‘It is the will of the G
oddess
.’ His voice rasped with urgency bordering on fanaticism. ‘As the appearance of Fleet and his holy felines shows. You carry the Lady’s aspect, and I respect that, but do not let that fool you into thinking you are more important than you are. We are
all
vessels for her will.’
He released her chin and retreated from her in a few unclear flickers of motion. Beth rubbed the skin where his fingers had been. The bruises were healing already.
‘Oh, and Miss Bradley? You are about the worst triage nurse I’ve ever seen. Gutterglass’ weevils keep having to unpick your stitches and redo them. It’s embarrassing, and a waste of time. For their sake, if not your own, find something to do that you’re actually
good
at.’
When Beth found Gutterglass, he was crouched over a Sodiumite girl so badly wounded that she could barely light his face. The trash-spirit’s incarnation was tiny, no bigger than a toddler, and he stroked her fibre-optic hair with soda-straw fingers and whispered to her that Mater Viae loved her.
There was a hissing, cracking noise and half a dozen rats nosed their way from the rubbish-dune, dragging a live electrical cable burrowed from some part of the national grid. Gutterglass slid condoms over his fingers like surgical gloves and set to work.
Beth didn’t disturb him ’til he was done. ‘The compact look suits you,’ she said. She eyed his avatar’s oversized, collapsing-football head. ‘In a creepy, decomposing baby sort of way.’
Gutterglass didn’t look at her. ‘I have five thousand and sixty-three distinct organisms under control at present,’ he said snippily, ‘scavenging, shoring up defences and, in some cases, conducting open-heart surgery. Frankly, I’d like
to see you manage half as much and animate a paper bag, let alone a fully functional avatar.’ The little refuse-marionette rummaged around, tugged out a battered pack of cigarettes and lit one between his split-seam lips.
‘You smoke?’ Beth was surprised.
‘Who better to have a filthy habit?’ Gutterglass countered.
Beth watched smoke billow back out through his balsawood ribs. ‘Does it … do anything for you?’ she asked.
‘It used to,’ Gutterglass shut his eggshell-eyes. There was a wistfulness as he spoke. ‘A long time ago.’
When the eggshells opened again, the look Gutterglass gave her was cold, and tinged with hostility. ‘What do you want, Miss Bradley?’
Beth looked at him through the smoke. ‘What do you think I want?’
The Prince of London had no mattress. His back and shoulders were raised off the ground by crushed rubble and chunks of brick. As Beth watched, the colour of the rubble faded and his pallid skin darkened a little, but only a very little.
She crouched and brushed the hair out of his face. His jaw was clenched and his eyes screwed up. ‘He looks better.’
‘Of course he does,’ Gutterglass said flatly. ‘
I’m
his doctor. Although, to give him his due, the-little-God-that-could here is very hard to kill.’
Air escaped the football-head in a sigh. ‘However, I have
no way of knowing when he’ll wake up,’ he confessed. ‘In the meantime I suppose that leaves you and me in command.’ He spat out the words angrily. ‘I’ll need you to—’
‘I’m going, Glas,’ Beth interrupted. She stood up.
The eggshells blinked. ‘Going? Going where?’
‘St Paul’s. Pen needs me.’
Gutterglass waited a long time before he answered. ‘Do you know what?’ he said at last. ‘I should
let
you.’ To Beth’s surprise his voice was harsh with anger. ‘I should wish you the best of London Luck and just let you waltz straight into the Scaffwolves’ jaws. After all, you
deserve
it. I introduced them, did you know that? Filius and Electra? She was brave and powerful and graceful; she was his best friend, and she made him happier than anyone I’ve ever seen.’
He twisted his head and looked at her with frank disgust. ‘Anyone except
you
. So for the love he bore you, I’ll say this once.
Don’t go
. You think you can make it better? You can’t. Reach will rip you asunder. Walk into the Demolition Fields looking for a happy ending and an ending is all you’ll find.’
He fell silent. For a long time Beth held his eggshell gaze. ‘You’re still going, then?’ Gutterglass said eventually.
‘What do you think?’
A cockroach in Gutterglass’ mouth clicked in disapproval and something bumped against Beth’s shin. She looked down. It was Fil’s corroded railing-spear, borne on a swarming tide of beetles.
‘You might need this.’
