Tom Pollock - The City's son

Tinny voices bled into the air, as though leaking from the wires stuffed into the girl’s ears:

We love you. Home, safe from harm. Safe. Never, never hurt you.

The red-headed girl’s eyes were not quite shut and her eyelids flickered in time to their words.

They eat voices. Beth remembered Fil’s words as the spider-calls swirled in the air. The cable in the girl’s mouth flexed obscenely, as though milking the sound from her throat.

Beth reached out and grasped the cable. Everything became nightmare-slow as she pulled it free.

The girl’s eyes snapped open. As the end of the cable left her mouth she screamed.

We love you we love you we love we love you we love you we love you we love we love you we love you…

The spiders turned instantly, order emerging from their chaotic motion. They swept over the metal in a glittering wave. Before Beth could even think they were crawling on her knuckles, through her hair, their needle-feet pricking her scalp and the skin over her breastbone. She lost control and shrieked, but a pair of pincer-jaws pierced the skin of her throat and the sound in her throat dried up as though it had been siphoned off.

The spiders marched over her shoulders towards her ears. Beth could see them spinning out threads of wire from their abdomens. Their static-voices swelled to fever-pitch.

W e love you we love you we love we love you we love you…

Their stolen words pulsed around her mind, suffocating her terror like morphine. Desperately, she tried to hold onto her fear, the true emotion, the only sane thing to feel, but she could feel it being drowned under the love of the spiders.

She waved her free arm desperately, slapping at them, crushing a handful, which vanished in a crackle of static.

We love you, the voices snapped viciously, but you made everything worse.

The thought pierced her like a lance. She sagged, dizzy and exhausted, against the metal. Her terror felt like a very distant thing now.

Something flickered in the air: a grey shape dropped through the tower’s hollow core towards her. A bony arm took her hard in the gut and she plummeted, barely aware of herself, barely conscious of the fall.

Beth looked up in a daze to find Fil holding her. He was shouting at her, his face livid — but no sound came out of his mouth.

We love you we love you we love you we love you: that was all she could hear. Worse, worse, worse.

He sprang from strut to strut, slowing their descent, Beth’s body jolting at every impact until at last they tumbled into the wet grass at the tower’s base.

He leaped to his feet and jabbed his finger at her angrily. At first there was no sound, then his voice began to crackle in his throat. ‘Thames and Riverblood!’ he swore, ‘when I said amnesty, I didn’t mean you could go pulling the plug on their pissing food supply!’

Beth gaped at him. She rose, unsteadily, onto one knee. The spiders’ voices were fading, giving way to nausea as the fright washed back. The red-headed girl’s screaming face blotted out everything else in her mind. ‘There’s someone,’ she gasped, ‘up there-’

‘The ginger girl?’ he said. ‘Yeah, I know. Thankfully, despite your clowning around, I think they’ve managed to reconnect her, so I’ve probably still got a deal with ’em.’

‘A deal?’ Beth yelled at him, her terror sliding into fury. ‘How can you make deals with those things? We have to help her, she’s a prisoner!’

‘Is she?’ His voice was a parody of shock. ‘Way I saw it; she didn’t start screaming until you pulled her loose.’

Beth was incredulous. She opened and closed her mouth a few times before she could find words. ‘You mean she wants to be there?’

‘Why not? Her brain spends every minute sunk in love now, flooded with it. She used to be alone — they always are. That’s how the Motherweb chooses ’em: finds ’em on the street, lost, lonely, cold, last bit of change in their hands to make their last phone calls to people who don’t care. Their desperation’s a kind of beacon to her: she homes in on it, and she offers them her choice.’

‘What happens if they change their minds?’

His face stiffened, but he didn’t look away. ‘It’s a oneoff deal. The Pylon Spiders don’t change their minds.’

Suddenly Beth was seeing her dad, the teeming hive of his grief. She could imagine him weeping with gratitude as a team of spiders dragged a cable to his lips and stuffed his ears with their calming song.

‘That’s crap,’ she snapped. ‘It doesn’t matter how bad it gets, how far down they are: people heal. You can’t just let them bury themselves like that. You can’t let those creatures offer them that choice. They’re just taking bloody advantage!’

The Urchin Prince straightened slowly to his full height. His words burnt with disdain. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘thanks be to Mater Viae that she sent us you to teach us the error of our ways.’

He spat at the ground. ‘Why is it you who gets to decide how much people can take before they want out?’ he asked. ‘Besides, even if you’re right, what about the spiders? They’re an entire species — you think they can’t feel? And think? And bloody love? They can’t eat nothing else, Beth; no matter how you or I might wish they could, they can’t. They need a voice; they don’t get it, they starve. That’s not their fault, and it’s not mine either, so you can stop looking at me like that.’ His voice was flat. ‘There’s more lives at stake here than just the flesh-and-blood ones, the fourlimbed ones, the ones that look like you. You’d better learn that, fast, or you’ll kill our army before Reach even gets his cranes in gear.’

Beth bit her lip and looked down. She could still hear the echoes of the spiders’ sibilant stolen voices. Everything worse. Her mind felt dirty, scraped raw.

He stared at her with narrowed eyes. ‘What did they say to you?’ he said at last. ‘It wasn’t just the usual love songs, was it? What else did they say?’

Beth bit her lip and refused to meet his gaze. She didn’t answer. Dawn was breaking over the distant stubble of the city. He turned and stalked away from the tower without another word.

‘Whose fault is it, then?’ Beth called after him. ‘If it’s not yours, and it’s not theirs, whose fault is it that I’m those things’ prey?’ She leaned bitterly on the word.

He paused. ‘The one who made them that way,’ he said at last. ‘Mater Viae. My mother.’

‘I wondered if I might speak to Parva, please.’

Pen glanced through her bedroom doorway. From her bed she could just make out the open front door downstairs, and a man with a spam-pink bald spot, standing on the top step.

‘I am very sorry, sir,’ her mother said in her sing-song English. ‘She has been very ill. She has not been able to get out of bed.’

Pen looked slowly around her room. She’d been stuck in here for three days now. It smelled like a hospital, and was starting to feel like one too. She’d taken to stashing the lamb samosas her mum had been bringing to her under the bed. ‘ Aap ki pasandeenda,’ Mum had said every time, ‘your favourite!’ Pen’s long-fought-for vegetarianism was dismissed in a stunning display of strategic amnesia now that she was trapped at home. She could smell the pastry and the fat in the meat congealing together into one artery-busting torpedo.

She hadn’t read any poetry in days. (Her dad would smack her one if he ever found the copy of Donne stitched into her biology textbook. With typical awkwardness, he’d probably grasp just enough of the old-fashioned English to understand the dirty bits.) She was starting to feel genuinely ill.

‘Could I… Could I possibly nip up and see her then? I wouldn’t take…’ The man’s voice tailed off. He sounded scared — given the face that her mother was likely to be making to such a suggestion, Pen didn’t blame him.