by Tom Pollock
Underneath the fear that had dominated her for so long, she felt hope.
As the River entered Canada Square, it banked hard to the right, hugging the contours of the inside of the labyrinth, and swirled into a fast-flowing circle with Canada Tower at the centre. Even from where she watched, half dead on her hilltop, Beth could feel its eagerness.
Water poured into the square, more and more of it. It surged, faster and faster, its sides rising until it was a whirlpool, a rushing vortex with walls as high as the Skyscraper Throne itself. Looking down from her vantage on the hilltop, Beth glimpsed two green glints of light at the tower’s apex.
With a titanic roar, the Thames fell on Canary Wharf from all sides, and the green lights vanished. Tearing steel and shattering glass were all swamped by the sound of the River’s triumph. For a second, the torrent thinned enough for Beth to make out the tower, slumping as though exhausted. Every strut was buckled, every window shattered. At the apex, the throne was empty.
And then Canary Wharf fell.
It collapsed all at once, crashing inwards on itself. The glittering silver peak slid off it like a fallen crown. To Beth, her ears still ringing with the fury of the River, it sounded muted.
The River … she thought. Horror planted spider-feet in her heart as she watched. The River wasn’t done yet.
The Thames gathered itself and hurled itself against the walls that surrounded it like a demented thing. Beth might have broken its chains, but the City was its prison and it still stood. The River threw itself on building after building, gurgling eagerly as each one collapsed beneath it.
Beth’s brief-born hope drained out of her. The River had been imprisoned for millennia and it hated the City; she’d felt that. Perhaps it wouldn’t stop until the whole place had been rendered down to flood-plain mud. She’d recognised that sentiment – she’d respected it too. After all, she wouldn’t be satisfied with less in its place.
But …
Sorry, mate, I can’t let you … She started to pull herself on her elbows over the slag, but collapsed on her face after three drags, her shoulders burning. There were still people alive down there, in the buildings below her hilltop. She tried to think of a way to warn them, but her mind felt clayish and her thoughts came slowly. People … She cast blearily over the landscape until her eyes landed on St Paul’s. Reach’s cranes still clawed the sky around it. The dome was still standing. The fire had never reached it, but the water would. The thought was like an iron lump in the pit of her stomach: the water she’d unleashed … All those people. The refugees they’d sent there …
I have to … But the impulse was ragged and slipped away from her. She was too broken, too tired, too sick. She curled up on the shale. Her eyes began to close, but a sound reached her then that was so unexpected she snapped them back open again. Nearby, someone was sobbing.
Wincing, she struggled onto her other side so she could face where the sound was coming from. A few feet away, a black skeleton sat on the shale, elbows on rickety kneecaps, skull cupped between its bony fingers. Thick, oily tears ran from its eye sockets as its ribcage heaved.
Seriously? Beth thought. You’re crying? You. You don’t even have eyes, let alone tear-ducts.
But as so often in the past year, her disbelief didn’t change anything: Johnny Naphtha, last git standing of the Chemical Synod, was bawling his eyes out.
It wasn’t just to fight the fire, was it? Beth thought about asking it aloud, but it was too much effort, and anyway, she knew, with the muzzy self-confidence of the semi-conscious, that she was right. You always planned to wake the River. That’s why you built it a mind – a mind you thought you could negotiate with, a mind you thought you could manipulate.
And then, with a clarity that startled her given how foggy the rest of the world was getting, That was what Mater Viae was going to do for you. That was your price.
She almost wanted to laugh.
The sky overhead began to bleach itself blue. The River’s rage was a drumbeat in the distance. It grew slowly closer, but if even the ground beneath Beth had been falling away, she couldn’t have moved.
‘Well,’ she said as she finally let her eyes close, ‘we really bollocksed that up, didn’t we?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Beth lay flat on the gravelled rooftop, staring up at the blank grey sky. There was a roaring on the horizon that she thought at first was the rhino, but on second listen sounded more like the sea. Somewhere, a city beyond this one was getting hammered.
