The City's son

CHAPTER 9

Night seeps in from the sky. The breath from the manholes starts to steam. The city shivers, and draws darkness about it. This is when the Sodiumites dance.

I stand in a clearing between tower blocks, a pedestrianised island of asphalt beside a railway footbridge, away from the road. Streetlights puncture the pavement at the four compass-points. A couple of kids stand on the bridge, smoking and studiously ignoring me as the warmth ebbs sluggishly from the air.

Slow, slow at first, a light begins inside the streetlamps; the first steps of the dancers behind the glass barely raise a glow, just a few tiny flashes where they plant their heels. A graceful hand twists and beckons inside one of the bulbs, sparks leaping from her fingers.

I crack my knuckles, stretch my back, breathe deep.

All four sisters are awake now, pressing themselves against the glass, blowing fiery kisses, feigning helplessness, coyly pretending to be caged. My heart begins to trip.

Now speed comes to the dance and bright lights flicker. My shadow dances, and I start to move with it, twisting my limbs to the rhythm of the light: visual music. The strobe is hypnotic; I feel drunk but perfectly balanced, high on light.

Thames! This feels good The girls on the bridge toss their cigarettes and one of them laughs as the other mutters something about the ‘junkie tramp’.

They walk away and do not see the lamps, one by one, cut out.

Electra is the first, the boldest, as always. She slides her body smoothly down the length of the dimmed streetlamp until her feet scorch asphalt. Her glassy skin is perfectly clear. The fluorescent dust in her blood is blinding. Fibre-optic hair waves in a magnetic breeze I can only dream of feeling. I glance around; her sisters have all slipped their bulbs too now and they encircle me, swaying in time to the light, laughing soundlessly.

Electra starts clapping and the others pick up the rhythm, light flaring as palm hits palm in a complex syncopated glow-and-dim. Once her sisters have it, Electra stops and stands tall, extending an arm to me in formal invitation.

I take her hand and we dance.

Each strobe is a flash of vision: a motion, a thud of blood in my head.

Flash. Flash. Flash.

She controls my pulse with her fingers. She owns my breath. I slide my hand close over her hip.

Flash flash flash She singes the hairs on my skin. Her neck arches back and her teeth flare as she grins. I can feel their heat by my ear. She dances, she shines, she is alive; I dance with her and so am I.

Eventually I have to stop, panting, and laughing, and she slows, cooling enough to kiss my cheek. The heat of her lips is a shade below painful.

Welcome, Son of the Streets.

The others keep playing. One plucks a spectritar, adding shades of colour to the music while the remaining two sisters laugh and dance together, cheerfully mocking old-fashioned styles.

I sit and find the gravel chilly after her heat.

She turns and paces around me, and then stops and opens her mouth. ‘ What is it? ’

I read the word in semaphore from the pulsing light of her tonsils. ‘What’s what?’ I ask, exaggerating the words so she can read my lips.

‘ You are tense. ’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘ I could drown a rat in toxic waste; it would make a better dancing partner. ’

My cheeks burn. ‘I didn’t think it was that bad.’

She shrugs disdainfully. ‘ You were stiff, and slow, behind the beat even more than usual. Your mind was somewhere else — I hope so at least, because it’s either that, or you have gone- ’ She hesitates, groping for the word, and eventually strobes out the characters in her own language: something like ‘shines-not-brightly-in-contemplation’.

‘Moronic,’ I interpret, and snort. ‘Thanks.’

She sits down beside me. For an instant she is still, and her light almost goes out, then she puts her arm around me and starts tapping my shoulder with scalding fingertips. She pulls me around to face her. ‘ You can talk to me, Filius. ’

I sigh. ‘I ran out on Gutterglass.’

She’s started some platitude, but this gives her pause. ‘ Tell me about it,’ she semaphores.

