Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (32 page)

The storm raged on, pummelling Beth’s body, dragging at her hair. Freezing rain pounded her skin. With one hand, she clung to her tower, the only building left. All else was flat grey earth and uncanny light.

Lightning danced around her. Her body was pulled taut by the wind, her toes splayed out over empty air. Her arms burned all along their length. One hand was clamped to the edge of the roof and her fingers and knuckles were numb with the cold. The other was dragged out behind her; the skinny grey boy who clung to it flapped in the wind like a flag.

‘Beth
—’
She saw her name on his lips, but she couldn’t hear it. ‘Help – I don’t
—’

His fingers slipped and he was lost in an instant, spinning head over heel, weightless as a winter leaf, until he merged with the grey.

The clouds gathered in close around Beth. Lightning flashed
again, scorching the air she breathed. Concrete grazed her fingertips as they slipped an inch. There was nothing left to do. She closed her eyes and thought of home.

She let go
.

A steam-whistle echoed gleefully over the rooftops and the Railwraith clattered between the housing terraces, bearing its passengers north.

Pen watched England whip by through the window. In between the red blocks of houses she glimpsed patches of green. The fabric city was thin here: only a single row of terraced houses on either side separated the tracks from open countryside. Every few miles, holes gaped in the terraces, lined with rubble. Fire-blackened cranes lay at the top of the railway embankment like dug-up animal bones: signs that the battle had stretched even this far north.

On the far side of the carriage, Gutterglass gazed out the opposite window, her Biro-fingers twisting restlessly through the torn plastic of her hair. The proximity of the open fields made her nervous; for Glas, there was only City and un-City. The latter was a desert, barren and impossible to survive. Pen was grateful she was here. Even after everything, she wouldn’t have wanted to be in here with the carriage’s third passenger by herself.

Dr Salt slumped against a chair three rows away, one wrist tied to the handrail with blue nylon rope. He didn’t struggle. His eyes, shockingly wide and pale above the filthy thatch of his beard, flicked continually from the garbage-built woman to Pen and back again.

He hadn’t given them any trouble. They’d found him crouched on a bench in a dark alcove at the back of the cathedral. The little two-barb sentinel Pen had set to watch him lay on the wood like a dead insect. When she’d ordered him to get on the train, he’d obeyed without a word. He saw no difference between Pen with the wire and Pen without; he was simply terrified of her. If she’d opened the doors of the carriage and told him to jump down under the wraith’s clattering wheels, he’d probably do it. He was, in a way, her creature now.

Pen felt a shiver of disgust at that thought. Her fear of him was a small hard thing lodged in her chest and she couldn’t shift it. Anger boiled up in her and she wondered if it would ever leave her. She remembered Beth’s city-voice: ‘
You never could have done that to him
.’

‘You were wrong, B,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘You knew me better than anyone, but you were wrong.’

She could have killed Salt, and she knew it. On a different day, in a fractionally different frame of mind, if she’d made the decision a minute sooner or a minute later, on one of the million moments when her anger had burned so bright in her that she couldn’t tell the difference between it and her desire to be free of him, then it would have been him
and not Paul Bradley that she sent to bleed out on Crystal Palace Hill.

Right now, she wished it had been. Tomorrow she might feel differently. Or not.

She looked down at the notebook open in front of her. The page was blank except for one word.

Beth
.

She stared at the white space beneath it. A few times she lowered her pen to the paper, and then pulled it back. She pressed the tip into the page and pushed harder and harder until with a loud
snap
it broke. Salt started at the sound and pushed himself back into the mouldering fabric of his seat. Pen ignored him.

Without looking around from the window, Gutterglass pulled a Bic from her right hand and passed it over.

‘Thanks,’ Pen said.

‘It’ll come,’ the trash-spirit said.

Maybe Glas was right. She remembered returning to the factory, not understanding, fleeing from the strange new architecture that had materialised amongst the ruins of the city. She’d been sure, deep down, it had to be something to do with Beth; it
had
to be. That certainty had turned into a cold clamp around her heart when she had seen the architecture-skinned body lying face-down and motionless on the beach.

She remembered pulling that prone figure over by the shoulder, horrified by her stillness, her dead weight. She’d
tried to set herself, to draw on all the little mental preparations she’d been making for this moment, but they were completely inadequate. What she’d felt as that face had come around to face her was sheer, unreasoning panic …

A panic that had subsided in a welter of confusion and relief, because she knew that face, and it wasn’t Beth’s.

