The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (11 page)

All of the black-armoured figures were facing her. She couldn’t be sure, because of the visors, but it felt like they were staring.

One of them had shoulder-guards patterned with silver chevrons. He shook himself and pulled a radio from his belt. ‘This is Corbin. We’ve found Lady Khan. Repeat: we have
found Lady Khan. The suspect led us right to her. She’s unharmed, but she has been in the river and has – er … sustained minor impact damage. We’re taking her to St Janus’ for medical assessment. Over.’

Pen clearly heard the answer crackle from the radio: ‘
Negative, Captain. Deliver the countess to the palace for immediate debriefing.
’

The captain sounded startled by the contradiction, but all he said was, ‘Confirmed, proceeding directly to palace. Out.’

Pen rubbed feeling back into her wrists. Her mind was racing, desperately trying to keep up.

The guys with the guns thought she was her mirror-sister, that much was obvious, and since that appeared to be the only reason they were no longer pointing those guns
at her
, she wasn’t in any hurry to set them straight. But
Lady
Khan?
Countess? Palace?
Who
was
Parva in this place?

Pen looked up. The buildings clustered above on the embankment were like fun-house reflections of those she knew from home. She recognised the art deco horses of the Unilever building over her, and the old power station that housed the Tate Modern on the opposite bank, but they were taller here, and their shapes rippled as they rose into the sky, their familiar outlines bent by strange accretions of brick and stone.

They look exactly like they look reflected in the river at home
, Pen marvelled.
Here, that’s how they actually
are.

A hacking sound dragged her gaze back to the pavement.
The ragged swimmer lay flat on his back, his eyes lolling, and flecks of bloody saliva erupted from his mouth as he coughed. A medical pad had been slapped on his shoulder, tape peeling half off, but a fat bruise was blossoming on his left cheek. He’d taken a heavier pistol whipping than Pen had, and she flinched at how painful it looked. His head slumped sideways, revealing another bruise on his right cheek.

Pen went cold.

That bruise was
identical
to the first, with precisely the same patterning of yellow and purple on the man’s white skin. In fact, she now saw that the whole of the right-hand side of his face was the same as the left, even down to the direction of the curl in the hairs of his beard. He was
exactly
symmetrical.

Something on his face glinted in the sharp morning light. Bisecting his face from hairline to chin along the bridge of his nose was a dotted silver line, a fine thread stitched in and out of the skin like the anti-counterfeit strip on a bank note, marking the axis of his symmetry like the edge of a mirror.

Sergeant Mennett caught her staring. ‘Are you all right, ma’am? Did the miserable terrorist bastard hurt you? Want to kick him a couple of times?’

‘What? No!’ Pen didn’t take her eyes off the eerily symmetrical man at her feet. ‘He didn’t touch me – I’ve never seen him before just now.’

Captain Corbin turned to Pen. ‘I’m sorry, My Lady, but are
you saying you don’t recognise this man? But—’ He left it hanging.

‘But what?’ Pen stared at him.

Mennett’s next question came out careful and nervous. ‘Ma’am, if he didn’t force you in, how did you get in the water?’

‘I— I …’ Pen looked from one armoured figure to the next, but none provided any help. She seized on the simplest lie in the world. ‘I don’t remember.’

The captain spoke back into his radio. ‘Command, Lady Khan appears to have sustained some loss of memory. Concern over possible head injury, over.’

‘Oh,
frag
,’ Mennett muttered fervently.

‘
Confirmed. Medical staff will be waiting upon your arrival at palace. Bring her in now, Captain. Orders from Senator Case’s office, over.
’

‘Confirmed.’ The captain stepped forward. ‘Please come with us, My Lady. You’re safe now.’

Pen didn’t know what else to do but nod. Black gauntlets took her elbows and she was ushered gently towards the embankment. Sergeant Mennett’s touch was so timid she barely felt it. As they guided her up the steps, she looked back at the scrawny figure lying prone on the flagstones. Blood trickled into his beard from cuts in the centre of his bruises, the red droplets progressing on identical paths down his cheeks.

Pen decided to take a chance. ‘Sergeant,’ she said quietly. Her tongue still felt huge in her mouth.

‘Yes, ma’am?’

‘That man,’ she said. ‘He didn’t hurt me. Make sure you don’t hurt him.’

‘My Lady, I—’ he began.

‘
Sergeant
.’ She leaned on the rank. ‘I believe I made myself clear. I wouldn’t want to have to make an issue of
this
’
–
she touched her jaw, where her own bruise was rising – ‘at the palace. Make sure he’s looked after. Now.’

The black-armoured figure stiffened. ‘Yes, ma’am. I’ll … I’ll try.’ Something in his voice suggested he didn’t think much of his chances, but he let go of her elbow and went back down the steps two at a time.

A train rattled the railway bridge as the captain led her underneath it. A black SUV with tinted windows waited for them in front of the stuccoed edifice of the City of London School. Two police horses whickered next to the vehicle – at least, Pen assumed they were horses. They were horse-shaped and horse-scented and rigged with saddles and blinkers, but every inch of them, hoof-to-ears, was wrapped tight in black cloth. They were like horse-mummies, all bandaged up, except for the dark holes of their gaping nostrils. They snorted and tossed their heads and stamped. Both vehicle and animals were marked with the same emblem: a white coat of arms featuring a stylised chess knight with the letters GC reversed – mirror-writing – printed underneath.

