فصل بیست و پنجم

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

George in Charge

A metal ladder was fixed to the embankment wall, leading up the greasy slabs of stone toward the orange fluorescent lights above. George climbed as far as he could, then came to a sheet of hinged metal that had been padlocked in place on the top six feet of the ladder, to stop people climbing down into the river. He hunched his feet up closer to his body, and used the slope of the metal and his two arms to brace himself as he climbed up the last bit of ladder, his feet held in place by friction and willpower.

He took a deep breath and stuck his head over the parapet. His arms were burning with the strain of holding his weight, but he wasn’t going to climb onto dry land until he saw if they’d come far enough to be safe. He peered to his left and, with relief, saw no sign of the dragon. They were a long way past it. He checked right and saw nothing more threatening than the river walkway disappearing under the bridge almost directly above him.

He turned and gave Edie the thumbs-up. She wasn’t watching him. She was still looking back along the river.

“Hey!”

She looked up, her eyes taking their time to return from a long way off. He gave her another thumbs-up.

“It’s safe. We’re in the City. No dragons.”

He clambered over the wall and onto the river walk. Below him, she began climbing.

“No dragons doesn’t mean we’re safe.”

Her gravelly voice sounded even rawer than usual. He wondered if it was the cold. And now that he thought about it, he noticed what he had been ignoring, that he was soaked and muddy and very very cold indeed. Now that he was on dryish land, his body let him feel the full force of the exposure they’d just put themselves through. The body works on autopilot when you’re running scared, and pumps adrenaline into your system to help you fight or—as in George and Edie’s case—flee. Sadly, there’s only so much adrenaline in the system; and it runs out. George felt like his was running out through the soles of his feet and making him notice every detail of how uncomfortable he was, all at once. Even the stone under his feet felt like a jagged sheet of ice.

But one thing was good. One thing had changed. Maybe it was the jolt that Edie had given him telling him that the Gunner was gone, or maybe it was pulling her out of the water when she’d disappeared and he’d thought he was alone again: but since he’d decided to take the lead, he actually felt less out of control. He didn’t expect Edie would accept he was leading anything, but for the moment he was, and it felt good. He was less panicked because he had someone else to think about rather than just worrying about himself. It was strange.

He pulled his shoes out of his pockets and tried to put his feet into them. Wet feet resisted the leather lining, and his feet seemed to have grown two sizes anyway, so he gave up—just as Edie slid over the wall and joined him and dripped onto the pavement. They both shivered uncontrollably.

Edie looked terrible, as if the wet and the mud had dampened her normal fire. Her shaking was like a flame guttering out. Her lips were tight and tinged in blue.

George knew that she was colder than he was, and he knew he still had to stay in charge.

“Come on. Let’s run.”

Her eyes came up, their normal light frosted over with sadness and cold. For a change she didn’t say anything, didn’t argue or jab or complain. He jerked his thumb toward the bridge.

“Is that Blackfriars Bridge?”

She nodded.

“Then let’s run up there and find this Black Friar.”

“I don’t want to run.”

She hunched down on her heels, trying to curl her body around the last flickering lick of heat in her core. Her hand found the sea-glass, and she checked it. It was dull and safe and wet from the river. Seeing it wet reminded her of the seaside, the beach where she had first found the glass and pocketed it. She realized even that first moment had been surreptitious: she had seen it at her feet in the wet pebbles, and had picked it up without thinking much, but once it was in her hand she had realized that she felt something about it, and hadn’t wanted him to see it or touch it or take it away from her.

He hadn’t noticed her crouch and scoop it up, because he’d been awkward and looking out to sea and trying to light a roll-up at the same time. He’d been awkward because he’d taken her onto the beach to tell her that her mother was not coming back, and that it was just the two of them for now, “until things sorted out.” On the train that had brought Edie into London, she had sat next to two happy families returning from a day at the sea, and one of the posh mothers told the other that the thing she always loved about the seaside was that you never saw unhappy children at the beach. And the other mum had laughed and said no, not until it was time to go home. And Edie had wanted to scream. All the worst things that had happened to her had happened at the beach or—if they hadn’t—the news of them was first given to her on a beach, in front of an uncaring bloody sea whose waves rolled in endlessly, their greeny-brown surfaces flaked and scalloped by the wind, hard and relentless as liquid flint.

