The City's son

CHAPTER 40

‘I can’t make this add up at all.’

Parva looked forlornly at her father across the table. She knew how this was going to end. She’d struggled into her green wedding sharara, which had hurt because it was over-ambitiously small and there were cuts under her arms.

Her dad wouldn’t meet her gaze but remained hunched, scowling over his ledger. ‘Come here and help me, Parva.’

Obediently she stood and went to his shoulder. Behind her a knife scraped over china as her mother dumped the food into the bin.

‘See?’ her father grumbled. He smelled of nuts and dry tobacco. ‘He’ll want a fortune.’

Parva gazed into her own mutilated face. Her father held the pencil, but it was Beth’s style that characterised the picture.

Her father slumped forwards and sighed, his breath stirring the white hairs on his brown arms. ‘I can’t afford it. I can’t. It will ruin me. I’ll have to sell the practice.’

A crash made them both look up. Parva’s mother stood over the shrapnel of a broken plate. Her hand was trembling. ‘Why, Parva? Why couldn’t you take better care of yourself? I taught you how.’ She sounded tearful, and she looked terribly old.

‘I’m afraid it’s worse than you think, Mrs K,’ a familiar voice said. Beth ambled in from the front room, her hands thrust into the pockets of her hoodie.

‘Do you mind?’ She lifted the pencil from Parva’s dad’s unresisting fingers and began to scribble over his picture, her tongue between her teeth as she worked, her face all concentration. Under her pencil, the true extent of Parva’s injuries became clear. She twirled the pencil in her fingers and used the rubber end to erase one nostril and half an ear. She drew in a ragged scar at the corner of the mouth.

Pain flared through Parva’s face. She put her hand to her cheek and felt blood. She probed with her fingers and felt the skin where her lips met split and separate as through dragged with an invisible wire.

When Beth had done, Parva slumped to the ground, her nose and mouth full of the tang of metal.

Beth dropped the pencil down on the paper. ‘Sorry, Mr K,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ll find any takers. Not for any price.’ She extended a hand to Parva. ‘Come on, Pen,’ she said.

Pen reached out with the thumb and three remaining fingers of her right hand. She smeared Beth’s palm red as she grasped it. She followed her best friend from the room.

*

Pen woke slowly, the crash of demolition like a call to prayer from mosques in some dawn in her childhood she barely remembered: tower blocks for minarets, wrecking balls for muezzins.

She opened her eyes cautiously, but it was only the matted web of sleep that held them shut. Her mouth felt parched; it tasted of resentment and old blood. She sighed, expanding her ribs as far as she could against their wire corset.

Kill the host… That’s what the skinny boy had said as she squeezed him. Pen found herself furious with Beth for not obeying him. In the brief, feverish periods of sleep she managed to snatch she dreamed of Beth: both rescuer and mutilator, cutter and cure. It was an addiction, tenacious as a weed. She had to stop. Neither blaming nor hoping for Beth was going to help her.

A long strand of wire uncoiled from her arm and reached up to a scaffolding strut and wound around, tautened, and pulled her to her feet.

Staying focused was all but impossible now. The things Pen wanted were as slippery as wet soap. Hours passed now when she didn’t think of escape at all. She was horrified she’d catch herself lusting after the hunt, wanting nothing more than to swing out on wire cables across the city, to find the asphalt-skinned boy and kill him: to make the Crane King proud of her.

She knew she hadn’t originated these desires, they came from the Wire Mistress, but she felt them, and her hands shook in their metal cage with the craving. The desires were in her skin. She didn’t want to want to kill, but she wanted it all the same. Her borrowed bloodlust scared her.

Still, unlike the desire to be saved, it didn’t make her feel like a victim.

The morning sun burst over her like a fireball, reflecting off the roof of St Paul’s as she swung out into the air. The wire mask around her face shone bright with glare. Below, the machines worked, digging to unearth Reach.

‘ I am Reach, I am Reach. I will be. I will be.’

That was his desire; she shivered with it, the most primal in the world. She understood him better now. He was constructing himself, making himself be. He’d burst through into the city over and over again down the centuries, and yet, in a way, he’d never even finished being born.

The barbed-wire strand unspooled and she descended towards the rubble. There was a crack in the hoardings ringing the site, an exit into the labyrinth of collapsed masonry that separated Reach from the rest of London. The Wire Mistress walked her towards it.

Just before she slipped into shadow, she saw something out of the corner of her eye: two massive pneumatic drills were hacking one corner of a mouth from the earth. She could see lips with cracks and capillaries. A creature with a mouth that size would dwarf the Cathedral that rose above them.

She wanted to be scared of it, but she wasn’t. A part of her, a big part, was excited.

She didn’t want to want it, but Pen wanted to see Reach stand.