Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (11 page)

With her back to the sunset, Pen clambered across the broken city. Dust and fumes had soaked into her clothes. Every fold of her skin felt gritty, the dirt cemented onto her with her own sweat. The city’s convulsions had shattered Southwark; its warehouses and viaducts lay in tumbles of brick and sheared-away iron. Pen scrambled up the dunes on all fours, wary of slipping masonry and the blade-like stubs of shorn girders that lurked like traps beneath them. The air was parched. She paused, panting for breath, and then pressed on. It was still a long, long way back to Frostfield.

An alien thought burst into her head, a voice that sounded like her.

Uncoil! Uncoil! Ease your toil!

The Wire Mistress had latched on to the bit of her brain where her poetry lived, speaking to her in half-nonsensical rhymes. There was something about the tangled, twisting language that bent back on itself that the steel creature seemed to recognise.

‘Shut up, would you?’ Pen muttered.

She knew what she wanted; she could feel the Wire Mistress, itchy and impatient, dripping the urges into her through the back of her neck. The cramps in her coils were aches in Pen’s own muscles and she couldn’t stop herself from thinking how good it would feel to let the wire stretch out and bear her up on spindly legs, to luxuriate in the cool night air far above the surface of the city.

But even as she imagined it, her heart stuttered and memory assaulted her: barbs burning in her nerves, her skin sticky with her own drying blood as she was carried away, with no way to know where – no way, and no say: no say at all.

‘No,’ she said, ‘not yet. Not again. I’m not ready.’

The wire whined, but she felt it coil back up quietly in her skull.

‘Just as well B and her dad aren’t here. Talking to you out loud like this would freak them out no end.’

She’d left them arguing: Mr B adamant that he could help, that he
had
to help, Beth just stubbornly shaking her head. Nothing would be done, she insisted, until they had a plan to get him back. Pen hadn’t contributed much. The face of the boy in the factory had hovered in front of her, needling her to speak, but every time she’d opened her mouth, Beth’s expression, frantic with the premonition of bereavement, had shut it for her.

Brick shale slid from under her foot. Her breath stalled, restarted. She found a new footing and reached for
another handhold. She crested the masonry ridge and looked over.

Heat slammed into her like an invisible wall.

‘Crap,’ she muttered.

A Fever Street cut through the sprawl below her like a lava flow. Black smoking stains on the surface of the asphalt marked where
something
unfortunate had fallen onto its surface. She scanned left and right, anxiously looking for a break or crossing, but all she could see was shimmering tarmac. She had no way of knowing how far the pyrexia stretched.

Behind her, the sun was already low and bloody.

‘Yeah,’ she muttered, her stomach swimming. ‘Right.’

She exhaled and closed her eyes.

It was like stretching a limb she’d been sitting on for hours: she felt pins and needles ripple through the wire strands as the Mistress’ magnetic muscles flexed, unrolling a tendril and sliding it down into a hollow in the brickwork. Another followed it, then a third, and then more, until seven strands connected Pen to the earth.

Sweat spotted her hijab where it lay against her forehead. She felt sick. ‘Me,’ she whispered through gritted teeth. ‘
I’ll
do it. Let me.’

She concentrated, trying to feel the shape of the wire,
the weight of it where it lay wrapped around her torso. She traced it in her mind: how each severed strand connected to the next until, finally, they punctured her neck, plugging into her.

At her command, and with an ease that astonished her, another wire tendril unravelled, wavered in the air, then planted itself into the bricks.

Direct control
, she thought. She had direct control. The swimming in her stomach calmed a little.
It can
’
t be that easy, can it?
The Wire Mistress coiled in the back of her mind, purring, too damned quiescent. Pen didn’t trust her, but the creature put up no resistance as she pushed her consciousness back along the metal, groping again for the wounds in it, reassuring herself with the Mistress’ weakness.

She was tentative at first. She leaned forward into the cage of wires across her chest, then, very slowly, straightened the tendrils underneath her. Her toes dragged in the dust as they came off the floor.

She hung there for a moment: a barbed-wire spider on eight legs of twisted steel burnished by the sunset. For a single dreadful instant, she couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t stop the thought that the wire had been lying in wait for just this moment to crush her.

You
’
re just panicking
, she scolded herself.
Breathe, Pen. Breathe. Stop fighting it. You don
’
t need to fight it
—

—
not now
.

She tried to slow her lungs, tried to breathe normally,
and found she could. She burst out in a laugh so loud it shocked her.

She waited, but the Mistress didn’t move, though Pen could feel her savouring the stretch, the feeling of her weight in her strands. She sat quietly, in abeyance, not even talking to her as the coils gently contracted and expanded in time with her breathing.

With an unsteady kind of awe, Pen realised the Mistress was waiting for her to take the first step.

She focused on the foremost strand, lifted and planted it on the far side of the Fever Street. It reached easily across the hot tarmac, shuddered a little bit, but held firm. She planted another next to it. When her front four legs were firmly planted she pushed off hard with her hind ones and sailed over the Fever Street like a pole vaulter, its heat briefly stroking her face.

Her arc carried her too far and she overbalanced; her stomach flipped over and she screwed up her eyes. The rubble on the far side rushed up fast—

Pen bounced, but not as hard as she had expected. She opened her eyes again and saw in astonishment that the wire was
cradling
her; it had balled up around her in a cage, flexing and absorbing the impact. They rolled to a stop at the bottom of the hill and there they lay while the Mistress waited for Pen to make the first move.

‘Okay, then,’ she muttered.

