saw Anissina stumble across the twisting floor as more cables crawled from beneath us and lashed out of the walls in a zigzag of twisted wire. I saw Kemsley raise a child’s face, too much going on for that mind of his to comprehend, look up towards the door, and see for a moment in it a man in a pinstriped suit, from whose chest thin wafts of paper tumbled where there should have been blood.
Then Kemsley started to scream, and it was the same pressed-down scream of Nair, of the soldier who had died, of lungs that couldn’t stop, of a throat drawn too tight for anything other than sound to escape, and I grabbed Anissina and half threw her out of the window, one wrist tangling in cables as she dropped, heard her shoulder crack and a cry burst from her lips, saw those mad red eyes that weren’t her own.
“Oda, get . . .” I began, but my words were lost in the sound of Kemsley’s scream, and there was Mr Pinner in the door, smiling, just smiling like always, and the spectres behind him, filling the balcony, faceless non-eyes staring straight at us. I felt a tear down my arm, felt a stabbing across my hand, a burning below my eye, tiny, microscopic, agony. We looked at our fingertips and saw the ringed pattern of our flesh part in a tiny, crawling line of blood, too shallow even to ooze, and knew in an instant we would scream like Kemsley and die like Kemsley and that would be the end,
So I said, “No!” because that was all I knew.
And we saw a tiny droplet of blood rise from our breaking flesh, and that was enough, just enough. We looked into Mr Pinner’s smiling grey eyes, and raised our right hand, skin breaking inside the fingerless mitten, and screamed with the beginning of our final breath, “
The world went blue.
Beautiful, electric blue. Blue blood dribbling down our fingers, blueness blazing across our eyes, blue fire spilling from our hands, blue fury in our veins, blood blue inside and out, soul blue electric rage, we are the angels, we be light, fire, life, freedom, fury . . .
and all I knew was
set our blood on fire!
he wasn’t scared
not even of us
but then, that hadn’t been the point.
We turned our hands down towards the floor of writhing wires and spitting cables, burst up from the carpet and the concrete, and turned the fury of our fire downwards, shook our fingertips until that single drop of blood that had wormed out of the paper-thin cut on our flesh shook itself free and fell.
When it hit the floor, it went
And for a moment, even Mr Pinner looked surprised.
The floor buckled. It creaked, it twisted, it bent, it sagged. The cracks ran across it, up the walls, and crawled into the edges of the ceiling.
Then the floor collapsed.
It went out beneath me, beneath Oda, and beneath Kemsley. We tumbled in dust and shattered cable that flopped like dead creepers from the hole of our passage, spilt like so much old flour in a torn sack down into the floor below. I bounced, head hitting the lower end of a sofa, feet knocking over a coffee table — we had fallen into someone’s living room. Oda landed on her feet, like a cat, rolled and rose in a movement, twisting away from the radiator against the wall and coming up by a small shelf of cheesy books. Kemsley fell where he had fallen above, a limp bloody sack in the hall towards the door. I rolled to my front, then crawled to my feet. Nothing felt broken but that meant nothing, we were on fire, blazing inside with fury and terror and stolen electricity snatched from the wire, pain wasn’t going to get a look-in until it was too late to care, so we didn’t care, staggered forwards, tried to pick Kemsley up and found his sleeve saturated with blood that slipped from our fingers. “Oda!” we screamed. “Help us!”
She was forward in an instant, ducking her head under one arm and lifting him bodily, crouching and rising like a weight-lifter at the gym to get the man to his feet. His face was a nothing, an acid burn from which strips of loose whiteness dangled, but his breath still came, even as the hair fell from his head, the roots torn loose by the laceration his skull had received. I heaved open the front door, ran onto the balcony — no spectres, not yet — ran to the end, snatching electricity from the walls around me until our skin was bright white lightning and our hair stood on end, saw the stairwell by the faint neon glow clutched to my hand, heard above,
And maybe:
Even Oda, superhuman, subhuman, inhuman, utterly human — didn’t know, didn’t care — even Oda was struggling with the dead weight of Kemsley. I took his other arm, slipped it over the back of my neck, dragged him into the stairwell and downstairs, staggering and stumbling in the faint glow of neon by which we ran. Ground floor; courtyard, the courtyard where Nair had died, smog, so thick that two steps were two too many and now behind was nothing more than a vague recollection lost of all geographical meaning, and “out” was a naive illusion from brighter times. I felt in my pocket, found Nair’s phone, shrieked at Oda, “Road! Get to a road!” and she chose a direction; faith, random, someone had to choose.
So we staggered/ran/fell in our bubble of stolen pinkish-orange light, could have been at sea, could have been alone in the world, no way to tell, just silence and perhaps:
Nair’s phone took all of time and much of space to warm up; then did; I found the phone book, I flicked through; a number, a long shot, but still a number. It was labelled Black Cab and nothing more, no company, no nothing, and that was why it was a shot fired in the dark. I called it, our staggering in the smog had found a wall, not an exit, Oda pressed us to it as she directed our course and used it as a guide, coughing and choking as we staggered through the dark.
A voice on the other end of the phone said, “Black Cab, how may I help you?”
“I need a ride!” I whispered it, but the words came out an old man’s wheeze through the scarf across my nose and mouth.
“From where to where?”
“Raleigh Court, Kilburn, to anywhere safe!”
“What time do you require collecting?”
“As soon as possible!”
“Very well, sir, please make your way to Raleigh Road and a cab will be there to collect you in the next few minutes . . .”
I hung up, Oda had found dustbins, dustbins rang a bell, it was near where I’d found my Mr Fox. I hissed, “This way!” and dragged her by the weighty bridge of Kemsley in the way I thought I remembered the road. A few steps on, and Oda trod on something and hissed. I looked at it. A trooper, one of the Aldermen’s, lay on the pavement in front of us, a penknife stuck calmly through the wrinkled pipe of his throat.
“Quiet!” I whispered. “Quiet!”
We stopped, and listened.
“Where is he?” hissed Oda.
“Don’t know. Shush!”
“Sorcerer . . .”
Fear, not question, reassurance, not answers. She could probably have done with answers, but knew better than to think I’d have any going spare.
I curled my fingers tighter around our neon bubble, let it become nothing more than a tiny flame between my clutching fingertips. “This way,” I whispered. We staggered forwards at an old man’s totter, each step the one before the last that ruptures that ageing artery, this one, maybe this one, maybe now . . . so we kept moving, counting maybes, no sound except the tiny whisper of a bass beat in a pair of headphones and our own gigantic
