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they wanted to react with it and burn. His frantic speed made him brilliant, and his light reflected off the concrete walls of the estate, leaving ghostly after-images. The grassunderfoot was wet and he throbbed off shrieks of pain as he ran, scrambling to find shelter.
    The Whitey found a slick black tarpaulin crumpled into a corner by an outbuilding. He threw it over himself, but the rivulets of water that ran off it made him scream, so he stood and ran again, his light beaming out from the treacherous holes in the tarp. Curls of hydrogen twisted wherever the rain struck home.
    Suddenly the wind changed and a puddle rippled, splashing a curl of water against the Whitey’s leg. He blazed in pain and the metal in his ankle reacted: his foot vanished in a flare of light and gas and he fell awkwardly by a barbed-wire fence. He crawled in agony over the wet tarmac. The world around him was bright with lit windows, safe, dry lights, but there was no way in.
    A jag of concrete snared the edge of the tarp and it was dragged from him. The Whitey lay there, unable to crawl further. He spasmed and his knee scraped over the concrete. A spark caught and he was bathed in flame as the hydrogen cloud around him ignited. The heat soothed him for alltoo-brief a moment and then burned out.
    It was only the needles of pain rippling over him that kept him conscious. He thought of his home, wondering how he had got so far from the bright gas-white globes on their posts over the Carnaby Street market. His brothers and sisters would be there now, with the rain ricocheting harmlessly off their bulbs. One orb would be dark, empty; where he ought to be.
    Something moved above him, a thin, dark shadow, and the Whitey looked up. A skein of barbed wire was coming off the fence towards him, twisting and coiling like a snake through the air. It shivered along its length and the barbs gave off a rattling hiss.
    ‘ No ,’ he strobed. Even in his agony, a deeper fear gripped him. ‘ No, get back. I’m not yours. I can’t sustain you. ’
    But the eyeless thing kept coming and in the flickering light of his words he saw a tendril slither off the ground to caress his face. The moisture on it burnt him.
    ‘ Please ,’ he whispered, a dim flicker, ‘ please, not me. I can tell you things – there are threats, threats to your master. The Viae Child, he’s raising an army against him, against Reach. I saw him – I hid and read his very lips— ’
    But the thing kept coiling lovingly around him, tighter and tighter. Metal thorns clasped hungrily at his scalp, seeking a way in, as though they could plunder straight from his mind the information he was trying to bargain with.
    Cracks started to spread through him and he shrieked brightly as the barbs pierced his glass skull and let the water in.

CHAPTER 10
    Beth sat on the bus to Bethnal Green. She looked around, but she couldn’t see a wet dog so she was forced to conclude that the smell was coming from her. Strange blots were dancing at the edges of her eyes and it felt like a gnome in lead boots was tap-dancing in the back of her head.
    She managed to doze off between ringing the bell and the bus hissing to a stop. Jerking awake, she leaped to her feet and shouldered her way through the closing door. A thunderclap echoed somewhere to the west and the rain redoubled, greeting her with soaking enthusiasm, plastering her hair flat against her skull.
    Beth sighed and squelched onwards.
    At first she thought he was a hallucination, just sitting there cross-legged, despondently getting drenched. The streetlamps were flickering on and off in some sort of sequence, making his shadow jump in a weird staccato dance.
    ‘Hey!’ she yelled. Relief and excitement fizzed through her. ‘Hey, you! Guy!’ She didn’t know what to call him. ‘Urchin!’
    He looked up and his grey eyes widened as Beth came down the steps of the bridge three at a time. He scrambled to his feet. ‘What are you doing here?’ he