His little face looked exhausted, but in a strange way satisfied. ‘In the unlikely event you get close enough, drive it into the Crane King’s throat.’
Beth’s fingers closed around the spear. The grooves and pits in the metal seemed to fit her hand precisely. She could almost feel the shape of Fil’s handprint on it.
‘It’s not much,’ Gutterglass said, ‘but without Mater Viae’s Great Fire, we must improvise.’
Beth exhaled slowly. ‘I’ll kill him, Glas,’ she swore, tasting every word. ‘For Fil, and Electra, and Pen. And for me.’
Gutterglass’ seam-smile said he didn’t believe her, but he nodded. He disintegrated slowly. His eggshells watched her to the last.
When Gutterglass had gone, she bent down and kissed Fil’s forehead. ‘You brought me home,’ she whispered into his ear. It physically hurt her, deep in her chest, to leave him like this, but he had Gutterglass, and Gutterglass had his army, and Pen, Pen who she loved more fully and deeply than anyone else, who she’d almost let herself forget, Pen had only her.
Fil had believed she could be like him, so she owed him that: to do more than just run. ‘I saved your life once, remember,’ she whispered as she turned to go. ‘Don’t let it be wasted effort. I’ll try to do the same.’
It was only a hundred feet to the landfill’s perimeter fence. The tarmac felt nourishing under her feet as she ran, and London blurred past, all lights and noise and
grandeur and stink, the spear pointed due south before her.
Before long, cranes began to rear up on the horizon, and she turned east. The bulk of St Paul’s emerged like a vast black beetle crouched against the sunrise. The Demolition Fields were drawing closer.
‘I can’t make this add up at all.’
Parva looked forlornly at her father across the table. She knew how this was going to end. She’d struggled into her green wedding sharara, which had hurt because it was over-ambitiously small and there were cuts under her arms.
Her dad wouldn’t meet her gaze but remained hunched, scowling over his ledger. ‘Come here and help me, Parva.’
Obediently she stood and went to his shoulder. Behind her a knife scraped over china as her mother dumped the food into the bin.
‘See?’ her father grumbled. He smelled of nuts and dry tobacco. ‘He’ll want a fortune.’
Parva gazed into her own mutilated face. Her father held the pencil, but it was Beth’s style that characterised the picture.
Her father slumped forwards and sighed, his breath stirring the white hairs on his brown arms. ‘I can’t afford it. I can’t. It will ruin me. I’ll have to sell the practice.’
A crash made them both look up. Parva’s mother stood
over the shrapnel of a broken plate. Her hand was trembling. ‘Why, Parva? Why couldn’t you take better care of yourself? I
taught
you how.’ She sounded tearful, and she looked terribly old.
‘I’m afraid it’s worse than you think, Mrs K,’ a familiar voice said. Beth ambled in from the front room, her hands thrust into the pockets of her hoodie.
‘Do you mind?’ She lifted the pencil from Parva’s dad’s unresisting fingers and began to scribble over his picture, her tongue between her teeth as she worked, her face all concentration. Under her pencil, the true extent of Parva’s injuries became clear. She twirled the pencil in her fingers and used the rubber end to erase one nostril and half an ear. She drew in a ragged scar at the corner of the mouth.
Pain flared through Parva’s face. She put her hand to her cheek and felt blood. She probed with her fingers and felt the skin where her lips met split and separate as through dragged with an invisible wire.
When Beth had done, Parva slumped to the ground, her nose and mouth full of the tang of metal.
Beth dropped the pencil down on the paper. ‘Sorry, Mr K,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ll find any takers. Not for any price.’ She extended a hand to Parva. ‘Come on, Pen,’ she said.
Pen reached out with the thumb and three remaining fingers of her right hand. She smeared Beth’s palm red as she grasped it. She followed her best friend from the room.
*
Pen woke slowly, the crash of demolition like a call to prayer from mosques in some dawn in her childhood she barely remembered: tower blocks for minarets, wrecking balls for muezzins.
She opened her eyes cautiously, but it was only the matted web of sleep that held them shut. Her mouth felt parched; it tasted of resentment and old blood. She sighed, expanding her ribs as far as she could against their wire corset.
Kill the host …
That’s what the skinny boy had said as she squeezed him. Pen found herself furious with Beth for not obeying him. In the brief, feverish periods of sleep she managed to snatch she dreamed of Beth: both rescuer and mutilator, cutter and cure. It was an addiction, tenacious as a weed. She had to stop. Neither blaming nor hoping for Beth was going to help her.
