The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (3 page)

Pen inclined her head slowly, trying not to let her puzzlement show. The oh-so symmetrical lines of Gwen’s face creased as her smile grew wider, but the expression never reached her eyes, and it was only when Pen looked past her
to the shocked expressions of the other students and heard the scandalised whispers, that she understood what had just happened.

Pen was marked out, ugly and untouchable. She was ready for that, she’d geared herself up to fight it.

Gwen Hardy had just undercut it all, and she’d done it on purpose. She’d stepped out and offered the poor unfortunate a refuge, just because she
could.
Gwen was the only one who didn’t need to fear the social taint the wounded girl carried with her. She was untouchable in a different way, and she’d just used Pen to rub everyone’s faces in it.

…
she’d just used Pen …

Without warning, the trembling started.

Everyone was looking at her.

Her fingertips started to drum on her thigh; she tried to stop them, but she couldn’t.

Hot and cold shivers rippled her skin.

—
used Pen—

She blinked fast and images came: a face carved in the collapsed masonry of a building site, cranes like metal claws, metal barbs hooked in her skin. Her chest was tight, as though bound by a wire tourniquet. She remembered blood drying on her cheeks. She fought to still her muscles and hot shame flooded through her as she failed.

She ran from the hall.

The banned junior block was the only place she knew she could be alone. She found herself in the bathroom by accident, sitting on the chilly floor and hugging her knees until
she stopped shaking. Unsteadily, she stood and gulped chalky water from the tap.

‘So,’ she muttered to herself when she’d gathered her breath, ‘that’s what a flashback feels like. Well, okay, we coped, didn’t we? We’ll just have to cope
better
next time.’

She’d turned away from the mirror on the wall and instead snapped her compact open. That was the ritual, and rituals were important.

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

She looked at herself, caught between the tiny round makeup mirror and the massive frameless slab screwed to the tiles: an infinity of scarred, headscarved girls with smeared makeup stretched back into the reflection, as if there was one for every choice that had brought her here.

And then, suddenly, all those images of her concertinaed hard together into one.

An instant later the compact mirror shattered, pain shot through her skull and she cried out. It felt like a fault-line was shaking open right down the middle of her head.

The world shuddered and blurred around her.

The tiles were cold against her palms and her knees hurt. She didn’t remember falling. Nausea swelled up, but she fought it back down.

Her fast, shallow breathing was the only sound in the silence. She rose unsteadily and reached back to steady herself on the sink behind her.

‘Pen.’

It was her own voice. It sounded a little weird, the way it did when she heard it recorded on her answerphone, but still it was unmistakable.

Except she hadn’t spoken.

‘Pen—’ The voice came from behind her, where there was only a tiled brick wall and mirrored glass. It sounded confused, and very, very frightened. ‘Pen,
please
…’

Pen sucked her reconstructed lip between her teeth and bit it.

She looked back.

‘Gwen’s not so bad,’ Pen said, stretching out on the cold concrete floor. ‘At least, not next to the crowd she runs with. They’re …’ She groped for the right word.

‘Toxic?’ the girl behind the mirror put in. For reasons of mutual convenience, they’d agreed she was ‘Parva’ rather than ‘Pen’.

‘I honestly think that if Iran stockpiled Gwen Hardy’s friends, the Americans would invade. There’s probably a UN convention just against Trudi Stahl.’

Parva laughed, the sound echoing through the glass. ‘Well, here’s to your new crew—’ The reflected girl rummaged around in her ostrich leather handbag and, to Pen’s astonishment, pulled out a bottle of wine. ‘I hope they make you happy.’

‘You’re
drinking
now?’

‘Pen,’ Parva said patiently, ‘in the last four months I’ve been kidnapped by a barbed-wire monster, ridden to war at the head of an army of giant scaffolding wolves
and
rejoined school in the middle of term. There’s only one girl I know
who deserves a drink as much as I do, and I’ll happily share.’ She unscrewed the cap and swigged straight from the bottle before offering it to the lips of Pen’s own mortified reflection.

Pen shrank back. ‘But I
never—
’ she started.

Her double grinned at her through the mirror and said, ‘But I’m not you any more.’

