The City's son

CHAPTER 20

Tower blocks reared up around the St Paul’s Demolition Fields, black against the City’s incomplete darkness. They formed a perimeter of sorts around Reach’s stronghold, with a crooked crane looming over every alley or lane that led in.

Electra paced back and forth along the roof of a corner shop, blazing her heart out against the night. She felt trapped, like the entire city was her cage, and only the acre of land that surrounded the Cathedral was freedom — the acre sitting tauntingly beyond her, in the palm of the Crane King’s hand, where the Wire Mistress and her bleeding prey had slunk off to.

Reach’s servant had led her a harum-scarum chase across London. She’d hurled herself bodily after it with her hands and fields and feet, scrambling over rotten garden fences, leaving scorched footprints on neatly tended lawns. They’d climbed to the rooftops under the moon. The Wire Mistress’ barbs made it surer on the tiles and it squeezed more and more speed from its host. The fleshgirl wept and made shapeless moans with her punctured tongue, and she obeyed.

Lec had chased it mile after mile, fuelled by a hundred thousand volts of hatred, and only when the cranes had appeared suddenly over the rooftops had she skidded to a stop. Now she raged and spat sparks. For one insane moment she thought she might leap from the roof and charge, cranes or no cranes, but even in her anger she knew exactly how that would end: with Reach’s metal claw turning, the chain hissing over pulleys, the rusting hook swinging in fast, bringing pain and blood, and then nothing at all.

If the Crane King kills you, she glimmered to herself, phrasing the light as simply and carefully as though she were talking to an infant, the Wire Mistress escapes.

She felt the last warmth of her momentum leave her and in its wake, a chill crept in that didn’t belong to the night. Lec hunkered down on the tiles, staring into space with tear-scorched eyes. There was a sensation in her stomach of standing on a precipice, as if one step forward would bring an endless fall into darkness. She’d felt something like it before, she realised, although with her sisters dead, comparing it to anything felt like a betrayal.

The feeling dredged up a memory: standing outside the Stepney warehouse on the very last night of the Spectrum War, her hand flat against the wood of the door. She was barely more than a kindling, but the Tel-Nox clan blooded its children early. She was just a scared little girl trying desperately to remember the steps of her barely practised war-waltz, her gut heavy with the knowledge that if she stumbled, she was dead, and not just her, but the other girls behind her too.

But there’d been no marauding horde of Whities behind that door, just dim shapes that turned out to be glass bodies, stacked head-to-toe alongside the walls with horrible neatness. In death they shone no colour, so it wasn’t until Luma had recognised her cousin that they knew they were theirs. The Whities had retreated, but they’d killed their prisoners first. The young Sodiumites had looked down at their sisters and cousins and aunts, at the pucker-burn marks around the holes in their foreheads where their captors had dripped the water through. At that moment Lec had really understood what her grandmother meant when she told her you couldn’t trust the Whities, or Blankleits, or whatever name they went by. They were pale, treacherous killers.

She thought of Filius, capering absurdly around her lamppost, trying to protect the Whitey that had trespassed there, and the flash of annoyance that swept over her surprised her so much she almost fell off the roof. Not that she wasn’t used to being annoyed by Filius — wanting to wring his scrawny neck was one of the anchors of their friendship — but she felt so charred and used-up that she was a little shocked she had the energy to be irritated with him.

Still, if she was honest, the urge to smack the little guttersnipe God around the ear was comforting. He’d embarrassed her in front of her sisters, and many a Streetlamp Daughter less proud than her would’ve danced a lethal measure for that — or at least that’s what she’d tell him.

But then he was always doing thoughtless things like that. When they were really tiny it had rained and he’d run straight out into it and Lec’s heart had almost sparked out. She’d thought the water would kill him, like it would her, and as she’d imagined it, it had felt like the fright would shatter her.

That same vein-darkening, skin-chilling fear entered her now; fear at the memory of the Wire Mistress flexing around the flesh of her new host, squeezing her skin obscenely through the gaps in the steel, and at the way she had uncurled the poor girl’s finger and forced her to ask Where is he?

The creature had destroyed her family. Now it wanted to do the same to a thoughtless, hopelessly naive boy with no sense of rhythm, always half a beat too late. A boy who was the only living thing left she cared about.

An empty streetlamp poked up above the roofscape a couple of houses away. The bulb was cramped and old-fashioned, but Electra squirmed inside anyway. She couldn’t get comfortable, but she flexed her fingertips and then, gradually, she began to push her fields outwards. She stretched the magnetism further and further, groping with it over the textures of brick and concrete and windowglass, slipping it over the mouths of alleys and doorways and manhole covers until at last she’d covered every opening into the Demolition Fields she possibly could. Her muscles tingled. She knew she couldn’t burn this bright for long. In time that tingle would become an ache, then the ache would start burning until she was in exhausted agony, but this was all she could think of to do.

The magnetic blanket she draped over Reach’s kingdom was so thin that a wireworm could push through it and not even feel it, but Electra would perceive the ripple when the field was broken. She’d know when and where her prey had emerged.

She closed her eyes as exhaustion washed through her. Somewhere beyond the low rubble of London’s horizon the daylamp was coming, but she wouldn’t sleep, not while the glittering pieces of her family waited behind her eyelids. The creature that had shattered them would come hunting again, sooner or later, seeking the son of the streets.

It would be ready to kill.

And so would she.