‘A deal?’ Beth yelled at him, her terror sliding into fury. ‘How can you make deals with those things? We have to help her, she’s a prisoner!’
‘Is she?’ His voice was a parody of shock. ‘Way I saw it; she didn’t start screaming until you pulled her loose.’
Beth was incredulous. She opened and closed her mouth a few times before she could find words. ‘You mean she wants to be there?’
‘Why not? Her brain spends every minute sunk in love now, flooded with it. She used to be alone — they always are. That’s how the Motherweb chooses ’em: finds ’em on the street, lost, lonely, cold, last bit of change in their hands to make their last phone calls to people who don’t care. Their desperation’s a kind of beacon to her: she homes in on it, and she offers them her choice.’
‘What happens if they change their minds?’
His face stiffened, but he didn’t look away. ‘It’s a oneoff deal. The Pylon Spiders don’t change their minds.’
Suddenly Beth was seeing her dad, the teeming hive of his grief. She could imagine him weeping with gratitude as a team of spiders dragged a cable to his lips and stuffed his ears with their calming song.
‘That’s crap,’ she snapped. ‘It doesn’t matter how bad it gets, how far down they are: people heal. You can’t just let them bury themselves like that. You can’t let those creatures offer them that choice. They’re just taking bloody advantage!’
The Urchin Prince straightened slowly to his full height. His words burnt with disdain. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘thanks be to Mater Viae that she sent us you to teach us the error of our ways.’
He spat at the ground. ‘Why is it you who gets to decide how much people can take before they want out?’ he asked. ‘Besides, even if you’re right, what about the spiders? They’re an entire species — you think they can’t feel? And think? And bloody love? They can’t eat nothing else, Beth; no matter how you or I might wish they could, they can’t. They need a voice; they don’t get it, they starve. That’s not their fault, and it’s not mine either, so you can stop looking at me like that.’ His voice was flat. ‘There’s more lives at stake here than just the flesh-and-blood ones, the fourlimbed ones, the ones that look like you. You’d better learn that, fast, or you’ll kill our army before Reach even gets his cranes in gear.’
Beth bit her lip and looked down. She could still hear the echoes of the spiders’ sibilant stolen voices. Everything worse. Her mind felt dirty, scraped raw.
He stared at her with narrowed eyes. ‘What did they say to you?’ he said at last. ‘It wasn’t just the usual love songs, was it? What else did they say?’
Beth bit her lip and refused to meet his gaze. She didn’t answer. Dawn was breaking over the distant stubble of the city. He turned and stalked away from the tower without another word.
‘Whose fault is it, then?’ Beth called after him. ‘If it’s not yours, and it’s not theirs, whose fault is it that I’m those things’ prey?’ She leaned bitterly on the word.
He paused. ‘The one who made them that way,’ he said at last. ‘Mater Viae. My mother.’
CHAPTER 12
‘I wondered if I might speak to Parva, please.’
Pen glanced through her bedroom doorway. From her bed she could just make out the open front door downstairs, and a man with a spam-pink bald spot, standing on the top step.
‘I am very sorry, sir,’ her mother said in her sing-song English. ‘She has been very ill. She has not been able to get out of bed.’
Pen looked slowly around her room. She’d been stuck in here for three days now. It smelled like a hospital, and was starting to feel like one too. She’d taken to stashing the lamb samosas her mum had been bringing to her under the bed. ‘ Aap ki pasandeenda,’ Mum had said every time, ‘your favourite!’ Pen’s long-fought-for vegetarianism was dismissed in a stunning display of strategic amnesia now that she was trapped at home. She could smell the pastry and the fat in the meat congealing together into one artery-busting torpedo.
She hadn’t read any poetry in days. (Her dad would smack her one if he ever found the copy of Donne stitched into her biology textbook. With typical awkwardness, he’d probably grasp just enough of the old-fashioned English to understand the dirty bits.) She was starting to feel genuinely ill.
‘Could I… Could I possibly nip up and see her then? I wouldn’t take…’ The man’s voice tailed off. He sounded scared — given the face that her mother was likely to be making to such a suggestion, Pen didn’t blame him.
‘Good bye.’ The door slammed hard.
Pen sat for a few moments, picking at the skin on her fingertips and on the palms of her hands. Her skin barely hurt any more as it curled away like pencil sharpenings. The lower layer was shockingly pink against her normal tea colour. Soon there would be no skin left that had touched anything the week before. Of course it would have rubbed off and become dust eventually anyway, but it made her feel a little better helping it along.
She heard the whine as the vacuum started up and above it, her mum singing contentedly to herself as she prosecuted her one-woman jihad against dirt. Pen’s mum had wardrobes full of dresses still in their original plastic. ‘They are only new once, my sweetheart,’ she would cluck happily; ‘I am saving them for a special occasion.’
That was exactly how Pen had felt when she’d come home from school in the middle of the day claiming to feel sick, when her mother had welcomed her greedily, no questions asked, and tucked her up safe in bed: Saved for a special occasion. Sealed up like a dress in plastic, gathering dust.
Pen couldn’t stop remembering Salt’s office. There’d been a harsh disinfectant smell. Pen had sat there, rigid with terror. She’d expected him to shout, but of course he never did. Instead he’d read aloud from Beth’s student file: the minor arrests for shoplifting and vandalism, the fights, the truancy. Her uniform was tatty, he said; he knew she sold paintings at Camden Market at the weekend; he suspected she sold cannabis at school every other day of the week.
Frostfield High had no record of Beth’s father’s occupation, he’d pointed out, and Mr Bradley had never once been to a parents’ evening.
‘I can only conclude,’ he said with counterfeit regret, ‘that she’s fending for herself. And then of course there’s this little piece of vandalism you helped her perpetrate.’
He’d brushed away Pen’s protests with a wave of his hand. He knew it was Beth, of course he did, whether he could prove it or not. There was no one else it could have been.
‘The Child Protection people will make their own assessment, of course,’ he said with grim satisfaction, ‘but I believe there’s a solid case for rehoming your little friend.’
It felt like he’d pulled a plug out of Pen’s stomach. The midnight tagging, roaming around the streets, the access to the city, to the night: that was Beth. To shove her into some orphanage would end her.
Pen had thought: She did this for you.
‘I don’t want to do this, Parva,’ Salt had said, leaning forward so she could smell that morning’s coffee on his breath, ‘but she’s a terrible influence on you. It’s your future she’s wasting.’ He’d paused, as though the thought had just come to him, then said slowly, ‘I suppose if I saw genuine commitment from you to that future, a real willingness to change, I could put this away.’ He’d patted the folder.
Reluctantly, Pen met his eyes. They showed nothing but grave concern. He was taunting her, making her feel her powerlessness — showing her how superb at looking innocent he was.
‘Twice a week, after school,’ he’d said softly. ‘This office. Extra maths. I’ll help you out.’
Pen had swallowed, her throat parched, and then again, until she finally found the strength to nod.
Salt’s voice had hardened. ‘I want your little friend gone, Parva: that’s non-negotiable. She can be gone from my school, or gone from her home. Those are your choices.’
Then he’d smiled at her. ‘It’ll be our secret,’ he’d said, and he’d leaned over the desk and kissed her on the lips.
Every muscle in her body clenched at the smell of the sweat in the folds of his neck, the scrape of his beard along her cheekbone. The hard points of his fingers had pushed down the small of her back and under the waistband of her underwear.
She didn’t know if he wanted her because he fancied her, or because he knew how much it hurt her. She
