The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (2 page)

Pen walked against the tide of the students into the playground. Something cold landed on her eyelash: snowflakes were drifting from the yellowing clouds. She pulled her headscarf tighter around her and shuddered.

You will tell us.

She should have known that was coming. Pen was hanging around with Gwen because her …
patronage
– she couldn’t think of it as anything other than that – kept the rest of Frostfield off her back, but Gwen didn’t do charity. She wanted to be seen to be the one the damaged girl opened
up to, the one who could get the answers to the questions the whole school was buzzing with.

Where did Pen go for those three weeks last autumn?

What was it that had mutilated her face?

And where on earth had Beth Bradley, Pen’s best friend, a girl she never used to be seen without,
gone
?

Buried in her thoughts, Pen almost walked into the school perimeter wall. She shook herself and bent double against the snow. The wind had started up and now it shrieked up and down octaves and stripped her face raw. She was grateful for it – everyone else would have hurried indoors and there was less chance of being seen.

The old junior block jutted out into the playground in front of her, bandaged up in hi-vis tape like an injured brick limb. Some workmen had found asbestos in it while Pen had been gone and the whole structure had been cordoned off. Orange cones marked out the edge of the forbidden zone.

Secret spaces can open up so fast in the city
, Pen thought.

Wary of the CCTV, she squeezed herself in behind the tangle of spiny evergreen bushes that grew by the wall and edged her way towards the fire escape at the back.

The air inside was dank and cave-like, but out of the wind it felt warm. What little light penetrated the muck-smeared windows silhouetted little funeral cairns of bluebottles. Pen picked her way along the corridor, climbing over a couple of toppled-over lockers, and ducked into a doorway on the right.

It had been the girls’ bathroom once. Toilet-stall doors stood open, plastic seat lids down and covered in dust. Sinks jutted from the wall like pugnacious chins, with a long frameless sheet of mirror-glass still screwed in above them.

Just to be sure, Pen checked inside the stalls, but she was alone in the room.

Anxiety bubbled in her throat as she stepped up to the mirror. She saw herself up close: the scars criss-crossed her cheeks like cracks in broken glass. Luckily Dr Walid had owed her father a favour from their university days, so he hadn’t charged when he rebuilt her nostril and her lower lip using a graft taken from her thigh. Camouflage, carefully applied, could conceal the border between them and the surrounding tissue, but it left a flat texture, a
wrongness
that couldn’t be disguised.

There was only so much you could hide from people if they got too close.

‘It’s all you, Pen,’ she whispered. ‘They just rearranged you a little bit.’

Gradually her gorge subsided. It helped to be here, in this mildewed, tumbledown bathroom, the only place in the world she could find someone who understood.

She leaned over the sink and rapped on the mirror with her knuckles. ‘Hello? Hello?’

Her voice echoed hollowly off the tiles.

Hello
?
Hello
?

‘Hello.’

In the mirror, Pen saw a slender girl walk out of one of
the toilet stalls; the same stalls Pen had looked into and
knew
were empty. The interloper stepped up behind her, put her arms around Pen’s waist and settled her chin on her shoulder. Pen felt the pressure from the girl’s hug and the comfortable heat from the cheek next to her own, but she didn’t bother looking sideways; she knew she’d see nothing there. She kept her eyes on the glass, studying the reflection that appeared not to be cast by anyone at all.

The clothes were different; the girl in the mirror had obviously been shopping. She wore tighter jeans, a stylishly cut leather jacket and a pair of heels that meant she had to stoop slightly to hug Pen. The girl’s headscarf looked new too, an expensive-looking raw silk in pigeon-grey.

The face though – the face was identical: fine-featured, brown-skinned, even down to the intricate asymmetry of the scars.

Pen looked into the mirror and saw her reflection doubled. Two copies of her looked back.

The girl next to her reflection broke into a grin and the slashes that framed her mouth became something quite beautiful. ‘You look good, girl,’ she said.

Pen’s new face was like a bully: the unstable, manipulative kind who sticks close to you like they’re your needy best friend, demands constant attention and care and then ridicules you the moment anyone else shows up.