The captain lifted off his black helmet to reveal a head of dense, closely cropped hair. His broad face was almost as symmetrical as the swimmer’s, and like the swimmer, a row
of metal stitches glinted down the centre of it. The only difference between his left and right sides was that while his left eyebrow was brown, the right one was grey and had another ring of tiny stitches around it. The skin around the right brow was different too, wrinkled and liver-spotted. It looked like it had been transplanted from a much older man.

‘My name’s Corbin, ma’am’ he said. ‘I don’t know what happened with your last protection detail, but there won’t be any funny business with a Glass Chevalier escort. Scylla and I’ll look after you.’ He patted one of the horses fondly before opening the back door of the SUV.

‘If you’ll just climb in, we’ll be off.’

Pen was barely listening. She was staring over his shoulder, back towards the south end of the railway bridge. There was a billboard there, hoisted against the side of a brutalist slab of concrete apartments. At the bottom of the advert, elegant silver reversed script on a black background read:
– MAKE YOUR CHANCE, she realised – and listed a website: gl.yrettolssalggnikool.www –

Above those words was an image, a photograph of a girl.

Pen barely felt the loosening of her jaw, or the cold air that swept into her lungs as she inhaled.

Fifty feet high, every pore blown up to the size of a dinner plate, immaculate dark makeup making her eyes luminous and picking out each individual scar: Pen’s own face smiled back at her from the billboard canvas.

Pen rested her forehead on the window and watched the city drift by under stony clouds. Men and women filled the pavements, hustling or strolling, laughing into mobile phones, shovelling sandwiches and fried chicken into their mouths from takeaway cartons or simply walking with their heads down and hands thrust into their pockets, lost in themselves. They could almost have been Londoners, had it not been for the eerie symmetry of their bisected faces. Where they passed windows, they cast no reflections. It was like being in a city full of vampires. They paid no attention to the Londoners who moved through the city caught in
their
mirrors, the city Pen called home.

Most of the pedestrians weren’t
exactly
symmetrical though. Like Captain Corbin, they had stitched-in differences on one or other side, a scrap of lighter or darker skin, a mole or a scar, always quarantined from the neighbouring features with a border of silver thread. A few had several such patches, and Pen thought they walked a little taller than the others, a little more confidently. Behind the car, Captain
Corbin plodded along on his cloth-swathed mount, the clatter-clop of horseshoes just audible through the glass.

The buildings that loomed over them were all stretched and warped: distorted reflections of those back home. The old Blackfriar pub spiked up like a gothic nightmare; the Gherkin was elongated to a glass teardrop. Pen shivered. It was as though the London she knew had run in the rain.

There were supermarkets and cafés Pen recognised, their signs displaying London-Under-Glass’ reverse script, but nestled amongst this unfamiliar familiarity were other shops she hadn’t seen before. There was a boutique with silver-on-black signage displaying a disembodied smile. She worked to translate the backwards sign:
Fulcrum and Scroutt: Beauty Brokers
. The windows displayed photographs of women in glittering jewellery with crooked noses or big pink birthmarks on their cheeks. The centrepiece of the display was a miniature treasure chest, and nestled against the plush velvet lining were three elegantly arranged human right ears, all in different shades of skin.

They drove past a narrow alley and Pen did a double take, feeling her throat constrict.
Cuttner’s Close
,
EC1
, the enamel sign read. The name wasn’t familiar and neither was the street itself.

It should have been.

In her own London, Pen had wandered up and down these pavements a million times on her way to and from her dad’s practice; they were an extension of her rat-runs, her neighbourhood. A chill spread through her, and she turned from
side to side, peering urgently out of the car windows. More and more unfamiliar details struck her, more and more that was wrong: a missing shop, or a building razed to the ground where its equivalent in London still stood; a row of frontages continued unbroken where Godliman Street ought to have been. This reflection of London wasn’t just distorted; it had been rebuilt in places, its topography altered.

It doesn’t match
, she realised, her stomach sinking. She’d assumed that the London she knew would be a map for London-Under-Glass, but it wasn’t. But without a map, Pen had no idea how to find Frostfield High – or if the school even existed here.

A city of eight million people, covering more than six hundred square miles, and the room with the bloody handprint on the floor could be anywhere.

Twenty-one days and nights.
Johnny Naphtha’s silk-and-oil voice whispered through her mind.
Twenty-one.

Her driver kept shooting illicit looks back at her and then snatching his gaze away again. He cleared his throat and opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then he bottled it. He scratched the back of his head and sighed loudly, then he tilted the rear-view mirror until it caught her. It never showed her him.

‘Look, are you all right?’ Pen asked.

‘Oh, frag me!’ he started. ‘I was staring, wasn’t I? Oh, Mirror of God, excuse me – I’m sorry, ma’am, I was just—’ He groped for the words, and then sagged slightly in his seat.

‘Forgive me?’ he asked sheepishly.

Pen blinked. ‘What for?’

‘Well, my language, Lady Khan, for one thing – I shouldn’t be talking to a Mirror Countess like that, I know that – it’s just …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I’m just so relieved, ma’am.’ His grin was furtive, as though smiling at her was a liberty he could scarcely afford to take. ‘Everyone is, of course, but especially the wife and me. Thank Mago those Faceless scum didn’t do … well, what everyone said they’d done.’