Un Lun Dun

93. Shed Skin

An almighty explosion rang in Deeba’s ears. The UnGun recoiled.

From every corner of the air came paper airplanes. Some were tiny; some were made from huge sheets. They were all different colors. Some were made from pages torn from books, some were written on in pen, some were blank.

There were simple folded darts and intricate models with recurved wings. The air was filled with thousands. They dive-bombed Brokkenbroll and Unstible as if they were carried in a hurricane.

They swept past the targets, brushing the two men with the edges of their wings, scoring lines. Brokkenbroll cried out.

Her aim was good. But Brokkenbroll was clicking his fingers, and a phalanx of his unbrellas opened and made a shield. With a drumming like rain, the paper missiles bounced from the reinforced fabric.

In the center of that shield, Deeba saw the red, lizard-covered rebrella.

No! she thought in despair. With him so close, he’s controlling it again.

There were no unbrellas protecting Unstible. The paper edges scraped it hundreds of times. Had it been a man, the stinging onslaught might have hurt it. But it was not. It stood in the middle of the blizzard of darts and laughed. Behind it, the vat bubbled violently, and thick steam poured off it. Unstible sucked, and the green swirls eddied into its mouth and nose. Unstible’s body grew fatter. Its skin stretched.

“Come on!” Deeba shouted, and shook the UnGun. “Paper planes?” she shouted. “Paper cuts? Drop a ton of books on them or something!” But the onslaught of folded planes was ebbing.

Unstible’s skin was marked with little wounds, which didn’t bleed, but oozed wisps of smoke. Brokkenbroll peered out from behind his unbrellas.

He looked at Deeba, holding her useless empty weapon. She desperately tried to snap open its cylinder to reload, but it wouldn’t budge. The Unbrellissimo looked at Unstible, still sucking in the stream of green fumes.

Brokkenbroll didn’t look triumphant: he looked bewildered, and afraid.

“What are you…?” he said to the Unstible-thing, and his words dried.

He snapped his fingers. The unbrellas folded their canopies and made towards Deeba.

The rebrella did not. Deeba saw it fold up under Brokkenbroll’s nose, and understood. It had infiltrated his shield, to get close to him. When it did not obey him, Deeba saw a look of total horror cross Brokkenbroll’s face.

He did not have time to do anything. The rebrella whacked him resoundingly in the head. He keeled over backwards.

Instantly, in time with his fall, the unbrellas stopped moving towards Deeba, and eddied in confusion.

The rebrella smacked Brokkenbroll several times more, until he was definitely unconscious.

Deeba could not take her eyes from Unstible’s horrifying transformation. It inhaled like an industrial pump, and swelled into a revolting parody of a human. The smoke pouring from the vat sluiced into its body. The vat itself was beginning to shake, and creak.

Unstible staggered towards Deeba, but it was too grossly inflated now to walk. Instinctively Deeba raised the UnGun, but it was empty, and she could only lower it again. Unstible smiled.

“It’s,” it spat out through an inrush of reeking steam, “time.”

It smiled wider, and wider. It opened its mouth and stretched back its lips, and still kept smiling. Its mouth began to gape, and the skin at the corners stretched, and Unstible’s jaw dropped and its head lolled back, and that mouth opened so wide suddenly its head hinged all the way open, turned inside out, and a huge, dense cloud poured out.

The Smog inside Unstible was so thick it completely blocked out light. It was dark and tinged with the green of the steam. It gushed out of Unstible as if from an exhaust pipe.

Unstible’s skin collapsed. There was not a fleck of blood. It fell in on itself, as the fumes, the only things that had filled it for a long time, left.

The skin lay in a man-shaped rag on the floor. The Smog expanded luxuriously into the room. It seemed impossible that so much smoke had fit in Unstible, no matter how stretched. The Smog was everywhere, and Deeba couldn’t breathe, or see.

She felt the grit of airborne soot and rubbish sting her, and she tried to keep her eyes and mouth shut. The chemical stench was inescapable. She spat. She fell to her knees.

The room began to shake. For a second Deeba thought it was her imagination, but she could dimly hear the roaring of the huge cauldron as the magic compound boiled into gas, and joined the Smog’s substance.

There was a bursting roar, and Deeba felt the Smog rush from her, and the air clear.

Wind tugged at her hair. She opened her eyes, and was staring up into the crawling stars, and the loon, and a dark, soaring cloud.

Deeba looked around in confusion. Dust was settling everywhere, coating the aimless unbrellas, the ruined furniture, and the room’s other coughing inhabitants. She saw Unstible’s skin where it had fallen.

