Beth gasped and her heart felt like a balloon, inflated to dangerous levels with euphoria. A sudden raw awareness hit her: everyone was watching her. They were still looking at her as an outsider, but no longer as an interloper.
God
, she thought dazedly,
they
know
what I’m saying is right.
Under their bravado, their
denial
, the Blankleits were deeply afraid. What had Fil said? The stronger Reach got, the scareder people became …
I guess it’s not hard to become a leader
, she thought.
All you have to do is step forward while everyone else’s looking for a place to run to.
At this point, Beth thought wryly, they’d probably follow a sock-puppet if it offered them a way out – as long as it wasn’t known for
fraternising
with their Amberglow enemies.
One by one, other glowing men drifted from the crowd towards them. Lucien kept protesting, flashing brighter and brighter, but Beth saw the mistake he was making: by shouting, he was taking her seriously, and that gave the others permission to take her seriously too.
A tall, muscular Blankleit and a lanky, sharp-eyed one
took each other’s shoulders. They whispered to each other in soft flickers, then nodded and embraced. They walked over to the humans and each shook first Fil’s and then Beth’s hand. Apparently they came as a pair.
‘So,’ Beth barely moved her lips as she whispered, ‘can I do the talking next time?’
Tower blocks reared up around the St Paul’s Demolition Fields, black against the City’s incomplete darkness. They formed a perimeter of sorts around Reach’s stronghold, with a crooked crane looming over every alley or lane that led in.
Electra paced back and forth along the roof of a corner shop, blazing her heart out against the night. She felt trapped, like the entire city was her cage, and only the acre of land that surrounded the Cathedral was freedom – the acre sitting tauntingly beyond her, in the palm of the Crane King’s hand, where the Wire Mistress and her bleeding prey had slunk off to.
Reach’s servant had led her a harum-scarum chase across London. She’d hurled herself bodily after it with her hands and fields and feet, scrambling over rotten garden fences, leaving scorched footprints on neatly tended lawns. They’d climbed to the rooftops under the moon. The Wire Mistress’ barbs made it surer on the tiles and it squeezed more and more speed from its host. The fleshgirl wept and made
shapeless moans with her punctured tongue, and she obeyed.
Lec had chased it mile after mile, fuelled by a hundred thousand volts of hatred, and only when the cranes had appeared suddenly over the rooftops had she skidded to a stop. Now she raged and spat sparks. For one insane moment she thought she might leap from the roof and charge, cranes or no cranes, but even in her anger she knew exactly how that would end: with Reach’s metal claw turning, the chain hissing over pulleys, the rusting hook swinging in fast, bringing pain and blood, and then nothing at all.
If the Crane King kills you
, she glimmered to herself, phrasing the light as simply and carefully as though she were talking to an infant,
the Wire Mistress escapes.
She felt the last warmth of her momentum leave her and in its wake, a chill crept in that didn’t belong to the night. Lec hunkered down on the tiles, staring into space with tear-scorched eyes. There was a sensation in her stomach of standing on a precipice, as if one step forward would bring an endless fall into darkness. She’d felt something like it before, she realised, although with her sisters dead, comparing it to anything felt like a betrayal.
The feeling dredged up a memory: standing outside the Stepney warehouse on the very last night of the Spectrum War, her hand flat against the wood of the door. She was barely more than a kindling, but the Tel-Nox clan blooded its children early. She was just a scared little girl trying desperately to remember the steps of her barely practised
war-waltz, her gut heavy with the knowledge that if she stumbled, she was dead, and not just her, but the other girls behind her too.
But there’d been no marauding horde of Whities behind that door, just dim shapes that turned out to be glass bodies, stacked head-to-toe alongside the walls with horrible neatness. In death they shone no colour, so it wasn’t until Luma had recognised her cousin that they knew they were theirs. The Whities had retreated, but they’d killed their prisoners first. The young Sodiumites had looked down at their sisters and cousins and aunts, at the pucker-burn marks around the holes in their foreheads where their captors had dripped the water through. At that moment Lec had really understood what her grandmother meant when she told her you couldn’t trust the Whities, or Blankleits, or whatever name they went by. They were pale, treacherous killers.
