فصل هفدهم

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Single Handed

George was already walking when he truly became conscious. Edie was dragging him, her shoulder under his armpit, her arm around his waist, staggering down a sloping alley that led away from the light. He was aware she was talking to him, but the echo of the screaming still filled his ears, accompanied by a heavy pounding bass backbeat that he recognized as his heart pumping. He felt his injured hand throbbing in time to the blood, pulsing with a pain that was bone-deep and too intense to be sharp anymore, just a pounding blunt pain that was both too hot and too cold all at once. He tried to look back at his hand on the end of the arm Edie had jammed over her shoulder.

She shook her head and said something he couldn’t hear. Panic hooked out of nowhere and hit him in the gut.

Maybe his hand was too badly shredded to mend.

Maybe?

Certainly.

The dragon had slashed it with a white-hot dagger-claw.

His hand had to be maimed, that’s what she was trying to stop him seeing.

He yanked his arm, tugged his head around, tried to see, tried to stop—but she carried on, and they became tangled and fell in a painful scrabble of knees and elbows on the wet concrete. As the impact pain shot up his leg, the echo of the screaming stopped dead, and the roar of the city came back, and he could hear.

“… said you were an idiot—OUCH!” yelped Edie, as she hit the wet concrete. “Why?” George felt the slime on the ground beneath him and realized that it must be—had to be—his blood. You don’t get your hand shredded without a lot of blood, he thought. He’d played enough computer games to know that.

Nausea rose in his stomach as he looked at his good hand.

It wasn’t blood. It was just city slime, gray and brown street dirt slicked with rain. He disentangled his hurt arm from behind Edie, and even as he did so, he knew it was a false hope—this absence of gore, because, of course the dragon’s claw had been white-hot, so it would have sliced up his hand and sealed the wound at the same time.

He scrabbled back against the wall and made himself look at the throbbing pain at the end of his arm.

The shock hit him and he started to shake. He clenched his fists to try and stop the tremors. Fists, because he had fists—as in, two good ones.

His hand was still there.

He opened and closed it again, in disbelief.

The more he moved it, the more it hurt. But he couldn’t help moving it, because he could; because, against all the odds, it was still there on the end of his arm, and there was no blood and no gore; and for a brief glorious moment he didn’t care about what the future held, because whatever it was, he, George, would also be able to hold it with two hands. He couldn’t stop himself laughing, and that began to hurt, too.

“What’s so funny? We’ve got to move.”

Edie got to her feet on the other side of the alley and tried to brush the slime off her knees.

He held up his hands, like they were the punch line of the funniest joke in the world.

And then he stopped laughing.

Edie stared at his hand and moved across the alley as if drawn against her will by what she was seeing. And he looked closer too, and saw what he’d missed. He had been so happy to have both hands work that he’d just been clenching them and staring into his palms, and hadn’t looked closely at the back of the one that the dragon had slashed.

There was a red and purple mark, a pulsing scar-branded into his skin, cut and seared closed in the same zigzag fiery slashes, and it looked like this: image

Edie shook her head.

“That’s not good.”

He put his hand away in his pocket. Hiding it seemed the right thing to do. It found the wodge of plasticene and kneaded it between finger and thumb.

“The dragon slashed me.”

Her face showed no emotion. It was as blank as if people told her that dragons slashed them every day of the week. As soon as he’d said the words, George started laughing again. He repeated his words, just to see how deranged they sounded.

“The dragon slashed me!”

She watched him get up, wipe the tears from his eyes, and stumble off down the alley toward the river.

“Where are you going?”

He stopped at the pavement edge, looking at a red and blue Underground sign that shone out against the dark glitter of the Thames beyond the traffic on the Embankment.

“Home.”

She stood in front of him.

“You can’t.”

“Watch me.”

“We can’t go home. Not from all this.” I can.

He looked for a break in the traffic.

“We can’t just pretend this isn’t happening, you have to get to the Black Friar—” “You go to the Black Friar. I’m going home.”

Edie actually stamped her feet in frustration. He hadn’t thought people really did that, but she did. She did it again. She looked as if she were going to explode.

“Listen, you idiot, we—”

“Hey, you’re the one who said there’s no ‘we’! I’m agreeing, you’re right, okay? I’m just not doing this anymore… .” He waved at a taxi that was pulling away from the Temple tube station across the street. The driver saw him, waved, indicated for a U-turn and waited for a gap in the traffic. Something flapped between George and the streetlight, and he flinched, but when he looked up he saw it was just a big black bird, not a dragon or anything made of stone or metal, so he relaxed.

Edie looked desperate. He felt guilty, but he didn’t know why, or if he did, he didn’t want to know. He felt his brain was about to melt anyway, and the pain in his hand was rising again.

“I’m just stopping this. I’m just going home. And I’m just going to crash out, and then I’m just going to wake up tomorrow and this will—this will just be … over.” “What about me?”

“I don’t know. You should go home, too. Everyone should go home and this should stop.” It won’t.

“You don’t know that.”

Edie jutted her jaw. The streetlight glistened in her eyes. At her feet the black bird swooped in and tugged the guts out of a discarded burger in a bright wrapper. She took a deep breath.

“I do. It never stops.”

“You don’t know that. You can’t know that. You’re just—just a kid.” The taxi found its gap and U-turned to park next to them. She put a hand on his shoulder.

“So are you. You can’t go home, George. I’m sorry, but you really can’t. The Gunner said—” The bird hopped with them as George pushed past her to the driver’s window. It left the burger uneaten. George shook off her hand and leaned into the taxi.

“Thirty-seven St. George’s Square, please.”

“All right, son, hop in.”

Edie reached for him, but the black bird chose this moment to launch itself into the air between them in a flurry of black feathers, and Edie stepped back for an instant, and in that instant George slipped into the taxi. She reached an imploring hand across the gulf of air between them.

“Look. Don’t do this—it’s dangerous—” I m sorry.

He closed the door. The window was open. So was Edie’s mouth. She couldn’t believe this was happening. He tried to find something to say that would make what he was doing feel better.

“Good luck.”

“Good luck?”

She stood there as if she’d been hit. George looked at her and tried to say something better, but the taxi moved off, and he didn’t have the words, so he just shrugged and held up his hand in half a wave, and their eyes stayed locked on each other until the taxi turned onto the Embankment and George couldn’t see her anymore.

He took a deep breath. Then another. Then he curled himself around the pain in his hand, the hand still thrust deep in his coat pocket, and sank down in the corner of the seat with his eyes closed.

Of course, if he’d looked back he’d have seen the bird flapping lazily along behind the taxi until the big dark mass of Waterloo Bridge swept up and over them, and the bird wheeled north, up and over the brightly lit classical pillars of the long building on the side of the bridge, in the general direction of St. Pancras station.

Edie wiped her eyes. She felt in her pocket. The glass was still there. It just reflected the lights of the city. It had no inner warning flame now. She reached beyond the glass, to the scrabble of coins that jingled like shrapnel at the bottom of her pocket. She counted the heavier coins into one hand, dropped the others into her pocket, and took off her shoe. There was a banknote inside. She slid it out carefully. Her hand closed around the paper and the coins as she wriggled her foot back into the shoe and set off toward Temple station.