After she came out of hospital, Pen spent hours at her dresser, skin camouflage cream open before her. She patted over the little ridges of twisted, discoloured skin with the sponge, the way she’d been taught, trying to change what she saw in the mirror back into someone she recognised.

The first week, she hadn’t worn any makeup at all. Burning with the energy of what she’d survived, she’d tried to catch the eye of total strangers and started conversations at the Number 57 bus stop about the weather or
Downton Abbey.
She’d been pugnaciously cheery,
daring
them to look at her.

It hadn’t been worth it.

Only little kids would let themselves gape openly; adults just became fascinated with the their own feet, not wanting to be caught staring, and more and more Pen had started to hide her new face.

She took to running in the middle of the night, keeping her eyes on the pavement so she wouldn’t see the Sodiumites dancing their burning dances inside the streetlamps. She ran until the freezing air turned to fire in her lungs and sweat drenched the scarf tied around her hair. She looked up strength-training regimes on the internet and practised them in her bedroom until calluses armoured the inside of her fingers and she could do chin-ups on the lintel over her door. The thrill as her body responded to her felt like defiance and she watched in satisfaction as her ribs emerged through her tightening skin. She became a little more careful about what she ate, then a little more, then a little more. Food felt risky; it could unpick the changes she had willed on herself. She’d chop and mix the chickpeas and spinach on her plate, prod at them with bread but take very few bites. Every refrained-from mouthful burned in her chest like another victory. She did her best to ignore the worried looks from her parents.

You know best, Pen,
she told herself.
It’s your body.
Yours.
Everything’s going to be fine.

Prayer had become almost impossible.

It wasn’t as though she’d never missed Salah, back in the time that she was beginning to think of as simply ‘Before’. She’d often overslept, or been out with Beth, or been so busy she’d just forgotten, but this was different. At first, she was careful to make the time: she wanted prayer to be something she could hold on to. But the familiar words of the
rak’ah
felt awkward in her mouth, and she faltered before she finished,
feeling horribly,
intimately
insincere. Eventually she’d stopped trying. When her dad tried to lead prayer at home, she told him she was going to pray in her room instead; she’d just stared at him, using her scars, until his protestations had faded away.

Once she had her morning makeup routine down to forty-five minutes and her hands no longer shook when she held the sponge, she went back to school.

The 57 drove her past a building site on Dalston High Road. From the upper deck Pen glimpsed cranes, spindly as winter trees, through the chilly fog. They were still, their motors stopped and voiceless, but she shrank back in her seat anyway. There was a flicker of movement inside the bulb of one of the still-lit street lamps and for an instant she saw a hand silhouetted against the glass.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and read,
Look left.

Outside, something darted across the mouth of an alley, human-shaped, hooded and impossibly fast.

Her phone buzzed again.

Too slow. Look right.

Through the far window, Pen saw a figure fly across the gap between two rooftops.

Pen! This is harder than it looks, you know. Try and keep up! Look behind you.

Pen rolled her eyes and then, very slowly, craned her neck to face the back of the bus.

Upside down, hanging
somehow
by her toes from the roof,
her nose pressed to the glass, a teenage girl with skin the colour of concrete blew her a long, slow kiss.

Didn’t think I’d miss your first day back in the madhouse, did you?

*

They stood at Frostfield High’s metal gates. It was still early. A few uniformed kids, hunched like Sherpas under their rucksacks, made their way in from their parents’ cars. A couple of them looked, but no one recognised Pen. She glanced back over her shoulder and took in the landscape. East London’s terracotta roofs overlapped like insect-chitin in the long shadows of the tower blocks.

Beth leaned with one foot against the gatepost, hood up, head down, thumbs flickering while she texted. The spiked iron railing she always carried now rested in the crook of her elbow. She showed Pen her screen.
Sure you’re ready?

Pen exhaled. ‘Nope,’ she said, ‘but I’m not sure I ever will be, so I might as well do it now.’

Hardcore, Pencil Khan. I’m proud of you.
Pavement-grey eyes met Pen’s.

