Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (20 page)

‘I can’t,’ she said at last. ‘There’s someone I need to be here for. A promise I can’t break.’

Es sighed, and then said, ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘It’s okay, I’m glad you did. And for what it’s worth, the kissing
was
very persuasive. Oh, hey!’ Pen said it like she’d just thought of it. ‘You could always come through here. I know I must have really sold it to you with all the gloom and doom earlier—’

‘You did actually,’ Espel said. ‘I’m a sucker for a desperate last stand. Only I’m kinda tied up here leading my aesthetic terror insurgency.’

‘Must be hectic,’ Pen said with a mock-sympathetic shrug. ‘Sounds like it’s going well at least?’

Espel’s expression soured and the humour left her voice. ‘
Recruitment
’
s
going well, but the crackdown is more vicious than anything I’ve ever seen. Case is replacing her lost Chevs with battalions recruited solely from the Mirrorstocracy.’

‘I’ve met them,’ Pen said.

‘Lucky you,’ Espel said drily. ‘They’re clumsy and they’re badly trained, but they’re hired for brutality and in that they
excel
. They just go round to the neighbourhoods of suspected Faceless and shoot everyone. They don’t even pretend to ask questions. Even then we could probably take care of them if it wasn’t for the claylings.’

‘Claylings?’

‘Didn’t you know? That Goddess who’s taking a wrecking ball to your city left a whole fragging garrison in mine. Nominally they’re under Case’s command, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the orders were actually going the other way.’
Something set hard behind Espel’s eyes. ‘It was bad enough when the secret police used to knock on your door in the middle of the night. It’s a lot worse now they come up through the floor.’

Pen looked up sharply. ‘They’re taking people?
Still?
Like they did before?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you know why? It can’t be to feed Mater Viae any more – She’s here now.’

Espel spread her hands. ‘We assumed it was just out of a general commitment to the repressive government cliché, only’ – she frowned – ‘only there’s the new districts.’

‘
What
new districts?’

‘That’s the thing: they don’t even have names yet. About three months ago, right around the time the kidnappings got going again, new boroughs in the city opened up to the north.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘London-Under-Glass is a reflected city: it exists only as a mirror to the old place. It’s why we build upwards, and why we have to grow all our food in greenhouses with soil dug out of the parks. Beyond our city limits, where
your
mirrors stop, it’s barren grey dust and a barren grey ocean all the way to Mirrorkech.’

‘So?’

‘So it’s
growing
, Countess. There are new roads and buildings and post offices and parks, and for all I know sewers to the north. No one lives in them; no one’s building them;
they just appear. You can see them from the tops of the taller precipitecture towers in Kenneltown.’

Pen felt her throat dry. There was a hollow roaring sound in her ears. She tried to swallow three times, but couldn’t. ‘What did you say?’

‘You can see them from the taller—’

‘No, before that: no one’s building them. So they’re growing?’

Espel nodded.

‘You sure? Have you sent anyone to check them out?’

Espel’s face darkened. A furrow appeared either side of her face. ‘Alexei,’ she said shortly.

‘What happened?’

‘He didn’t come back.’

Dizziness hit Pen in a wave. She leaned back slowly from the sink.

‘Parva?’ Espel asked. ‘What is it?’

But Pen wasn’t looking at her. Her thoughts were back with Paul Bradley as he stepped into a pool in Canada Square, a pool that he said felt like it had
taken
something from him. She blinked, and there was Gutterglass, crouching over him as the blood they couldn’t stop poured from the small cut on his forehead. She heard the trash-spirit’s voice as clearly as if she was standing in the dusty bathroom with them, saying, ‘
His hair
’
s not growing
.’

‘Parva! What is it?’

Pen blinked and then focused back on Espel. She’d climbed halfway through the mirror, which was twitching
and threatening to seal back around her. Her face was furrowed with worry around her silver seam.

Pen’s throat felt full of dust as she answered.

‘Mater Viae – I know what She’s up to.’

Beth hadn’t slept. The picture of her dad had taken shape over the course of the night and it felt desperately urgent that she finish it
now
. Everything felt more urgent now; there wasn’t enough time for anything.

