The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (13 page)

‘The final promo shots for the Lottery, remember? It’s been booked for weeks, and what with Draw Night only being a week away, I thought …’

Her enthusiasm drained away with her words and her lined face looked suddenly shrivelled. ‘I thought they’d destroyed you, Parva,’ she confessed. ‘When I saw that video
and then I heard you’d disappeared … I thought they’d destroyed
us
.’

Pen felt her stomach pitch and the image of the bloody handprint on the bathroom floor flashed into her mind. ‘What video?’ she asked.

Case held her gaze for a long moment. Pen watched the wattle on her neck move as she dry-swallowed. Then without another word she reached into her jacket and pulled out a touchscreen phone. Her fingers danced over it for a second, then she handed it to Pen.

A sound crackled from its tiny speakers, low but incessant: a human voice – groaning.

The video was dark and grainy, filmed on a single fixed camera in what looked like a cellar, or maybe an attic. Pen could make out three figures on the small display. Two of them faced the camera; they wore black sweatshirts with the hoods pulled up and dark bandanas covered their noses and mouths. They looked the way the kids from Pen’s neighbourhood did when they were playing at being gangsters. One of them held a dark shape and Pen felt a jolt of shock as she recognised it as a gun.

Mennett’s words when she was lying on the dock came back to her:
You’d covered your face … I thought you were an insurgent.

The third figure sat between the other two with his back to the camera. As far as Pen could see, he was naked. He was tied down with blue nylon ropes, so tightly that his skin bulged between the wooden slats of the chair back.

Pen watched the phone’s timer ticking off seconds in the bottom right corner. The thin moaning that emanated from the speaker was the only sound – the only sign that the video was playing at all, so still were the figures on the screen.

After a full minute, one of the hooded figures spoke. ‘We are the Faceless.’

Pen could see his mouth moving beneath the thin fabric of the bandana. His voice was distorted, like someone had messed with the sound before releasing the film. ‘We are unseen, but we will be heard. We could be
anyone
. We could be
anywhere
– and we
are
everywhere. This is not a demand.’ The hooded figure gestured at the man in the chair. ‘It is a
demonstration
.’

At the word ‘demonstration’, the man in the chair flinched, straining against the ropes. The speaker gripped his shoulder and the moaning stopped abruptly, giving way to wheezy, frightened breaths.

‘The earl here used to believe that beauty was his birthright. We’ve taught him to look inside himself, and he knows better now. He has contributed –
generously
– to our cause.’

Pen’s skin felt too tight on her. She was suddenly acutely aware of her scars, as though they were crawling like grubs over her face.

The hooded figure leaned in close to the camera. His eyes gleamed in the room’s dim light, and Pen could see his irises were blue, flecked with hazel and gold. The pattern of colour was exactly symmetrical.

‘The tyranny of the Looking-Glass Lottery
will
end,’ he said.

The chair legs shrieked against the floor as he dragged
the naked man around to face the camera.

Pen wanted to scream, but the sound never quite made it out. It lodged in her throat – half-born distress – choking her.

Sweat plastered the naked man’s hair to his forehead, gleaming in the light from the room’s single bulb. But
below
that hairline – where the man’s face ought to have been – was
nothing
.

The earl had no face.

Pale, bloodless skin continued unbroken, dipping shallowly over eye sockets and cresting gently where the nose ought to have been. There were no ears.

For a moment Pen thought they’d covered his head in some kind of skin-coloured fabric, but then the camera was dragged in close and she realised she could see sweat beading from the tiny pores.

The only feature in that nightmarish expanse of skin was where the man’s mouth should have been: a dark lipless hole, rough-edged as though made with too blunt a knife. It was no larger than a child’s mouth, and somehow its tininess was the worst thing in that massive adult unface. Its edges worked and stretched clumsily, and through it, the earl began to keen.

‘We are the Faceless,’ the hooded man said somewhere off-screen. ‘And now, so is he.’