Something white fluttered down beside her ear. Beth had precisely no desire to move, but she lifted her head by a few inches anyway and looked down. It was a letter.
‘Dear Mr and Mrs Bradley,’ it began, and then continued, ‘We regret …’
‘Want to explain that?’ It was her dad’s voice, impatient, tense. He’d stoked himself up for a row before he’d even clapped eyes on her. When she looked back up he was standing over her, his hairy forearms crossed over his stomach. ‘Beth, I’ve had it with you. You cannot keep getting into fights.’
Beth cast her mind back over the last few months: cranes and wolves and wire and water … Hate to break it to you, Dad, she thought, but I really can.
‘I was at work.’ The way he said ‘work’ made it obvious it was miles more important than anything Beth would ever do. ‘I was covering the desk when I got the call. The letter’s just for form – they didn’t even post it. Your headmistress slapped it into my hand just before I left. Know who I have to ask to cover for me when you get me yanked out of the office for this rubbish? Allen – bloody Allen – I already owe him too many favours because of you.’
Beth knew the speech off by heart, of course. She’d heard it in dozens of dreams like this one, and she knew her response just as well.
‘Wow,’ she said, with the anvil-heavy sarcasm that her thirteen-year-old self had injected into everything, ‘you poor thing. Where were you when Shakespeare was doing tragedies? He’d have lapped this right up.’
She’d been proud of that line at the time. It was versatile; she’d managed to trot it out about four times a week back then. She felt an echo of the old satisfaction, and the old anger, but both faded as she finally looked properly at her father.
There was something indistinct about him. His face was clear enough, but no matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t work out what colour his shirt was. His expression flickered jerkily between the same hammy caricatures: anger, disgust and there, visible for just an instant in between the two, helplessness.
‘You’re making my life harder than it needs to be, and I’m not having it any more.’ He was yelling now, but his voice sounded brittle. The anger she could cope with, but the anger was a mask for the fact that he had absolutely no idea what to do with her, and that had terrified and enraged her.
‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’ Clichés were all he had. He acted out parenthood the way he’d seen on telly.
Beth looked at him and just felt sad. This was how she remembered him. Had he ever really looked like this? His hands and forearms and elbows massive, like a gorilla’s, his face red and his eyes lost while he bellowed things at her she couldn’t remember? There was nothing in this memory to suggest this shouting man would ever make her tea, or hold her hand or go out to an abandoned factory armed only with two giant Toblerones and wait for alien hands to drag him through the floor. There was nothing that suggested to Beth she scared him enough for that kind of courage.
‘What happened, honey?’ It was her mother’s voice. Her mum’s face appeared above her, gentler than her dad’s, and kinder, but just as brittle. Her face was set in an embarrassed smile, the same as in the photo Dad kept in the kitchen, but Beth couldn’t work out what her hairstyle was. Was it a bun, or loose down the back of her neck, or cut short in a bob? Was it dark like Beth’s, or greying like it had been in the years before she died?
Fil sat on the edge of the roof, legs pulled into his s
crawny, grey-skinned chest, arms locked over them, head turned ostentatiously to look down into the street below. He kept his distance. They weren’t like him, these sketchy remembrances. They were Beth’s memories of her parents, not their memories of themselves, and Beth knew he felt like he was intruding, seeing her with them.
‘What happened, Beth?’ Mum asked again. ‘You’re a smart girl; we take it as read that you know you’re not allowed to hit people—’
‘Not even Trudi Stahl?’ Beth interjected. It had been a weak attempt at humour when she first uttered it and the years hadn’t been kind to it since then.
‘—not even her. So why did you?’ Her mum’s voice was patchy, like a bad radio signal. The closer she listened to it, the more it sounded like Beth’s own voice. With a little twist of the heart she realised she couldn’t remember what her mum sounded like any more.
‘Something she said,’ Beth mumbled. The old truculence filled her mouth like a bad taste. ‘I just flipped.’
