فصل پنجاه

CHAPTER FIFTY

London Labyrinth

The Gunner led George out of the stairwell, leaving the faint smell of urine-soaked concrete behind them as they skidded out onto a raised walkway.

George slipped. The ground beneath his feet was slick with rain, a thickening downpour that was just beginning. Running in under the storm clouds felt like running toward something it was infinitely more normal to run away from. As fast as you could.

The Gunner caught him and pulled him to his feet. He stopped and looked hard at George’s hand. At the scar left by the dragon. He grunted.

“What?” asked George.

“Makers mark. The glint—Edie—told me, just before the Raven got hold of you. That mark means you got a choice, and I’d say you’ve made it.” “What kind of choice? I haven’t chosen anything about this!” George protested.

“Yeah, you have. You’ve chosen a lot, son. You’re here. You could be at the Stone, putting your world to rights. But you’re here.” He nodded as if he approved of something George didn’t understand.

“Standing taller, you are; taller and straighter than when I first saw you. You ain’t apologizing for yourself. You’re fighting.” “I’m just trying to stay alive.”

“No. If you was doing that, you’d be at the Stone, making your amends, not thinking about anyone else. Not with me, trying to help her.” He looked George up and down.

“You come a long way, mate, and not just miles. And you know why you’re fighting and not just sniveling?” “Not because of this mark,” said George.

“You’re fighting because you got something to fight for. The mark is what got you in trouble, but it’s also what might help you out of it. The mark says you might be a maker.” “I’m not a maker! I don’t make anything.”

But his hand was, he noticed, back in his pocket, kneading away at the plasticene blob.

“You may not know what you are, but I’ll tell you what, the taints know it, and after I seen you with that dragon at Temple Bar, I think I know it. It’s in your blood and it’s in your bone. You done well, son. You looked to be made of pretty dodgy stuff when I first seen you. Just goes to show. It’s like Jagger used to say in his studio—it’s not just the clay, it’s what you make of it.” George thought of his dad, quietly sucking at the cigarette parked in the side of his face, hands working at the clay in between them. Before he could think further, the Gunner ran on.

“We can talk later. We got our work cut out.”

George ran after him. He realized they were in a new self-contained complex within the City. The raised walkways that they were sprinting along gave it a futuristic feel, especially if your vision of the future involved grime and blank windows staring at you as you passed.

The Gunner pulled ahead, and George followed him along a path that ran parallel with the busy street below. He could see speeding cars and taxis racing past through the glass wall on his right. George had to swerve to avoid an old man with a cane, and bounced off a dustbin that looked like it was made of rubber but felt like it was made of rocks.

He ignored the pain and kept going.

Ahead of them, the four lane street disappeared under a vast arch in a big brick and stone building, as if it were being swallowed by a whale. The top of the arch was glassed in, and he saw people blankly staring out from their tables in a restaurant, chewing under the blue neon “Pizza” sign.

They ran into a covered atrium alongside the arch, and suddenly there were shiny floor surfaces and noise and color and bright artificial light. Diagonal steel pipes pierced the glass wall on his left, buttressing the polished pink granite to his right. A sign reading “Bastion Highwalk” slid past. They ran around a statue of two frozen tango dancers out in the open air. George wished he felt as light-footed as they looked. He felt like he was dragging lead in his shoes.

He was tired, and as he and the Gunner turned and twisted, he began to feel deeply out of control, with no idea where they were going. He was getting lost in the maze.

He had an impression of open spaces to their left, a flash of green, an unlikely white church by some water, and then they were out of the fresh air again and running in a low-ceilinged space. The walkway seemed to hug the roof as it right-angled through a forest of thick concrete columns.

In this long vaultlike space he felt underground again, although his sense told him they were still high above the ground-level of the city. He found it harder and harder to breathe.

“Come on, son. Dig in,” said the Gunner.

They ran toward the square of light at the end of the dim passageway.

When they clattered out into the rain, they were on the edge of a huge rectangular space, entirely closed in by balconied flats raked back like pictures of Aztec pyramids that he had seen at school. The lost-city feel was added to by the vegetation sprouting from every balcony, startlingly green against the gray concrete and the reddy-brown bricks. On the floor of this elongated piazza was an impressive stretch of water, where fountains were fighting a losing battle with the wild downpour that was eclipsing their more ordered sprinkling.

They splashed through a sheet of water on the brick beneath their feet, then along another covered walkway.

George gave up trying to keep his bearings. He just concentrated on not losing the Gunner. He stopped noticing the things and places he was running past as anything other than a blur. Except, at one point, he looked right, and found himself glimpsing something like a giants greenhouse, with tall lush tropical vegetation and groups of schoolchildren standing beneath it, looking out at the rain.

He couldn’t believe he’d been as uninvolved and bored as they looked on his own school trip only a day ago.

He felt the rain on his hot face and thought about how he’d stood out on the steps of the Natural History Museum and been so angry and so sure that being a loner was the safest way to protect himself.

Right now he’d have given anything to be part of that mindless group behind the fuggy windows—not happy, maybe, but also not scared; not exhausted, not where he was now. He couldn’t believe that all he’d been through had been going on for nearly twenty-four hours.

And then he remembered that the clock was ticking down, and that unless he got to the London Stone soon, he was going to be living—perhaps not for very long—something that the Black Friar had called the Hard Way.

Ahead of the Gunner a tall new office block swept into the sky, its bottom floors flaring out like a ski jump. Lit from within, against the dark clouds and driving rain, it somehow lifted the spirits. Maybe because it was glass and light, and not wet concrete.

George felt a bit better.

The Gunner turned a corner.

And then the Minotaur hit him.