The Minority Council (54 page)

“I pulled. I summoned light, a tiny twisted tangle of orange-pink that I dragged from the heat in my body and the pain in my head and the stain on the sky, a glimmer that drifted along at feet-level to mark the path, the weakest will o’ the wisp as ever got made.

“After a long, long while, the trees thinned out. The path sloped down onto an open grassy place.

“But it was proper grass, proper contained grass, inside a proper fence, kept under control by stomping feet and
pissing dogs, kids playing football and all that shit, and beyond the grass…

“… God, I nearly laughed!

“Beyond all those fucking miles of grass, the city. South London. I never thought I’d be so fucking pleased to see it. It stretched out like a pinky-sodium star-map in front of us, neat little streets with neat little houses where everyone knows their neighbours and the kids can always find a quiet place to smoke after school, not much in the way of bloody landmarks except the odd red-topped mast and mobile phone tower, and the odd bit of rising dark in places like Norwood and that, but still, all around, my city.

“It all came back then, like light that had been hiding just behind a wall, just out of reach; it went straight in through my pupils so hard and hot I thought I was gonna burn; but I felt it inside me again, proper city magic, big and wide as that ten-million-light horizon, deep as night and strong as street stone, and the light at my feet grew brighter and stronger and I almost started to turn to Nabeela, to hug her or something, before I remembered just how fucking stupid that would be. But I thought I could hear the metal moving on the top of her head and, to me, it sounded like excitement.

“ ‘We’re gonna make it,’ I breathed. ‘We are gonna bloody make it.’

“ ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I think…’

“And that was when Templeman shot her.

“I felt it, as well as heard it.

“Her blood was on the back of my neck.

“It was on my arms.

“She must have been standing close.

“You know how gunshots are supposed to be really loud?

“I guess it was, but I wasn’t listening for it, and the sound just sorta spread out big across that big bit of grass, so I suppose my brain didn’t connect at first. But my body did, because I turned and she was falling, already falling, and as she fell her eyes closed and all the hair on her head went sorta limp, wriggling down and dying around her, a few cables twitching but everything else soggy. Living, she’d been awesome; dead, and the freakiness of that stuff on her head was suddenly horrifying, blood curling round the places where metal met skin.

“He came out of the darkness behind her, gun in hand. It was a little thing, and he held it out to one side like a proper gangster. His eyes were flecked with yellow, only really visible when he turned his head too fast, like the flash of a reflective jacket caught at a funny angle, and he was breathing fast. He didn’t speak, didn’t have nothing to say, just turned the gun right towards me and I screamed.

“Not girl-scream.

“Not standing-on-a-table-oh-shit-look-a-mouse scream.

“I screamed a city. I turned my face towards him and I screamed from that place inside where all the light and the dark and the shadows went; I screamed the echo of a gunshot in the night and the look in Nabeela’s closing eye, the taste of concrete and fear, the smell of streetlight and shadows, the touch of night and the cold of day; I screamed the rolling drops of blood running down the back of my neck, the straight pattern of the streets pressed against my back, the pain in my legs and the ice in my
fingers, the shriek of the culicidae and chitter of slate legs on brick, the memory of a bridge on the river and the sound of falling paper; I screamed everything, so long and so loud that the lights began to go out in the streets beneath me and the red beacons on the spires behind grew to a point and burst into black. I screamed until the streetlight spun on the surface of the clouds and I kept on screaming because my friend was at my feet,

“And Templeman staggered back like a seagull against the wind, putting his hands to his head, chin turning upwards in pain, and I kept screaming until the blood rolled from his nose and from his ears and the gun turned red hot in his hands and he dropped it and the tears rolled from his eyes and the tears were amber-yellow, tree-gum goo and his body bent like I’d hit it in the middle and then bent again like I’d punched it in the stomach and then bent a third time and I had fingers in his lungs and I was squeezing, squeezing the breath out of him and making it mine, digging in deep, trying to pop him from the inside out, stepping over the body of my friend to move that little bit closer so I could see the eyes bulge in his skull and…

“(Give me back my hat!)

“… and I guess something in the way he looked reminded me of… I dunno what. His tongue was lolling out of his mouth and his arms were twitching at odd angles, and I remembered…

“Give me back my hat!

“… remembered the way it had been that night on London Bridge, when everything had hurt so much and everything had burnt and I hadn’t meant to, but I’d made something bad, and this was the same, this was it, déjà vu, that pain again but so much deeper and so much more,
and I knew I could scream forever and this time, nothing would be able to shut me up except me.

“And it was the hardest thing I’d done.

“Harder than not watching my back when scared of a knife.

“Harder than running through the darkness with a medusa at my side.

“Harder than looking at a guy with a gun and knowing he wanted to make me die.

“That was nothing.

“Stopping—that took everything I had.

“But I did.

“I stopped.

“And it was like I had nothing left; I just fell forward onto my hands and knees, and my foot fell on Nabeela’s arm as I slipped down, but she wasn’t complaining, her head turned to one side, blood and thicker lumps of stuff on her face. And, fuck me, but Templeman was still on his feet, curling round, his hands over his ears like the echo of the sound was still going through his brain, but he looked at me and there was something in the way he opened his mouth, a tightening in the air about him, and I knew, whatever it was, it wasn’t over.

“Then he shouted right back at me.

“It wasn’t a shout like I had done, it was something that came from inside him, and him alone, a force in the pit of his belly, and as he opened his mouth I saw something move behind his teeth, staining them yellow, and I threw up a wall between him and me on instinct, not knowing I had the strength to do it, and this stuff came from out of his mouth, this cloud of yellow dust, it burst out of him like a sandstorm and knocked back against my shield
hard enough to make me gasp, the blood drum in my head, and there was stuff moving in the dust. There was water in my eyes I was like working that hard to keep my shield up, keep something between me and it, but I saw still, as the yellow stuff surrounded me, I saw the way it moved and it wasn’t moving like a normal thing: it swirled and it danced and it spun, and sometimes, if you were feeling imaginative, you could say that faces screamed out of that cloud before they melted again into nothing.

