The City's son

CHAPTER 42

Beth raced through London. She felt the gaze of the gargoyles from Highgate’s slated roofs, and haughty men stared down at her from tower block windows, reflections of people who weren’t there. It felt like the whole of the city was urging her on.

Railwraiths clattered past her, dragging carriages of commuters for another day’s work. The passengers were incurious; if they saw her at all through the trains’ filthy windows they didn’t acknowledge it.

She leaped off the tracks near King’s Cross and as her spark-scorched feet hit the tarmac she wound her way past the Chinese takeaways and minicab offices on Pentonville Road, as quick and subtle as water in a gutter. The pavements were thick with pedestrians all bundled up in thick coats against a cold she barely felt, chattering into mobile phones, laughing, complaining about how little sleep they’d had: the lifeblood of the human city, sluggishly beginning to circulate after a cold night.

They were slowing Beth down.

She turned into the backstreets, whirling past graffiti-covered bins, homeless people huddled in sleeping-bags and winos sleeping in pools of piss near the back doors of strip clubs. Drum’n’bass pulsed from an open window in a flat four storeys above — a student, maybe, a rich one, given how high the rents were in this area. She’d tagged these streets years ago; she retrod them now, this time leaving only a scent of petrol and damp cement behind her.

As the buildings became older and grander and the streets more narrow she slowed to a walk. The cranes reared over her; cruel hooks were connected to their jibs by umbilical cords of chain. A street sign on the wall above her read Dean’s Court, City of London EC2Y. She grinned to herself. These pavements her feet were drawing sustenance from belonged to Reach.

She rounded a corner into a pedestrianised square where glass towers punctured the old City’s collapsing grandeur. Now people were seeing her; more than one of the well-heeled men and women who were walking into these buildings stopped to stare at this apparition of oil and grime, with her railing and her manic glare. On the front page of their newspapers she saw versions of the same headline:

Earthquake in London, Chelsea Bridge badly shaken.

‘People believe the story,’ Glas had said, ‘not the facts.’

She grinned or grimaced or sneered — she didn’t know how these smartly dressed movers and shakers would interpret it. She felt more affinity for the buildings around her than these people. The only thing they had in common with her was flesh.

St Paul’s loomed to her left, quite beautiful in the clear winter sun, and she wove her way towards it. She felt a shiver as she passed through the Cathedral’s shadow, and she swore. She hadn’t realised how much she’d come to dread it.

Now, if I were the King of the Cranes, where would I hide?

She looked up. The nearest cranes sprouted from behind the row of buildings straight ahead of her. She eyed them uncertainly, and ducked instinctively as one whirred around, afraid it might see her. She breathed in the dust of dry cement, listened to the clamour and clang of the construction machines, and started to walk towards them, but she found her joints reluctant to bend. The muscles in her legs were trembling.

All right, B, you’re scared — no surprise. Don’t make a big deal out of it. Walk. You can work out what to do when you get there.

She braced herself and walked briskly down the steps.