Beth couldn’t help but smile. ‘Show off,’ she muttered.
Two grazed elbows and a lot of choice curses later, she hit the ground on the other side. ‘Damn it, Phyllis, why can’t you use a front door? Ow!’
She straightened slowly, taking it all in.
The terrace was a facade. The street-facing wall still stood, but it was a brick veil concealing the ugliness of the demolition site behind, where everything had been torn down.
Dominating the space was a corkscrew-drill, rising fifty feet into the air, and collapsed at the drill’s caterpillar-tracked base: rust-eaten and magnificent…
… was a crane.
An uncomfortable tension pricked under Beth’s ribs as she walked towards it. The crane exuded a kind of dormant menace, like an unexploded bomb. Fil sat on a slab on the far side of the waste ground, watching her carefully.
‘I don’t get it,’ Beth said. She laid a hand on the crane’s pitted metal. ‘These must have cost a fuck-load, but they look like they’ve been here for decades. Why didn’t the owner take them back?’
Fil’s voice echoed back off the derelict house-fronts. ‘The owner was in kind of a hurry to go. A crusading army whose one and only commandment is to rip your guts out will have that effect, know what I’m saying?’
‘Not even remotely.’
‘You’ll see,’ he promised her. His tone was oddly solemn. ‘Look, Beth: look around you and you’ll see.’
Dutifully Beth looked, but in the darkness the heaps and valleys of rubble were just so much crenellated shadow. She frowned and rummaged in her bag for her torch.
‘No!’ His shout froze her. His eyes were pale in the night. ‘We don’t bring light here, Beth. Not ever. Out of respect.’
Beth muttered imprecations under her breath but she dropped her torch back into the bag. She squatted and brushed the dirt off a jagged hunk of brickwork. She thought she could see some kind shape on it, but it was vague in the darkness, just a shadow of a shadow. She strained her eyes, trying to see it better, until, bit by bit, it became more defined.
What are-? she wondered. And then she realised what she was looking at. And her shocked cry pierced the night.
Staring vacantly out at her was a face, rippling the surface of the masonry like a brickwork fossil. Through busted mortar teeth it screamed silently back.
Beth recoiled and turned away, but it was too late: her eyes had adjusted and the bodies The bodies were everywhere.
They were withered like mummies, with stark ribs protruding from the surfaces of the broken brickwork. She could even see the outlines of blood vessels where limbs had been sheared away.
She cupped her hands over her mouth as if trying to catch the tiny noises of distress coming out of it. Her eye was drawn to one figure hunched over, hugging its knees. Eyes and mouth gaped wide between its legs. Its neck was utterly broken.
Beth reeled. She tripped and sprawled, her hands clutching dead things, and she yanked them away and curled them into fists. She shrank into a foetal ball and lay there amongst the brick corpses, gasping for breath.
And then he was there, hugging her, as she whispered, ‘ Who-? ’ She could barely speak. The dust of the rubble sat in her lungs like blood. ‘Who are they?’
‘Women in the Walls and Masonry Men,’ he said sadly. ‘They’re just people, Beth: people who made their homes here.’
Women in the Walls. Beth couldn’t help but imagine the huddled figure trying to flee, turning and turning and turning in panic as the wrecking balls crushed it and crushed it again, into an ever-smaller fragment of brick.
Slowly her body unclenched and she made herself look. A fat bore-hole blossomed from a boy’s chest, the ribs splintered around the edges. She looked at the drill and knew it was the murder weapon.
‘ What is this place? ’
When he answered, the shakiness in Fil’s voice told Beth that he’d been here many times, and that it never got any easier. ‘We call them the Demolition Fields. In the last war, this was the furthest Reach got from St Paul’s. It’s…’ He hesitated. ‘It’s also the smallest. There are others, closer to where we started, but… I brought you here because it’s the easiest one to take.’
Beth turned on him, her eyes gritty in her skull. ‘ Why? ’
‘You needed to understand,’ he said sadly. ‘You needed to get it. He is murderous, Beth: he’s the city’s own greed, killing itself in its haste to grow. He’s reborn, generation after generation, and every time he comes back stronger and we get weaker, like a cancer. I needed you to realise that all those pretty little towers he builds out of glass and steel’ — he spread his arms over the mass grave — ‘it’s all built on that.’ His gaze was open, his voice pleading.
And then Beth understood why he kept coming back here: it reminded him of who he was. Despite his hunts and his streetlamp dances and his scrambling runs across the night-city, he knew this was what he’d have to face in the end.
And he needs your help to face it, Bradley, so get up off your arse.
Beth stood up unsteadily, shrugging off his attempts to help her. Horror made her giddy — she felt like a ghost, drifting over the broken dead. There was nowhere to step that was not on them. Something cowardly in her wanted them to recede into the rubble, to disappear; she wanted to close her eyes and forget she’d ever seen this. She shoved the impulse angrily aside and instead, forced herself look at the bodies curled around their children, because inadequate though it was, it was both the least, and all she could do.
‘How did you do it before?’ she demanded harshly. Her anger was mounting; there was a corrosive feeling in her gut. ‘How did you kill Reach before?’
He barked a short laugh. ‘ Kill him? Mostly we try and make sure he kills us a little slower.’
Beth glared at him and his forced humour fell away. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so once, my mother almost snuffed Reach for good: she burned him with a fire hotter than — well, than anything. The Great Fire, we called it.’
There was a moment while Beth took this in, then, ‘ The Great Fire?’ she asked incredulously. ‘Of London? That was your mother? That was-? Jesus Christ, that was a weapon?’
Fil’s answer was a sing-song nursery rhyme: ‘London’s burning, London’s burning; pour on water, pour on water. Fire, fire; fire, fire: wash the blood of the streets from Pudding Lane.’ He smiled bleakly. ‘September, sixteen sixty-six: the baker’s shop was her tinderbox, but the fuel was all hers. Yeah, Beth, it was a weapon — her greatest weapon; some’d say her greatest power, because sometimes it’s the power to destroy that keeps all the other powers safe.’
He raised his chin proudly. ‘The city burned for three days and nights, but not one hair on a human child was harmed. Remember that, next time you call my mother a monster.
‘Gutterglass said that for the longest time they thought Reach had gone, but deep underground, some germ of him must’ve remained.’
The anger was in Beth’s mouth now, making her want to spit it, but where did it come from? She didn’t know these people; she hadn’t even known there were people like this, so why was she trembling with an urge to avenge them?
The answer came to her fast, borne on a wave of fury: these were her streets, London was her place, and if it had a people, then they were her people. The city was alive, and she’d always known that inside.
She hadn’t run away from home. This was her home: her home, her people.
Her people, her fight.
She looked at Fil. His face reflected the same anger back to her.
‘We should go,’ Beth said quietly. ‘We’ve got an army to rally.’
He looked at her gratefully, then the gratitude on his face gave way to an expression Beth recognised, though it looked out of place on his cocky face. It was the same look Pen used to have before she followed Beth on some stupid stunt: an appeal for courage. Please, it said, make me brave enough for this.
Then he was off, scrambling hand over hand up the length of the dead drill until he was standing precariously on the hydraulics at its summit: a skinny shadow swaying against the clouds.
‘Reach!’ he yelled, wild and inarticulate. He shouted his defiance across the sleeping city, to the cranes on
