Beth had read it, and promptly burst out laughing. ‘That’s cheery. Pen, if Leon’s making you feel like—’
‘It’s
not
about
Leon
,’ Pen had insisted again, her voice hard. She’d blushed deeply, not meeting Beth’s eye. It was only now that Beth realised she should have stopped laughing then.
The image in Beth’s mind changed to the headmistress’
office, to Pen hugging herself tight, like her arms were all that held her together. Like she’d been shattered and needed someone to remake her.
And Beth had been too full of fury to even try.
She shook her head hard, bringing herself back to now and the autumn night, their regiment of glowing glass soldiers. Their war.
She looked at Fil. ‘My best mate wrote it.’ She was a little surprised at the tears she was sniffing back. ‘It doesn’t say “one”. It’s the end of this poem, it says—’
But he wasn’t listening, he was looking past her, and so was everyone else.
A tall figure was coming up the middle of the deserted road towards them, past the empty restaurants and the window displays of gaudy, mile-high shoes. It lurched with a peculiar, rounded gait, as though one leg was a lot shorter than the other. It was dropping rubbish; scraps trailed behind it like it was shedding them. The figure was too far away to see clearly, especially with the flaring of the Blankleits in her eyes, but the
smell …
Beth looked at Fil. His nostrils twitched as an odour of rotting fruit and mildew gusted up the street. He didn’t take his eyes off the man-figure as it stumped into the light. She swallowed hard; she’d never seen the figure before but she knew who it was.
‘Filius.’ The garbage-built man’s voice was weak, squeezed from punctured football lungs. ‘I’m so proud of you.’ Gutterglass tottered forward two more steps, then his lips
slipped across each other, giving his jaw a dislocated look. An eggshell slipped from his eyesocket. His body disintegrated from the head down, collapsing into a heap of rubbish on the tarmac.
Down the roads of roof-slate, over battlements of brick,
My lord wants you to come to him, quick! quick! quick!
Across the Demolition Fields, where dozers plough the dead,
Your fleshy body through the cracks, thread! thread! thread!
Scale the tower, kiss the glass,
Break the wood and burn the grass.
Gaze across the barren beauty, Cranes construct and do their duty.
Pen’s finger came away from the wall, the metal barb that surmounted it was caked in dust. She stared at the verse she’d carved – but had
she
written that, or had
it
, the wirething that had enveloped her? She was terrified and exhausted, but she couldn’t cry any more.
She was so tired that without the wire holding her up she’d have fallen. The metal thorns had goaded her across rooftops and through backyards and down streets until
the office blocks had reared up around her like the sides of a gorge. She’d barrelled into pedestrians, knocking them flying. One old woman had stared up in horror at her face, but the wire pushed her on so fast that she’d barely glimpsed herself in passing windows – torn nostrils, ripped cheeks, bloody teeth – before she went barrelling on.
A wall had reared up in front of her and she’d ducked under a lintel and through doorways, clambering through tiny spaces into a labyrinth of tumbled-down concrete. The air stank of wet cement and she’d wriggled and wormed her way through in silence.
Once the wire had gone suddenly still, freezing her in the dark, and Pen forgot herself and screamed. Her lips tore on the barbs and blood ran back down her throat. She mewled around her ripped tongue, afraid she was being kept here to die, but no, the wire twitched and shifted, piercing her skin in a new configuration, and resumed its sprint.
It was only when a police siren wailed far below that she realised how high she’d climbed.
She’d burst out onto the top floor of a half-built tower. The concrete was bare, and one wall was missing. All that separated her from the construction site below was a thin tarpaulin and five hundred feet of empty air. Wind whistled and the tarp snapped aside.
Neon lights mounted on cranes like eyes on stalks turned on her, bleaching her skin bone-white, whiter than a white girl. Her blood, where it caked the barbs in her arms, was black.
Pen could feel herself slipping away. She wanted to vanish into herself, to feel nothing, to be dead – it would be so much easier. She wanted to close her eyes, so much …
She started to let her eyelids drop, but a barb caressed the water on her eyeball, oh so lightly. She found new reserves of fear to keep them open.
The wire wanted her attention.
