He lifted his spear from the ground and swept it around in a smooth arc, as if following the path of something hidden behind the buildings.
The hollow ringing was deafening now, enough to smash glass and burst eardrums.
How?
Beth wondered:
how could it be that loud and not be on them?
She twisted left and right, but she couldn’t see it.
Suddenly, chillingly close, came a low metallic howl.
Scaffwolf.
Steel screamed around the corner. Beth hurled herself to the ground, feeling the wind of its passing. Metal pipes
whirled over her at decapitation-height, catching a Blankleit and shattering him into phosphorescent powder. A sooty man-shape burnt on her retinas for an instant and then was gone.
The world was spinning metal and broken glass and sickening howling. Something grabbed Beth by the hood and yanked her back. A steel paw clanged off the cobbles where her head had been.
The Scaffwolf bayed. She saw it and heard it and felt it in her gut. A blunt muzzle formed by a skeleton of pipes emerged from an unformed body, a cloud of scaffolding whirling in constant, chaotic motion. Jaws creaked on hinges as they snapped, and clouds of blood-red rust sprayed from flaring nostrils. As Beth watched, rods spun and locked into place and a paw the size of her head lashed out, shattering the life from another lightbulb man.
‘Victor!’ Fil yelled over the screeching metal, ‘we have to fall back!’
The old man was dancing a strange jig, trying to dodge the rain of metal. ‘Da, you
think
?’
The Scaffwolf snapped at them with jagged teeth and sharpened screws and Fil hauled Beth backwards. Her entire body rang with the impact as the jaws slammed shut on empty air. She shoved herself upright and together they ran for a narrow lane. Gutterglass crawled and spilled and swarmed under her feet.
They wormed their way into the narrow gap in the bricks, Blankleits scrambling after them. Mannequins watched
dully from a shop window and it took Beth a second to realise that the shop was set into a wall at the back of the lane. Panic rose in her throat.
The lane was a cul-de-sac.
Everything shuddered as the wolf pounced. Its toes gouged the cobbles at the mouth of the lane. It was huge, its shoulders wider than the alley. The Scaffwolf rammed against the buildings, baying and snapping. Brickdust flowed like snow from the scarred walls. Its head extended nine feet into the alley, but it could come no further. It snarled in frustration; the sound was like a braking truck.
Beth pushed out breath as hysterical relief washed through her. She looked at Fil for reassurance, but she found none. His knuckles were pale around his railing and his face taut with fear.
Cogs whirred and nuts loosened. There was a
shinking
sound and oiled struts slid closer together as she watched. The muzzle at the mouth of the lane grew narrower, the neck and shoulders collapsing towards one another. The wolf shrank just enough to slide into the alley and sprang right at them.
Fil yelled, ‘
Victor!
’ and the old tramp barked something in Russian. His light flashed and the Blankleits flared in response. Their light, springing back off the belly of the wolf, nearly blinded her. The Scaffwolf slowed down in midair. It sank sluggishly and landed just short of them, growling and shaking its head from side to side.
Beth’s back was pressed to the glass shop front. Around
her the Blankleits’ hands were extended towards the beast: a forest of glass arms with incandescent veins. The fine hairs were standing up on Beth’s skin. The Blankleits were pushing out some kind of force at the wolf.
Beth’s head whirled. She felt giddy.
How?
She couldn’t breathe.
How?
The glass men had slowed the beast, but they hadn’t stopped it. Slowly, inexorably, it placed one paw in front of the other, its metal neck bent against the invisible power they projected.
A glass man stood transfixed in its path: the round one, the first one to sign up. Beth wished suddenly that she knew his name. The wolf loomed over him, jaws hanging open, slavering rust. Other Lampmen stepped forward. She could see every filament straining, but they couldn’t stop it.
Every light flashed, but Beth’s scream was the only sound as the wolf’s jaws crunched shut.
It turned to face her, a tiny bit quicker now with one of its enemies dead. Its feet rang off the street as it loped towards her with casual malice. The whistling of its breath echoed all around, filling the alley. As she cast around for some sort of weapon she saw a Blankleit collapse, exhausted.
Something grey blurred past her. Faster than a hummingbird’s wing, Fil launched himself at the beast.
