Beth had only been slightly surprised when the old man made of rubbish had slowly rebuilt itself as a woman this time.
‘What?’ Fil asked.
‘Piss off,’ she repeated.
‘Well… that’s pretty much what we were going to do.’
‘I know — piss off with your pissing off. You can’t just piss off. You need me-’
‘What for?’ Gutterglass enquired mildly. ‘Your extensive vocabulary?’
Beth glared at her. ‘You want to hear my extensive vocabulary? You patronising cu-’
‘ Lizbet! ’ Victor cut her off, sounding so scandalised that she actually blushed. ‘Not ladylike!’ The Russian on the pavement beside his huddled glass-skinned soldiers, who’d all promptly yawned and stretched and fallen asleep the moment the sun had come up. He swigged from his vodka bottle and looked mournfully from one to the other, muttering, ‘Not ladylike at all.’
Fil took a step towards Beth. The edges of his eyes were red-raw, a shockingly human colour on him. ‘Beth, I don’t think you’re listening to me.’
‘No? I reckon I heard you tell me to get lost loud and clear.’
‘Beth!’
‘ Fil! ’ she snapped, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
His jaw set, he sniffed hard and turned back towards Gutterglass. ‘Well, we are. Come nightfall you can have this place all to yourself.’
Beth grabbed her backpack. ‘I’ll follow you.’
He whirled, his face taut and furious. ‘You couldn’t keep up — that’s the whole point: you need protecting all the time.’
Beth shoved herself towards him, jutting her chin pugnaciously. ‘Why? Because I’m a girl?’
‘No! Because you’re slow and weak and bloody…’ He tailed off, grasping the air in frustration. ‘You’re bloody human! And I’ve not got the eyes — and she’s not got the eggshells — and neither of us have the spare arms to keep dragging your skinny arse out of trouble every time we meet one of them.’ He pointed to the twisted remnants of the Scaffwolf.
He breathed in deeply, then let it out slowly, regaining control of himself. ‘I’m sorry, Beth,’ he said. ‘I thought I could cover you, but I can’t. You were this close to getting bitten in half. I won’t have it.’
Beth stood eye to eye with him. ‘Oh, you won’t?’ Her throat was tight and dry, and her voice came out in a growl. ‘You’re the one gave me this, remember?’ She tugged her sleeve up to show her tower-block-crown scar. ‘“Give up home”, you said. “Give up safety, forever.” Forever. Not “until we get into a scrape and Beth gets a bit knocked about.” Well, I gave it up, willingly. You can’t make me go back now.’
He looked away, shamefaced, so she swept her mutinous gaze round to Gutterglass. ‘You put him up to this, didn’t you?’ she accused, her voice climbing shrilly. ‘He was fine with me getting my arse kicked bloody before you turned up. He’d’ve been perfectly happy to have my guts hanging from the nearest one of those!’ She pointed at a crane arching over the Gherkin in the distance.
‘Oh dear,’ Gutterglass murmured softly with a wince, as though Beth just had displayed a painful level of naivete. ‘No, he most certainly would not — quite the opposite in fact.’
Beth gaped at the wretched-looking boy who was blushing almost black. Her thoughts flashed back to the day before, after they’d delivered their ultimatum to the Mirrorstocracy, that moment their lips had hovered over each other. She felt a twinge in her chest, like someone had tapped her heart with a tiny hammer.
Gutterglass cleared her throat primly. ‘Indeed, the Prince is so concerned for your wellbeing that in view of your fragility he is reluctant to enter combat for a second time while you are with him. Were you to come to harm, I expect he’d be beside himself, weeping, wailing, beating of breast, et cetera-’
The Prince fixed his tutor with a glare.
Beth managed to stop herself from saying the first thing that came into her head. Unfortunately she blurted out the second thing instead: ‘That’s not my fault! That’s him being a pussy-!’
‘Oh, for Thames’ sake!’ Fil’s spear clanged off the cobbles as he threw it to the ground.
