The City's Son Read Online Free PDF Page B

the strangeness of it. She said it out loud: ‘You aren’t real—’
    Are you ghosts? she wondered, with a shudder. Were you trapped here?
    But they didn’t seem like ghosts to her. They were more like memories – memories of passengers, a few seconds of their lives, snatched out of time and imprinted within the train, repeating over and over like a scratched CD.
    Beth rolled her gaze around the train carriage with its faded fabric seats and peeling panels. She remembered the questioning sound it had made. This was the inner architecture of a living thing. Was she inside its mind? Are they your memories? Is it you, remembering them?
    Brakes squealed and hydraulics hissed. The carriage began to sway. Beth felt her stomach plunge. The train was moving.
    She ran to the door and hammered the button, but nothing happened. Panic clawed at her and she pressed her face to the window. Through the cracked glass she could see the crosshatched bricks of the tunnel whipping past, faster and faster. She was locked in – and they were speeding up. She reeled away from the door and threw herself at the entrance to the driver’s cab: maybe she could stop it from there? Blue sparks flickered on the teeth of the ghostly passengers, who swayed with the train, unflinching.
    The door to the cab was locked, and though Beth wrenched frantically on the handle, it wouldn’t budge.
    ‘Christ on a bike!’ she yelled, drawing her fist back and slamming it against the door in frustration—
    —and it went straight through the door.
    Beth shivered and pulled her arm back. This time she pushed it forward more slowly; it passed through the metal as if it were vapour.
    The door, like the bubble-blowing girl, was as insubstantial as a thought.
    Beth hesitated, then pushed herself through.
    The train exploded from the tunnel.
    Beth stared wide-eyed around the cab. There was no driver. Air pummelled her face as though the front of the train wasn’t there. She felt her fear level out, and as she swallowed down her panic, something else, a hot, raw excitement, rose in its place. She reached out and petted the thing’s controls. The engine purred to her. Blue electricity danced around her hand but it didn’t touch her.
    The driver’s window seemed to waver. Beth took a deep breath. She leaned forward and the window-pane parted around her like cold mist. She gripped the sides of the control panel and hung out over the train’s insubstantial prow like a figurehead. Regiments of sleepers shot by under her. She tasted the diesel on the wind. She found herself laughing hysterically, and the wind snatched the sound. She uttered a wordless shout of elation and the train’s whistle sounded joyously in response.
    A bulky mass squatted low in the distance as they surged onto the vast, rail-matted viaduct leading to Waterloo Station. On each side, houses and billboards and glimmering towers boiled together into a continuous river of darkness and streaks of yellow light. Railway signals burnt red through the autumn mist, suspended from a bridge as black and dark as hangman’s scaffold.
    Beth wasn’t just riding the train, she was riding the entire city. The rush of it filled her and she crowed – but the yell of affirmation died in her throat: another pair of lights was coming towards them.
    There was another train.
    Beth stared. Each second brought the lights closer, and each second made her more and more certain. Excitement turned to horror. She gaped in disbelief, but it was true …
    The other train was on their tracks.
    ‘Stop!’ she yelled to the creature that carried her. ‘Stop, we’re going to hit it!’ But the wind snatched her voice away and her train did not slow, even as the other engine, theirlethal mirror-image, came on inexorably towards them. She could make out its shape now: a massive freight train, striped yellow and black like a wasp and armoured in heavy steel. But it wasn’t a natural train either: electricity whirled around it in