His spear stopped before he did, torn from his grasp by the same magnetism that had slowed the wolf, and he
caught the lower jaw and swung up like an acrobat, landing precariously on the beast’s nose. The Scaffwolf lashed its head furiously but he windmilled his arms and somehow kept his balance.
Beth gasped and breathed again.
‘
Filius
—’ The voice was a wet hiss of air. Gutterglass sounded horrified. He tried to accrete towards his ward, the wrapping paper arm outstretched.
‘Beth!’ Fil snapped, his concentration fierce, ‘hold him there!’
Beth threw herself down hard, clawing at the rubbish. Rats hissed wildly and bit her and the beetles scurried through her hair, but she clung onto the garbage body and Gutterglass could not escape her.
‘Hold it!’ he cried, crouched down like a surfer. His head was bent over as though he was listening for something. A look of incredulous hope emerged onto his face. ‘Hold it, that’s good, lads,’ he cried. ‘Hold it now!’
The Blankleits had gathered around the sides of the wolf. They stood now, palms out, hemming it in with their force. The animal was torn between smashing them and shaking loose the boy who hung from its neck, taunting it. The spear rotated slowly in the air in front of the Scaffwolf, like bait. The animal’s breath whistled through its pipes, echoing off the narrow alley walls.
Another whistle sounded as if in answer, higher-pitched, a sound that seemed to come from inside the bricks of the buildings themselves. A heavy, churning rhythm started
shaking the ground. An electric fear paralysed Beth.
Don’t wolves hunt in packs?
‘Hold it!’ Fil was screaming now. ‘Hold it there!’
The whistling from the buildings grew louder, and the ground shuddered in a syncopated rhythm:
Thrum-clatter-clatter.
Beth had heard that sound before.
Maybe it blames you for its mauling
, she thought suddenly.
Maybe what it wants is payback—
‘Hold it!’ Fil was hanging by one hand from the wolf’s shoulder and as it turned and snapped at him its teeth sliced the air inches from his face. His fingers slipped on the metal. He was going to fall—
Beth couldn’t watch; she turned her head away and gazed sightlessly into the shop window. The dead gaze of the mannequins met hers, and behind them …
Behind the glass, two tiny pinpricks of light were growing.
‘Hold it! Hold it!’
Thrum-clatter-clatter-thrum-clatter-clatter-thrum-clatter-clatter—
The points of light in the window swelled into headlamps and wind whipped Beth’s hair against her forehead. The whistling climbed to a shriek.
‘Hold it,’ His voice was frantic but triumphant: ‘
Hold it!
’
The shop window exploded.
Beth curled into a ball as shattered glass rained down. Hot pain flared where it lacerated her. Dead straight grooves like tracks ripped through the cobbles – but they swerved
around
her. Lights rushed past barely an inch from her head.
For an instant, she saw it,
her
Railwraith – but it looked vague, weaker than she remembered.
It can’t survive away from the tracks
; that’s what Fil had said. It was already dying. But she looked in through its windows and saw its ghostly passengers: sewing and chattering and texting: every face was fiercely determined.
Fil leapt, snatching his spear from the air, as the Railwraith rushed towards the wolf’s empty eyesockets.
Metal screamed for a long second, then silence.
Beth touched her ear and felt something wet. She was shivering, she realised. She rose to her knees, and fell straight back. Twisted scaffolding filled the alley, glowing red-hot and seething with smoke. A steamwhistle cry ghosted from the air.
Beth twitched her toes. They responded, so she tried to stand again, and this time she made less of a hash of it.
Fil lay were he’d been cast against a wall. His skin was livid with cuts, but he was sitting up before Beth reached him. His eyes were glazed and his nose had been snapped hard to the right. His grin was crooked. ‘Glas?’ he asked.
Beth groped for the eggshells in her hoodie pocket. They were whole. She set them down and after a second rats and worms and beetles started writhing out of the brickwork, building their master around them.
Gutterglass could barely stand. Fil had to support him. ‘My my,’ he murmured. ‘What a mess.’
His eggshell eyes fell on Beth and a little rill of shock went through her. ‘Nicely taken,’ he said, and pointed at his eyes. A grimace crossed his garbage face. ‘Filius,’ he murmured, ‘I need to talk to you alone.’ Leaning heavily on Fil, he lurched out of the lane.
