The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (18 page)

She couldn’t help tensing when Espel brought the brush to her cheek, and she noticed Espel tense in turn. Then, very gently, the steeplejill eased pigment onto the skin below one of Pen’s scars, and started to speak.

‘My brother and me, we used to do each other’s makeup when we were kids. Well,
he
used to do mine, and then he’d let me smear stuff all over his face and get one of his friends to fix it later. I was only seven. One autumn I won a steeplechase – I was the fastest girl at school, and I was going to have to go up on stage in front of the entire year to get my prize. My brother said he’d help me get ready, but I was so scared I kept jerking around under his brush. When he asked me what was wrong I told him I was afraid of all those people looking at me. Most of my classmates had managed to buy at least a mole or a dimple or
something
original for their false sides, but I was still as symmetrical as symmetrical gets. I was so scared what they’d think, how they’d see me,
what
their eyes might make me into, that I’d thrown my breakfast up.

Her fingers hovered over Pen’s skin with a closeness that stalled her breath, but in the mirror, the half-faced girl was invisible and the brush seemed to float in the air like magic.

‘So my bro said to me, “Think of it like this: right now, what I’m painting on you is another face, the one that goes between your face and their eyes. The makeup’s a mask, that’s all. So you don’t need to be scared of how they’ll see you, because they won’t see you at all.”’ Espel smiled to herself at the memory. ‘“The only one who’ll see you is me,” he said. ‘“And you can trust me to see you right.”’

She’d expertly layered dark blue and red around one of Pen’s scars, creating a vivid optical illusion that raised the twisted tissue from her cheek.

A mask.
Pen latched on to the idea:
It’s Parva they’ll see: the most beautiful woman in the world, not me.

Her breath moved a little easier in her lungs. ‘Thank you,’ she said, very quietly.

Espel blushed and shrugged Pen’s gratitude awkwardly away.

Pen looked into the mirror, at the ghostly floating brush.
You’re a mirrorstocrat
, she thought.
You can see yourself. You do your own makeup.

‘Espel?’ she said casually.

‘Ma’am?’

‘How come you don’t show up in mirrors?’

Espel actually laughed.

‘Give me a break, Countess! I’m only a half-face. I can’t
afford
to just go spilling my image into every passing mirror the way you can. Image is essence, after all. Gotta hold on to it.’ Espel picked up an eyebrow pencil. ‘I was brought up thrifty; runs in the family.’

‘The family?’

‘For four generations. Ever since my great-grandprofiles were reflected through from the Old City.’

‘Like I was,’ Pen said.

Espel’s lip quirked. ‘No, Countess, not like you were – not even close. They were half-faces; you were born in an instant, out of infinite reflections, infinite wealth. My great-grandprofiles gestated over
years
– their originators in the Old City took the exact same pose in the exact same mirrors with the exact same light, time after time, and every time those mirrors retained and remembered a tiny little bit of what they saw.’

Reflections and memories
, Pen thought.

Espel sighed. ‘Fifty per cent’s about the lower limit for consciousness in a Simbryo. When there were enough stored reflections of my great-grandprofiles to make up half a face, that’s when they woke up and found themselves here, confused and scared, stumbling away from the mirrors that made them before they could grow any more, remembering only half of who they once were. That’s why there aren’t any third-faces or three-quarter-faces, only halves and mirrorstocrats. Infinite and sparse. Rich and … not so rich.’

Espel looked into the mirror, at the emptiness there. ‘I
could,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘if I tried, I
could
cast a reflection. I could give up a little piece of myself to see myself. I won’t lie, it’s tempting – but it’s also addictive. There are hospitals in the Kennels full of faded men and women who couldn’t stop admiring themselves, and I don’t want to start down that road.’

Her hand rose to brush the skin on her prosthetic cheek.

‘Besides, staying respectable takes pretty much everything I can spare. Ids are reflections too, remember, and reflections ain’t free.’

She turned her gaze towards Pen’s reflection. She shook her head as she picked up a dark pencil. ‘It’s strange, I never would have thought—’

She caught Pen’s eye, broke off and blushed deeper.

‘Never would have thought what?’ Pen asked.

‘Nothing, Countess,’

‘You never would have thought what?’ Pen insisted.