Pen knew that. She’d plied Beth with careful questions, feigning idle interest, and learned as much as she could about the mirrorstocracy and their city behind the mirrors. The girl on the other side of the glass had come from her – she was composed of all the infinite reflections of her that had been caught between the two mirrors – but that was when their coexistence had ended.

Pen and Parva had diverged from that moment in time like beams of refracted light; now Parva had her own feelings, her own
life
, built up in the weeks since she’d first stepped into whatever lay outside the bathroom door in the reflection. She drank wine, ate meat and swore like a squaddie with haemorrhoids. Much to Pen’s chagrined envy, she’d even managed to land herself a job, although she wouldn’t say doing what.

But still, she
had been
Pen: for nearly seventeen years they’d been one. Parva had seen everything Pen had seen, felt everything Pen had felt. It was like having a sister, a bizarre twin – a twin who understood
everything
. Not even Beth could do that.

‘I want to show you something.’ Parva blew softly over the
neck of the bottle and the liquid pipe-sound echoed through both bathrooms. ‘Give me your hand.’ In the mirrored bathroom she extended her own hand towards Pen’s reflection.

Pen reached into the empty space in front of her and felt warm, invisible fingers close over her skin.

‘What are you—?’

‘
Shhh.
’ Parva was digging in her handbag again. She pulled out a phone and earbuds and put one bud into her own ear and the other into the ear of Pen’s reflection.

Pen heard the crackle of an old-fashioned waltz and felt her double’s ghostly hand on the small of her back.

‘Come on,’ Parva said, ‘one–two–three, one–two–three!’

And then they were off, dancing to the creaky music. Pen followed the rhythm uncertainly, her feet stumbling a little, her arms curved around empty air. In the mirror, she saw her expensively dressed double leading her.

‘One–two–three, one–two–three – that’s it.’

Pen felt her arm lifted over her head and she spun under it as Parva whooped. Pen found herself laughing as they pirouetted around the tumbledown toilets like they were in a nineteenth-century ballroom.

‘Where did you learn this?’

‘One–two–three. It’s the job, they’re teaching me all kinds of things, it’s—’

‘Ow!’ Pen abruptly broke away. She hopped in a circle as pain spiked through her foot.

‘Sorry!’ Parva winced. ‘I’m not used to leading, and, uh … the shoes are new too.’

‘Yeah, I noticed them.’ Pen slid down the bathroom wall and tugged off her trainer and her sock. The impression of Parva’s vertiginous heel had gone all the way through to the skin, but at least there was no blood. ‘You have to go back to Reach to hoist you into them?’

Parva smiled from the mirror. Jokes about the slain Crane King were part of their routine. They felt weirdly daring, disarming the memories of their abduction.

‘I managed by myself,’ she said. ‘Just.’

‘Pretty fancy. Are they from the new job too?’ Pen clutched theatrically at her heart. ‘That’s it: that’s the lethal dose. I am now officially too jealous to live. Fancy new shoes, fancy dancing lessons – at least say your new boss is a slave-driving creep.’

Parva shrugged. ‘Sorry, sis. The new boss is really sweet, actually. Everyone is – well, most of the time.’

‘Most of the time?’

Her mirror-sister frowned. ‘It’s nothing really, just … the very top people here – only
some
of them, mind, and only some of the time – but … The way they look at me. I feel like they’re watching me when my back’s turned. Sometimes – sometimes I can’t shake the feeling they mean me harm.’

Pen sighed. That sounded familiar. ‘I reckon, after everything, maybe feeling like that’s normal for us, you know?’

‘I guess.’ Parva chewed her reflected lip. ‘They just look at me funny.’

‘Hate to be the one to break it to you, hon,’ said Pen, ‘but you are toting three-fifths of the western world’s total supply
of scar-tissue around on your face.’ She smiled gently. ‘So, are you actually going to tell me what this magic new job is?’

Parva was about to speak when the distant sound of the period bell carried through the closed window.

‘Tell you next time,’ the girl in the mirror said. It was what she always promised, like Scheherazade, keeping back one last story.

Pen pouted and headed for the door. ‘Whatever. Have fun at work.’

‘Pen, wait.’

