The City's son

CHAPTER 30

Pen dreamed of her parents. She was sitting at the kitchen table, and her father sat opposite her, sleeves rolled up over his teak-coloured arms. He peered though his glasses and scribbled in an old-fashioned accounting ledger.

His forehead rucked up in concentration, he muttered, ‘This bloody thing simply will not add up.’

Her mother fussed at the hob, skipping out of the way as the fat spat. Behind her pakoras and samosas were piled high on the kitchen counter, the paper beneath them transparent and glistening with grease.

‘Mum?’ Pen said. It was hard to shape the words because of the scars on her lips. ‘What’s all the food for?’

Her mother gave her a bemused look and squeezed her shoulder. ‘Why, it’s for your wedding, dear one. Why else would I be putting myself to all this trouble?’

Pen stood up to help, but her mother waved her out of the way. She didn’t protest. Of course she was getting married soon, although at that precise moment she couldn’t remember to whom. ‘Well, Mama,’ she said, ‘it is only slightly more than you’d make for a light lunch for the three of us.’

They all laughed heartily at this weak joke.

Her father threw his pen down on the table in frustration.

‘Damn it, I cannot make this add up at all. We’ll have to call it off. All of it.’

Her mother looked disappointed and began to dump platefuls of hot food into the bin.

‘Mum!’ Pen was appalled. ‘Dad, what is it?’

‘Your dowry — come, see if you can make this work out.’

Pen stood up and came round the table. She looked over his shoulder. Instead of rows of numbers, a face had been drawn in Beth Bradley’s distinctive style on the lined ledger pages, a face with swollen scars and twisted lips.

‘He’ll want an exorbitant sum to marry that,’ her father said, rubbing her hand fondly where it sat on his shoulder. ‘But I suppose we’ll have to try to find it.’

Pen put her hand to her face; she felt the scars and the bruises. Her fingers brushed air where one earlobe used to be.

‘We’ll do the best we can with you, my daughter,’ her mother said kindly. ‘But it won’t be easy with a face like that.’

Pen looked past her and saw her own reflection in the kitchen tap.

Wake.

Wake Wake Wake Wake Wake Wake Wake Wake Wake Wake.

Air ripped in through Pen’s nostrils and she coughed and opened her eyes. This was the first time she’d dreamed of her parents since she’d been taken. She’d imagined them while she was awake: coming home, her mother scolding her with relieved tears in her eyes. But they’d never entered her sleep until now.

The wire gripped her and rolled her over.

Wake Wake Wake Wake Wake Wake Wake Wake

The word was all around her, scratched in the concrete in massive, jagged letters. Fresh dust caked her finger. Her wire exoskeleton was vibrating over her skin. She felt its eagerness — or was it her eagerness? It was becoming difficult to know which of them any given emotion belonged to now.

What? she thought to it. What is it?

In answer, it lurched her to her feet and used her hand to pull the tarp aside. Pen squinted in the site’s arclights for a moment. A sound of tearing metal echoed around the half-finished architecture. Pen watched in astonishment as clamps unlocked, scaffolding bars slid free and the metal framework that had been bandaging the buildings fell away in an iron avalanche. But instead of crashing into a heap in the dust, struts swivelled around joints into new configurations, moving faster and faster, forming clouds of blurring metal. The wire’s excitement flowed through Pen as she watched and she found herself almost panting.

Then suddenly, the whirring metal reformed itself into more familiar shapes: massive metal animals like dogs, or wolves, even, and skeletal men. The steel men reached down and patted the beasts’ gleaming necks, and they put their heads back and emitted echoing iron howls.

The scaffolding creatures loped from the building site.

We ride, the wire scratched on the wall with Pen’s shaking finger, and adrenalin filled her. The wire felt no fear, so neither did she. Her legs bunched under her and she jumped. The air stung her cuts as she plummeted; the lights of cranes flashed past. Barbed tendrils flashed out from her feet and touched earth. Two spindly legs of wire contracted under her, bearing her slowly to earth, breaking her descent gently.

A wolf bent its neck in deference and Pen climbed on. The wire lashed her securely to its back and with another baying howl the beast turned and padded after its packmates.

The iron giants strode beside her. The clang of their footsteps on the shale of the building site was like war drums.