The City's son

CHAPTER 22

Down the roads of roof-slate, over battlements of brick,

My lord wants you to come to him, quick! quick! quick!

Across the Demolition Fields, where dozers plough the dead,

Your fleshy body through the cracks, thread! thread! thread!

Scale the tower, kiss the glass,

Break the wood and burn the grass.

Gaze across the barren beauty, Cranes construct and do their duty.

Pen’s finger came away from the wall, the metal barb that surmounted it was caked in dust. She stared at the verse she’d carved — but had she written that, or had it, the wirething that had enveloped her? She was terrified and exhausted, but she couldn’t cry any more.

She was so tired that without the wire holding her up she’d have fallen. The metal thorns had goaded her across rooftops and through backyards and down streets until the office blocks had reared up around her like the sides of a gorge. She’d barrelled into pedestrians, knocking them flying. One old woman had stared up in horror at her face, but the wire pushed her on so fast that she’d barely glimpsed herself in passing windows — torn nostrils, ripped cheeks, bloody teeth — before she went barrelling on.

A wall had reared up in front of her and she’d ducked under a lintel and through doorways, clambering through tiny spaces into a labyrinth of tumbled-down concrete. The air stank of wet cement and she’d wriggled and wormed her way through in silence.

Once the wire had gone suddenly still, freezing her in the dark, and Pen forgot herself and screamed. Her lips tore on the barbs and blood ran back down her throat. She mewled around her ripped tongue, afraid she was being kept here to die, but no, the wire twitched and shifted, piercing her skin in a new configuration, and resumed its sprint.

It was only when a police siren wailed far below that she realised how high she’d climbed.

She’d burst out onto the top floor of a half-built tower. The concrete was bare, and one wall was missing. All that separated her from the construction site below was a thin tarpaulin and five hundred feet of empty air. Wind whistled and the tarp snapped aside.

Neon lights mounted on cranes like eyes on stalks turned on her, bleaching her skin bone-white, whiter than a white girl. Her blood, where it caked the barbs in her arms, was black.

Pen could feel herself slipping away. She wanted to vanish into herself, to feel nothing, to be dead — it would be so much easier. She wanted to close her eyes, so much…

She started to let her eyelids drop, but a barb caressed the water on her eyeball, oh so lightly. She found new reserves of fear to keep them open.

The wire wanted her attention.

Machines raged in the building site, even in the depth of the night: cranes whirred, metal screeched on metal; bulldozers roared, and there was the distant, dreadful note of hammers.

Why? She breathed the word up into her throat and felt her arm come up again. Pen was grateful — she didn’t want to be grateful to it, but she felt the hot wave of relief wash through her anyway: relief, because it didn’t seize her tongue and squeeze her like an accordion to make her answer her own question. Instead it took her hand and scratched its answer in the dirt.

The crane’s clear cry, glass and steel

In the shaking earth you feel

Hear him, Hear him

Love and fear him.

Blessed, abased in holy waste.

Pen didn’t understand. Frustrated breaths wheezed out of her nose. Was the wire mocking her with these stupid rhymes? How did it know about her poetry?

Are you in my mind? The idea twisted her into even tighter panic. It was easy to believe, as the wire bent her neck to stare at its nonsense verse, that it was leaching her thoughts through her scalp, that even her mind was within the barbs’ reach.

Reach.

A scream of steel rent the air, a screech that echoed her own thoughts.

Reach.

The tower shook. A voice formed at the edges of all of the sounds carried on the tongue of the wind: bulldozers and jackhammers and the crackle of distant radios.

The barbed wire gripped Pen tighter and she gasped. The barbs let her lips open and teased along her tongue. The words she’d scrawled stood out starkly on the naked wall.

‘Hear him,’ she whispered. ‘Hear him. Love and fear him.’

She looked down at the building site, a hive of frenzied construction and destruction, and felt herself retch. Cranes turned and diggers chewed at the earth like hungry dogs. Echoes crashed back off half-born architecture. Even from here she could see none of the machines had a human controller, but it wasn’t this that sickened her. It was the fact that things were dying down there.

Screams rang out in the shriek of steel on rubble. She blinked, and in an instant she perceived the foundations and exposed pipes as bodies and bones. She saw the digger’s mouths opening wounds. These were people — maybe not flesh and blood, but people nonetheless, like the glass woman who’d tried to help her. People made of the city itself.

From up here she could see patches of black across London, hidden amongst the winking lights: building sites, demolition sites — dozens upon dozens of killing fields: a hidden holocaust.

Listen. She didn’t know where the thought came from.

Needle-points squeezed into her chest and the breath rushed out of her. The wire exoskeleton bent into a ragged S-shape and she collapsed, coughing, onto her knees. Cold air stung her eyeballs. At the edge of her vision she could see her finger, scratching a word onto the floor.

‘ I am Reach. ’ The voice sang in the screech of the cranes.

The word was next to her eyeball.

Listen.