Machines raged in the building site, even in the depth of the night: cranes whirred, metal screeched on metal; bulldozers roared, and there was the distant, dreadful note of hammers.
Why?
She breathed the word up into her throat and felt her arm come up again. Pen was grateful – she didn’t want to be grateful to it, but she felt the hot wave of relief wash through her anyway: relief, because it didn’t seize her tongue and squeeze her like an accordion to make her answer her own question. Instead it took her hand and scratched its answer in the dirt.
The crane’s clear cry, glass and steel
In the shaking earth you feel
Hear him, Hear him
Love and fear him.
Blessed, abased in holy waste.
Pen didn’t understand. Frustrated breaths wheezed out of her nose. Was the wire mocking her with these stupid rhymes? How did it know about her poetry?
Are you in my mind?
The idea twisted her into even tighter panic. It was easy to believe, as the wire bent her neck to stare at its nonsense verse, that it was leaching her thoughts through her scalp, that even her mind was within the barbs’ reach.
Reach.
A scream of steel rent the air, a screech that echoed her own thoughts.
Reach.
The tower shook. A voice formed at the edges of all of the sounds carried on the tongue of the wind: bulldozers and jackhammers and the crackle of distant radios.
The barbed wire gripped Pen tighter and she gasped. The barbs let her lips open and teased along her tongue. The words she’d scrawled stood out starkly on the naked wall.
‘Hear him,’ she whispered. ‘Hear him. Love and fear him.’
She looked down at the building site, a hive of frenzied construction and destruction, and felt herself retch. Cranes turned and diggers chewed at the earth like hungry dogs. Echoes crashed back off half-born architecture. Even from here she could see none of the machines had a human controller, but it wasn’t this that sickened her. It was the fact that things were
dying
down there.
Screams rang out in the shriek of steel on rubble. She blinked, and in an instant she perceived the foundations and exposed pipes as bodies and bones. She saw the digger’s mouths opening wounds. These were
people
– maybe not flesh and blood, but people nonetheless, like the glass
woman who’d tried to help her. People made of the city itself.
From up here she could see patches of black across London, hidden amongst the winking lights: building sites, demolition sites – dozens upon dozens of killing fields: a hidden holocaust.
Listen.
She didn’t know where the thought came from.
Needle-points squeezed into her chest and the breath rushed out of her. The wire exoskeleton bent into a ragged S-shape and she collapsed, coughing, onto her knees. Cold air stung her eyeballs. At the edge of her vision she could see her finger, scratching a word onto the floor.
‘
I am Reach.
’ The voice sang in the screech of the cranes.
The word was next to her eyeball.
Listen.
Fil ran forward, unnaturally fast, his hands darting into the rain of rubbish as it fell. He caught some – a chunk of plaster in the vague shape of a brain, a mouldy carrot – and let the rest bounce off the cobbles. He crooked his ankle under the eggshells, braking their momentum so they tumbled whole onto the ground.
Beth raced over to help, but the rubbish and insects flooded out in a puddle under her feet, the stench of rotting things washed up at her and her stomach flipped over. Disgruntled flies batted her cheeks.
‘Mind his eye!’ Fil barked and she jerked her foot instinctively, just missing crushing the fallen eggshell. ‘What you trying to do, blind him?’ he snapped, his grey skin pale. ‘Give it here.’
She bent and passed it over. Rodents and beetles scurried through the debris. One moment they looked like they were pulling the stuff back into some semblance of a body; the next, they had forgotten themselves and turned on each other, hissing. A body-like heat radiated out from the pile.
Fil began to rearrange the rubbish, helping the vermin. For a moment Beth watched, perplexed, then she got it. It was like a game of make-believe surgery, building Gutterglass from the rubbish, placing drinking straws that could be ribs over the bicycle-pump heart. She joined in. The droplets of sour-milk sweat on the patient made it feel real.
‘Is wounded?’ Victor stumped over. ‘Can help; was medic in the Spetsnaz—’ He tailed off when he saw what they were doing, and then he rummaged around in the scattered trash and yanked out a roll of discarded wrapping paper.
‘Here, is good for forearm.’