A long strand of wire uncoiled from her arm and reached up to a scaffolding strut and wound around, tautened, and pulled her to her feet.
Staying focused was all but impossible now. The things Pen wanted were as slippery as wet soap. Hours passed now when she didn’t think of escape at all. She was horrified she’d catch herself lusting after the hunt, wanting nothing more than to swing out on wire cables across the city, to find the asphalt-skinned boy and kill him: to make the Crane King proud of her.
She knew she hadn’t
originated
these desires, they came from the Wire Mistress, but she felt them, and her hands
shook in their metal cage with the craving. The desires were in her skin. She didn’t
want
to want to kill, but she wanted it all the same. Her borrowed bloodlust scared her.
Still, unlike the desire to be saved, it didn’t make her feel like a victim.
The morning sun burst over her like a fireball, reflecting off the roof of St Paul’s as she swung out into the air. The wire mask around her face shone bright with glare. Below, the machines worked, digging to unearth Reach.
‘
I am Reach, I am Reach. I will be. I will be
.’
That was
his
desire; she shivered with it, the most primal in the world. She understood him better now. He was constructing himself,
making
himself
be
. He’d burst through into the city over and over again down the centuries, and yet, in a way, he’d never even finished being born.
The barbed-wire strand unspooled and she descended towards the rubble. There was a crack in the hoardings ringing the site, an exit into the labyrinth of collapsed masonry that separated Reach from the rest of London. The Wire Mistress walked her towards it.
Just before she slipped into shadow, she saw something out of the corner of her eye: two massive pneumatic drills were hacking one corner of a mouth from the earth. She could see lips with cracks and capillaries. A creature with a mouth that size would dwarf the Cathedral that rose above them.
She wanted to be scared of it, but she wasn’t. A part of her, a big part, was excited.
She didn’t
want
to want it, but Pen wanted to see Reach stand.
‘Wake up! Wake up! Christ, you snore like someone’s shoved a hedgehog down your throat!’ A horrendous ringing filled Petris’ skull – one he couldn’t put down to last night’s pint of garbage gin. His eyes grazed open against the inside of his punishment skin and bright wintry light stabbed into his retinas.
‘Wake up! Wake up!’ The girl who was shouting at him wore a filthy hoodie. The reason for the ringing in his head became abundantly clear: she was repeatedly hitting it with an iron railing.
‘Gerrroffofit,’ he snarled, sour alcohol-flavoured bile bubbling in his throat. He swiped at the railing with a gauntlet, but the girl jerked out of the way easily.
‘Who in the name of my sadistic Goddess’ tits are you?’ he growled at her.
The girl ignored his question. She cocked an eyebrow as his breath washed over her face. ‘It’s what’s inside that counts, huh? Well then, I guess what counts for you is about ten pints of booze.’
A face from Petris’ memory battled through the alcoholic fug – but that face hadn’t had the grey-tinted skin, the concrete-coloured eyes. His gaze lighted on the railing. The tip on its spike tapered to vanishing point. ‘You’re
Filius
’ bit of fluff?’ he burst out incredulously. She glared at him. He coughed and recovered himself. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Beth, is it? You’ve … changed.’
Beth sniffed. ‘So have you. Last time I remember you having manners.’
Petris waved a hand dismissively. ‘Oh, I’m
hungover
,’ he explained. ‘I always drink when I pray.’
‘Tough being religious, is it?’ she asked.
Petris barked out a laugh. ‘It’s like sleeping with another man’s wife,’ he told her, ‘nine parts guilt to one part ecstasy, and somehow you’re always alone again in the morning.’
Beth snorted. ‘Bitter, much?’ she said. ‘Well, I’d love to have the time to care.’ She clapped her hands abruptly. ‘Get it together, stoneskin. Sober up, rally your troops. There’s a war on, or haven’t you heard?’
Petris shook his head. Even the tiny motion made the world blur alarmingly and his pulse slammed unpleasantly at the base of his skull. He was very much not in the mood for idiots, which was a shame, because the girl was talking like one. With extreme effort, he hefted his heavy legs under his stone habit and walked into the shade of a leafless oak tree, big enough to cast enough shadow to get him out of that bastard sun. Only then did he rasp, ‘Come again?’