were his words, back at the bridge: Is there any way you wouldn’t be a liability? She wouldn’t show fear. ‘I’m fine.’
Fil leaned close to the spider and whispered to it, and a forelimb coiled around him too. When he didn’t struggle Beth steadied herself. For an instant, she glimpsed her face, distorted in the curve of the spider’s massive exoskeleton — and then the giant spider carried them away, scuttling up and over the phone lines at a speed that left her last breath stranded behind her in the air.
Houses, streets, factories, cars, all streaked past below them: distorted light and roaring, rushing noise. Filius, across from her, became grainy and faded away, and Beth felt her own body fizzing and saw her hand dissolve into pixels. She was breathless, but moment by moment she grew less afraid. The pulse of the spider soothed her.
All sense of motion dissipated. Time changed. The city lost definition, became dark and blurry. What was real, what was vivid, was the web: cables twisted between the shadowy buildings and ran underground, shining as they crisscrossed the urban darkness, alive with chattering voices.
A shape rose on the horizon: a slim steel tower, all blazing light and sound, rising from a hill in the south of the city. The strands of the web converged on it. It grew steadily, shining, blotting out the sky, burning her sight into nothingness. The murmur of a million conversations swelled to a roar — then there was blackness. The light was extinguished like a dowsed match; the voices were silenced. Beth lurched forward and caught herself on a metal banister. Chill air buffeted her and she groped around as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. She was up high.
Really high.
She was standing on a platform on a metal tower. It took her a second to recognise the interweaving metal struts of the Crystal Palace radio mast. The city, hundreds of feet below, glimmered like a firefly army in the darkness.
‘I’m on Cryst-’ She fought for breath and her skin tingled at the sheer lack of anything between her and the drop. ‘I’m on Crystal Palace Tower? That’s-That’s actually beautiful.’ Hysterical laughter bubbled out of her as she realised how far they’d come.
Spiders no bigger than you’d find in your house flickered in and out of existence all around her, crawling everywhere, fussing at bales of wire and satellite dishes with their sharp limbs. The spider that had carried them shivered and then splintered into hundreds of smaller eight-legged bodies, which quickly vanished into the teeming mass.
Beth shuddered at their skittering movements and the wagging of their tiny glassy heads. As her ears adjusted, the wind began to sound more and more like voices, submerged in static: waves of crackling conversation.
Fil rubbed feeling back into his limbs. He peered upwards into the tower’s upper reaches. ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘She don’t know you, and you won’t wanna know her.’ He hesitated, his face pinched, worried-looking. ‘Be careful, right?’ he said. ‘I got us an amnesty with the Motherweb for the chat, but the kids here’ — he indicated the milling arachnids — ‘they can be a little keen. But they only eat voices, so keep your mouth shut and you should be fine.’
He tested a strut with his bare foot, and then he began to scramble rapidly up the inside of the structure, as surefooted as a spider himself, until he was lost to sight.
Beth hugged herself. A sense of freedom went through her like a chill. She thought of the people she knew in the city below, and she wondered if she’d ever see them again. You were warned this could kill you, B, she reminded herself. You already said your goodbyes.
She faltered. B. Why had she called herself that? Only one person ever addressed her with that kind of lazy familiarity. And then she was thinking of Pen, and there was an ache in her chest, a longing, a desperate desire to share this view, this sight that no one ever saw. She hurriedly shoved it down.
The height was making her queasy, so she turned to look inwards — and noticed the bundle. It was about five feet high and maybe three across: a bale of steel wires, hanging down from a strut above her like a fat metal wasp’s nest. Something thin dangled from the bottom of it. She frowned and stepped in for a closer look.
It was a shoelace.
A tightness gripped Beth’s chest and she became aware of the bundle’s dimensions in a new and horrible way. She reached out and her fingertips brushed it, set it swinging in empty space.
The spiders chittered and ignored her.
Swearing softly, she grabbed the struts and began to climb towards the bundle. Her hand slipped on rainwaterslick steel and her stomach lurched, but she pulled herself tight to the metal again.
Easy, Beth, she admonished herself. You’ve climbed worse than this to tag a bloody rooftop.
As she drew level with the top of the bundle she saw a few strands of red hair poking between the wires, drifting like seaweed in the breeze. There were gaps between the metal threads and Beth made out a face: a girl, not much older than she was. The collar of her coat was street-stained. Cobwebs were matted over her eyesockets. A fat cable extruded from her mouth, and Beth almost gagged at the way her throat stretched around it.
Tinny voices bled into the air, as though leaking from the wires stuffed into the girl’s ears:
We love you. Home, safe from harm. Safe. Never, never hurt you.
The red-headed girl’s eyes were not quite shut and her eyelids flickered in time to their words.
They eat voices. Beth remembered Fil’s words as the spider-calls swirled in the air. The cable in the girl’s mouth flexed obscenely, as though milking the sound from her throat.
Beth reached out and grasped the cable. Everything became nightmare-slow as she pulled it free.
The girl’s eyes snapped open. As the end of the cable left her mouth she screamed.
We love you we love you we love we love you we love you we love you we love we love you we love you…
The spiders turned instantly, order emerging from their chaotic motion. They swept over the metal in a glittering wave. Before Beth could even think they were crawling on her knuckles, through her hair, their needle-feet pricking her scalp and the skin over her breastbone. She lost control and shrieked, but a pair of pincer-jaws pierced the skin of her throat and the sound in her throat dried up as though it had been siphoned off.
The spiders marched over her shoulders towards her ears. Beth could see them spinning out threads of wire from their abdomens. Their static-voices swelled to fever-pitch.
W e love you we love you we love we love you we love you…
Their stolen words pulsed around her mind, suffocating her terror like morphine. Desperately, she tried to hold onto her fear, the true emotion, the only sane thing to feel, but she could feel it being drowned under the love of the spiders.
She waved her free arm desperately, slapping at them, crushing a handful, which vanished in a crackle of static.
We love you, the voices snapped viciously, but you made everything worse.
The thought pierced her like a lance. She sagged, dizzy and exhausted, against the metal. Her terror felt like a very distant thing now.
Something flickered in the air: a grey shape dropped through the tower’s hollow core towards her. A bony arm took her hard in the gut and she plummeted, barely aware of herself, barely conscious of the fall.
Beth looked up in a daze to find Fil holding her. He was shouting at her, his face livid — but no sound came out of his mouth.
We love you we love you we love you we love you: that was all she could hear. Worse, worse, worse.
He sprang from strut to strut, slowing their descent, Beth’s body jolting at every impact until at last they tumbled into the wet grass at the tower’s base.
He leaped to his feet and jabbed his finger at her angrily. At first there was no sound, then his voice began to crackle in his throat. ‘Thames and Riverblood!’ he swore, ‘when I said amnesty, I didn’t mean you could go pulling the plug on their pissing food supply!’
Beth gaped at him. She rose, unsteadily, onto one knee. The spiders’ voices were fading, giving way to nausea as the fright washed back. The red-headed girl’s screaming face blotted out everything else in her mind. ‘There’s someone,’ she gasped, ‘up there-’
‘The ginger girl?’ he said. ‘Yeah, I know. Thankfully, despite your clowning around, I think they’ve managed to reconnect her, so I’ve probably still got a deal with ’em.’
