it away roughly. It was like trying to push a mountain. She could smell the salt of its sweat.
‘I can’t protect you from them!’ she cried to it. ‘Run, can’t you?’
But it stayed. It rested its head on her shoulder and leaned against her. The weight of the massive head forced her legs to buckle slowly, and when she had settled on the ground, the beast knelt and laid its lovely deformed head on her knees.
‘Oh you poor thing, you must go,’ she murmured helplessly, shining the torch down onto it, but the violet sadness of its eyes asked only where it should go, and there was no answer to that.
Then it was too late. There was a great hullaballoo of triumph and the ragged men and women with dirt-streaked faces and crazed eyes were capering around them in the darkness, crowing with glee as they caught hold of the great white beast by its mane and tail and ears. A dozen filthy pairs of hands bore it away and brushed the girl aside without seeming to notice her when she tried to hold onto it. Or so it seemed, until one of the men, a great hulking hunchback with an ash-brown beard, looked over his shoulder at her and said with rough gentleness: ‘You found it.’
‘Will you take it out of here?’ she said.
‘Up there?’ the man asked, jerking his chin up contemptuously. ‘There is no place for its like up there, girl.’
She stood boneless and will-less, as they surged away and were swallowed by the dark, knowing she had stayed the beast for the crowd. Without her, they never would have caught it. Exhaustion deep as a mineshaft opened within her. A surge of the metro wind wrested the torch from her fingers. It rolled away and came to rest against the wall beside a tunnel, its beam reduced to a flickering golden egg. As the girl retrieved it, the wind blew again, gently, a mere sigh, cool and damp with the smell of the sea. She did not know what to do, but it seemed to her that she could not go back up to the city and her aunt. There was no place for creatures such as her there, either. She began to walk in the direction in which the ragged people had taken the beast, uncaring that she did not know where they were going.
The torch light gave a sepia spasm and she was again in darkness. She lifted her hand, groped for the wall, and continued on. She did not know how long she had walked except that her feet hurt. She knew she must be on one of the ledge paths again, and thought she would sit down and rest, but the salt-strong smell of the sea drew her on. The ground under her feet began to slope down and she wondered again if, deeper than the metro, there was a sea, awaiting her. If she could find her way to it, she would surely find the beast and the ragged metro people. Perhaps they had a camp of some kind and she could stay with them and help tend the beast. If it lives, whispered her heart, and oh, she knew what fear was then. There was no mistaking it.
She was still walking an hour later, or perhaps years later. In the darkness, time had become elastic and then liquid. Memories floated around her of the wind and the sea and of her solitary childhood, the way her parents had touched her so rarely. She had never wondered at this, but now it came to her that they had been afraid to touch her.
Ahead she saw a blue light and then the tunnel spilled her into what must be an immense cavern filled with ghostly phosphorescence, but if it was a cavern, then it was big enough that she could not see the walls or roof of it. She walked across pallid sand, cold and soft as powder under her feet, which the blue light turned aquamarine. Beyond it a sea stretched away and away to an invisible horizon. She walked to the edge of it and heard how the waves hissed as they unrolled at her feet. Some distance away, the narrow beach jutted out in a long pale finger, and at the very tip, through a dark jostle of people, she saw the red flare of fire. Beyond them or in their midst stood the white beast, swaying slightly to