes from the TV.

  Pen sighed. She felt the decision – her suggestion to the Wire Mistress – like a nerve twitch at the base of her neck. Six wire tendrils unfurled from around her and twisted slowly through the air. She closed her eyes briefly, but she could still feel them. Their barbs shivered in the breeze like they were hairs on her arms.

  Perfectly synchronised, the six wire strands found the power switches for the TV screens. The room became instantly silent.

  When Pen reopened her eyes, the six men were staring at her in open-mouthed horror.

  Their fear sparked something in the back of Pen’s mind; her pulse quickened. She felt the wires curl slightly, one in front of each of their faces, tensing to strike—

  She stamped down on the urge. That hot metallic taste at the back of her throat didn’t belong to her. She’d felt this urge to kill before and she knew it wasn’t hers, even if it felt like it was – even if, in that moment, it felt like it was her dearest wish to end these frightened men, to discharge the violence and the anger pent up in her into their fragile flesh.

  It’s not me.

  The wire whined, high and quiet, like an insect in her ear, but the steel tendrils relaxed. Pen stood very still and pressed her nails hard into the palms of her hands until the urge subsided.