the dark horizon, repeating, over and over, ‘Reach! Reach! ’
At last he climbed down and staggered over to her, his eyes wide, and she folded him up in her arms and held him tight until he stopped shaking.
CHAPTER 16
‘So, where to now, guv?’ Beth perched on a bollard and ripped open the greaseproof paper on her bacon sandwich. The smell of bacon and hot melting butter drifted into the chilly air.
A few hours after leaving the Demolition Fields Beth found that she could no longer remember exactly how it had felt to be there. In fact, she couldn’t feel anything much at all: it was as though her emotions had blown a fuse and shut down, leaving just a basic awareness of her own body, the cold, the pressure of urine in her bladder, the ache of tired muscles…
Beth took a big bite. Suddenly she was ravenously hungry.
‘You want a bit of this?’ she mumbled around the mouthful of bread and bacon.
Fil declined with a smirk. ‘Don’t need it.’
Beth swallowed. ‘Oh yeah, your weird synthesis thing. Don’t you ever just eat? You know, ’cause it tastes good?’
‘Sure, a good bit of tarmac-cake or a few petrolberries, when I get time. Nothing like that. ’ He eyed Beth’s sandwich with a mix of curiosity and intense distrust. ‘Speakin’ of which, what time is it?’ he asked.
She glanced at her G-Shock. ‘Six twenty-three in the a.m.’
‘Then we can relax; the people we’re going to see won’t be up for a bit.’
Darkness still covered the street behind Waterloo Station where they sat, but besuited office workers bustled to and fro. The news kiosks were manned and the headlines fresh. Cars and buses hissed over the asphalt.
‘What I don’t get,’ Beth said, ‘is why you think we’re going to have trouble getting people on our side. I mean, Reach is blatantly dangerous, so why aren’t your mum’s worshippers queuing round the block to have him got rid of?’
He looked at her like she was a prize-winning idiot. ‘You’re kidding, right? Because he’s blatantly dangerous. We’ve never had do anything like this before. Mater Viae always gathered the army, and she always led it herself, before Reach grew too strong to kill.’ He looked grim. ‘My mother’s left us right in the lurch. With her around, people got scared, and so they acted. Without her, they get scared and pretend it’s not their problem. They draw boundaries: “Let Reach stay in the Square Mile,” they say, “and we’ll live and let live.” And when he breaks those borders, they give him new ones: north of the river, east of the park, stuff like that.’
He picked dirt from under his fingernails and flicked it absentmindedly at a nearby pigeon. ‘And the longer they leave it, the stronger Reach gets, and the stronger he gets, the scareder they get, and so they leave it even longer. It’s a vicious cycle: stupid, but that’s how it works.’
Well, this is a carnival of bloody optimism, Beth thought. ‘But those people,’ she insisted, ‘those people, from last night — the men and Women in the Walls. Don’t they have friends, families?’
‘Sure they do,’ Fil sighed, ‘but for every man or woman demanding vengeance for their murdered brother, there’re three more who’ll curl up in a corner and beg you not to hurt them too.’
He squirmed under Beth’s appalled gaze. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said. ‘I don’t know which way I’d go myself yet. And despite what you’re thinking, I bet you don’t either.’
Beth wondered what had happened to the brash kid who’d declared: I’m the most dangerous thing on the street. He was sloughing off layers of bravado at a rate that frightened her.
When sunlight began to spear from behind the horizon’s taller buildings, he stretched and slung his spear over his shoulder. ‘Come on, finish your munching. We need to get moving.’
They threaded through the early morning crowds. A few people looked askance at the pavement-skinned teenager, shirtless in the cold, but only a few — after all, if you didn’t inspect him too closely there were dozens of weirder performers working London’s streets.
They ducked off the main drag and hopped a fence with a diamond-shaped yellow sign warning: High Voltage: Danger of Death. Fil climbed up a fire escape onto a roof and walked towards a pair of towering pipes that were belching out air-con vapour. He leaned on the nearest pipe and paused, pursing his lips in thought. ‘Okay, Beth,’ he said, ‘the people we’re about to meet are uppity, arrogant and excruciatingly bloody irritating, i.e. they’re nobility. I’m warning you in advance, because we have to be polite to ’em, and because-’
‘Because I have a big mouth?’
He nodded emphatically.
‘Okay,’ Beth said, ‘but I don’t know what you’re worried about. I can control myself, you know. Just now, when you said “arrogant, uppity and irritating”, I didn’t say a word about pots, kettles and being bla-’
He gave her a playful shove. ‘ Walk. And take off your watch, I don’t want the glass reflecting somebody’s eyeball and causing a diplomatic incident.’
Beth considered asking him what on earth he was talking about, but she was rapidly giving that particular question up as a waste of breath. She slipped the G-shock into her pocket.
When they rounded the pipes they were confronted by a rectangular shape draped in black fabric, about the height and width of a shipping container. He yanked away the cloth to reveal a frameless slab of mirrored glass.
Beth studied her own reflection in the mirror. She’d lost weight in the days she’d been on the streets. Her cheekbones jutted out now, and her skin was dirty. She looked rough, sleep-deprived.
‘Did you put this here?’
‘It had to be out of the way so they wouldn’t hurt anybody.’
‘ Who wouldn’t?’ Beth tried not to sound exasperated, but she did wish, just once, he’d give her a plain answer.
‘You’ll see.’ He stood a little straighter and tapped on the glass three times with the butt of his railing. ‘His Highness Filius Viae, Son of the Streets, Prince Ascendant of London, Heir and Protector to all her colonies,’ he intoned formally, ‘requests and requires an audience with the Seven Senators of the Most Noble Order of the Silvered Glass.’
Beth leaned into him. ‘Nice title,’ she whispered.
‘Yeah, the Mirrorstocracy love all that pomp and circumstance stuff.’
‘What, and you don’t?’
They exchanged a long look, and he blushed.
‘I believe that’s what they call “busted”, your Highness,’ Beth murmured.
‘Hush.’
They waited. Birds cawed overhead, but nothing else happened. Fil rapped on the mirror again. ‘His Highness, Filius-’ he began again, but this time he was interrupted by a stuffy voice that sounded like its owner had spent about a century gargling dust.
‘Very well, very well — no need to hurry. How very uncouth.’
In the mirror Beth saw a stooped old man walk onto the roof. He appeared from the reflection’s edge, as though he’d been lurking behind them, just out of sight. He approached until he stood right between mirror-Beth and mirror-Fil.
A shiver went up Beth’s spine. A glance sideways confirmed what she already knew: there was no old man beside her. He existed only in the reflection.
‘ Harrumph,’ said the old man. He was dressed in a purple uniform with gold piping and a beret and looked like a cross between a brigadier and an incredibly ancient bellboy.
He peered doubtfully out of the mirror at them. ‘You don’t look much like a Prince Ascendant,’ he said. He plucked distastefully at the jeans of Fil’s reflection and Beth was faintly appalled to see his real jeans ripple, just as if they’d been pinched by invisible fingers.
Fil cocked an eyebrow. ‘You don’t look much like the Seven Senators of the Silvered Glass, so I reckon that makes us even.’
‘How very uncouth. I am the Senate’s agent-de-porte. Anything you wish to say to them, you may say to me,’