Pen paused in the doorway. The lonely note in her double’s voice was stronger now.

‘How’s Beth?’

‘Chatty,’ Pen said drily. ‘Supposedly she’s still living at home, but I don’t think Paul sees her much. Things are okay, but a bit …’ She struggled to phrase it. ‘She thinks I—’

‘—blame her,’ Parva finished quietly. ‘You do, a little. I do. It’ll take time.’

Pen didn’t reply.

‘Listen …’ Parva hesitated. ‘Do you think … do you think she’d come here? I get why you haven’t told her about me yet, but – well, it would be good to see her, you know?’

Pen imagined leading the silent, grey-skinned girl here; letting her in on this one last secret, and a resentful flare ignited in her throat. She loved B, but this was
her
sanctuary, her respite from the life she was living because of Beth.

The resentment burnt out fast. She loved B, and so did
Parva. And unlike Pen, Parva hadn’t seen their best friend in months. ‘I’ll ask her.’

‘Thank you.’ Parva smiled in relief. ‘What you got now?’

‘English: Richard Three.’ Pen mimicked a movie-trailer voice: ‘
The hunch is back!
’

Parva snorted at the weak pun. ‘With jokes like that, it’s a good thing you’re pretty.’

‘Narcissist,’ Pen countered.

Her double laughed. ‘Get out.’

Beth pulled her hood up and crossed the threshold into the sewers, gripping her iron railing like a spear. She fed on the city around her with every step she took, drawing power and information through the bare soles of her concrete-grey feet:

A railwraith clatters across Blackfriars Bridge like an iron heart attack. A pair of streetlamps flicker angrily at each other across Electric Avenue as an argument between Sodiumite sisters flares up into insults and duelling challenges. Masonry Men move through the walls of an old house in Hampstead, rippling the brickwork and making it groan, while in an upstairs bedroom, a mother reassures her frightened daughter, whispering, ‘Old houses just creak a bit, sweetheart.’ Pylon spiders race along cables beneath the pavements, whispering to each other with white noise, static and stolen syllables.

Underneath the distortion there was a familiarity to the arachnoid voices that made Beth’s chest ache.

It was a typical London night, only not
quite
typical, because deep in the tunnels ahead was something very unusual, and so subtle that had she not been within a hundred
feet of it and listening intently for that very thing, she would have missed it utterly:

A tiny sphere of perfect silence.

It was no bigger than her clenched fist, but she could hear the way London’s other sounds contorted around it. It
had
to be what she was looking for.

Beth had been trawling London’s sewers for five straight nights now and this was the first sign she’d found. Her pulse quickened. She tightened her grip on her spear and picked up her pace, all the while straining to listen past the swish of the water across her ankles.

The stream widened and deepened and she began to wade. The rich sewer gases fugged around her and she shook her head, trying to clear it. To her right, two vaguely human-shaped lights, one orange, the other white, flitted across the mouth of an access tunnel, safely away from the water. There was a flushed excitement in their glow which made Beth smile. Mixed-spectrum couples were still rare, but more and more had got together in the months since the war – those few brief days when Blankleit and Sodiumite had fought side by side against the Crane King had unlocked something. She wondered just how many of them were sneaking around down here while their disapproving elders dozed in the daylight. These two were late getting back.

Lamp-crossed lovers
, she thought, and her smile stretched to a grin.

The last of their light faded and the darkness crowded back. A few months earlier Beth would have been blind down
here, but now she saw the brick tunnels in new colours: bruise and thundercloud hues. She remembered the boy, cocksure and scrawny and loose-limbed, who’d possessed the same spear she now carried.

Is this how you saw the city, Fil?
she wondered.
Is this how you saw me?

The thought was like being stabbed in the heart with a safety pin.

She took another corner, and came face to face with her prey.

The lizard didn’t look like much, but, to be fair, it seemed equally unimpressed with her. It clung to the bricks, an inch and a half of greenish-brown leather. It rolled a black, liquid eye to track her, but otherwise didn’t move.

Without realising it, Beth held her breath.

Slow now, B
, she told herself,
slow as a sloth with a hangover. Remember what Candleman said: don’t piss it off ’til it’s pinned.