A few moments later, they were up again and crossing the city with a swaying gait, unsteady as a baby giraffe at
first. Her confidence grew with each step and soon the bricks began to flow away in a blur under her. The Mistress began to drip in quiet, unspoken suggestions; Pen could feel her, like a stabilising hand, guiding but never pushing her influence. The air flowed faster and faster past her face and secretly, behind her mask of wire, Pen let herself smile a little.

Is this how it was for you, Es?
she wondered, the smile tugging a little wider.
What will you make of me?

Something snagged her attention.

She stopped sharply. Her new legs bent, and slowly flexed back as she lost momentum. She frowned. They’d passed something significant; she’d felt it. She focused, groping for the sensation. She felt more pins and needles: the sense of another wire limb waking up – but this one wasn’t attached to her. It was Out There.

In the night.

Pen gasped. Her eyes stretched wide and the lashes tickled wire strands as she realised the scale of what she was connected to. She concentrated harder. She felt the distant wire in her mind, focused on it and felt it flex in response: a remote limb. The more she shifted it, the more the magnetism flowed, the more she felt, sensing its shape, and where it lay on the ground.

The Mistress purred contentedly in her mind.

She coiled and flexed the wire until she had all of it, then to her astonished delight, she felt her awareness jump to another strand close to that one, then another followed,
then another. Her proprioception raced along fence-top coils and bales of razor-wire and tendrils buried under hillsides. She was almost screaming with the electric sensation of it, just on the border of pain.

Dark shapes formed in her mind: streets and cellars and empty courtyards, like the half-images she got in her head when she listened to the radio. The wire could feel the form of the city that surrounded it, and the echoes vibrated in its barbs. Pen’s awareness raced up over rooftops and along railway tracks. She sensed the electromagnetic thrum of neon and steered towards it. A hulking square black building emerged out of the night – a warehouse or a supermarket, lights were blazing against it. A figure slouched towards those lights across an empty car park, a figure, a man, who looked familiar somehow. Curious, she moved the wire closer towards him—

‘Oh.’ Pen uttered a little shocked breath. Ice crept into her gut and up into her throat. The wire mewled around her, wanting to know what was wrong, why she’d stopped.

‘It can’t be,’ she whispered. ‘I mean, it
can
’
t
—’

Tentatively, almost unwillingly, she reached back out to the supermarket car park and the barbed-wire tendrils that guarded its high brick wall from alighting pigeons. She unwound one tendril and sent it snaking silently after the figure. The closer it got, the more of a sense Pen got of him. He lurched like a man exhausted, and he was thin – far thinner than she’d ever seen him. His beard was a mat of darkness on his hollow cheeks, but Pen knew him. She
could never not have known him, no matter how badly she wanted to forget him.

Dr Julian Salt stumbled towards the building where he’d made his makeshift home, and behind him, Pen coiled the wire to strike.

She held it there for an unbearable time. Her mind was full of his voice, the grate of his stubble on her cheek, his callused fingers sliding up under her clothes, stroking her spine. She felt a snarl build in the back of her throat.

‘
It
’
ll be our secret
,’ she spat, and the wire barbs around her mouth clenched like a second jaw. A metal voice sang in her mind.

But still she hesitated. The wire remained curled, a scorpion’s sting, but her eagerness faltered. Was this her, she wondered, or was it the wire? Could it really
be
her, deciding to kill a man? A nervous thrill ran through her at the thought, at the
freedom
it hinted at. She could choose, and take all his choices away.

She’d waited almost too long. Salt had pressed forward and now he was just a wavering charcoal shape on the edge of her perception. Steel tendrils lashed the air around her in frustration.

‘Stop pushing me!’ Pen snapped, and the wires recoiled from her face but then crowded back in, metal hissing over metal. Her eyes darted back and forth, trying to track them all, but they were as tangled and impossible to follow as her own thoughts.

The Mistress made another suggestion in her sing-song voice, and this one stopped Pen cold.

Suddenly Paul Bradley was staring out at her from her memory with his earnest, short-sighted eyes, saying, ‘
It has to be me. There
’
s no one else. Maybe I don
’
t have to come back
.’

Mr B, Beth’s dad, who was willing to walk eyes-open into the trap that had claimed half a city. Who she’d all but cornered into volunteering, and who now, maybe, didn’t have to.

Pen felt her resistance wavering. Out across the night, her wire fingers stretched out towards Salt to claim him. For Paul’s sake. For Beth’s sake. Salt shivered as a barb brushed a hair on the back of his neck.

The wire hummed inside Pen’s mind. ‘
And maybe
, he
won
’
t have to come back
.’

No
.

It was instinctive rebellion. She recoiled, her consciousness rushing back down the wires to where she stood. She blinked, suddenly seeing once more the tumbled brick beneath her, the stars burning coldly above. A breeze cut into her sweat-soaked skin and she shivered. She flexed her hand. These were her fingers, these flesh and blood digits; the metal ones belonged to the Mistress.

We
’
re not the same
, she told herself desperately.
We
’
re not the same
.

‘
I
will decide.’ She was shaking, and she spoke aloud to the creature that encased her. ‘
I
will decide what I want from him – for me. Not for you, not even for B or her dad, for
me.’

He voice was full of resolve she didn’t feel. She didn’t know what to do. Her head was a mess of half-made decisions and shreds of purpose. Bloodlust was sharp in her veins: her own, or the wire’s or a mix of both. She didn’t know how to tell the difference any more.

She steadied herself on the bricks and cast around, but she barely saw anything until she looked back up at the sky.

Clouds were racing in, obscuring the stars, promising storms, and she thought,
Espel
.

She hesitated, her anger still smoking inside her, but then she pictured Espel, pushing her blonde hair out of her eyes and sitting anxiously on the cold bathroom tiles, waiting for her.