The Cutting Crew Read Online Free PDF

protecting don't care about you. In fact, a good proportion of them fucking hate you. Sometimes we earn that, sometimes we don't.
    As a result, you begin to see people differently. It happened to me, and after a while I began looking sideways at the city itself.
    Sean felt the same, and that's partly what brought us together and cemented our friendship.
    There were nights when he'd drive me out of the city and up into the hills nearby. We'd park and both look out over the buildings and the lights and the people below us, and it would seem to me that in some awful way the city was alive: that there was a dark heart flexing and thumping underneath the skin of concrete and soil. Everybody thinks that way sometimes, I guess, but Sean thought it most of the time, and his belief was infectious. He'd tell me his theories, and the feeling would bloom inside me. The more we talked and worked, the more I could sense the city's heartbeat.
    It made me feel powerless and awful and weak.
    I was supposed to be in control of this city - this enormous creature that was bad from top to bottom - and it wanted none of it. Maybe it would let us get away with the little stuff, but the evil was too ingrained: any concerted attempt to dig it out would bring the buildings crashing down. That's what Sean said: it was like the human body if you removed all the water - all you'd be left with is a pile of sand.
    That was how he saw the city, and after a while that's how I began to see it too. Partly it was because of the way things worked: everything was so orchestrated and coordinated that it was often difficult not to see a design under it all. But sometimes you only had to walk down the streets to start imagining them as veins and arteries, and on those occasions I often wondered if I could kneel down, press my hand to the pavement and feel the slow thud of the city's pulse.
    Stupid, maybe, but that was how I started to see things.
    Alison Sheldon's murder offered a kind of proof of it.
    We didn't know her name then, of course. We didn't know who she was, only what she was.
    Some kids found her, deep inside an old, abandoned building in Bull. Bull is a strange, eerie district in the top eastern corner of the city, expanding out far beyond the walls. To the far north-east, towards the hills, you have the power stations and towers, with smoke gusting out day and night. At the tops, you can see it unfolding ever so slowly, churning up and merging into the still grey of the sky. Closer to the city, the district is quiet, but there are always echoes and clangs in the distance. It's the industrial heart of the city, and probably one of the oldest parts, historically. Inside the city walls, the houses are all old mill-workers' back-to-backs.
    They're where the navvies lived; where wool was spun; where the air was filled with smoke and soot and cholera. These buildings are mostly abandoned, dirty and dangerous, and because the district borders Wasp to the south, a lot of things go missing in them, including people.
    Like I said, some kids found her. Bodies generally rest unattended in Bull for quite some time before they're stumbled on.
    These kids were exploring and got unlucky. It was pretty dark inside, and she was just a shape to them: a shape and a smell. They spilled out of the building and called us - probably the first time in their lives, and probably the last. Sean and I took the call.
    It was an old house. With a lot of the back-to-backs round there, it wasn't always clear where one place stopped and another one started. The walls were often thin; some of them would be missing entirely. Boards were nailed across properties, dividing homes into smaller sections, many of which had been knocked through into their neighbours. The front doors were only ever a guide to the internal spread of properties. Where there were back doors, you couldn't get to them because the alleys were all filled with squat bin-bags and splintered timber.
    The kids, and a few