incarnations. These scars were more permanent than rock. She shivered at the intimacy.
The darkness made everything closer, louder and sharper. The engines clattered on the surface above and Beth jumped as gravel sifted down from the ceiling. She swore at herself to keep calm.
Judging by the constant stream of inventive obscenity floating up the tunnel from behind her, though, she was doing better than Victor. ‘By Virgin’s first missed period,’ he muttered, ‘is been seven years since I even sleep under roof. What in hell I am doing here?’ He fell silent for a moment, and then said, ‘Tsarina not judge me too harshly, niet? I am not normally so cowardish.’
Beth reached behind her and felt a worn, gnarly hand grasp hers. ‘I know, Victor. I know. If it makes you feel any better, I have a friend who hates little spaces too.’ Beth swallowed hard and looked ahead into the darkness. ‘And she’s as brave as they come.’
The minutes faded away. The only way Beth could mark the time was her heartbeat, and that was too quick to be much use. She felt an urgent desire to talk, to blabber, What if we’re lost? What if we miss a turning in the dark? What if we’re trapped down here?
She bit her lip so hard she tasted petrol and blood, determined not to speak, Giving voice to her own fears would only make Victor’s worse — but then she reached forward, and this time she couldn’t stop herself crying out.
‘Tsarina?’ Victor said uncertainly.
‘It’s okay,’ she whispered. She’d felt something in the rubble, a warmth and a thrum, like a pulse. It was alive. Now as she wormed her way forward, she could feel the kiss of the living concrete on her arms and neck and her belly, charging her skin with the city again. She laughed, shockingly loud in the dark: the pulse coming through the ground was faint, but to her it was like fresh air after drowning. She laid her head on the ground. She heard something, and froze.
Was that crying?
It was very faint, the vibrations carried through the stone from deeper underground. She strained to listen.
There it was again: quiet crying, as though with pain, the kind of pain that you had endured for a long time but you still couldn’t get used to. There was another sound, too, the creaking of rock under terrible strain. The sounds were synchronised, and each groan of the rock drew a gasp and a whimper from the voice, as though someone was drawing painful breath against stone.
Women in the Walls. Masonry Men.
Unbidden, the image of the mangled human shapes at the Woolwich Demolition Fields sprang into her mind and her stomach lurched. She suddenly knew where the life she was sensing was coming from.
She scrabbled at the unseen ground with her fingers, looking for a seam, slipping her nails into cracks until finally she found what she was looking for. She heaved, and a concrete slab jarred the tunnel as she cast it aside.
‘Tsarina! Stop!’ Victor shouted.
Beth ignored him. There was someone alive down there. She dug into the hole she’d made, until the smell of stale piss and sweat and raw spirits enveloped her and thick, muscular arms seized her own.
‘Tsarina, stop,’ Victor whispered in her ear.
She strained, but he wouldn’t let go. ‘There’s someone alive down there!’ She braced herself, preparing to wrench herself free, even if it meant breaking his arms.
‘ Niet, no some one,’ Victor hissed, ‘some many.’
Beth fell still, panting for breath. She felt a gentle pressure on the side of her head and she let Victor push her to the wall.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I begin to hear them a way back.’
For a second Beth could hear nothing but the thud of her own pulse, then voices began to filter through the rock: women’s voices, and men’s; age-clotted voices, and shrill, unbroken ones. They echoed backwards and forwards, sometimes answering each other with a few garbled words in bereft tones. But most of them just cried: weak, but inconsolable.
‘Wherever you dig,’ Victor said, ‘you will only bury others deeper.’
After a moment, Beth understood what he was telling her She’d only ever seen the dead before now; what she was listening to were the wounded, crushed under the weight of the Crane King’s court.
‘Come, Tsarina. Let’s find your friend. There is nothing else to do.’
But as Beth made to take her ear from the wall, a change infected the voices. The crying stopped, and in its place came a whisper: one word. It spread through the voices with the virulence of rumour: Mistress
Mistress Mistress Mistress Mistress Mistress MistressMistressMistressMistressMistressMistressMistressMistress
And then as one, the voices fell silent.
CHAPTER 48
‘Victor,’ Beth groaned as a new sound filled the tunnel: a hissing scratch like steel coils sliding over stone. ‘She’s coming.’
Beth imagined the Wire Mistress’ barbs hooking into the walls of the tunnel, dragging their human bundle along in their wake. The sound echoed around the stone walls; Beth couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from.
She gripped the spear in the dark and imagined Pen’s mutilated face.
As quick as a snake, something lashed through the air by her cheek.
Victor cried out, a cut-off gasp, and Beth whirled, the spear’s iron point catching on the roof of the tunnel. Metal scraped over stone and a bright blue spark flared.
She saw Victor, in that instant’s light, four feet behind her. A thin skein of wire was wrapped tightly around his neck. The barbs were biting into his flesh. His eyes were popping out of his head and his tongue was bleeding where he’d bitten down on it.
Then darkness fell again and Beth was knocked against the wall as Victor’s bulk was hauled past her and up the tunnel. ‘Victor!’ she yelled. She pushed herself back onto her knees, still dazed, the spear gripped tightly in her right hand. The Mistress’ hiss carried back down the tunnel and Beth followed, crawling on hands and knuckles and knees until the tunnel widened enough for her to lurch to her feet. Cramped muscles protesting, she broke into a shambling run.
She could see the next corner now. The clash and grind of Reach’s machines was growing louder. She gripped her spear tighter as she swung around the bend, and stopped cold.
Ahead, at the far end of the tunnel she saw a chamber. Four walls had collapsed inwards and were taking each other’s weight, forming a kind of pyramid. Pen stood in the centre of the space, in a cat’s-cradle of light shafts. Dust motes spun around her and her wire-skin gleamed.
‘Move,’ Beth muttered to herself, willing her muscles on. ‘ Move.’ She drove herself forwards.
Pen gazed out at her from her between the wires, her eyes wide with fear. Her lips were stitched shut with barbs.
When she was just inches from the opening to the tunnel, Beth saw why Pen looked so scared. A strand of wire, so fine as to be almost invisible, was stretched across the doorway at neck-height, ready to bite hard into Beth’s throat. Arms flailing wildly, she tried desperately to check her charge, but she skidded on loose gravel and she couldn’t stop herself. She swallowed as the barbs tickled her neck.
Pale fingers lashed out and yanked the wire away just as Beth fell into the chamber. She rolled and came up fast, spear ready, eyes twitching for a target but unwilling to throw.
Victor staggered forward and then pulled back. The tendons in his neck stood out. One hand gripped the wire he’d torn from the door, the other was at his throat, where the coils of the mistress bit deep. Beads of blood glimmered on his skin. He was white as death, but he smiled tightly.
‘Not worry, Tsarina.’ His breath escaped in snatched wheezes. He leaned back and hauled on the wire. The muscles in his neck bulged. Veins emerged through his face like cracks in glass. ‘In Moscow was seven times Tug-
