wrapped presents she’d bought with their meagre…
Bought.
The word brought Beth up short. ‘Fil?’ she said, suddenly worried, ‘what did this cost? What did the synod want for changing me like this?’
He sat up, groaning, and scratched himself with his spear. ‘Not a lot, given what we asked ’em for.’ He yawned like a giant contented cat. ‘I told ’em to make you as close to a child of Mater Viae as they could. All they wanted in exchange was some poxy ingredient their stores were missing that I happened to have. Long as I live, not something I’m goin’ to use. But they were dead keen on it.’
‘Seriously?’ Beth was dubious. ‘That sounds… cheap.’
He shrugged. ‘There’s no predicting the stuff the synod are going to prize. Like Petris said, they’ll make a commodity out of anything.’
By the time he clambered to his feet Beth was jigging with pent-up nervous energy. He dusted himself off and picked up his railing. ‘All right, all right.’ He spoke with the knackered kind of good humour she’d overheard dads using to their toddlers in the park. ‘What do you want to do?’
There was only one answer to that. She shivered with pleasure as she said, ‘I want to run.’
*
Beth led the way, her gait impossibly smooth, as Fil stumbled behind her, missing his footing, groggy in the daylight.
She ducked inside the back door of the factory and raced between its mouldy walls, which echoed back their voices as they shouted with laughter.
The factory passed in an eye-blink and then they were back out into the sun. He was at her shoulder now, his face lined in concentration, his feet blurring as he ate up her lead. Exhilaration built in her chest as the urban scrub gave way to tarmac and they pounded along a main road. Horns screamed as traffic vanished in a smear behind them.
She caught a flash of his grinning face as he overtook her and she gritted her teeth and pushed herself harder. She understood now how he could run so fast: each footfall drew more power from the asphalt, each step charged the next. Their sprint was growing ever faster.
Beth crowed gleefully into the wind; Fil whooped in answer. Her feet were learning the city: every time her bare soles hit the ground she knew she would never forget that piece of slate, that patch of tarmac, the texture. She could find every inch again with her eyes shut.
Gradually, Beth pulled level. On the first day she met him she’d collapsed, breathless, in his wake. Now, children of the city, they raced side by side through their home.
A small marina opened up before them, a couple of hundred yards off the river, anchored boats bobbing in the murky water, sails furled tight around their masts. Without pausing, Fil sprang onto a sailboat, then his momentum bore him into the nearby rigging until he was swinging from yard-arm to yard-arm.
Beth stormed up to the marina’s edge.
Go round, a nervous voice in her head urged, go round.
And a louder voice overrode it. Screw that, she thought, and leaped. Her stomach lurched as she swung from a crossbeam, but her grip held. She let her new instincts carry her through the forest of masts to the far side of the marina where Fil waited, his arm pointing upwards to Canary Wharf.
Her eyes followed his finger, and widened.
‘Enjoy the climb? How about one of them, then?’
The three giant skyscrapers reared overhead, lights glowing in the oncoming evening gloom. They were only a few hundred yards away.
Beth swallowed hard. The middle one, Canada Tower, was the tallest in the city. The glass-and-steel edifice soared over the capital, the silver pyramid that capped it piercing the underbelly of the clouds.
He winked. ‘I’ll race you.’
The bricks smeared past. Beth’s blood, her new blood, pounded in her veins. Was it still red, she wondered, or tar-black? The few people skating on the ice-rink in Canada Square barely saw the grey-and-black pair blur past them.
He shinned rapidly up a steel pillar beside one of the skyscraper’s revolving doors and hauled himself up to the first floor. He started scuttling crabwise up the side of the building, squeezing himself flat into the dark spaces between the brightly lit windows. Somehow his fingers and toes found invisible crevices in the smooth metal on the outside of the building.
Beth skidded to a halt. Her feet felt suddenly heavy, lead instead of quicksilver. She found herself shaking her head. He’s scaling sheer steel.
She couldn’t She couldn’t do that.
She began to pace back and forth, squinting critically at the sheer metal escarpment, embarrassed that she couldn’t keep up with him.
A tendril of metal caught her eye: a cable running all the way up the side of the tower. It was supporting a window-washing platform. She grabbed it, and found it a perfect fit for the rough new texture of her hand. She lifted her feet off the ground and dangled, relishing the feeling of so easily supporting her own weight.
With a wide grin she set her shoulders and began to haul herself up, hand over hand, gripping the cable with fingers and toes. Her reflection slithered over the metal as the wind whipped her hood into her face, billowed her clothes out like balloons. She looked down only once, and laughed at the toy-like city beneath her.
She could see his wiry silhouette on top of the tower, waiting for her.
‘You took your time,’ he said as she pulled herself over the lip of the roof.
Beth lay back against the slope of the roof, the breath in her chest burning. ‘We can’t all climb like bloody squirrels, y’know.’
‘Really? You think I’m like a squirrel?’ He sounded proud.
‘I wouldn’t get too excited. Squirrels are just rats with a blow-dry.’
‘And what’s wrong with rats?’
Beth didn’t bother to answer. She rolled away from the edge. The silver pyramid rose steeply above them. A light flashed on and off, a warning to low-flying aircraft. Steam snaked from the air-conditioning vents, diffusing the beacon’s light, and directly below it She felt her jaw drop.
‘Um, Fil?’ she croaked.
‘What?’
‘Is that a throne?’
Cut into the western face of the pyramid was a seat with high sloping arms. It was vast — nothing could possibly be big enough to fill it. But even as the words left her mouth, Beth knew whose throne it was, because cut into the chair’s high back was the tower block crown.
He glanced upwards, snorted in amusement. ‘Nah,’ he said in a deadpan tone, ‘it’s the Maharajah of Madras’ diamond left buttock.’
He paused, then said, ‘Well identified, Beth: it is, in fact, a throne. Congrats. Your power to observe the bleedin’ obvious is a credit to the human race.’ He looked out over the view and whistled appreciatively.
‘It is quite something, though, don’t you reckon? I can never get over it when I come up here. You’ve gotta hand it to old Rubbleface, he can build.’
‘Rubbleface?’ Beth looked at him in astonishment. ‘You mean Reach?’
He looked at her. ‘Okay,’ he said slowly, ‘so maybe your grasp of the obvious isn’t quite as good as I thought. All skyscrapers are Reach’s children, Beth. Think you can build one of these things without cranes? Canary Wharf was his biggest, baddest accomplishment. A mirror to his ruptured face that the whole city could see — and Mater Viae took it, and sat on it.’
He chuckled. ‘You’d better believe that sent a message. No more petty heresies. Friar Archibald and his Apostates of Stone went awful quiet. No one said a bad word about the Old Girl for a good decade.’
The beacon flashed and lit his wicked grin. ‘Wanna try it out?’
Beth stood slowly, gazing up at this vast, empty chair on the roof of the City. ‘Are we — you know — allowed?’
The throne’s seat swamped both of them. They sat side by side, Beth cross-legged, Fil sprawled back on his elbows. Darkness rendered the city a mass of shifting squares of light, a puzzle waiting to be solved. It was a