The sun had just risen and she was weighing up the merits of adding colour versus keeping it black and white when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around and her stomach clenched.

Pen was breathless, little licks of sweat-slicked hair were coming loose around the edges of her hijab. Her expression was tense as she gasped, ‘Up …’ She pointed to the top of the tower. ‘We need to
check
—’

Beth didn’t know what lay behind Pen’s frantic instruction, but she’d spent a sizeable chunk of the last five years reading her friend’s face and right now it said:
Don
’
t ask, just do. Trust me
.

Beth capped her marker and dropped it into the grass, dusted off her hands, turned to the tower leg and started to
climb. Her muscles were searing under her skin before they reached the first gantry.

Remember this, Petrol-Sweat?
she thought, to take her mind off the climb.
Remember the first time we came here: the steel, and the spiders, and the dark? I damn near chucked myself off the top of it
.

Fil’s voice muttered wryly back to her,
I remember. Fun times. Mind you, if you spent a little less time reminiscing about the good old days and paid attention to your hand-holds, you might not be about to slip off that … WATCH IT!
’

The steel was suddenly frictionless under her fingers and then it slid out from under them. Beth grabbed for a hanging cable, but her reflexes were slow and she grasped only air. She fell.

Wire closed around her, as gently as the silk strands of a moth’s cocoon. Her descent slowed, and then moments later, she started to rise again.

‘
Nice catch, Pen. Now put me back on the tower
,’ she called, and when Pen ignored her, ‘
Pen, put me back on the bloody tower! I can do my own climbing!
’

Pen didn’t seem inclined to take the chance.

‘
This is your fault, you know
,’ she muttered, her cheeks burning with embarrassment as well as fever.

Inside her skull, Fil’s voice wasn’t having any of it.
Me? You
’
re the one who’s driving, Beth. I
’
m just the comic relief on the car stereo
.

Beth endured the rest of their ascent in huffy silence. When they reached the highest platform, the wires
unwound themselves and deposited her on the steel. Tiny spiders swarmed around Beth’s feet, winking in and out of existence, their static voices lost in the wind. The cold air up here pierced her hoodie, finding every chink and crack in her street-laced skin. She clung to the struts of a satellite dish and tried not to let her teeth chatter. Her fever must have flipped.

Pen stood next to her, lashed to the mast itself with strands of barbed wire. Insects scrambled past them, heading for the pinnacle of the tower, with bits of garbage clamped in their mandibles. A moment later, Gutterglass leaned out from the mast above them, silhouetted against the half-light, his bin-bag coat streaming out behind him. A pigeon shot by in a flutter of wings, bearing his eggshell eyes higher still.

‘Thames preserve us.’ Gutterglass had to shout over the wind. Beth was shaken by the awe in the trash-spirit’s voice. ‘I can’t see the end of it.’

‘
What?
’ she asked, and Glas pointed a garden-wire finger.

Beyond the twisted wreck of the Wembley Arch, where the dense crosshatch of architecture thinned and gave way to fields, a spur of dirty grey concrete and reddish roof tile stretched to the horizon. Beth didn’t need an
A-to-Z
to know those buildings hadn’t been there a couple of months before.

Glas’ voice turned grim. ‘I can see terraces without windows,’ he said. ‘Those streets are infected.’

‘Mater Viae did this?’ Pen’s voice was hollow with fright.
‘But why? It could be halfway to Birmingham by now – what’s it all for? I don’t get it.’

But Beth did. The understanding that came was sudden, but coldly unshakeable. She looked down at the cross-weaving metal struts of the tower, remembering.

‘
The cranes
.’ She spoke so quietly the words were almost lost in the wind. ‘
The Lady of the Streets and the King of the Cranes
.’

‘What?’ Pen looked at her.

‘
It
’
s what She does, Pen. It
’
s what She
’
s always done. It
’
s what She wants, and who She is. She
’
s a mother, and the City is Her child – She wants to see it grow. That
’
s all Reach was, in the beginning: he became a force of demolition, yes, but he was a force of construction first. He just got out of hand
.’

