Tom Pollock - The City's son

Electra starts to answer, but she is distracted by a flare of light, not the soft amber of her kind, but bright white, like a magnesium flare.

It’s coming from her lamp.

Her face takes on an ugly cast. ‘ Whitey,’ she snarls in a dim orange.

Her sisters have seen it too. They crowd around Electra’s lamp. Another glass figure has climbed up the lamppost while we were talking. He emits a pallid white light as he casts fearful looks at them, clutching his limbs around himself as he tries to get inside.

The Sodium sisters flare bright yellow, displaying their colours. They spit like firecrackers, flashing in their own language, too fast for me to follow. I catch a few phrases though, vile imprecations about parenthood and voltages. The Whitey squirms and shivers, his light uneven. He probably can’t understand half the abuse being screamed at him.

It’s Electra, always the boldest, who throws the first stone. Her fingers twist around it, weaving a magnetic field that lifts the rock up and it spins in the air, faster and faster, then shoots straight at the glass.

‘Lec, no! ’ I shout, but she isn’t looking so she’s deaf to me. The others follow her lead and stones start to zip like bullets. The lamppost is dented; glass shatters. The Whitey twists frantically, trying to protect his filaments. I realise he can’t help infuriating them: the faster he moves to avoid the rocks, the brighter he burns, the stronger his colour, the angrier the Sodiumites become…

… and the faster the stones fly.

I gape: why is the Whitey taking this? Why doesn’t he run? A look at the sky gives me my answer: heavy thunderclouds are swelling over the city’s orange glow.

I make a decision.

Grabbing my spear, I jink between the sisters’ bodies and scramble up the lamppost, waving my spear like a flagpole, trying to get their attention. ‘ Stop! It’s going to rain — rain, you get it? There’s only one of him — he’s not invading, he’s only looking for cover.’

They don’t acknowledge me, but magnetic trajectories shift slightly and the missiles lose a little momentum as they swerve around me to find their target. The whistle as they fly through the air can’t quite drown out the terrified buzzing of the Whitey behind me.

Splinters of glass shower me. The tiny cuts heal fast.

Eventually I feel the heat behind me lessen as the Whitey slides down the back of the lamppost. He hunches for a second on the tarmac, his corona of white light shrinking as the Sodiumites advance on him. Then he shambles away, clutching himself, strobing off little mewls of pain.

There’s a touch of moisture on the wind. My stomach twists. I know what will happen to him if he’s caught out in a rainstorm…

… and so do they.

Electra’s slap burns my cheek. She’s climbed the lamppost as well. Her sisters stand around the courtyard, ostentatiously staring in the other direction.

‘ What were you doing? ’

‘It’s going to rain!’ I yell back at her, my skin stinging. ‘He just wanted shelter.’

‘ He was trespassing. They have their own shelters. ’

‘On a dozen streets in the centre of the city, five miles away — he’ll never make it in time!’

She stares at me. Her eyes glow a uniform clear amber from lid to lid.

‘ Good,’ she strobes. ‘ If I ever trespassed on Whitey ground, a stoning is the least I would expect. ’

She looks down at her sisters. ‘ They wanted me to throw you out but I told them about Glas, and about Reach. They understand you are upset. They are not happy, not at all, but you can stay — as long as you never ever get in our way like that again. ’

My stomach burns as fiercely as my face. How dare she apologise for me? I want to scream at her, but spots of rain are already kissing my forehead. Alarm flashes across Electra’s face.

‘ Rest. Recover,’ she murmurs hurriedly. She lays hot fingers on my chest. ‘ We will talk when the moon comes out. ’ She vanishes into the filament of her lamp, which begins to glow after a second. There is a tinkling sound and the fragments of glass shattered by the stones begin to levitate, floating in her electro-magnetic field, glittering as they catch her light. The glass closes around the filament. For an instant she burns hotter: a bright and unbearable white, almost the same shade as the Whitey she scorned. I turn my face away.

When I look back, the lamp glass has melted back together and inside, Electra’s light is amber again.

I drop lightly to the ground. Electra’s sisters have retreated into their own shelters. I shiver and thrust my hands in my pockets.

You can stay, she said. How river-pissing generous of her.

Am I in hiding then? That’s what was in Electra’s tone, the shade of her words. Can I really be hiding? The idea’s absurd, I don’t hide. No, I came here to dance, to relax, clear my mind and get ready for …

For what? I am hiding. I’m afraid. The realisation weighs me down as though every blood vessel in my body is suddenly full of gravel. Reach is much, much too strong for me. All of the wraiths I’ve fought, the Pylon Spiders, the city’s petty monsters, none of them ever felt like this.

Out in the wilderness there is a faint glow that might be the Whitey.

The wind gusts and snaps at the hem of my jeans. I sit down cross-legged between the lampposts. And the rain comes down hard.

The Whitey danced for his life. He snaked and jerked, trying to dart between the raindrops. He could feel his magnesium bones tingling, stretching out to the water, almost like they wanted to react with it and burn. His frantic speed made him brilliant, and his light reflected off the concrete walls of the estate, leaving ghostly after-images. The grass underfoot was wet and he throbbed off shrieks of pain as he ran, scrambling to find shelter.

The Whitey found a slick black tarpaulin crumpled into a corner by an outbuilding. He threw it over himself, but the rivulets of water that ran off it made him scream, so he stood and ran again, his light beaming out from the treacherous holes in the tarp. Curls of hydrogen twisted wherever the rain struck home.

Suddenly the wind changed and a puddle rippled, splashing a curl of water against the Whitey’s leg. He blazed in pain and the metal in his ankle reacted: his foot vanished in a flare of light and gas and he fell awkwardly by a barbed-wire fence. He crawled in agony over the wet tarmac. The world around him was bright with lit windows, safe, dry lights, but there was no way in.

A jag of concrete snared the edge of the tarp and it was dragged from him. The Whitey lay there, unable to crawl further. He spasmed and his knee scraped over the concrete. A spark caught and he was bathed in flame as the hydrogen cloud around him ignited. The heat soothed him for alltoo-brief a moment and then burned out.

It was only the needles of pain rippling over him that kept him conscious. He thought of his home, wondering how he had got so far from the bright gas-white globes on their posts over the Carnaby Street market. His brothers and sisters would be there now, with the rain ricocheting harmlessly off their bulbs. One orb would be dark, empty; where he ought to be.

Something moved above him, a thin, dark shadow, and the Whitey looked up. A skein of barbed wire was coming off the fence towards him, twisting and coiling like a snake through the air. It shivered along its length and the barbs gave off a rattling hiss.

‘ No,’ he strobed. Even in his agony, a deeper fear gripped him. ‘ No, get back. I’m not yours. I can’t sustain you. ’

But the eyeless thing kept coming and in the flickering light of his words he saw a tendril slither off the ground to caress his face. The moisture on it burnt him.