Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (33 page)

The sun sets low over Battersea, or at least over the streets where Battersea once was. Perhaps they will need new names now, these nests of alleys and overpasses; then again, perhaps not. Cities often cling to their names when they slough off everything else. Either way, it’s not up to me; these streets aren’t mine any more.

I haul myself over the edge of a gable and the roof tiles clink as I scramble onto them. I can smell the sharp oil in my sweat and feel it running down between my shoulder blades to cool in the evening air. I race along the length of the terrace, my bare feet sure on the tiles. A steel bridge looms up in front of me and I race under its shadow. A wraith clatters overhead. It sounds its steam-whistle, challenging me, but I have no time to race. I look down into the road below me, peering into shadows and around corners. I sniff the wind, but all I smell is petrol and rain.

I need a higher vantage. A sheer grey tower rises on the far side of the road and I pick up my pace. The wind rushes in my ears as I leap for it.

I scrabble, and a window ledge catches my fingertips. I climb, winkling my toes into tiny crevices, scrambling crabwise upwards.

It’s a long way up, and night settles around the city’s shoulders while I ascend. The tower’s windows become burning slabs of orange light. A woman dances towards me beneath its concrete skin, her flamenco dress picked out in aerosol paint. Her every step is graceful, for this is far more her element than mine.

She pauses beside me and I feel the brush of her painted hand as it slides beneath my fingers. She whispers her name and invites me to dance, to take my hand from its hold and place it on the smooth surface where her palm waits. I can feel the warmth rising from the wall where her skin is painted. One of her eyes is a diamond, the other a black swirling galaxy, flinted with stars. I realise that she is blind.

I don’t think I would fall, but I don’t pause to indulge her. I make my apologies and scramble higher, for there is no time, and there are deadlier things than her on the walls of this painted city. In the distance I hear a rhino snort.

With an exhilarated shout, I gain the roof. Lungs heaving, I race to the far side and look down. Streetlamps are igniting across the city, etching it in shadow and orange light, but how many of the spirits dancing in their bulbs are refugees from the old city, and how many were dreamed into existence with the new, I cannot say.

The towers are taller in this new London, the architecture stranger. The railings lining its parks are jagged-edged and
sharp. Its shadows whisper promises and threats. Ahead, beyond the old burned-black apartment blocks and the new ring of church spires that rise up from the city like teeth, I see the river glint.

It
’
s awake
, I think.
In her name, it
’
s awake
.

The sentient water zigzags between the new buildings, it arcs gracefully over bridges and then dips to crash through tunnels hidden far under the street. The Thames’ course changes according to its mood now; this new city is its playground. Rediscovering its freedom has made it a fickle thing, and the humans beginning to recolonise the city will have to work hard to stay on the River’s good side.

I see them occasionally, tiny figures moving in the windows of abandoned houses. Perhaps soon they’ll be dancing with the Lampfolk or bartering octaves of their voices to hungry spiders in exchange for a message carried to their families. Perhaps they’ll seek counsel from the veterans, the survivors, the ones who sit on doorsteps still marvelling at the freshly closed cuts in their hands and feet. I wish them all the luck they’ll need, but they’re not my concern. I scour the streets below me but find no sign of my quarry. I heave out a breath, and run on.

My muscles are burning. I’ve been running for four nights now, my bare feet sucking up energy from the street to keep me fresh. During the daylight hours I sleep fitfully in the shadows of the high-rises. My own dreams are full of her. I glance down at the tower-block tattoo on my wrist.

It’s four nights since I woke in an empty alley, my skin
leaching colour from the asphalt, the light from a single dancing Sodiumite drawing my shadow across the floor. Four nights – my flagging heart trips faster at the thought – and perhaps she can say the same.

I remember my own voice:
Your body is a city now. Your mind is a citizen. Mine is a refugee
.

It’s a desperate hope: if the city is real now, out in the world, shouldn’t the citizen be too?

Four nights, I wonder. Who knows what she might have seen in four nights in this city she once wore as a skin, where her dreams and her nightmares were born into brick? Would she be helpless before it, paralysed by recognition? Or does she navigate these streets more expertly than I ever could?

Is she, even now, stalking
me
?

I cannot know. Nothing is certain now. She was the blueprint of this city. She was its essence and its source; these streets were her body and her brain. I remember the hooded girl who walked beside me while she slept, a girl who never forgot her human skin. All I can do is hope that, like me, that girl is restored to sight and smell and blood and bone and breath – that when this city was born out into the world, she was born with it. And so for her, the only one who has ever frightened me enough to make me brave, for my scarred, scared brave girl of a conscience,

    I’m hunting.

Well, we made it.

Enormous thanks to Jo Fletcher and to Nicola Budd, Andrew Turner, Tim Kershaw and the whole team at Quercus for shepherding these stories out of my head and onto the page. Extra special gratitude to my agent Amy Boggs for being a rock, and helping me bring this home.

Thanks also to Den Patrick, James Smythe, Emily Richards, Helen Callaghan, Sam Miles and Glen Mehn, who were invaluable to this final volume, and to Kim Eyre and Marek Kochanowski, the teachers who helped set me on this path in the first place.

I’m hugely grateful to Sarah Pollock, Barbara Pollock, David Pollock, Sally Simpson, Barbara Barrett, Robin Barrett, Moira Barrett, Olivia Simpson, Aislinn Laing, Hugo Laing and the rest of my extended family for their tolerance, love and advice. That goes quintuple for my wife, Lizzie Barrett, who has to live with me every day.

I cited a lot of authors in this section of the first two books, and I felt their influence no less when writing the
third. There is one name still to add though: Jon Courtenay Grimwood, who sets the gold standard for writing voices in people’s heads (among other things).

And the final thanks goes to you, for reading this far, for lending your imagination to the creation of Scaffwolves and slatestorms, and also for reading the acknowledgements, and knowing that no story is ever made by one person alone.