Beth held her gaze and typed blind.
I’ll come in with you if you want, you know that, right? Screw ’em. I’m still enrolled. Just give the word and we’ll be sitting together in French.

Pen looked at her curiously. ‘When I suggested that before you didn’t seem so up for it.’

Beth shrugged, a little shyly.
Just for me, no. But I’d line up next to you in front of a firing squad if that’s where you wanted me.

She would too.

Pen touched her cheek. ‘No thanks, B. I could use a bit of
upstaging, mind, but I think you might draw a bit
too
much focus.’

Be all right. Got a spear.

She was joking. Probably. Nevertheless, Pen winced at the thought of Beth prodding the railing into anyone who looked at her funny. There was a wild edge to her friend now and she couldn’t entirely rule that out.

‘Still,’ she said, ‘I think it might put a bit of a dent in Operation Normality.’

She caught the guilty flicker in her friend’s eyes, but her own voice echoed back to her.

No further down the rabbit hole, B
. She’d said it and she had to hold to it; she couldn’t look back.

Beth stretched out her hand, Pen pressed her palm to hers and they interlaced fingers. She felt the uncanny texture of Beth’s skin graze over her own, warm and rough as summer pavement.

Beth texted one-handed,
I’ll find you at the end of the day.

The street-skinned girl kicked herself off the gate, tucked the railing under one arm and sauntered into the slowly thickening morning crowd. Pen caught a couple of disapproving glances from older, stuffier-looking pedestrians. Hooded head bent as though against the cold, Beth could have been any teenager who’d eyed up a Monday morning at school and decided she couldn’t be arsed.

‘You’re still you,’ Pen muttered to herself turning back to the gates. ‘And school’s still just school.’

Like that wasn’t the problem.

Gripping the straps of her rucksack like it was an escape parachute, she pushed past the gate.

*

Frostfield’s hallways were the usual cacophony of laughter, shouts, phone-speakers leaking bass, trainers, squeaky lino and slamming lockers. Under it all, Pen heard the muttered snatches and the cut-off gasps. She saw the hurried looks away.

‘—look who’s back—’

‘—what
happened
to her?—’

‘—where’s her punky little mate?—’

‘—She got kicked out for that graffiti stunt, remember?’

‘Nah, Salt never made that stick … where is Salt, anyway?’

Pen knew exactly where Dr Julian Salt was: out on bloody bail. The DI in charge of her case had called her the day before to tell her. The same brown-haired, tired-eyed woman had spent four hours a week ago asking Pen painfully blunt questions in a gentle voice.

‘
No
,’ Pen had answered, feeling small and resentful, clutching her mum’s hand while she spoke. ‘
No we never did … that. But he touched me. No, he never physically forced me. No, it was – it was blackmail. He said he could get Beth put in a foster-home. She’s my best friend. No, she doesn’t know. No, I don’t know why you can’t reach her.

And, ‘
No, the scars were something else. An accident.
’

And she’d trotted out the same ridiculous plate-glass window lie she’d sold her folks – because how could they ever,
ever
come close to believing the truth?

It had taken Pen a long time to recognise the black, choking feeling in her throat for the anger it was. Even though she was assured that things were ‘progressing’, even though ‘action was being taken’, the fact that Pen had screwed up her courage and made the call and that Salt was still free for Sunday lunch at home with his wife blistered her with rage.

‘Hey, Parva.’

Pen looked up in surprise. Gwen Hardy’s smile had the voltage of West End signage. Pen blinked and faltered and stammered, ‘G-Gwen.’

Gwen had nodded approvingly, as if Pen deserved a prize for remembering her name. The hallway was silent now. Everyone was watching. Pen felt their scrutiny like an icy wind. She braced herself for the question she was sure was coming …

‘
What the hell happened to your—
’

‘Beth not with you?’ Gwen asked. Pen shook her head, more in confusion than in denial. It was probably the first time that name had passed Gwen’s glossy lips, but she used it with casual intimacy, as if Beth was
her
best friend, not Pen’s.

‘Too bad. Good to have you back anyway. If you want to catch up at lunchtime, you know where we usually sit?’