The screen went dark.

Pen felt the phone eased from her unresisting fingers. Slowly she became aware of the sunlight, the glass-housed
garden around her, the fresh smell of the leaves. Senator Case’s voice was tight. ‘The poor man disappeared three days ago and this showed up online twelve hours later. When you vanished too, we …’ Her voice sank for a moment, and then she recovered herself. ‘We feared the worst. I showed it you, only because you could have found it yourself online in about four seconds.’

‘Who was he?’ Pen croaked, when she finally managed to find her voice.

‘John Wingborough, Earl of Tufnell Park.’ Her voice caught on the name. ‘Jack. My nephew. Very handsome man. Or at least he was – Mago knows how many more bombs and guns
his
face will have bought them when they fenced it. ‘Her voice turned grim. ‘I hope they’ve killed him. It would be kinder.’

Pen didn’t bother stating the obvious: that kindness didn’t appear to sit very high on the Faceless’ list of priorities.

Senator Case lifted Pen’s chin. ‘Listen to me now,’ she said. ‘You are the face of the
Looking-Glass Lottery.
Nothing and no one in London-Under-Glass will be better protected, and that includes me and the other six sleepless old farts who run the place.’ She leaned in and kissed Pen’s forehead, and Pen just about managed not to tense up.

‘I promise you,’ the old woman told her, ‘what happened to John Wingborough won’t happen to Parva Khan.’

Pen nodded, but she felt chilly claws grasping at her stomach, because Parva Khan wasn’t standing there. And in reality, the senator could promise nothing of the sort.

Senator Case’s private lift serviced only her office and gardens on the top floor of the building, so Pen had to ride all the way back to ground level to go anywhere. When she stepped out into the cool granite expanse of the lobby, there was a third black-clad, chisel-chinned column of muscle standing next to Bruno and Max.

‘Countess.’ He inclined his head respectfully. ‘My name is Edward. I’ll be your bodyguard from now on.’

Pen took him in. He was like a cliff with a head on it. He had two small scars patched to one side of his perfectly symmetrical chin, just to the right of the silver seam that bisected his face. She blew out her cheeks. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

*

Actually, Pen was rather grateful for Edward. For one thing, he had the soldiers’ habit of staring straight ahead when talking to anyone he believed to be his superior, which meant that he never actually looked at Pen’s face, which was a relief because all the gawping by everyone else was making her want to hide in a cupboard.

More importantly, following her new bodyguard around let Pen hide the fact that she had no idea at all where she was going.

In a small sterile room in the basement, a mirrorstocratic doctor in round wire-framed spectacles gave her a clean bill of health and, to her embarrassed bemusement, a lollipop. Afterwards Edward took her up to the sixty-second floor. Pen looked left and right down the corridor. There were only two doors: polished dark wood, one at either end. If these were apartments, you didn’t get many to a floor.

‘I’m afraid the palace reassigned your lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Deptford, ma’am,’ Edward said as he led the way to the right-hand door and opened it for her. ‘You know what her ladyship’s like – she does go through them a little fast. We’ll arrange a replacement for you as soon as we can, but getting security clearance for new staff takes time. In the meantime, do let me know if I can help you with anything.’

‘Thanks,’ Pen said. An unpleasant prickle ran over her skin. Was there something possessive in his tone, or was she just imagining it? Salt’s face flickered briefly in front of her eyes. ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’

‘Ah, Countess? One more thing.’ Edward offered her something in the palm of his meaty hand. It was a black leather fob with a silver button about the size of a five-pence coin sticking out of it. ‘A replacement panic button. I trust you don’t need a refresher in how it works?’

‘I panic, I push it?’ Pen hazarded.

He nodded approvingly. ‘Then stand well back and let me remove the cause of your panic from your life.’

‘Via extreme blood-curdling violence?’ Pen eyed the man’s hefty build.

