The Midnight Mayor

the platform and Oda was holding us, she was holding us as if we were going to be any use in the buried darkness of that place.

And that was it.

Polite silent death.

A drip, drip, drip of black, ink-stained blood rolling down off the platform’s edge. The rapid breathing of Oda, her face pressed against my shoulder, my head turned into her hair. The only light came from the indicator board, orange letters scrawling across the thin rectangular screen.

1. High Barnet via Bank — 1 mins

2. Edgware via Bank — 7 mins

3. Edgware via CharingX — 13 mins

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT GIVE ME BACK MY HAT GIVE ME BACK MY HAT GIVE ME

A pair of footsteps, leather soles, walking down the platform, a smiling face half-lit up in reflected orange glow. Mr Pinner, not a mark on him, examining the burnt-out twin crosses I had painted onto the concrete.

“Domine dirige nos,” he said at last. “The blessing of the city.”

I couldn’t speak, we couldn’t breathe.

He looked up slowly, considered first me, then Oda, then me again. Then he started to smile. “Oh,” he breathed. “How unlikely! Not just a sorcerer and some Aldermen. The Midnight Mayor made a phone call before he died.”

I held up my right hand, trembling with fear, and cold from the rain. The twin crosses ached across my skin. “Domine dirige nos,” I whispered. “Keep back.”

“You!” breathed Mr Pinner. “Well . . . I have to admit I’m surprised! Considering that it was you who killed Bakker, you who brought down the Tower, you who destroyed the only institution that might have kept your city safe from my revenge . . . and Nair made you Midnight Mayor?”

“Believe me, it’s as inexplicable to me as it is to you.”

1. High Barnet via Bank

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT GIVE ME BACK MY HAT GIVE ME BACK MY HAT GIVE ME

It didn’t say the train was due — these things were never clear. Did the lack of a “1 min” statement mean it was due right now, or in fifty-nine seconds? I doubted if we’d survive fifty-nine seconds of this conversation.

“So . . . this makes you what? Sorcerer and Midnight Mayor? A heady combination! How do you sleep at night, how do you not get lost in it, all the power you could have, heart beating in time to the rumbling of the engines waiting at the lights, breath gusting like the vents up from the kitchens, eyes moving with the twitching of the pigeons and the sweep of the cameras? So much life, so big and so mad and so wild and so bright — I’m impressed you’re not drooling! Seriously. Man to man — well, as the phrase goes, respect. Still not enough to keep you alive.”

The last ashes of my twin crosses, burnt onto the platform floor, shimmered out. I wrapped my arms around Oda, felt her tense against the touch, looked into her eyes and smiled, hoped she would see my apology for what we had to do.

“OK,” we murmured. “OK. You’ve got us. A sorcerer can’t stop you, the Midnight Mayor can’t stop you.”

A distant rumbling, a distant breath of cold air in the tunnel, a distant grumbling of wheels, a distant white light in the darkness . . .

Too distant.

“You missed something,” I said. “About me.”

“What was that?” he asked, sounding genuinely interested.

A cold push of air from the tunnel, a pair of white lights grinding

down towards us, an asterisk running across the indicator board, wiping out all previous statements, clean slate, end of the line, goodnight, good luck, reload, reboot . . .

“Us.”

And holding Oda by the waist, we pulled both her and us head-first onto the tracks.

There is an idea: the live rail.

We have always liked it.

Electricity, alive.

They say: don’t step on the live rail.

We tumbled over tracks rumbling with the approach of black razored metal wheels, slipped into the mouse- infested, litter-filled dip in the middle, and I heard Oda gasp as her nose came within an inch from the live rail, raised on its insulating white supports just above the height of the tracks. She tensed, pushing back against my weight, and above us I heard Mr Pinner start to laugh, start to clap.

She looked at us, saw the blue of our eyes, whispered, “No.”

We grinned, raised our hand burnt with the sign of the Midnight Mayor, and as the approaching train saw us in the blackness of the station and slammed on its brakes, too late, much too late, we pulled Oda closer to our chest, and wrapped our fingers around the raised bar of the live rail.

It takes a lot of electricity to move a train.

The shock of it blasted us up and sideways, pitched us into the air, fingers fused to the metal by a screaming, writhing tangle of white lightning snakes that bit and snapped with poisoned teeth, scorched the air black and sent furious screaming sparks spurting out of every join of the tracks. We let it burn through us, set our blood on fire, our skin on fire, our eyes on fire, let it blaze and scream and burn and dance and flash and flare and fury and

I screamed God just screamed and

we sucked it in through our burning hand

my skin on fire

caught it up beneath our feet, let it fill us, sucked in every drop from the live rail and then a little more, fed on the left-over neon clinging in the snuffed-out tubes, ate up the orange glow from the indicator board, sucked in the taste of black blood running down the rails, feasted on the screaming of the train’s brakes, and more still

I could taste more as my tongue ignited with blue burning going from here to there faster than the electricity in the wire just a little mortal going to burn going to catch fire going to here it is . . .

. . . blue blood burning . . .

. . . blue electric angels . . .

We spread our wings.

We dragged in the fire from the live rail, the rushing of the train, the pumping of the cold air in the tunnels, the light, the darkness, the blood, the heat in my stomach that I couldn’t give, the strength in my blood that I didn’t have left, the warmth in Oda’s body clutched to our chest; we dragged in a million million million ghosts who had died to dig the tunnels, who had lived their lives on the train going from here to there and back again, touch in, touch out, ticket, escalator, platform, chair, a million, million, million dead and living things who every day prayed for their train to come for the seat to be free for the paper to be left for the strangers to be kind for the journey to be swift for the ticket to be cheap for the stairs to be empty for the tunnels to be cool for the announcers to be gentle. And with all this life poured into the tunnels beneath the streets, was it any surprise that here, of all places, here, we could grow a pair of blue electric wings?

Was it any surprise that here, where the business was movement, with our hand burnt to the live rail, we could fly?

The electricity blasted us into the tunnel ahead of the incoming train and we let it. We lifted our feet from the earth and let the fire burn across our flesh and outside our flesh and with a single beat of the burning blue electric wings, beautiful and immortal as the darkness in the tunnels, we flew into the waiting depth of the Underground.