The City's son

CHAPTER 28

Beth involuntarily screwed up her eyes and clamped her mouth shut. She exhaled hard through her nose as the thick meniscus of the pool slid over her face. Then the water swallowed her.

Liquid rushed into her ears, roared in, drowning out her heartbeat. She felt her T-shirt billowing as the water covered her stomach, prickling it like insect feet. Blisters erupted on her neck, inside her ears, between her fingers, stinging her lips.

Don’t breathe in, don’t breathe in.

She pushed more breath out of her nostrils. She couldn’t imagine the pain of having the toxins flood her sinuses, but the pressure built up steadily in her chest. She held her mouth shut.

Don’t breathe. Don’t breathe. Don’t panic.

When you have to tell yourself that, a voice in her head countered dryly, you’re already screwed.

The water savaged her skin. She could feel warm blood pouring out through her pores.

The pressure grew as the liquid squeezed her until every beat of her pulse felt fit to crack open her head. There was a vacuum in her chest like a black hole. The water seeped into the corners of her mouth, burning her gums, making her teeth fizz horribly in her mouth. It levered at her jaw, straining to be let in.

Don’t breathe. Don’t breathe. Don’t panic.

The breath died from her nostrils. The bubbles rippling over her face ceased.

Breathe. Breathe. Don’t panic.

I watch as she goes limp, spread out in the water like a black star. It would be a lie to say I’d thought this was without risk. We both knew this could kill her, and as good as she was at hiding it, Beth was horribly afraid of her death.

So was I.

I want to dive in after her, but instead I bite my lip and taste the petrol. This is a war, and that makes us soldiers — and what kind of soldier backs out because a friend of his might get hurt? It’s a fifty-fifty shot, better than Reach would give her. ‘This is my fight now,’ she said, and I will myself to respect that.

Six shadows fall across the water and I look up sharply. The synod have stepped in, buttoning their jackets in identical time. They bend over the pool like the petals of a black flower. Too late, I notice the absence of sound. They aren’t snapping their lighters. Beth is still and they are still and there is an all-swallowing silence.

Each holds a flame in their outstretched hands. As one, they turn and grin at me.

‘Johnny!’ I shriek — and six flames fall towards the petrol-slicked water.

Dimly Beth heard the whumphh as the fire blossomed above her. Even without opening her eyes she knew what must have happened; now the surface of the pool was capped in flame. No way back out. At first the liquid ameliorated the heat, rendered it to warmth, but as she hung there she felt the pool heat up around her. Her skin began to hurt less; perhaps the nerve endings were burning out, perhaps she was dying. The beat of the blood in her head was the loudest thing. The loudest thing she could ever dream…

Pressure in her temples obliterated the thought. A slow current tugged at her and she allowed herself to turn, rolling in the water like a crocodile.

The pressure battered furiously, unbearably, at her throat and chest and jaw. She realised with sadness, rather than fear, that she was going to open her mouth and let the poisoned water enter her. She was too weak for this test and it would kill her.

The light of the fire touched her eyelids. And because she didn’t want to die blind, she opened them.

‘Johnny! Let me- Beth! Beth! ’

But the Chemical Synod hold me, woven in a symmetrical web of their arms. Their skins are too slippery for me to pull them off, but their grip on me is vice-like.

‘BETH! BETH! ’ I scream at the top of my voice. ‘Let me go!’ But they grin their horrid grins and hold me tighter. I’m panicking now, and I don’t understand. We had a deal. Deals are sacred!

In my pain and confusion, I barely register the change in the water, but then I notice the flames flickering, reflected in the surface — the surface which is no longer oily black.

It has turned silver.

Silver. Why in Thames’ name does it look silver? Beth gazed around her. The liquid was warm against her eyeballs, but it didn’t sting them, and she could see the fire, raging through the silver water like a close-up sun. Her skin was ragged and torn, but the water seeped into it and the pain ebbed away. The water was healing her flesh, smoothing her blisters to a finer grain the texture of concrete.

‘ How in Thames’-? ’ The thought tailed away. It didn’t sound like her; it sounded like him.

An image struck her: rain pouring over the city, water flooding down sewers, through gutters, seeping through the earth, teasing up tiny particles of London and carrying them here.

Liquid chaos, and other more exotic ingredients.

Here, into her.

The heat of the fire forced droplets of sweat from her and she felt them clinging to her skin, insulating her from the heat. A petrol tang touched her lips.

She remembered Fil putting his hand on the Lampgirl’s arm. The heat should have been agonising, but he’d shown no sign of pain.

She kicked towards the flames.

The synod’s grip on me slackens and I spring forward, my heels spurning the earth as I run towards the fire. One second of pain, that’s all it’ll take, and I can reach her, pull her clear. At least they won’t get her body.

A shape bursts from the water as I reach the bank, the flames in its hair sputter out and it collapses in front of me, coughing up great lungfuls of rancid water.

I damn near fall over her as I drag her onto her back. Her chest is still and I grab her arms and shake her idiotically, yelling her name two inches from her face: ‘Beth! Beth! ’

There’s no response, and a sickening certainty grips me: she can’t respond. Sudden death.

Mad, frantic, I begin to push at her chest, but there’s no sign of life. I slump over on her, my ear to her ribcage, and still I hear nothing. ‘Oh, Thames,’ I whisper, and at last, I feel a faint flicker through her hoodie. I flail about, almost smacking her in the side of the head in my haste to jam my fingers into her mouth and pull it open. I draw in chemical-heavy air, ready to breathe it into her.

‘You about to snog me, Phyllis?’ She wheezes the words, her lips an atom’s breadth from mine, trembling, but slowly creasing into a smile.

I sit back, gazing at her. Her skin is grey, the silver-grey of the water she just climbed out of: the colour of steel and concrete. The colour of mine.

A thin shadow falls across my shoulder. ‘Filius.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Confusion and leftover terror pound through me like a jackhammer. ‘You burned her.’

Johnny Naphtha bathes me in his eternal grin. ‘This is a special conflagration,’ he says, ‘purchassed at great expensse. It cleanssess and corusscatess, maimss and makess anew. That iss what you assked for, after all,’ he adds with a certain pride. ‘The ssynod always does what is assked.’

He and his oil-slick brothers turn and walk back towards the factory, their feet falling in perfect time. ‘Filiuss,’ Johnny says, without turning, ‘inform your friendss: the form of our agreement iss now fixed. Forgetting would not be forgiven.’

My stomach plummets for a second. Symmetry: every deal has a cost as well as a benefit. The chemists’ equations always balance.

‘Exit by your own endeavourss,’ he says before they turn away.

Beth lies there, eyes shut, chest slowly rising and falling, now and then spluttering up a little more oily water. It’s a joy just to watch her being alive. When the synod have retreated back into their cloister I collapse down beside her. Exhaustion drags my eyelids together. I press my arm along Beth’s and we lie there, absorbing the sunlight.