Savage City Read Online Free PDF Page B

sorry for.’
    Makaria’s voice, falling in from somewhere as remote as snow-flakes, but it wasn’t her he was talking to. He said, surprised at hearing himself again, ‘I tried.’ He could feel the hectic motion of the people crowding over him, their hands on him, and yet it was as if they were beating against an impenetrable surface to reach him, as if he’d slipped through the marble floor and they hadn’t realised it.
    The pale oval of sky darkened, pulsed white, spread. An intense sweetness of relief overwhelmed him as even the pain finally shivered into nothing. He couldn’t breathe, and he was aware of his body straining desperately for the unreachable air, but oh, mercifully, the struggle barely touched him, did not hold him, although he was glad when it stopped. He couldn’t feel anyone near him any longer; no one else was there.
    The world held, transparent as ice for another instant, before it thawed and broke – so easily, with such simplicity, that if any words had remained he would have called it beautiful.
    No one noticed Una on the medics’ ladder until she had almost reached the top, scaling it in one breathless rush. Then the vigiles closed ranks at the parapet of the box, shouting, ‘Get down, get down!’ Two of them below rushed for her, one aiming a gun – and Una couldn’t take that in, it was just a little thing in the man’s hand. She clung onto the ladder, unable to explain herself, only stammering, ‘Please, please—’
    Then Makaria appeared, filthy and exhausted, at the wall of the box. She raised a hand and ordered, ‘Let her through.’
    Una didn’t know how she came to be on her hands and knees, bending over Marcus as if she’d been dropped there. Between theladder and here had been nothing except a kind of dazzled afterimage of Marcus on the far side of the ruined box, dead on the ground – but she hadn’t seen that, she didn’t remember it.
    She said his name again, and the claw-sharp catch of expectation was the same each time she repeated it; she couldn’t stop. She ran a hand up over his face, not gently, as if there were something there that could be wiped away. The sweep of her palm tipped his head back a little, and though she knew she’d caused the movement, it was stupidly arresting to her: it looked like a drowsy stirring out of sleep, as if his eyes were about to blink open. She took his face in both hands, shook it.
Absurd
. She did it again.
    No one was doing anything; even the men who had been cutting away the terrible length of steel that lay on Marcus’ legs were just standing there looking at her. Una turned on them, shaken by how furious she was. ‘Why have you stopped?’ She heard her voice as it would sound to another person, loud and raw and irrational; she tried to make it more controlled, but the mad voice babbled, ‘Please don’t stop, please do something, oh God—’
    They didn’t move. Someone said something.
    She made a sound that horrified her, because she had no warning it was coming, and because the meaning of it was unmistakable. Her hands moved over Marcus’ throat, chest, searching for something to put right. ‘Marcus, come on, you can’t— Marcus . . .’
    Then time crumpled in on itself again and now she was lying half-across him, her face buried into his neck. But this wasn’t an embrace, that wasn’t the point: if there was any life left to be detected, however faint, she must be close enough to find it. But she couldn’t feel anything except his chilly blood soaking her clothes and his broken ribs shifting beneath her; the weight of her body would have caused him agony, if—
    Sulien raced up the steps from the passage into the wet daylight and Una was lying among the wreckage covered in blood. So different – and so much worse than anything he’d expected – that cold crashed over him before the queasy slide from horror to relief to horror again as he understood.
    And Una jolted upright, her face lit with dreadful