terrified buzzing of the Whitey behind me.
Splinters of glass shower me. The tiny cuts heal fast.
Eventually I feel the heat behind me lessen as the Whitey slides down the back of the lamppost. He hunches for a second on the tarmac, his corona of white light shrinking as the Sodiumites advance on him. Then he shambles away, clutching himself, strobing off little mewls of pain.
There’s a touch of moisture on the wind. My stomach twists. I know what will happen to him if he’s caught out in a rainstorm…
… and so do they.
Electra’s slap burns my cheek. She’s climbed the lamppost as well. Her sisters stand around the courtyard, ostentatiously staring in the other direction.
‘ What were you doing? ’
‘It’s going to rain!’ I yell back at her, my skin stinging. ‘He just wanted shelter.’
‘ He was trespassing. They have their own shelters. ’
‘On a dozen streets in the centre of the city, five miles away — he’ll never make it in time!’
She stares at me. Her eyes glow a uniform clear amber from lid to lid.
‘ Good,’ she strobes. ‘ If I ever trespassed on Whitey ground, a stoning is the least I would expect. ’
She looks down at her sisters. ‘ They wanted me to throw you out but I told them about Glas, and about Reach. They understand you are upset. They are not happy, not at all, but you can stay — as long as you never ever get in our way like that again. ’
My stomach burns as fiercely as my face. How dare she apologise for me? I want to scream at her, but spots of rain are already kissing my forehead. Alarm flashes across Electra’s face.
‘ Rest. Recover,’ she murmurs hurriedly. She lays hot fingers on my chest. ‘ We will talk when the moon comes out. ’ She vanishes into the filament of her lamp, which begins to glow after a second. There is a tinkling sound and the fragments of glass shattered by the stones begin to levitate, floating in her electro-magnetic field, glittering as they catch her light. The glass closes around the filament. For an instant she burns hotter: a bright and unbearable white, almost the same shade as the Whitey she scorned. I turn my face away.
When I look back, the lamp glass has melted back together and inside, Electra’s light is amber again.
I drop lightly to the ground. Electra’s sisters have retreated into their own shelters. I shiver and thrust my hands in my pockets.
You can stay, she said. How river-pissing generous of her.
Am I in hiding then? That’s what was in Electra’s tone, the shade of her words. Can I really be hiding? The idea’s absurd, I don’t hide. No, I came here to dance, to relax, clear my mind and get ready for …
For what? I am hiding. I’m afraid. The realisation weighs me down as though every blood vessel in my body is suddenly full of gravel. Reach is much, much too strong for me. All of the wraiths I’ve fought, the Pylon Spiders, the city’s petty monsters, none of them ever felt like this.
Out in the wilderness there is a faint glow that might be the Whitey.
The wind gusts and snaps at the hem of my jeans. I sit down cross-legged between the lampposts. And the rain comes down hard.
The Whitey danced for his life. He snaked and jerked, trying to dart between the raindrops. He could feel his magnesium bones tingling, stretching out to the water, almost like they wanted to react with it and burn. His frantic speed made him brilliant, and his light reflected off the concrete walls of the estate, leaving ghostly after-images. The grass underfoot was wet and he throbbed off shrieks of pain as he ran, scrambling to find shelter.
The Whitey found a slick black tarpaulin crumpled into a corner by an outbuilding. He threw it over himself, but the rivulets of water that ran off it made him scream, so he stood and ran again, his light beaming out from the treacherous holes in the tarp. Curls of hydrogen twisted wherever the rain struck home.
Suddenly the wind changed and a puddle rippled, splashing a curl of water against the Whitey’s leg. He blazed in pain and the metal in his ankle reacted: his foot vanished in a flare of light and gas and he fell awkwardly by a barbed-wire fence. He crawled in agony over the wet tarmac. The world around him was bright with lit windows, safe, dry lights, but there was no way in.
A jag of concrete snared the edge of the tarp and it was dragged from him. The Whitey lay there, unable to crawl further. He spasmed and his knee scraped over the concrete. A spark caught and he was bathed in flame as the hydrogen cloud around him ignited. The heat soothed him for alltoo-brief a moment and then burned out.
It was only the needles of pain rippling over him that kept him conscious. He thought of his home, wondering how he had got so far from the bright gas-white globes on their posts over the Carnaby Street market. His brothers and sisters would be there now, with the rain ricocheting harmlessly off their bulbs. One orb would be dark, empty; where he ought to be.
Something moved above him, a thin, dark shadow, and the Whitey looked up. A skein of barbed wire was coming off the fence towards him, twisting and coiling like a snake through the air. It shivered along its length and the barbs gave off a rattling hiss.
‘ No,’ he strobed. Even in his agony, a deeper fear gripped him. ‘ No, get back. I’m not yours. I can’t sustain you. ’
But the eyeless thing kept coming and in the flickering light of his words he saw a tendril slither off the ground to caress his face. The moisture on it burnt him.
‘ Please,’ he whispered, a dim flicker, ‘ please, not me. I can tell you things — there are threats, threats to your master. The Viae Child, he’s raising an army against him, against Reach. I saw him — I hid and read his very lips- ’
But the thing kept coiling lovingly around him, tighter and tighter. Metal thorns clasped hungrily at his scalp, seeking a way in, as though they could plunder straight from his mind the information he was trying to bargain with.
Cracks started to spread through him and he shrieked brightly as the barbs pierced his glass skull and let the water in.
CHAPTER 10
Beth sat on the bus to Bethnal Green. She looked around, but she couldn’t see a wet dog so she was forced to conclude that the smell was coming from her. Strange blots were dancing at the edges of her eyes and it felt like a gnome in lead boots was tap-dancing in the back of her head.
She managed to doze off between ringing the bell and the bus hissing to a stop. Jerking awake, she leaped to her feet and shouldered her way through the closing door. A thunderclap echoed somewhere to the west and the rain redoubled, greeting her with soaking enthusiasm, plastering her hair flat against her skull.
Beth sighed and squelched onwards.
At first she thought he was a hallucination, just sitting there cross-legged, despondently getting drenched. The streetlamps were flickering on and off in some sort of sequence, making his shadow jump in a weird staccato dance.
‘Hey!’ she yelled. Relief and excitement fizzed through her. ‘Hey, you! Guy!’ She didn’t know what to call him. ‘Urchin!’
He looked up and his grey eyes widened as Beth came down the steps of the bridge three at a time. He scrambled to his feet. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.
Beth grinned. ‘You told me to look for you under broken light.’
She was buzzing: to have found him again, to have him be real. The tower blocks reared vastly against the sodium-soaked clouds and the way they dwarfed her was suddenly thrilling. ‘Is this your home?’ she asked.
A grin to match hers sneaked onto his face. ‘Home? Well, part of it, I guess — I could bed down in any square inch of London town. Welcome to my parlour.’ He stretched his arms out as though to take in the entire city. ‘Make yourself comfy.’ He laughed, and then seemed to remember who he was talking to.
He folded his arms and looked at her suspiciously. ‘Who are you? Why are you following me?’
Beth crossed her arms too. Her stance was pugnacious but she could feel herself trembling with the adrenalin racing through her. ‘Who are you?’ she countered. ‘Why did you save me?’
