Free This Census-Taker by China Miéville Page B

visible at junctions at work in their economies. They looked at me in curiosity. They couldn’t have seen my face and it wasn’t as if there were no ragged children in the town, nor as if none ever went walking in such forbidding hours. No one called to me.
    I took a twisting route, striving for silence, returning to the bridge over the cut, to Samma and Drobe’s favorite house.
    My hope was met: the door opened. I stood in the threshold. My eyes were wide and I felt as if they might shoot out rays for me to see by. I stood half-in half-out, unsure how to proceed, and Samma opened her own eyes to look at me.
    “Oh, you,” she said. “It’s you.”
    She rose and came for me. She was sleepy and vague and she held out her hand and whispered to me with more tenderness than I’d heard from her or anyone, now it was only she and I awake and she was unheard by the tough brood she helped shepherd.
    —
     
    She whispered to you the story of when you came down, to calm you. You had a childish hope of sanctuary right there in that airy ruin but Samma knew better and pulled herself all the way awake and warned you, finger to her lips. She thought. She put her hand on Drobe’s chest and brought him instantly out of sleep. They murmered.
    She said to you, “Is anyone coming?”
    “I think someone was on the hill.”
    Some other gang children looked up from where they lay at the quiet caucus. Drobe and Samma pointed them back to sleep and they pretended to obey.
    Samma leaned out and scanned the bridge. A light rain now fell. “Come on,” she whispered to you. “Come on right now.”
    Watched by those silent comrades, Samma and Drobe took you to your dismay back out into the night. You could see the lines of the country now, rising into quickly ebbing darkness, the hills’ shoulders coming visible. Each streetlamp wore a corona.
    Your guides surprised you. They took you left, above the bats’ arches, to cross the bridge. Past that dark cart, as absolute in its aspect as any rock, into the southern half of the town. A street slanted up. They took you higher. Your skin was wet.
    It was as if dawn had been told to come quicker on that side, as if the greater emptiness of the streets sucked the light in. What watchers you noticed may as well have been dispassionate observers from some austere alternative, so opaque were their regards. Destitutes lying but not asleep under leaves in a graveyard, marking you from their locations, cozied up to the railings as if to give the dead their room. In a chair by her open doorway a woman waited for the sun and nodded as your escorts took you past. You cried out because something terrible clawed from her mouth, a dark tangle, as if something hookfooted was emerging from her and she didn’t care.
    “Hush,” Drobe said. “We have to be quick and quiet.”
    To the east there are beetles the size of hands and their shells tell fortunes. If you boil them you can chew their dead legs, as did the woman, and suck out narcotic blood. But you didn’t know that then.
    “Ah now,” whispered Samma. She spoke in Drobe’s ear and he thought a moment and whispered back and her eyes widened and she nodded.
    Perhaps someone was behind you, glancingly visible as the town came into its gray self. You tried to keep watch of any watcher. Drobe yanked you so you lost your grip on Samma’s hand and he pulled you into alleys, and you reached back but Drobe was too strong and fast, and Samma kept on in plain sight on the main way while you left her and headed into the snarls of the south side.
    “She’ll come for us, she’ll come,” Drobe said, patting down the hands with which you reached back in her direction. “She’s getting things you’ll need. Come with me.”
    Need? It was light so quickly. Drobe rushed you in through the windows of a barely musty cellar. From there, when the rain slowed, through a fence of barrel hoops, by a junction past two big men in butcher’s aprons who put down their