She swallowed out of reflex, even though the voice she was speaking with would never parch her throat. ‘
For three days and nights, when She first came through, the cranes came awake – She woke them. But the cranes are unpredictable and dangerous. So I guess She had a better idea – Her time behind the mirror
gave
Her a better idea. She
’
d already learned how to separate people from their memories, so why not take something else too? So She made a deal with the Chemical Synod: She started to steal the growth She wanted for the city straight from the people who lived in it. She put the cranes back to sleep, before they ever properly woke up in the first place. And we were too busy thanking our lucky stars for small mercies to ask why
.’

‘An organic city,’ Gutterglass murmured, ‘capable of
growing hundreds of miles in only a few weeks – and bringing its sickness to everything it touches.’

‘B …’ Pen took her hand, her voice suddenly urgent. ‘What can we do? We have to do something. We have to stop Her somehow. If it just keeps growing …’ She tailed off and an angry lash of barbed wire slammed into the tower hard enough to make it lurch alarmingly.

‘We have to
stop
Her!’ she said again, and this time there were tears in her eyes. She turned to Gutterglass. ‘She could just keep on, couldn’t She? Taking more land, more people, more growth, and so more land – where would it stop?’

‘In principle?’ Gutterglass shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it would have to.’

‘The whole country?’ Pen pressed. ‘Would it spread over the ocean floor? Could it cover the whole world?’

It sounded ridiculous:
The World
. Like a supervillain’s boast from a Saturday morning cartoon. But Gutterglass couldn’t contradict it, and anyway, Beth knew it wasn’t the world that Pen was really worried about.

It could be halfway to Birmingham by now
. She could see in Pen’s brown eyes that she was picturing her parents tucked up in her Aunt Soraya’s house, with thousand-degree Fever Streets heading their way.

‘What can we do?’ Pen demanded again.

Her cuticles were bleeding now where she’d worried away at them, and Beth couldn’t help noticing that the barbs on the wire were drawing tighter into her, the more agitated
her voice became. ‘We have to do something. What can we do?’

Beth was about to admit she didn’t know when she sensed an idea at the back of her head – an idea so strange, so unlikely, that she wasn’t sure it had really come from her at all. She recoiled from it, appalled that she’d even thought it, but then she looked back at Pen, hesitated and went to speak.

Don
’
t say it, Beth
. Fil’s voice sounded in her mind.
Once you
’
ve said it, you can
’
t take it back. You
’
ll get her hopes up and you don
’
t know it
’
s even possible
.

It could be though, couldn
’
t it?
she countered silently.
You thought of the cranes at the same time I did. It was you who put that idea in my head
. She looked at her street-scored hands.
If Mater Viae did it, maybe I could do it too
.

She
’
s healthy. You
’
re sick
.

I know
.

Beth, you
’
re dying
.

There
’
s enough left in me for this
. She said it to herself with more confidence than she felt.

Have you totally lost it?
Fil’s voice demanded.
Have you forgotten what it cost us to put him down the first time?

Beth pictured a railing-spear, its point scratching a bloody star in Fil’s chest as her hand trembled.
I haven
’
t forgotten. I won’t ever forget
.

Beth, please. When he
’
s done with a place, there
’
s no life, no energy – he
’
ll leave nothing to sustain you. You know that. If you do this, if he gives you what you want, you
’
ll die
.

Like you said, Fil, I
’
m dying anyway
.

‘Beth?’ Beth met Pen’s eyes; she saw the anxiety there, the need and the desperate hope that, somehow, Beth could help her. ‘You … you looked like you were going to say something?’

Beth, please
, Fil started, but the churn of gears and turbines and the growl of cars from Beth’s body drowned him out as she started to speak. ‘
There
’
s one thing we could try
,’ she said. ‘
It
’
s risky, but we don
’
t have an army and we don
’
t have much time, so I guess this is the only idea on the table
.’

‘What is it?’ Pen asked.

‘
London
’
s sick
,’ Beth said. ‘
The city is killing its inhabitants, infecting everything it touches – and it
’
s growing, right?
’

‘Right.’

‘
The only way to stop it growing is to kill it. So we kill it. We need someone who can do that, who can demolish an entire city. Tell me
,’ she said, ‘
does that sound like anyone we know?
’