‘That you’d be scared to be seen,’ Espel said quietly. ‘I mean, you’re a mirrorstocrat. You can see yourself any time you want. You can make yourself with your own eyes – be however you see
yourself
.’ Espel pursed her seam-stitched lips wistfully at such luxury. ‘What have you got to be afraid of?’

‘That maybe how I see myself is how I really am—’ Pen said before she thought.

There was a long silence, broken by a long low beeping coming from the desk-monitor.

‘That’ll be them calling from downstairs.’ Espel set the brush down. ‘Are you ready?’

Pen stretched her fingers experimentally. They answered her. She looked in the mirror at her stark scars, her inverted image: Parva’s face.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

*

The digital numbers blinked to 50 and the lift doors slid open. Pen went to step out, but Edward rumbled, ‘Ma’am?’ in such a pained way that she paused.

He jerked his head at Espel. ‘Go and make sure the chamber is prepared for the countess.’

Espel stiffened very slightly, then dropped a curtsey. After much embarrassed protestation, she was wearing a black shirt and trousers Pen had found in one of Parva’s seven cavernous walk-in wardrobes, a fact Edward seemed to note with disapprobation as she walked away.

Pen waited. The bodyguard’s massive forehead creased until it looked like sedimentary rock, but he didn’t speak.

‘Edward,’ Pen said at last. ‘They’re waiting for me.’

‘Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am.’ He rubbed his temples with his fingertips. ‘This is most awkward, ma’am.’

Pen felt something tighten in her belly.

‘What is?’

‘Milady’s private affairs are her own concern …’

‘But?’

‘The steeplejill girl … given her … background … are you sure she’s suitable?’

Pen glanced over her shoulder, but Espel had already vanished
around a corner. ‘Her
background
? What, have you gotta be posh to be a lady-in-waiting now?’

‘I didn’t mean for her position, ma’am. I meant for – for …’

When some people were uncomfortable they squirmed. Edward went the other way. He froze. Beads of sweat appeared symmetrically on his brow. He was an ice-sculpture slowly melting in the heat of his own embarrassment.

‘You must understand, Countess. I don’t judge, I like Espel—’

Pen arched an eyebrow. ‘I think I just felt the earth shift under the weight of
that
lie.’

‘Fine,’ Edward admitted, ‘I don’t like her at all. But what do you expect? I’m your bodyguard; I need to be ready to put two bullets in the brain of anyone who gets within twenty feet of you.
Liking people
,’ he said with the sort of curled-lip distaste others might keep for describing animal vivisection, ‘is not in the job description. Still, I loathe the girl on a purely professional basis. When it gets out you’ve taken a half-face for a lover, your fans won’t be so moderate.’

Pen felt her jaw loosen. ‘When it gets out I’ve done
what
?’ she said, but Edward was still talking.

‘She’ll get hate mail, death threats probably, and if you two are going to insist on spending any time in public together, then there’s a chance some nut-job delusional fanboy will try to blow her head off to prove his love to you, and wind up catching yours instead.’ He sighed. ‘So you can see why my professional instincts are telling me to stuff the
girl in the nearest bin. It’s got nothing to do with how ugly she is—’

‘She’s not ugly,’ Pen snapped.

‘She’s pretty damned symmetrical—’

‘So are you,’ Pen countered.

Edward flinched. His fingers brushed the two scars on his chin as though reassuring himself they were there. He exhaled slowly. ‘Countess,’ he said at last, ‘sleep with who you want, but please, for my sake, be a little more subtle. Letting her spend the night in your apartments, lending her your clothes – the tabloids will be all over it in about four minutes flat, and after that, the rumours won’t ever,
ever
die.’

Pen was ready to laugh, to flat-out contradict him, but she hesitated. It dawned on her that she didn’t have a better explanation. She wasn’t sure there
was
a better explanation.
You’re a celebrity. People are going to gossip.

And that gossip would give her the perfect cover to keep her lady-in-waiting as close as she liked.

She looked Edward in the eye. ‘I don’t know if I like you any more,’ she said, her tone one of grudging concession.

He shrugged apologetically. ‘Technically,
being liked
isn’t in the job description either, Countess.’