So I do, and she reads my lips in what passes for her as silence. Barely twitching enough to stay alight, she is almost invisible. She shakes her head when I finish. ‘ I heard a rumour recently, but I did not think there was anything to it. But if Glas believes… ’ Her words are shaded with astonishment. ‘ So she really is coming back? ’

‘And Gutterglass wants to prepare the way for her — wants me to go up against Reach.’ I laugh exasperatedly. ‘She dropped the problem in front of me like a smiling foxcub with a bit of carrion it found behind the bins.’

Electra smiles.

‘Glas wants an army raised,’ I say, ‘like in the old days before she left. She says if we wait for Mater Viae it could be too late.’

Electra starts to answer, but she is distracted by a flare of light, not the soft amber of her kind, but bright white, like a magnesium flare.

It’s coming from her lamp.

Her face takes on an ugly cast. ‘ Whitey,’ she snarls in a dim orange.

Her sisters have seen it too. They crowd around Electra’s lamp. Another glass figure has climbed up the lamppost while we were talking. He emits a pallid white light as he casts fearful looks at them, clutching his limbs around himself as he tries to get inside.

The Sodium sisters flare bright yellow, displaying their colours. They spit like firecrackers, flashing in their own language, too fast for me to follow. I catch a few phrases though, vile imprecations about parenthood and voltages. The Whitey squirms and shivers, his light uneven. He probably can’t understand half the abuse being screamed at him.

It’s Electra, always the boldest, who throws the first stone. Her fingers twist around it, weaving a magnetic field that lifts the rock up and it spins in the air, faster and faster, then shoots straight at the glass.

‘Lec, no! ’ I shout, but she isn’t looking so she’s deaf to me. The others follow her lead and stones start to zip like bullets. The lamppost is dented; glass shatters. The Whitey twists frantically, trying to protect his filaments. I realise he can’t help infuriating them: the faster he moves to avoid the rocks, the brighter he burns, the stronger his colour, the angrier the Sodiumites become…

… and the faster the stones fly.

I gape: why is the Whitey taking this? Why doesn’t he run? A look at the sky gives me my answer: heavy thunderclouds are swelling over the city’s orange glow.

I make a decision.

Grabbing my spear, I jink between the sisters’ bodies and scramble up the lamppost, waving my spear like a flagpole, trying to get their attention. ‘ Stop! It’s going to rain — rain, you get it? There’s only one of him — he’s not invading, he’s only looking for cover.’

They don’t acknowledge me, but magnetic trajectories shift slightly and the missiles lose a little momentum as they swerve around me to find their target. The whistle as they fly through the air can’t quite drown out the terrified buzzing of the Whitey behind me.

Splinters of glass shower me. The tiny cuts heal fast.

Eventually I feel the heat behind me lessen as the Whitey slides down the back of the lamppost. He hunches for a second on the tarmac, his corona of white light shrinking as the Sodiumites advance on him. Then he shambles away, clutching himself, strobing off little mewls of pain.

There’s a touch of moisture on the wind. My stomach twists. I know what will happen to him if he’s caught out in a rainstorm…

… and so do they.

Electra’s slap burns my cheek. She’s climbed the lamppost as well. Her sisters stand around the courtyard, ostentatiously staring in the other direction.

‘ What were you doing? ’

‘It’s going to rain!’ I yell back at her, my skin stinging. ‘He just wanted shelter.’

‘ He was trespassing. They have their own shelters. ’

‘On a dozen streets in the centre of the city, five miles away — he’ll never make it in time!’

She stares at me. Her eyes glow a uniform clear amber from lid to lid.

‘ Good,’ she strobes. ‘ If I ever trespassed on Whitey ground, a stoning is the least I would expect. ’

She looks down at her sisters. ‘ They wanted me to throw you out but I told them about Glas, and about Reach. They understand you are upset. They are not happy, not at all, but you can stay — as long as you never ever get in our way like that again. ’

My stomach burns as fiercely as my face. How dare she apologise for me? I want to scream at her, but spots of rain are already kissing my forehead. Alarm flashes across Electra’s face.