‘Glas, are—?’ she started, but she’d already asked the question dozens of times and the answer hadn’t changed.

‘Yes, Parva,’ she said. ‘I’m sure.’ Her voice had an off musicality; her guitar-string vocal chords were visible through a tear in her paper neck. ‘No pigeon, rat, beetle or worm anywhere in the city has seen her. But it’s more than that, we’d just
know
: if there was an Urban Goddess alive anywhere, we’d
feel
it.’

Pen set the pen to the paper again, then she bit her lip. She was only trying to do what she’d always done, write out how she felt, but when she tried to tune into that part of her that should have been grieving, she got only static.
There was no body
, she told herself.
So maybe …
She couldn’t accept it; she couldn’t
feel
the truth of it. Perhaps her emotions had shut down to protect her: an induced coma of the heart. Or maybe she was just being stubborn and this way it would hurt more in the long run. But then – and she even managed a harsh little smile – that’s exactly how Beth would have done it.

She closed the book.
Not yet
, she told herself.
Not yet
.

The Railwraith slowed under them, its swaying becoming more pronounced. They were almost there.

Pen tapped her fingertips on the hard cover of her notebook. A wordless anxiety rose in her. She jumped to her feet and paced up and down the aisle, ducking to peer out of the windows. She glanced back into the next carriage down and glimpsed the vague shapes of passengers that only the wraith remembered. Blue electricity danced on their teeth as they ignored one another.

The Railwraith screeched to a halt and the doors beeped and hissed open, letting in a shaft of noon sunshine. Pen jumped out and her feet crunched coarse gravel. She squinted in the brightness, looking around anxiously.

It was a tiny station: one track, one red-painted bench under a metal awning, one ticket booth, and one ticket machine covered in looping black graffiti, even though Pen doubted any other human had ever set foot here. The sun’s glare had turned the window on the ticket booth into a perfect mirror. Pen checked her watch. It was one minute to midday.

There were three glass phials in the back pocket of her jeans. She pulled out the left-hand one, almost fumbling it in her haste, and eagerly unscrewed the lid, then hurled the contents against the window. As the clear liquid ran down the surface, it erased the glass and revealed tangled blonde hair and a beaming, seam-split face.

‘Countess!’ Espel jumped up onto the reflected countertop, ducked under the window frame and dive-bombed Pen. They fell in a tangle onto the train platform.

‘Ow!’ Pen muttered. ‘Knee—’

‘Sorry.’

They both laughed and shifted until their limbs settled into a more comfortable position. The sun-warmed pavement felt good on Pen’s back. She tilted her head; Espel’s lips found hers and opened over them. For a little while the world disappeared.

‘Ahem.’

Gutterglass didn’t even bother to make the throat-clearing noise, she just said the word. Without breaking the kiss, Espel extended first an arm and then a middle finger.

‘There’s no need to be rude,’ the trash-spirit murmured. ‘I simply wanted to indicate that we had company.’

Pen felt a little flutter behind her ribs and pulled away from the kiss. Espel rolled off her and she sat up. About fifty yards from where the railway gave out, a road shimmered in the heat. It twisted past the buffers at the end of the tracks and then bore straight on, vanishing into the low skyline of Birmingham, where England’s makeshift new capital bulked on the horizon. Pen heard a buzz that might have been a distant engine or a nearby insect. Steadily the sound grew louder, until a white car with yellow hi-vis markings on its bonnet came into view over a rise.

The fluttering behind Pen’s ribs grew stronger.

‘How long can you stay, Es?’ Even as Pen asked the question, she was playing the answer the steeplejill was bound to give in her head and trying not to be disappointed.

A few days at most. The claylings may have all dropped back into the floor but there are still plenty of officer-class dickheads to keep me occupied. Plus, Case is nowhere to be found …

‘How long do you think?’ Espel said, cutting across her thoughts. Intriguingly, it was her right eyebrow that was arched. ‘As long as you fragging well want me to.’

Pen blinked. ‘But Case – and the Resistance—’

‘We’ll find Case,’ Espel said patiently, ‘and the rest of the Faceless aren’t going keel over and die if they have to be without me for a few days. We don’t really have figureheads, Countess. That’s kind of the point of us.’

She shaded her eyes with one hand, and then whistled. ‘
Mago
,’ she breathed in an awestruck voice.

‘What?’

‘There’s just so much
green
stuff.’