The vat was burst. The liquid had reached some critical heat and exploded.

It had blown off the roof. Deeba looked up again and let out a cry of terror.

Rising directly above the room, the Smog flew.

It was growing as it rose, spreading out into its full dimensions. It indulged itself, played, gave itself momentary smoky wings, or claws, or teeth. In the loonlight, Deeba could see thick green spread through it as it mingled the chemical with the rest of its substance. All the fumes in the room were sucked up in its wake, merging with it.

The factory’s great chimney was trembling. It began to collapse at the top, falling in on itself and roaring as it tumbled down, sending bricks and brick dust into the fireplace a few feet from her.

Deeba put her head in her hands. But as she cowered, she heard ricochets.

Her rebrella was open by the fireplace. It was darting from side to side and up and down faster than she could see, using its reinforced fabric to shield her— and coincidentally Lectern, Mortar, and even Brokkenbroll— from the falling bricks. She watched its beautiful life-saving performance in amazement.

After several seconds, the top of the chimney had collapsed inwards and clogged the shaft. The remaining stub swayed and held.

One by one, the walls of the room fell away. The rubble of the laboratory was open to the air. The rebrella clicked closed, and spun into Deeba’s hand.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Deeba…” It was Mortar. The soporific little smoggler that had covered his face was gone, sucked into the growing cloud above them. He staggered to his feet, raising a plume of dust, and shuffled towards her, blinking.

“I don’t know what’s happened,” he said, “but I do know I’ve been a terrible, terrible fool. Please forgive me. I simply…couldn’t believe my own old friend Unstible was…” His voice failed him.

Deeba eyed him. She knew she should be extremely angry with him, and she would be soon, but not just then.

“He wasn’t,” she said. “Your friend didn’t do nothing. It was the Smog.” She decided not to show him Unstible’s skin. He looked on the verge of collapse already.

“But…can you ever…”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said hurriedly. “I’ll forgive you later. Right now there’s no time.” She pointed up. Mortar stared in horror at the growing mass of greening cloud.

“What’s it doing?”

Deeba spoke urgently.

“It’s getting ready to make every unbrella in UnLondon a firebomb— all them unbrellas it and Brokkenbroll told everyone to carry. For protection.” With your help, she thought, but didn’t say. It was obvious from Mortar’s face that he knew it.

“What can we do?” he said mournfully. “What can I do?”

“First, we need to…stop her getting away,” Deeba said suddenly and, without even thinking, hurled the rebrella at Lectern, who was creeping towards the elevator. It tangled into the Propheseer’s legs, pulled her down. Lectern wailed. “She went over to Brokkenbroll,” Deeba said. “Deliberately.”

“Lectern!” Mortar said.

“Yeah, it’s terrible, but we don’t have time to be horrified yet,” Deeba said. She thought quickly. She looked up at the Smog, and out over the ruined walls across UnLondon.

All over the city, dark plumes were rising from the smogmires.

Everywhere were flashes of fires and battles, and the noises of struggle, as the great war for UnLondon raged. But something new was happening.

The Smog was oozing out of the streets it had taken over, tugging out of the sewers and the houses, floating up into a choking lid. It sat in the air in fat globs acres wide, dangling filaments of smoke like feelers, sucking the last of itself from chimneys.

All the Smog of UnLondon rose. Nightbirds, highfish, and flying vessels lurched, shocked, to evade it.

From every battleground, the Smog seeped out of the reanimated flesh of the smombies. They collapsed, or were suddenly controlled by surprised ghosts who’d been struggling to push the sentient smoke out of them. The Smog gushed out of the tanks and pipes on the stink-junkies. They fell to the floor and wheezed in withdrawal as the pollutants that had addicted them floated away.

All the clots of Smog billowed through the air and rolled into each other, like blobs of mercury. They joined into fatter clouds. They slowly approached the densest patch of all, over Deeba’s head. After weeks in Unstible’s skin, it was luxuriating in the open sky.

Deeba heard cheers from across UnLondon.

“They think it’s over,” said Deeba. “They think they won. But it’s drawing together, so it can mix that chemical in. It boiled it so it could breathe it— now it’s going to mix it into every bit of Smog there is. Then it’ll spread again…and rain. While everyone celebrates. They’ll see it coming, but they’ll just put up their unbrellas.”

“And then…” said the book.

“The unbrellas,” Deeba said. “And the people carrying them. They’ll all burn.”