‘ Rest. Recover,’ she murmurs hurriedly. She lays hot fingers on my chest. ‘ We will talk when the moon comes out. ’ She vanishes into the filament of her lamp, which begins to glow after a second. There is a tinkling sound and the fragments of glass shattered by the stones begin to levitate, floating in her electro-magnetic field, glittering as they catch her light. The glass closes around the filament. For an instant she burns hotter: a bright and unbearable white, almost the same shade as the Whitey she scorned. I turn my face away.

When I look back, the lamp glass has melted back together and inside, Electra’s light is amber again.

I drop lightly to the ground. Electra’s sisters have retreated into their own shelters. I shiver and thrust my hands in my pockets.

You can stay, she said. How river-pissing generous of her.

Am I in hiding then? That’s what was in Electra’s tone, the shade of her words. Can I really be hiding? The idea’s absurd, I don’t hide. No, I came here to dance, to relax, clear my mind and get ready for …

For what? I am hiding. I’m afraid. The realisation weighs me down as though every blood vessel in my body is suddenly full of gravel. Reach is much, much too strong for me. All of the wraiths I’ve fought, the Pylon Spiders, the city’s petty monsters, none of them ever felt like this.

Out in the wilderness there is a faint glow that might be the Whitey.

The wind gusts and snaps at the hem of my jeans. I sit down cross-legged between the lampposts. And the rain comes down hard.

The Whitey danced for his life. He snaked and jerked, trying to dart between the raindrops. He could feel his magnesium bones tingling, stretching out to the water, almost like they wanted to react with it and burn. His frantic speed made him brilliant, and his light reflected off the concrete walls of the estate, leaving ghostly after-images. The grass underfoot was wet and he throbbed off shrieks of pain as he ran, scrambling to find shelter.

The Whitey found a slick black tarpaulin crumpled into a corner by an outbuilding. He threw it over himself, but the rivulets of water that ran off it made him scream, so he stood and ran again, his light beaming out from the treacherous holes in the tarp. Curls of hydrogen twisted wherever the rain struck home.

Suddenly the wind changed and a puddle rippled, splashing a curl of water against the Whitey’s leg. He blazed in pain and the metal in his ankle reacted: his foot vanished in a flare of light and gas and he fell awkwardly by a barbed-wire fence. He crawled in agony over the wet tarmac. The world around him was bright with lit windows, safe, dry lights, but there was no way in.

A jag of concrete snared the edge of the tarp and it was dragged from him. The Whitey lay there, unable to crawl further. He spasmed and his knee scraped over the concrete. A spark caught and he was bathed in flame as the hydrogen cloud around him ignited. The heat soothed him for alltoo-brief a moment and then burned out.

It was only the needles of pain rippling over him that kept him conscious. He thought of his home, wondering how he had got so far from the bright gas-white globes on their posts over the Carnaby Street market. His brothers and sisters would be there now, with the rain ricocheting harmlessly off their bulbs. One orb would be dark, empty; where he ought to be.

Something moved above him, a thin, dark shadow, and the Whitey looked up. A skein of barbed wire was coming off the fence towards him, twisting and coiling like a snake through the air. It shivered along its length and the barbs gave off a rattling hiss.

‘ No,’ he strobed. Even in his agony, a deeper fear gripped him. ‘ No, get back. I’m not yours. I can’t sustain you. ’

But the eyeless thing kept coming and in the flickering light of his words he saw a tendril slither off the ground to caress his face. The moisture on it burnt him.

‘ Please,’ he whispered, a dim flicker, ‘ please, not me. I can tell you things — there are threats, threats to your master. The Viae Child, he’s raising an army against him, against Reach. I saw him — I hid and read his very lips- ’

But the thing kept coiling lovingly around him, tighter and tighter. Metal thorns clasped hungrily at his scalp, seeking a way in, as though they could plunder straight from his mind the information he was trying to bargain with.

Cracks started to spread through him and he shrieked brightly as the barbs pierced his glass skull and let the water in.