‘Countess, please,’ he tutted. ‘Via
wholly proportionate
blood-curdling violence.’ He smiled briefly, the smile of a man secure in his own lethality. ‘Rest well, Countess. I’ll be just down the hall if you need me.’

*

‘Wow, Parv,’ Pen muttered as Edward closed the front door behind her. ‘Quite some gig you had going on, didn’t you?’

The sitting room was as big as a stage in a West End theatre. The wall on the far side of it was all one vast window, and through it Pen saw London-Under-Glass, spread out before her.

Crest after crest of gables and rooftops rose like breakers on a slate ocean. Uncannily shaped tower blocks reached up to surreal heights, and the early-setting winter sun limned the clouds in orange. It was an Impressionist dream of a city realised in brick and stone and concrete and glass, rather than paint, and it was beautiful.

It took a long time for Pen to drag her eyes away. She blinked and shook herself, and explored the rest of the apartment.

Pen reckoned she could have fitted the total floor space of her Dalston home into half of one room. The dark floorboards were liberally covered in thick white rugs and there were several comfy-looking sofas, but the living space still felt
cavernous, and the yawning fireplace didn’t help. A brushed-steel staircase spiralled up to a mezzanine level, which turned out to be Parva’s bedroom. Both bedroom and living room came complete with fully stocked bars. Apparently, Parva hadn’t needed a fake ID to satisfy her newfound thirst.

Best of all, neatly tucked into a corner, was a desk with a keyboard and a flat-screen monitor.

Pen tossed the panic button onto one of the sofas, crossed to the desk and sat down. She hit a key and as the screen brightened she felt a little catch in her throat: Parva was looking out of the glass at her.

It was a video, paused. Judging by the angle, it had been recorded on the webcam set into the frame of the monitor Pen was now looking at. She moved the mouse and clicked ‘play’.

‘My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen,’ video-Parva said. The crackle of the speakers made her voice spectral. She looked focused, like she was practising a speech. ‘Welcome to the Draw for the two-hundred-and-fourth Looking-Glass Lottery. I am Parva Khan, Countess of Dalston, and I am delighted …’ She faltered, frowning. ‘Damn, it’s
honoured
, isn’t it, not delighted … Bet this looks rubbish too.’ Video-Parva sighed. ‘Okay, let’s start again.’ Her face froze as the video hit the end of its playback.

‘Countess of Dalston, huh?’ Pen murmured. ‘Check you out.’

She clicked out of the player and toured through the various folders on the computer’s desktop, but there weren’t any other files saved.

She sat back, drumming her fingers on the desk, watching the dim reflection in the polished surface. Then Senator Case’s voice came back to her:
You could have found it online yourself in about four seconds.

None of the icons looked familiar, so Pen just clicked through them at random until she found something that looked like a web browser.

—two-hundred-and-fourth Looking-Glass Lottery—

—you are the Face of the Looking-Glass Lottery—

—the tyranny of the Looking-Glass Lottery must end—

Pen looked down at the keyboard. The letters on the keys were reversed, of course. She pursed her lips and typed.

‘gl.yrettolssalggnikool’ appeared, right to left in the browser’s bar, and she hit enter.

Parva’s face materialised onto the screen. There was no header with the Lottery’s name on it, no fancy banner. Apparently Pen’s smiling, scarred mirror-sister was all the branding the event needed. Above it were three links in a graceful, backwards calligraphic font:

It took her a moment to get her head around the mirror-font, then she clicked the ‘history’ link and read under her breath, ‘Inaugurated one hundred and four years ago by Senator Howard Bramble, the Looking-Glass Lottery has
become one of London-Under-Glass’ most cherished institutions: more than more than a century of philanthropic tradition that makes the Simularchy such a beloved part of the city’s heritage.

Read Senator Bramble’s inaugural speech
here
.

Pen clicked. Under a painting of a man in a wig and a frock coat with a moustache that would do a yeti proud was a mass of inverse text. Pen had to concentrate hard at first, but reading in reverse began to feel natural surprisingly quickly.