Her mum sighed. ‘Beth, no matter what people say about you, you can’t—’
‘It wasn’t about me,’ Beth protested. ‘It was about a friend of mine. Private stuff, serious stuff, you get me?’ She didn’t add that if anyone should know that sort of stuff about the friend in question, it should be her. ‘And if you think a couple of thrown punches is worse than that, then you really have been out of school too long. It takes a lot longer to come back from those kind of rumours than a hundred bloody broken noses like I gave that little ginger cow.’ She sniffed, enjoying a vague sense of satisfaction. ‘Especially if you’re … gentle like—’
‘Beth? What happened? Are you okay?’ The new voice was urgent and scared. Something sat low in the pit of Beth’s stomach. A familiar figure was running across the gravel roof towards her.
Pen dropped to her knees beside Beth. Her parents didn’t react to her at all, but then, they hadn’t reacted to each other. Pen’s hand slipped in to cradle Beth’s head. Her face was solid, clear in every detail. Of course it would be, Beth thought. I knew her better than I knew anyone.
‘Are you okay? How on earth did you get here?’ Pen asked.
‘I hit Trudi Stahl,’ Beth confessed with a shrug that was more pride than embarrassment. The city around her echoed her voice.
Pen wrinkled her brow in confusion. Her face was latticed in wire and crisscrossed with scars. The hands that smoothed the hair out of Beth’s eyes were striped in painful-looking black-red burns. Beth tried to remember when Pen had got those burns, but for the life of her she couldn’t.
‘Trudi Stahl?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about, B?’
And then Beth was confused too, because she’d never told Pen about that fight, or the reason for it. Pen would have worried herself sick if she’d known about those rumours. Beth felt a swell of terrible shame as she looked at the scars that adorned her best friend’s memory. Heat beat down from the sky. Behind Pen’s head, it wasn’t grey any more; it was a brilliant, burning blue.
‘I tried.’ The shame twisting her gut was so strong it was hard to keep looking, but she managed. You have to look at the things you make, she thought. ‘I tried but I screwed up.’
‘It’s okay, Beth. Just tell me what happened.’
‘We woke the River,’ Beth confessed. ‘It’s destroying the City – everyone. Everything.’
Pen’s expression changed and she looked out towards the horizon. ‘Yeah, so I see. That was rash.’
‘Rash’s where I excel.’
‘No doubt.’ Pen smiled, but she sounded scared.
Beth shook her head, trying with an act of will to remember Pen happy, not afraid. The way Pen would have wanted her to.
‘Is there any way to stop it?’ Pen asked.
Beth pushed herself up onto one elbow, and put a hand on Pen’s shoulder. This wasn’t exactly a secret, but if she confided it like one, it might feel like it.
‘The River – Johnny made a mind for it,’ she said, ‘all across one wall of his stores. But it didn’t react the way he thought it would.’
Pen’s expression changed. She gripped Beth’s shoulder. ‘What did you say?’
‘They made a mind,’ Beth started, but it was no good. She couldn’t look any more. This memory of Pen was scarred and scared and she couldn’t change it, couldn’t seem to hold all the complexity of Pen in her mind at once. It felt like letting her down to remember her that way. She turned her head aside, and closed her eyes. ‘Mind made up,’ she mumbled. It almost made sense to her. ‘Made up mind.’
‘Beth!’ Pen called to her, but Beth wouldn’t open her eyes; she couldn’t make herself open them.
‘Beth!’
‘Beth!’ Pen shook Beth by the shoulders, but she just squirmed from side to side and dug herself further into the shale, her eyes screwed up close like a child’s. Pen put a hand to her forehead and swore under her breath. The heat coming off Beth’s street-laced skin was ferocious.
Oscar hissed and crackled, hovering anxiously overhead. Pen looked up at him. ‘I don’t know, Oscar,’ she said. ‘I don’t know’. She felt oddly guilty when she admitted that, like she was welching on a bargain with him. She felt like the least she could do for him was wake Beth up – after all, the Sewermander had saved her life.