It was one of the reasons that she’d got on a train to London when she had had to run away. All the other trains went to places that she knew were by the sea. She hadn’t come to London because of the bright lights, or because it was the capital.

She’d come because it was inland.

George shook her shoulder, snapping her out of her reverie.

“Edie. Come on. We have to keep moving.”

“Just give me a minute,” she shivered back, grumpy with cold. “Frozen.”

He jogged on the spot. His dad had taken him walking and camping one snowy Christmas way up north. He’d told him how to keep moving to keep warm, how to check for frostnip, how to cuddle together in the tent to keep warm at night, and he’d felt in the grip of a real adventure then, sleeping in a tent in the snow with no noise except the wind buffeting the side wall and his dad’s snoring in his ear. It had felt like an adventure, but it had also seemed safe. Remembering the long-gone warmth from the bearlike curl of his sleeping father made his eyes prickle, made him notice how very cold and alone and not safe he felt right now. He snapped at Edie.

“Edie. I’m serious. You need to move. We’re going to get pneumonia or something.” She just crouched further in on herself. He had to make her move, and looking at her hand, he saw how to do it.

“Edie. You can stay here. But if you want this back, you better run.”

And he snatched the sea-glass from her and ran off.

Her hand closed on air, and her head snapped up and she was on her feet despite herself, already running before she was aware she’d decided to move.

“Wait!”

George looked back to check she was following and then just ran on. The river walk continued under the span of the bridge. The stubby pillars that decorated the piers of the bridge were floodlit, and he was so starved of warmth that he felt the heat of the lights on the side of his face as he ran under the red-painted metal arch.

From Edie’s point of view it looked like he was running into the mouth of something.

“George!”

He already felt fractionally better because he was running and warming up. It was good that she was following him. He lifted the sea-glass over his head to lure her onward.

“Come on! Catch up!”

She watched him run into the dimly lit gullet under the metal ribs of the bridge. And first she thought it was a reflection, and then as it grew she realized with horror what she was seeing: the sea-glass was beginning to glow, then blaze. Its light strobed off the vertical iron bars that ran along the landward side of the river walk, sending long lazy stripes of shadow across the strange caged space beyond.

But it wasn’t that that made her shout a warning.

Not only that.

Ahead of George, two helmeted figures were approaching at speed, although their legs didn’t move at all. They appeared to be statues eerily gliding over the ground toward him, and in their hands were weapons—spears maybe, or scythes.

One held his weapon ankle-low, the other carried it poised on his shoulder casually, but ready to strike. Their silhouettes were bulky with armor, and light reflected off the greaves on their lower legs.

Edie shouted George’s name just as the lead figure swooped into motion, his legs pushing from side to side in a slow powerful gliding movement, adding to his momentum as he bore down on the running boy.

Her warning shout scarcely made it to George’s ear before the leading figure put his weapon out and ran it along the iron bars, making a harsh ratchetting noise of wood against metal as he skated up to George.

Only, he wasn’t a monster or a taint or a statue, or even interested in anything other than making a noise with his hockey stick to amuse his friend, who took the stick off his shoulder and powered after him on his own Rollerblades, making the same noise on the cage bars as he passed George.

As they caromed out from under the bridge, laughing and skating, Edie saw them for what they were, street hockey players heading home on their Rollerblades.

She exhaled with momentary relief, and then doubled her speed to catch up with George.

“Hey!”

He waved the glass, still without looking at it, and jinked left into the mouth of a tunnel. The glass still blazed its unseen warning.

“No! NOT UNDERGROUND!”

He didn’t hear her.

Ahead of him, the tunnel angled beneath the old riverbank and the roundabout at the end of the bridge.

As he ran into it, he felt the heat rise, and he was glad of the way it seemed to have trapped the day’s warmth.