Fil took it with a curt nod; they had a torso, a head and one arm now, and the deflated-football lungs were stuttering, starting to breath again. Rubbish-juice sprayed like saliva over them as he placed a hand atop the chest, counting under his breath. He swore.
‘He needs energy. Victor, go through the bins, grab any food you can find – the rottener the better.’
‘The rottener the better?’ Beth asked as the old man hurried off.
‘Easier to break down,’ he muttered tersely. ‘He needs all the help he can get right now.’
Victor returned with a double-handful of slimy vegetables and a half-jar of mouldy mayonnaise. Fil fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a small glass vial and sprinkled a few drops of liquid on each, then poured the food directly
into the black-sack belly. Noses twitched, antennae wavered and the vermin seethed in around it. Once they’d eaten, they returned with renewed purpose to the task of pulling the rubbish spirit back together. His shape emerged from the little pile of landfill as suddenly as a Magic Eye picture.
Gradually his breathing began to ease and some of the tension left Fil’s face. He slipped a hand under his teacher’s filthy hair and gently tilted his head up. ‘Glas, what happened?’ he murmured.
For a while it was all Gutterglass could do to breathe. His paper lips opened and shut on nothing. Finally he uttered one word in a dry whisper: ‘
Reach
.’
Fil’s knuckles paled slightly where they gripped the old man’s hair. ‘Reach?’
Gutterglass whispered, ‘He knows about—’ With tremendous effort, he sat up and looked at the Blankleits, who were glowing back at him sullenly, uncertain.
‘He knows what you’re doing,’ Gutterglass concluded. Bugs shifted subtly under cardboard and suddenly the pride shone out through the patchwork skin. ‘Filius, look what you’re doing: you’re finally growing up,’ he croaked happily. ‘I’m so proud of you.’
Beth could have sworn Fil actually blushed. ‘Well,’ he mumbled, ‘they’re only a start. I can really see us rocking up at the Demolition Fields with a hundred Whities and a few reflections. “Oi, Crane Face, quake in the face of my awesome army!” I just hope it doesn’t rain.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘They’re not even trained yet, but—’
Gutterglass was staring up at him, an oil-like film stretching between his eggshells. He seemed to be looking past his shoulder. Or not looking at all.
‘Glas!’ Fil yelled. Fear made him warble. ‘Glas, stay with us!’
Gutterglass’ head snapped around, eggshell-eyes stretched wide. ‘They’ll have to do, child,’ he whispered. ‘They’ll have to learn fast.’
‘Glas, what are you talking about?’
Beth felt the silence before he answered. ‘It followed me – it hid on the buildings, Filius.’ His tone was beseeching. Rich garbage air gusted from his mouth. ‘I
tried
,’ Glas said again, ‘I tried but it – it
mauled
me.’
‘Glas, what are you
saying
?’
The white inside of Glas’ eggshell eyes glowed in the Blankleit glare. ‘
Scaffwolf
,’ he breathed.
A tiny tremor of shock ran through Fil; Beth was sure no one else had noticed it. Then the muscles in his shoulders and his arms relaxed, became visibly supple, and his grip on his spear tightened. His face took on the same cocky tension it had when Beth had first met him. Her heart tightened in her chest.
He was gearing up for a fight.
‘Victor, mate?’
‘Da.’
‘Be a champion and get our Christmas tree cousins ready for a scrap.’
Victor flashed his torch imperiously. The Blankleits
milled around, their faces uncertain. A couple flashed questions back.
‘They want to know what comes.’
As if in answer, a sound carried over the city: a clattering, ringing sound like an iron landslide.
‘Tell them it’s worse than an Amberglow scalping party.’
The Blankleits fanned out with Fil at the centre of their rough semicircle, crouching over Gutterglass. Beth stood behind him, her knees sagging. She was sweating despite the chill of the night, alternately feeling very hot and very cold.
‘Um, Fil?’ she said. Her voice was shrill. ‘What should I, you know? What do you want me to—?’ She tailed off as the sound of tumbling metal drew closer. It concentrated itself into a rhythm, focused knots of ringing. She caught sight of a flicker of motion above the slates to the right: something vast and fast and grey.