Un Lun Dun - China Mieville [5]
“…don’t know what she’s doing…” Deeba heard Becks saying to Keisha and Kath. Zanna walked a little ahead of them, her feet sending up little sprays of rainlike mist.
A lot like mist, a dark mist. Zanna slowed. She and Deeba looked down.
“What now?” said Keisha in exasperation.
At their feet, a few centimeters above the dirty wet tarmac, there was a layer of coiling smoke.
“What…is that?” said Kath.
Wafts were rising from the gutters. The smoke was a horrible dirty dark. It emerged in drifts and tendrils, reaching through the metal grilles of the drains like growing vines or octopus legs. Ropes of it tangled and thickened. They coiled around the wheels of vehicles and under their engines.
“What’s going on?” whispered Keisha. Smoke was beginning to boil out of the sewers. A smell of chemicals and rot thickened in the air. Far off and muffled as if by a curtain, the noise of a motor was audible.
Zanna was standing with her arms out, focusing intensely into sudden fumes that circled them. For a second, it looked as if the rain that was pelting them was evaporating, like drops on hot metal, a few millimeters above Zanna’s head. Deeba stared, but dark drifts hid her friend.
The motor was louder. A car was approaching.
The girls were shrouded in gritty smoke. They spluttered in panic and tried to call to each other. They could see almost nothing.
The noise of the motor grew, and glints of reflected streetlamp-light winked momentarily through the fumes.
“Wait a minute,” Zanna shouted.
Through the fog headlights suddenly flared, heading straight for Zanna. Deeba saw her, turned in to a shadow, sidestepping neatly as the lights bore down, her hands seeming to glow.
“It’s my dad!” Zanna shouted, and moved fast as the car raced into the smoke, and there was a rush as the fumes dissipated and—
—there was a bang, and something went flying, and there was silence.
The clouds undarkened and the rain stopped. The strange fumes dropped out of the air and flooded like thick dark water back into the gutters, gushing soundlessly out of sight.
For several seconds, no one moved.
A car was skewed across the road, with Zanna’s dad sitting in the front seat looking confused. Someone was shouting hysterically. Someone fair was lying by a wall.
“Zanna!” Deeba shouted, but Zanna was beside her. It was Becks who had been hit, and who lay motionless.
“We have to get a doctor,” said Zanna, pulling out her mobile and starting to cry, but Kath was already through to 999.
Zanna’s dad staggered out of the car, coughing.
“What…what…?” he said. “I was…what happened?” He saw Becks. “Oh my God!” He dropped to his knees beside her. “What did I do?” he kept saying.
“I’ve called an ambulance,” Kath said, but he wasn’t listening. Now the light was back to normal and there was no fog lapping at ankle-height, people were peering out of doors and windows. Becks moved uneasily, and made groggy moaning noises.
“What happened?” Zanna’s dad kept asking them. None of them knew what to say. “I don’t remember anything,” he said, “I just woke up and—”
“It hurts…” Becks wailed.
“Did you see?” Zanna whispered to Deeba. Her voice sounded as if it were cracking. “The smoke, the car, everything? It was all thick around me. It was trying to get me.”
4
The Watcher in the Night
That night, and the two that followed, Zanna stayed over at Deeba’s house. Just then, she preferred it to her own place across the yard of the estate.
Her father was in a bit of a state. The police kept asking him to tell his story again, and telling him there was no sign of the “chemical spill” he thought might explain the smoke that had made him light-headed. While he had to deal with the questions, Mr. and Mrs. Moon gratefully accepted the Reshams’ suggestion that Zanna stay with them.
The police had also asked the girls what had happened, of course, but Zanna and Deeba couldn’t explain what they didn’t understand.
“She’s had a real shock, Mrs. Resham,” Deeba heard one officer say. “She’s not making a bit of sense.”
“We have to make them