her.
‘Come on, Mr B,’ she said, trying to get past the awkwardness of the moment, ‘the workout’s good for you. I bet she’s-’ She tailed off.
‘What?’ he asked, but then he too saw and fell silent.
Ahead of them, the bridge gave way to nothingness. The stairs on other side of it had been ripped away and the ends of the planks protruded like split, dirty fingernails into the black.
And it was black. Every streetlight was out, and the concrete clearing behind the estates was invisible. On the other side a light glowed weakly for an instant, barely disrupting the murk, and then it was gone.
Mr Bradley looked bemused.
‘How do we-?’ he murmured, but Pen had already jumped down.
Glass crunched under her feet as she landed. On the ground she could make out the clearing a little better. Her breath stalled.
The place had been ripped apart.
The streetlamps had been uprooted like metal trees, wire roots sprawling from the concrete clods at their bases. The glass bulbs were smashed, the remains strewn across the ground.
She heard a whoomph of breath and a muttered swearword. Mr Bradley came up behind her shoulder. ‘What happened here?’ He sounded bewildered.
Pen tried to answer, but her throat constricted and she couldn’t speak. She stared at the place where she’d thought her best friend would be waiting for her, where she’d found only the aftermath of violence.
The light on the far side of the yard flared again. Briefly illuminated, something glinted by Pen’s foot. She uttered a little cry.
Mr Bradley shouted, ‘What is it?’
Pen pointed downwards as the light pulsed again. A severed hand clutched at the pile of planks that had once been the steps of the bridge.
He collapsed to his knees and reached for it. ‘Oh God, oh God-’ His voice faltered, and then relief flooded into it. ‘Parva, it’s all right-’ He lifted the thing up. ‘Look, Parva it’s not real, it’s- Ow! It’s glass, it’s made of glass!’
It was immaculate: the bones, the muscles, even the pores of the skin, were all sculpted in smooth glass, and fine strands of dull grey metal twisted through it in place of veins and arteries.
The glow came again from the other side of the courtyard. Mr Bradley stood marvelling at the glass hand, but Pen shouldered past him and walked towards the light source. A thin wheezing sound carried through the dark: stuttering little breaths, and Pen felt her heart flutter.
The glow came again and at last Pen saw the source clearly. She broke into a run, skidding to her knees beside it.
It was a glass woman, and she twisted her head, her eyes wide, as if she’d sensed Pen arriving but couldn’t see her. Both of her legs and one arm ended in short, ragged stumps, surrounded by glittering dust as though the limbs had been crushed to powder. Pen could see her lungs through her transparent skin. Each time she breathed, the lungs compressed and her glass heart beat, and with each heartbeat, the wires that ran through her glowed.
‘It’s okay,’ Pen found herself whispering. It blatantly wasn’t okay, but she didn’t know what else to say. She cooed as if to a small child, gently lifting the shattered woman’s head and grasping her one remaining hand. It was smooth and hard, and rapidly giving up its heat to the air. ‘We’re here now,’ Pen said softly, ‘we’ll help you.’ Although she had no clue how she could help at all.
Suddenly the woman sat up hard. She opened her mouth so wide Pen could see glass tonsils. Her eyes were screwed up, as though she was screaming. She didn’t make a sound, but flared off a brilliant flash.
Pen was blinded. The world vanished into coarse-grained darkness. She groped around for the woman and something snagged her finger. She felt blood. She heard the clink of the woman falling back, and her own breath was panicked.
Then Mr Bradley cried out, ‘ Parva! ’
Pen stumbled through the darkness towards his voice, yelling, ‘Mr B! Mr B!’ over and over. Her voice sounded thin and deranged.
‘Parva!’ He was close; she could hear his panting breaths through the night. ‘Parva, my leg-’
She was close enough to make out the shape of him now, lying face-down on the tarmac. He had something wrapped around his ankle, a tourniquet of barbed wire. A taut strand led away from the prone man and disappeared into the black mouth of a nearby storm drain. Pen crouched and pulled at it, but it was tight around his leg, and her fingers came back bloody.
Mr Bradley lurched suddenly, and the wire started dragging him backwards over the pavement. He screamed in pain as he slid along the ground, twisting and flailing for purchase on the asphalt. Pen cast around for something she could use to cut him free. She clutched absurdly at her clothes, as if she carried pair of wire-cutters in her pockets.
‘Hang on, M-Mr B, just, just hang on; I’ll-’
Orange light flared then, shattering the darkness like an instant dawn. Pen gaped at it as it stormed up over the broken bridge, coalescing into human shape as it came close. She scrambled out of the way as the figure jumped from the bridge and landed lightly on the concrete. It was another woman, like the first, but not identical — a sister, maybe — and she was burning with a far stronger inner fire. The woman extended one hand towards Mr Bradley and flexed her glowing fingers in a peremptory motion.
With a sickening, adhesive sound, the wire’s barbs began to come free, glinting in the woman’s light. The wire strands wavered, as if they were fighting some invisible magnetism.
The glass woman crooked her fingers into claws and bent her back in effort. Tendrils of barbed wire snaked grudgingly out of the storm drain: yard after yard, the inch-long thorns gleaming. The wire-thing thrashed, apparently trapped by whatever force the glass woman was projecting.
Her head was bowed and her hand extended as though in prayer. She sagged, her glass knees shaking with the effort.
A single skein of the barbed-wire thing reached for the ground. It wound and snapped in frustration, labouring through the heavy air.
The shining woman dropped to one knee. The glass rang on the pavement like a bell.
The barbed wire touched earth Suddenly, the monster was free from the glass woman’s power. It accelerated instantly, lashing out at her. Barbs bit into glass with a sickening crunch and she staggered back, her light flickering. The wire blurred and coiled in the air, like a metal cloud anchored to the earth. Tendrils curved like hooks and struck with venomous speed, not towards the glass woman, but towards Pen.
She had no time to get out of its way.
Metal whirled around her, whipping her hair. Pen gasped for breath, trapped in a vortex of wire. The whirling strands tightened around her, enclosing her in a spinning cocoon. The gaps closed up, extinguishing the light from the glass woman. Pen sucked in her stomach and screwed up her eyes, waiting for the barbs to touch her.
Silence. She heard nothing now, saw nothing, but she felt the needle-tips of the barbs on her eyelids. They were gentle, like a blind person learning a new face. They tickled her. Then pinpricks erupted all over her body, probing: under her arms, along the back of her neck, between her thighs, between her fingers. She felt the thorns sink in.
She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t expand her chest.
A second passed. Then another. Pen still didn’t dare open her eyes, but a spark of a thought filled her head: I’m alive. It was only now she realised she hadn’t expected to be. Warmth trickled over her body — wet, sticky warmth. I’m bleeding, she told herself, trying to be clinical, but there’s not that much blood. I’m alive. The wire thorns were in her, staunching the very wounds they’d made.
Pain rippled like fire over her skin, but it felt insignificant next to being alive.
Something like cold thin fingers prodded at her eyes, teasing her eyelashes; as a reflex they opened.
Mr Bradley was staring at her, his face slack with horror. She could see him because the glass woman was still there, kneeling on the ground, glowing.
I’m — I’m okay. It hurts, but…
But she realised she wasn’t speaking. Barbs held her throat tight and she could feel the fine metal thorns grip her lips when she tried to move them. There was a bead of blood under her nose; it tickled madly and she tried to