The police car pulled up at the side of the road, as close as it could get to the train tracks. The driver’s door opened. A stocky woman in a leather coat got out and then immediately ducked as a disgruntled pigeon flapped out of the car after her, soared briefly over Pen and Espel’s heads and lighted on Gutterglass’ shoulder.

The woman in the leather coat squinted at Pen for a moment and then hurried over, her heavy boots crunching the gravel as she crossed the tracks. ‘Parva,’ she said.

‘Detective Ellis.’ Pen was startled. ‘I didn’t expect it to be you.’

‘To be honest, I didn’t really expect it to be you either,
despite what your note said. But then, I didn’t expect the first message we’ve had out of London in months to come by carrier-pigeon, so what do I know?’

Pen frowned. ‘Why did they send you?’

‘They put your name through the computer and came up with mine, so they called me.’

‘No, I mean …’ Pen listened and craned her neck to look, but no more cars were coming down the road. ‘Why just you?’

Ellis winced slightly, but didn’t say anything.

‘Because if the letter was a fake and this was a trap, they’d only lose you, right?’ Pen surmised.

‘I wasn’t ecstatic about it to begin with, either,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ve seen the mess those blue dragons made of the army, so I figured any protection they could offer me wouldn’t be worth much anyway.’

‘But you came.’

‘Yes, I came.’

Pen smiled at her. ‘Sewermanders,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Those blue dragon things, they’re called Sewermanders, and they’re not all bad when you get to know them.’ Pen leaned forward and looked past her case officer’s shoulder at the car. ‘What I asked in my note – did you bring them?’

Ellis nodded. ‘I told them to stay in the car until I’d checked it out.’

‘Okay,’ Pen said. The fluttering behind her ribs became a drumming. ‘There’s a present waiting for you on the train.’

‘A nice sort of present?’ Ellis asked. ‘Or the sort of shitbag present you promised in your note?’

‘The latter, I’m afraid.’

‘All right.’

Pen started past her, but Detective Ellis put a hand on her arm.

‘Parva, I … ’ she started, then hesitated before trying again, ‘I don’t know quite how to say this, maybe it’s …’ She broke off again, clearly not understanding. ‘I don’t think they remember you.’

‘I know.’

Ellis gaped at her. ‘Their own
daughter
? How—? What did that to them?’

‘I did,’ Pen said gently. She pushed the policewoman’s arm away and started walking. Footsteps crunched beside her: Espel was keeping pace. Warm fingers, callused by years of scrambling over bricks, threaded through hers and she squeezed them tight.

When they were about ten feet from the car the passenger doors opened and a man and a woman got out. The man was short and wiry, slightly stooped around his pot belly. His black hair had been gelled back from his brow and his skin was a deep teak-brown. The woman was tinier even than her husband; everyone always said it was a miracle they’d had a daughter so tall. Pen’s mother wore a sky-blue hijab and a dress that looked brand-new. Her dad
wore a suit and a striped shirt. Pen’s heart gave a little lurch. This was how they’d dress to meet an important stranger.

And then, all at once, she was right in front of them. She stopped walking, unsure how close she could get. They eyed her uncertainly. She could see recognition in their eyes, but no warmth. They knew her from the photos in her aunt’s house, but nowhere else.

‘I’m sorry,’ her dad said. His voice was hurt and confused. ‘I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do.’

‘It’s okay,’ Pen said. She didn’t try to touch them. She pulled the two remaining phials from her back pocket. Each had been labelled in a careful copperplate hand, ‘
Mr Khan
’ and ‘
Mrs Khan
’. The writing was impossibly neat. Being wasted down to a skeleton didn’t seem to have damaged Johnny Naphtha’s handwriting.

Inside the phials, the liquid was silver as mercury. It clung to the glass.

She took one in each hand and offered them to them, like treats for children. They took them, regarding them mistrustfully.

‘It’s okay,’ Pen said. ‘They’re safe.’ With a bitter tang of panic in her throat she realised she didn’t know what she’d do if they didn’t believe her.

They looked up at her, the child they didn’t remember. Her mum unscrewed the cap first, her dad an instant later, then they looked to each other. Her mum gave her dad a reassuring smile and they linked hands, a mirror to
Pen and Espel. Pen saw her mouthing, ‘
One, two, three!
’ to him.

‘Mum, Dad,’ Pen said as the phials touched their lips. She squeezed Espel’s hand tight. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’