She thought of Filius, capering absurdly around her lamppost, trying to protect the Whitey that had trespassed there, and the flash of annoyance that swept over her surprised her so much she almost fell off the roof. Not that she wasn’t used to being annoyed by Filius – wanting to wring his scrawny neck was one of the anchors of their friendship – but she felt so charred and used-up that she was a little shocked she had the energy to be irritated with him.
Still, if she was honest, the urge to smack the little guttersnipe God around the ear was comforting. He’d embarrassed her in front of her sisters, and many a Streetlamp
Daughter less proud than her would’ve danced a lethal measure for that – or at least that’s what she’d tell him.
But then he was always doing thoughtless things like that. When they were really tiny it had rained and he’d run straight out into it and Lec’s heart had almost sparked out. She’d thought the water would kill him, like it would her, and as she’d imagined it, it had felt like the fright would shatter her.
That same vein-darkening, skin-chilling fear entered her now; fear at the memory of the Wire Mistress flexing around the flesh of her new host, squeezing her skin obscenely through the gaps in the steel, and at the way she had uncurled the poor girl’s finger and forced her to ask
Where is he?
The creature had destroyed her family. Now it wanted to do the same to a thoughtless, hopelessly naïve boy with no sense of rhythm, always half a beat too late. A boy who was the only living thing left she cared about.
An empty streetlamp poked up above the roofscape a couple of houses away. The bulb was cramped and old-fashioned, but Electra squirmed inside anyway. She couldn’t get comfortable, but she flexed her fingertips and then, gradually, she began to push her fields outwards. She stretched the magnetism further and further, groping with it over the textures of brick and concrete and windowglass, slipping it over the mouths of alleys and doorways and manhole covers until at last she’d covered every opening into the Demolition Fields she possibly could. Her muscles
tingled. She knew she couldn’t burn this bright for long. In time that tingle would become an ache, then the ache would start burning until she was in exhausted agony, but this was all she could think of to do.
The magnetic blanket she draped over Reach’s kingdom was so thin that a wireworm could push through it and not even feel it, but Electra would perceive the ripple when the field was broken. She’d know when and where her prey had emerged.
She closed her eyes as exhaustion washed through her. Somewhere beyond the low rubble of London’s horizon the daylamp was coming, but she wouldn’t sleep, not while the glittering pieces of her family waited behind her eyelids. The creature that had shattered them would come hunting again, sooner or later, seeking the son of the streets.
It would be ready to kill.
And so would she.
Beth and Fil looked at their new recruits. A hundred walking lightbulbs, ragged and disorganised, looked back.
For a moment the street prince flinched under their gaze. Then he drew himself up and reached for his spear.
‘Victor, will you hang around?’ he asked. ‘Help us translate?’
‘Da.’
‘We won’t be taking you away from anything important?’ Beth put in. She’d taken a liking to the old Russian.
He smirked under his beard, stepped out of his rumpled sleepingbag and scuffed his shoe over the cobbles, sweeping a crisp packet out of the way. ‘I think housework can wait for few days.’
Beth laughed, then a thought struck her. She rummaged in her backpack for her torch and offered it to Victor.
‘Can you use this to talk to them?’ she asked. ‘In their language I mean?’
Victor snapped the light on and off in a strange syncopated pattern a couple of times. The nearest Blankleit
nodded and flashed a response. The tramp pursed his lips.
‘Da,’ he said.
Fil gave Beth a quizzical look. ‘What made you do that?’ he asked.
‘I— I just thought it’d be nice, you know, for us to talk to ’em in their own lingo, you know, more respectful.’
He gave her a small half-smile, and Beth could see he was trying to look amused. She thought she could see a hint of admiration there too.
Victor grinned broadly and slapped Beth on the back. ‘You are sweet girl, I come to make sure you not get too horribly killed.’
Beth was jubilant. Lucien caught her eye and she did a small air-punch for his benefit, which he loftily ignored. It didn’t matter that there were only a hundred of them; what mattered was that
she’d
won them over. She was proving she belonged here in this strange city.