The alley had been badly damaged: windows smashed, stone and brickwork clawed. At the mouth Beth could see Victor, semaphoring to the crowd of Blankleits with her torch. Their glow reached back into the cul-de-sac, and Beth could see that barely half of them had survived. The rest were dust and burn-marks on the ground.
Beth staggered in amongst the wreckage of the wolf. There was no sign of her train. Desperately she tried to think: where were the nearest train tracks? The Underground ran close by, that nexus of lines at Oxford Circus. Could her Railwraith have reached them in time?
Please
, she prayed inside her head,
please have made it
.
There was an electric sense in the air, like the ghost of an emotion, a residue the wraith had left behind it. It was a feeling of
pride
, of making amends. The Railwraith
had
swerved around her, she thought, awestruck. She hadn’t imagined it. She remembered how ashamed it had seemed when it fled from the freight train’s attack.
You were its passenger
, Fil had said. It hadn’t been stalking her, it had been
looking out
for her.
Anyone who’s crazy enough to ride one Railwraith and shout at another needs all the help she can get.
Apparently, her Railwraith had felt the same.
She felt grateful, and sick, and like she didn’t deserve it.
You think they can’t feel, and think and bloody love?
His words rang round her head.
There’s more lives at stake here than the ones that look like you.
A lump filled Beth’s throat and she found herself starting to cry.
‘Beth.’ Fil and Gutterglass had reappeared at the mouth of the alley. Ants still raced over Glas’ cheek, filling in gaps with scraps of matchbox, but he looked steadier now.
Fil’s scratched and burnt face scrunched up. His voice was gruff, as though he’d been shouting. ‘Beth,’ he tried again.
Gruffness didn’t suit his voice, Beth thought; he was just a teenager, like her.
He took a step forward, then looked back at Gutterglass as if for support. The rubbish man smiled grimly and motioned him forward.
‘Beth,’ Fil said, ‘you need to leave. Now.’
Pen shivered in the tower as dawn crept into the nooks and crevices of the building site. She had been longing for sunrise, but it let her down: the daylight failed to banish her nightmare.
Below her, the machines worked on remorselessly. Immobilised as she was, only when the wind tugged the tarpaulin away could she see glimpses of a crane at the top of its arc, or a flash of yellow tape on the flank of a digger. The sources of the screams stayed mercifully out of sight.
Chatter floated up: tourists at the Cathedral. To them, this carnage would sound like any other construction work. It did to her, too. Nothing about the
sounds
was special; it was her
hearing
that had changed. She heard the cries of pain from the foundations as they were shredded, and they chilled her.
When the red faded out of the sunrise, the wire decided it was time for her to sleep.
Rest
, it scratched with her finger in the dust. Then it bent her at the knee and the
waist and laid her flat on her back. It was rigid around her, like a wire coffin.
Maybe it’s nocturnal
, she thought,
or maybe it thinks I am. After all, when it caught me I was stumbling around in the dark like a drunk girl.
The wire had been forcing her into strange poses and stretches, reconfiguring her, like a child trying to learn the limits of a new toy. It ran a barb caressingly over her skin, and left her a few seconds to stare at the drab concrete ceiling before its tendrils reached for her eyelids and pulled them shut.
It was the first time in days it had let her close her eyes, but Pen couldn’t sleep. Her heartbeat went through her skull like nightclub bass. When she was a kid she’d read stories about martyrs under torture who’d dislocated their minds from their bodies. They’d prayed to Allah and transcended their flesh. Inside their minds they had laughed as their tormentors laboured fruitlessly on.
Pen had never believed those stories, but now, with the metal barbs holding her eyes shut, she started to pray.
Over the beat of her heart, she could hear Reach, speaking. He hadn’t stopped repeating the same phrases since she’d arrived here:
‘
I am Reach
.
‘
I am Reach
.
‘
I will be.
’
Pen tried to pretend her body didn’t matter.
Your soul is feather-light
, she whispered in her mind.
It will peel from your body like lantern-fruit skin.
But it was no good; she was panicking again, breathing faster – she couldn’t make herself
believe
it.