“And it kept on coming, sound lost now, world lost now behind the dust.

“But Nabeela’s blood was still on my face and I’d be damned if I got killed by some fucking psychopath in fucking Croydon. So I stood up. My knees shook so bad I couldn’t balance on my left at all and had to try again with my right, hardly able to keep more than an inch of magic between the end of my nose and that roaring yellow stuff, hands still behind my back. But I got up and, for my next trick, I took a step, and then another, and then another, moving towards Templeman, and with each step I took, it got harder, and harder, until my head was bent forward double and the cloud of dust was sparking like welding iron off my shield.

“He was just a shadow in the storm, a fuzzy dark shape, but I pushed and pushed again until I couldn’t see for the fire blasting off my shield as to where it met his spell, but I knew, I knew he was almost there, right in front of me, near enough that I could almost touch, and I took one last step and closed my eyes tight and took the warmth from out my skin and out my bones and I took the beating of my own heart and listened for it, for that de-dum, that moment between the beat and when it came
again; I took the strength inside me and the rhythm of my blood and I threw it at him with everything I had.

“Something hot and bright and white burst across my skin, across the skin I wore just outside my skin, slammed into the dust-storm and broke outwards, with that sound exploding flour makes, a
whoomph
not a boom, a
vroom
not a bang, a sound that you can’t hear because it’s so high and so low and so everywhere all at once that the only part of you capable of feeling it is that squishy bit in your belly, and the hollow bit in your bones where it echoes up and down your body, and I was thrown right back, landing so hard I thought I had to have broken something, and he went flying back too, into the trees, landing with a crack against one of the branches.

“For a while we both just lay there.

“My head was spinning; all I could see were these dancing yellow stars.

“I think he tried to get up and then cried out in pain.

“The fucker broke something.

“Good.

“Hope it was one of those fucking breaks where the fucking bone sticks out of your arm, so you can like see all the little cracked ends and the veins and shit.

“Somewhere a long way off, a siren was wailing.

“I rolled over and I’d been lucky, I’d landed on grass made soft by rain, but I still fucking hurt everywhere and knew in my belly that that was it, game over, nothing left that wasn’t the end of the world, that wasn’t going to be more than I had to give. I’d taken the strength from a beat of my heart, and now the blood rushed back to the corners of my body like it was making up for lost time, and everything hurt.

“Blue light somewhere behind the trees.

“Someone had called the cops.

“Someone who knew more about what guns sounded like than me.

“I heard him try to get to his feet and that made me try to get to mine.

“I fell on my first go, landed right next to Nabeela, saw a place in the back of her head where the bullet went in, and wanted to puke. I crawled away on my belly and Templeman was trying to get up, shaking with pain. I didn’t have much left in me, but I saw the gun, still warm from where he’d dropped it. I crawled towards it, rolled onto my back, felt in the grass for the butt of it, found it, held it tight. Its heat burnt, but a good burning. I sat up on the grass, turned my body to the side so I had some kinda shot at him, and pulled the trigger.

“I must have missed by miles, I couldn’t fucking aim with the thing, but he didn’t know that. I saw him stagger up, and I fired again and he wasn’t waiting twice; he crawled away and I fired, and just kept on firing until the gun was empty and he was a fleeing shadow in the dark. Then I dropped the gun. He wasn’t coming back. Coppers were coming and we were both fucked.

“I sat there.

“I should have said something smart.

“I should have cried or something.

“I should have…

“… something.

“I guess when you’re a kid, you learn from your parents that you’re supposed to smile at funny things. And then you learn that you’re supposed to cry when you see someone bigger than you cry, and you learn that you’re
supposed to shout when you’re angry, because that’s what your stupid primary school teacher did that day you dropped the paint pot on her new trousers.

“I hadn’t learnt what you do when your friend is dead at your side.

“I hadn’t got lessons in how to look when there’s blood on your face.

“So I just sat.

“She’d understand.

“After a while, the blue lights stopped moving.

“I heard people among the trees.

“I thought about sitting there longer.

“Or, I guess, that part that thinks with words thought about sitting longer. The part that thinks with words explained it all, said sorry, sorry, sorry to Nabeela, and didn’t move. But the part that doesn’t need a voice to speak said, shift your arse, woman, there’s a dead medusa by your side and you are still totally screwed if you sit around, and it was right, so I moved, thinking still, sorry, sorry, sorry.

“I headed down the hill, towards the city.

“Sick and tired.

“I walked to that place where green belt begins to stop and city begins to start.

“Once-country lanes, big houses with big gardens on cul-de-sac roads, with alleys round the side that lead into football pitches. Retirement houses, new estates in yellow brick where Ideal People lead Ideal Lives.

“There was a church with a tower, and the tower had a clock put up there by the kind donation of Mr and Mrs Woods, and it said it was nearly six a.m. Even Croydon
would start to wake up soon, from the weird dog-walkers who don’t mind the cold to the kids with a long school run.

“I got rid of the handcuffs, finally, when I found the tram track. London isn’t big on trams, but I kinda liked this route just because of that, because it was strange, and different, and new. There was enough electricity above the track for me to drag it in, enough that I managed to put some into my fingers and burn the chains between the cuffs. The things were still locked around my wrists, but at least I could move my hands now, and I figured that, in this town, handcuffs were probably just another fashion statement.