She thought back to Canada Square; the heat pressing in like suffocating cloth; the sweat soaking her headscarf. Again and again, she’d sent the wire’s coils out, and again and again they’d sprung back in pain: the Great Fire burned hotter than anything, too hot for them to touch. But just when she’d given up, they’d gained purchase around Oscar’s flaming claws and she’d been yanked above the battlefield, dangling by one wire from the Sewermander like a kid on a kite string; he burned hot enough to blacken the wire, but not to melt it.
Of course – she flexed her hands, wincing at the burns that crisscrossed the skin on them – wire was also an excellent conductor of heat.
Boom. To the west, the River levelled another building, hitting it like a solid shockwave. It was getting closer; the destruction was getting louder. She ran to the edge of the cliff and searched the city below for the source of the sound. Boom. The River surged into the side of the tilting Olympic stadium, glittering in the sun. Steel and concrete gave before it like cardboard and in its wake the Thames left only a fine-ground moraine, like a glacier’s trail.
The River’s destroying everything. Pen’s mouth dried as she tracked its trajectory: the dome of St Paul’s was directly in its path, so massive and so intact it was almost taunting the River. She thought of the great mass of homeless people she’d sent into Reach’s embrace; could they still be there? Might they, she dared to hope, have fled?
Fled where, Pen? The voice inside her was merciless. You told them they’d be safe there, and it was true: the Fire never touched them. As far as they know, it’s still a sanctuary. If you were them you’d cling to that place until the last possible moment, until the Apocalypse was right at the door. You’d keep your faith in the one person who seemed to understand what the hell had happened to your world.
And by the time they worked out what a mistake that was, it would be too late.
Faith. Her lip twisted and she looked down at Beth. You never understood it.
‘Johnny made it a mind?’ She all but spat the words as she looked across at the pitch-black skeleton slumped on the shale a few yards away. He kept pushing himself back up the rock he was leaning against, only to slide back down it, smearing oil as the shingle under his hips subsided.
‘Is that true? Is that what you did?’
Air hissed between Johnny Naphtha’s teeth and bubbled the oil that covered them. It might have been the back end of a ‘Yesss’ or it might have been nothing at all. Either way he didn’t protest as the wire strand snaked under his arms, cinched in tight about his ribs and lifted him into the air.
Pen laid Beth’s head carefully back down onto the beach. She was unconscious again, and Pen wasn’t sure the last time she’d bee
n otherwise. She felt like a corkscrew was being turned in her guts. She wanted to stay; even though she knew there was nothing she could do for Beth, she wanted to stay – just in case. Just so she wasn’t alone.
‘Oscar,’ she called upwards, ‘look after her.’ The Sewermander swooped and crackled. He probably didn’t understand her, but she knew he would never have done anything else.
She faced St Paul’s, which loomed in front of her like a warhead, breaching London’s shattered carcase. All that was left was to put one foot in front of the other.
‘They made it a mind.’
Pen started to run.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
She took the first two steps with her own feet and then wire tendrils planted themselves in front of her, flexing as they took her weight and she bounded down the dry riverbed on legs of coiled steel. Above her, on the end of the wire that bound him, the black skeleton that was Johnny Naphtha snapped and flailed in the air like some macabre flag.
Streets whipped past and air rushed over her face, freezing her lips. Pen could barely breathe. Everything was a blur but what lay dead ahead: St Paul’s. They scrambled over rooftops, the Mistress’ barbs screeching on the tiles like cats’ claws. The haste that thrummed through the wire matched Pen’s own; the Mistress whined a frantic doggerel, over and over:
Master! Master!
Must go faster!
The cathedral was close now, and Pen could see the cranes around it were still moving. Reach – a part of him at least – had survived the Great Fire. The Crane King awaited them, or the flood, whichever got there first.
They careened to the base of Ludgate Hill. London’s convulsions had dragged it up, making it taller than ever. They straddled a toppled tower block and sprang from there into the next road. One wire foot punctured the roof of a red phone box, another came down in the next street along.