A metal point was protruding from her hoodie. It was smeared with oily red, and if she looked closely, Beth thought she could see tiny white chips of bone caught in the blood. The rest of the hook emerged from the back of her shoulder. A chain was connected to it, linked to that was a cable, a three-inch-thick steel cord, which stretched from her punctured flesh into the sky.
A loud whirring filled her ears and the crane’s winch kicked in.
Beth screamed. The wolves snapped at her heels and she screamed again, short bursts of sound between panicked breaths. Waves of hot-and-cold shuddering pain rippled from her shoulder to the tips of her toes. Acid bubbled into her mouth. Her feet kicked empty air as the crane lifted her.
Her weight, dragging down on the punctured shoulder, was unbearable, and she found herself blabbering incoherently, on the verge of passing out. She could feel her shoulder blade clicking against the steel hook, tendons beginning to tear under the strain. Any moment now, she thought, the hook would rip itself clean out of her.
But it didn’t. That alien substance in her blood was already clotting around the wound, setting like cement, sealing Reach’s grip, and she rose, the wolves baying under her. Her voice gave out before the crane reached the top of its arc.
Some hundred and fifty feet above the building site, the crane whirred to a halt and Beth jerked on the hook like a fish.
The Scaffwolves prowled over the building site, pawing and sniffing at its craters; diggers rumbled past on their caterpillar tracks as they moved busily to and fro. One lowered its metal jaws to a ridge of stone that looked almost exactly like the bridge of a nose.
And suddenly, Beth saw Reach.
From up here, the contours in the earthworks made sense in a new way. That crevice was the hollow of a cheek; this crack in the concrete, a parting of lips. A pitted ball of stone was an eye.
It was rough, not yet even half-finished, but it was definite. The King of Cranes had a face. Beth had run all the way across his forehead.
‘ I am Reach,’ his voice screeched in the gears of his machines. ‘ I will be.’
She gaped, numb with awe, as two diggers beetled towards one of the massive stone eyes. They lowered their drills and together ground a pupil-like hole in it. Then they altered position and began to dig again. Great chunks of rock flew in all directions in a cloud of dust and noise. The change was subtle but clear: the eye was now staring directly at Beth.
Beth sagged from her trapped shoulder. A fuzzy blanket of shock muffled her pain.
‘What are you?’ she whispered.
‘ I am Reach,’ Reach said, but Beth didn’t think it was in answer to her question.
‘Why-?’
‘ I will be.’ There was no malice on the Crane God’s hewn face, no hatred for her in its voice. Here was a girl wearing the aspect of his greatest enemy and carrying her son’s weapon, and yet there was no mistaking the expression on Reach’s face Curiosity
Childlike curiosity: like a toddler who’s found an interesting bug under the climbing frame. Even the way his features were only half-defined was reminiscent of baby-fat.
‘ I will be, I will be.’
Christ and Thames. The idea came to Beth through a fug of pain. He’s a child. Beth didn’t want to believe it, but the conviction settled in her gut and wouldn’t shift. He’s a young child, too, not yet fully born. The diggers and drills were still birthing him from the rock.
Fil had told her once: this is war, there are children everywhere. He hadn’t known how right he was.
‘ I will be.’
What if that was all Reach wanted — all he was sophisticated enough to want? He wasn’t a God; his wolves and their handlers weren’t his worshippers, they didn’t follow his orders. He wasn’t able to give orders. All he could say was I am Reach, and I will be.
The wolves must be part of him, Beth realised, like antibodies, eliminating threats to him.
A breeze caught Beth and she began to creak back and forth like some absurd pendulum weight on her cable. As the world spun slowly beneath her feet she noticed things peeking out from under the rubble: a severed leg of a statue; a twisted bar of iron that might once have been a streetlamp, the shattered glass scattered over the ground. She thought she saw fragments of a reflected face, once haughty, now screaming. She saw the price of Reach’s life.
‘He doesn’t know it,’ Pen had said, ‘but he’s killing everything.’
Reach was just a baby, trying to get born; he wasn’t capable of knowing or caring how many deaths that birth was causing.
A screech of steel broke Beth’s reverie. The Scaffwolves howled and wheeled around, bounding eagerly past. Frantically, she threw her weight from side to side, trying to see what they were chasing.
‘Beth!’ a familiar voice cried out, and her heart lurched.
‘Fil?’
‘What in the name of my mother’s iron underwear are you doing up there?’
A wolf snapped and then whined, and Beth smiled. Even unarmed, the Son of the Streets was formidable.
‘Beth! I’m comin’ up under you. I need my spear — drop my spear.’
Beth tried, but her fingers wouldn’t respond. All the muscles in her right side had gone into spasm, and she was gripping the spear as though it were a vital organ.
She glared at her hand. He’s down there tangling with three pony-sized metal wolves and I can’t even drop a railing? Unacceptably embarrassing. Let. Bloody. Go. Fighting her own muscles, she peeled back one finger, then another, then another until the spear was pointing downwards, clenched between finger and thumb.
A grey blur shot over the rubble below and into her field of vision: a dark streak across the plain.
‘Beth!’
Fil overshot and came up hard on the edge of the site. He kicked off the wall, launching himself back towards her.
Her index finger straightened and the spear fell.
The wolves snarled, racing towards it. The pavement-skinned boy ran, his hand outstretched for the weapon, intense concentration on his face. The wolves bounded closer, the rusty smell of their breath washing up over Beth.
Fil jumped for it, and a wolf snapped its jaws shut on empty air as he closed his concrete-grey fingers around the spear’s iron shaft.
CHAPTER 50
I manage a half-arsed swipe at the closest wolf on my way down, but I don’t know if I connect. The ground jolts through me as I push hard off the stone and I can feel fangs cleaving the air near my neck, but I don’t dare risk stopping to fight.
Faster, faster, I will myself. If I could run even half as fast as my heart’s drumming they’d never catch me. The rubble of Reach’s killing fields is dead; there’s no help for me here, no power to lend speed to my feet. The lifeless stone makes my skin crawl.
My chest is tight with excitement: I am armed and ready, and inches away from my mother’s foe.
I stumble over deeply grooved ground: the furrows make up Reach’s ferociously ugly forehead. A ramp rises before me, the bridge of his nose. As I race along it I can hear steel ringing off stone behind me. I can taste the metal stink of the wolves.
I look down as I jump off the end of the ramp. A pair of massive lips, cracked like hot pavement, pass underneath me. I land awkwardly on the fat bastard’s overly round chin, my feet slipping over the smooth surface. A sharp pain rips up through my ankle and I fall, smacking my face on a random lump of stone that protrudes from the earth apparently for the sole purpose of spreading my nose over my face.
‘Bugger!’ I yell, pain and frustration flooding through me. The wolves’ bounds shake the ground. Sweat