As Fil led them into the maze of alleyways, the glare of the Blankleits sprang back at them off the bricks, mingling with their shadows: soldiers of light and darkness on the march. Small sounds – London sounds: the growl of a night bus down a deserted road, drunken whoops, bass thumping – echoed distantly. They walked a fine tracery of reality inlaid in the streets. It was a groove worn by centuries of magic, a groove anyone might stumble into.
Anyone might
, Beth thought,
but
I
did.
Victor prattled as they walked, ‘I was colonel in KGB. No worry, I have this rabble kicked into shape in no time.’
‘KGB?’ Beth said. ‘I thought you were in the army.’
‘Was in both, my little Tsarina, in Moscow—’
‘You said St Petersburg.’
‘Moskva first.’
‘You in the Russian Ballet and all?’ Beth asked, suddenly sceptical.
‘
Niet
, but had girlfriend once who was.’
Beth laughed at the tramp in his musty greatcoat. ‘This girlfriend, was she a much prettier sane girl?’ she asked.
‘Prettier,
da
. Sane,
niet
, crazy as squid in vodka. All ballerinas are.’ He chuckled.
They turned onto a narrow road lined with small steel-shuttered windows and battered stairwell doors. Something about it nagged her, striking a dim spark of recognition off the inside of her head, something more than the sense of anonymous familiarity that she got from almost every London street. Then they passed a graffiti’d wall by a corner shop and all of sudden she knew why.
She stopped and stared. Nestled unassumingly in amongst the brighter, brasher graffiti was a patch of writing in black marker pen, so badly faded that only three letters were still legible:
o n e.
‘What’cha looking at?’ Fil came strolling up behind. ‘One? One what?’
A little ‘oh’ slipped from Beth’s lips. She felt like someone
had slid a fine blade into her chest. It didn’t say ‘one’, not really. She knew exactly what had been written there.
She’d watched Pen do it.
It had been one of those warm September afternoons that summer drags behind it like a lame leg. The sun had pounded down from an infinite sky, and the street had smelled of trees and baking pavements. The two of them had sat on the wall, kicking their heels and watching traffic as they listened to the radio on Pen’s phone, one set of earphones between both of them, alternately singing along and cracking up.
The tracks switched, a ballad crackled through.
‘
You saved me!
’ Beth had crooned daftly into the empty air, recognising the tune, ‘
Girl, your love saved my liiiife—
’
She’d sensed Pen’s mood as it went, an instant before the slim Pakistani girl snorted and yanked the earphone free. ‘What a load of bollocks,’ she’d said.
Beth had sighed and snapped the ring-pull on a can of Coke. There was pretty much only one thing that could get Pen’s mouth into the same postcode as a swearword, even one as mild as that. And if they were having this conversation again, Beth was going to need caffeine.
‘Bollocks love songs with bollocks lyrics, that mean
bollocks
all!’ Pen snapped.
‘Leon ignored you again, huh?’
‘No.’ After a few seconds silence Pen conceded, ‘Well, okay, so maybe he did kind of blank me after assembly, but—’
‘Pen, you could just ask him out – I mean, I know it’d lead to the eternal shaming of your ancestors, or whatever. But at least it would get it over with.’
‘This isn’t about
Leon
!’ Pen had protested hotly. ‘It’s just – “
you saved my life
” – Seriously? Who talks about being in love like that? Love isn’t the NHS or the bloody Samaritans; it’s not about saving lives. Love isn’t about keeping people
whole
. It’s—’ She tailed off, flailing her hands in disgust.
Beth gestured for her to go on. She didn’t often get a chance to hear Pen rant, and it was kind of entertaining.
But a thoughtful frown had crossed Pen’s face and instead of speaking she’d pulled a marker pen from her pocket. She’d jumped off the wall and scrawled on it:
The one you love is the one who breaks you
The one you owe, and the one you own
The one who shatters and remakes you
Sets you crooked as a broken bone.
‘
It’s more like that,’ she’d said at last, lamely.