his high-and-mighty attitude was pissing her off. ‘I just saved your bloody life, right?’
The boy made to protest, but she held up her hand. ‘ Don’t interrupt me. Admit it or not, I saved your life. Now, if you’re going to turn around and get killed, I might as well not have bothered. Frankly, I resent the wasted bloody effort.’
The boy’s face deepened to an even filthier shade of grey. ‘I saved your life, too,’ he snapped.
‘Yeah,’ Beth said, ‘twice. What’s your point? Because you saved my life, I’m not supposed to give a crap that someone’s trying to take yours?’
‘What?’ Now the boy looked confused.
‘You asked why I should care.’ Beth pronounced the words with exaggerated patience. ‘Why shouldn’t I bloody care? Why did you even tell me if you didn’t expect me to care? Ooh, “ Someone’s trying to kill me ”.’ She slapped her cheeks in mock horror. ‘Am I supposed to be impressed by that?’
The boy blinked. His forehead wrinkled. ‘Well, aren’t you?’ he said in a small voice.
‘YES!’ Beth yelled. ‘I BLOODY AM! THAT’S WHY I’M ASKING!’ She sat down hard on the gravel.
The boy, looking both sheepish and thoroughly confused, sat down beside her. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks for saving me.’
Beth breathed out hard. ‘Back at you,’ she said, then stuck out a hand. ‘I’m Beth.’ He took it, but didn’t say anything. ‘And your name is?’
He just shook his head.
‘Fine, be bloody mysterious.’ She sighed. ‘But if this was my school and you didn’t give yourself a name they’d give you one of their own, know what I mean? And trust me, you wouldn’t like it.’
They’d probably just call you Urchin, she thought. That’s what I’d call you. That’s what you look like: a five- years-later snapshot from a ‘Help a London Child’ campaign.
They sat a moment in silence He rubbed at the inside of his wrist and for the first time, Beth noticed the mark there: a tattoo, slate-grey against his lighter skin. It looked like a semicircle of tower blocks, arranged to form the spokes of a crown.
‘So who is trying to kill-?’ she began, but he cut her off sharply.
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask questions — don’t try. You saw monsters tonight.’ He gave a sickly grin. ‘And I’m probably the worst of the lot, so just forget me. You people can forget anything if you try hard enough.’
‘Come on,’ Beth protested, ‘whoever it is, he can’t be that bad. The way you took on that train-thing-’
‘He’s worse,’ he said flatly.
‘Yeah, but still-Whoever he is, I bet we could take him.’ We. She didn’t know why she’d said that.
Pavement-grey eyes met hers. He smiled, and she smiled back, but then he shook his head ruefully. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, you’re fun — in a bone-breaking kind of a way. Maybe, after this is all over, you can come find me.’ His smile was wan. It didn’t look like he was holding out much hope that ‘after this was over’ there’d be much left to find.
‘Where would I look for you?’ Beth asked.
He hesitated, and then said, ‘Your accent says Hackney…’
She nodded.
‘All right, Hackney Girl, look for me at the dance where the light itself is the music, where the Railwraith’s rush beats the drums.’ He eyed her appraisingly. ‘Look for me in the broken light, when this is all over, and maybe then we’ll dance. But for now, go. It’s gonna be bad enough me trying stand against what’s coming. I can’t be tripping over you too.’
The dismissal felt like a fist clenching around Beth’s guts. ‘Why not?’ she whispered.
He gave her a lopsided smile. ‘Because I saved your life,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to resent the wasted effort.’
‘Look, mate-’ Beth began, but in that same moment the grey-skinned boy sprang up and sprinted away along the tracks.
Beth swore and pushed herself after him. She had never run so fast; her battered muscles squealed in protest as the rails blurred under her. For a second they were side by side, but slowly, agonisingly slowly, he pulled away. Beth’s breath seared her lungs, but he just ran faster and faster. His motion became strangely smooth, sinuous, like a street rat’s. He almost didn’t look human any more.
He jumped up onto the wall of the viaduct and was silhouetted against London. For an instant, the low tumble of the city’s skyline was like an army, backing the scrawny boy. Then he dropped over the edge.
Beth arrived seconds later, wheezing and cursing. She craned her head over the wall. Early morning cars hooted up at her from the street below. But in between their fleeting shapes she saw nothing.
CHAPTER 7
The Thames Barrier breaches the water, glinting like the knuckles of a giant gauntlet. It’s a Saturday, and the industrial estates of North Greenwich are empty: little fenced-off wastelands. Gutterglass can manifest anywhere in London, but there are places where the spirit of rubbish is stronger, where it accretes in every brick and concrete pore.
I’m squatting in a car park, behind a car with two missing hubcaps and a cardboard for-sale sign in the window. Rats skitter past, but I ignore them. They’d get a message to Glas eventually, but I want it to travel faster than that.
I dig my hand into the ground. The soil crumbles between my fingers and tiny black ants teem over my palm. That’s better. I pull a small bottle from my pocket, yank the cork out with my teeth, and allow the fumes to waft over an insect’s antennae. It freezes for an instant, then vibrates ecstatically and races away over the back of my hand, down my leg and into the earth. You can’t beat a hive mind for speed of transmission.
Now I wait.
I think of the girl from last night, her broad, flat cheekbones and messy hair. We can take him, she said: we, even though I’d only met her five minutes before and I could have smelled the terror in her sweat through the Oxford Circus crush on a Saturday afternoon. What kind of person thinks like that? We.
Because I’m alone, because it’s a secret, I let myself smile at that.
Seagulls gyre overhead, cawing. As I watch, one of them drops out of its lazy circle and spirals fast towards the ground, flapping its wings rapidly to break its landing. The gull looks at me with one yellow eye. I can see a lump distending its throat. It jerks its head back and forth and gags.
With a slippery sound, a tangle of worms and woodlice spills from its beak onto the ground, spreading over the concrete. My little ant races away from the pack, its job done. It leaves a sticky trail of bird saliva behind it.
I watch as the bugs work, dragging empty foil tubes, crisp packets and chunks of plywood to the centre of the courtyard. Plastic bags are torn into strips by ferocious, gnashing weevils. Toes form first, and then legs and hips, and a higgledy-piggledy sculpture of rubbish rises uncertainly in front of me.
The eggshell eyes blink. They, and only they, are always the same. Glas is a woman this time, the rusting handlebars of a bike making up her hips, long strands of torn plastic her hair. The head of a worm wriggles unhappily at the end of one hand. I find an ice-lolly stick from the dirt near my feet and hand it to her. The worm coils itself around it and breaks it into knuckle-joints.
‘Thank you,’ she says. Her eggshell-gaze catalogues the burns and black blood-bruises on my chest. Yesterday she’d have tutted or cooed in sympathy, but a lot’s changed since then.
‘Nothing beyond your ability to heal,’ she notes with satisfaction. ‘The wraith’s dead, I take it?’
‘Earthed behind Waterloo,’ I confirm. ‘I got off light. I reckon the extra power was too much for her; it broke her after a few hours. She was confused, already bleeding out. It was a mercy at the end.’
‘That’s something then.’ A little thing. She sighs like she has to be grateful for the little things now. She hesitates, and then says, ‘My pigeons have seen wolf-shapes stalking the building sites. And the Pylon Spiders report feeling a power-surge through the grid at around midnight, night before last. Just when you said the wraith entered Reach’s domain.’
Sympathy edges into her voice. ‘I’m sorry, Filius, I really am, but Reach is gathering his strength. There’s no