Beth rounded on him. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she snapped, ‘did the weak, slow, helpless little girl hurt your feelings?’
He slumped onto the ground beside Victor, dragged the bottle from his grasp and swigged off a hefty measure.
‘ Beth,’ he said. Or at least he tried to say, but the booze had apparently scoured his throat and he only managed a lame rasp.
‘Beth,’ he tried again. ‘I can’t ask you to- You can’t ask me toLook, you can’t come, all right? I’ll break both your legs before I let you follow me somewhere Reach could hurt you.’
Beth could feel herself starting to tremble: a nine-pointnine on the dear-Christ-please-don’t-let-me-cry-now scale.
‘I’ll tell the world about you.’ She unslung her backpack from her shoulder and shook it, rattling the paint cans. ‘I’ll tell everyone. If you don’t take me with you, I’ll paint your face forty feet high on the side of every building east of Big Ben. You won’t get any peace. Everyone who sees you’ll harass you. People will come looking for you, searching for the freaks. ’
The word was cruel but she was ready for cruelty now, rejection was sharp in her chest. They couldn’t chuck her out; she’d make it too damned painful for them. ‘Armies of ’em,’ she promised nastily, ‘scientists and tourists and sodding zoos — they’ll hunt you down.’
Gutterglass was looking at her gravely. Fil’s lip twisted and he thrust his hands in his pockets. ‘They really won’t, Beth,’ he said. He sighed. ‘Go to the asylum in Brixton Road; ask if anyone there’s seen a walking lightbulb, or overheard a statue talking — I guarantee there’ll be one, maybe even a few. Noggin-wranglers’ notebooks all over London are stuffed with the kind of stories you could tell.’
‘Some of them even have illustrations,’ Gutterglass interjected. ‘There are already paintings of me, Miss Bradley, forty feet high, and four inches high, and everything between. And yet no matter how loudly a few benighted wretches scream and point at me, no one else takes a blind bit of notice.’
Beth faltered. She looked from one to the other, suddenly feeling as helpless as a child. ‘How?’ she whispered.
Gutterglass spread the hands Beth had given her as though to plead ignorance. ‘It’s none of our doing that no one listens to the few people who let themselves notice us. People believe stories, not facts, and we don’t fit into theirs, so they don’t tend to believe in us. We’re easy enough to miss after all.’
‘What did you think,’ Fil said sympathetically, ‘we were some kind of secret? We live in your streets Beth; you live in ours — you have done your whole life.’
Beth felt a pinch in the hollow of her throat. You live in our streets. She remembered him, that night under the streetlights, arms outstretched as if to embrace the whole city’s glow. ‘Home?’ he’d said, ‘I could bed down in any square inch of London town. Welcome to my parlour.’
That’s what she wanted: not safety, home. To be able to curl into the warmth of that word. To call the city home — to be home, with him, on these streets. She pulled herself up tall, held herself rigid against the tremor that threatened to run through her. ‘Fine,’ she said coldly. ‘Go your own way. But the first place I’m going when you do is St Paul’s. I’ll take on Reach by myself, even if I have to headbutt the bloody cranes to death.’
Fil snorted. ‘You don’t mean that.’
‘YOU DON’T THINK SO?’ Beth yelled at him.
He stepped back, alarmed, and fury boiled up in her throat like hot tar, the rage at being left behind, at there being nothing she could do about it — and she realised she did mean it. She really would take on Reach alone, just to prove a point. She didn’t know where it came from, this urge to spite the street-urchin, so strong that she would contemplate Suicide-by-Crane-God, but it was there.
‘You were going to run,’ she said, swallowing against the humiliating advance of tears, ‘remember that? You were going to run and I made you stay. Maybe I can’t run as fast as you or climb as high as you can, but fuck you, Filius Viae, I helped. ’
Her eyes were treacherously wet, but she wasn’t about to blink; she wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. He stared back at her for long, long seconds, then he turned and walked away…
… and then, just when it felt like her heart had fallen down a well and there was no way to get it back, he