Pen turned on her heel and stalked off without another word.

*

Espel was waiting in front of a pair of silver-inlaid mahogany doors, guarded by a pair of armed, black-uniformed men.

‘Are they ready for us?’ Pen asked.

The steeplejill didn’t look at her.

‘Espel?’

‘What—? Oh! Yes, ma’am. I think so, all set up, the guards say. Only we were late, so Driyard and his team have nipped off for a quick photo-op with Senator Case. There’s no one in there right now.’

‘A photo-op with a photographer?’ Pen asked. ‘Isn’t that a little—?’

‘A little what, ma’am?’

‘
Meta?
’

Espel looked nonplussed. ‘It’s Beau
Driyard.
He’s the most celebrated photographer in the city – his pictures can make or break how you’re seen,’ she said. ‘Case wants him on side. He’s dead famous.’

Pen smoothed the front of her top. ‘Okay, point him out to me when they get back. They tell me I’ve met him before, but I’ve got no idea what he looks like.’

Espel smirked at that. ‘I don’t reckon you’ll have any trouble recognising him. Driyard’s done well for himself. He sticks out in a crowd.’

The steeplejill went back to looking at the door. She adjusted her cuffs, smoothed her blonde hair down, then adjusted her cuffs again. She was even twitchier than Pen felt.

‘What is it?’ Pen demanded.

‘Oh, it’s nothing it’s just …’ Espel broke out into a sheepish grin. ‘It’s just … I’m about to be in the same room
as the
Goutierre Device
.’ She leaned on the name reverently. ‘The machine that makes the whole Lottery
tick.
I mean, I watch the Draw on TV every year, and I read about it in school, but I never thought I’d actually see it
in person
. When you said they were having the shoot in the Hall of Beauty, and that I could come … Well, this is kind of a big thing for me.’

She looked so excited, so nervous and so outright
happy
that Pen felt her own fears subside a little. There was something unguarded in the emotion that reminded her of Beth.

An idea occurred to her. ‘There’s no one in there right now?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Fancy sneaking in a private viewing then, before they come?’

Espel’s eyes stretched into tiny blue oceans at the thought. ‘By ourselves? The guards’d
never
let us do that.’

Pen looked past her shoulder. The black-uniformed sentries were staring straight ahead, but their eyes kept flicking towards her. She smiled and waved at them. Star-struck grins blossomed on their faces and they waved guiltily back.

‘Do you know,’ Pen said, ‘I think we might be able to persuade them.’

The Hall of Beauty was built on a scale Beth would have called
ludicrous
. Rich purple drapes hung open over forty-foot windows, dwarfing the lights and reflectors already set up for the shoot. Brushed-steel beams arched overhead like metal ribs, making Pen feel like she was in a vast chest cavity – that the palace was a beast that had
inhaled
her.

If the hall was a chest cavity, then the sprawling metal-and-glass machine which dominated it was its beating heart. Pen felt her own breath shorten as she looked at it.

The Goutierre Device, a huge circular array of curved lenses arranged in concentric layers and suspended from the hall’s distant ceiling, shone in the early morning light. It looked as though someone had blown up a glass planet and then frozen it just at the moment the tectonic plates had begun to fly apart. In the centre lay the padded leather bench where the Looking-Glass Lottery’s fortunate winner would lie to receive their prize, all the lights and all the attention of the city focused on them. For one night, they would be the centre of this reflected world.

Next to her, Espel was utterly awestruck. She turned slowly through a full three hundred and sixty degrees, her arms spread, taking it all in. ‘I can’t believe I’m actually here,’ she whispered. ‘Do you have
any
idea how much I want to just jump on that couch right now?’

‘I’m guessing that would be frowned upon?’ Pen said.

‘It’d get me very, very shot by your gun-toting fan club over there.’ She jerked her head to where the blackuniformed Chevaliers stood in the doorway. ‘You know what? It might almost be worth it, to know what it was like,’ she muttered wistfully. ‘Just for a few seconds, to have a proper complete aesthetic. Not
this
’ – she brushed her prosthetic right cheek with familiar distaste – ‘but a full, real face.’

‘Where would it come from?’ Pen asked. ‘I mean, the new face would have to match yours perfectly, but not be a copy of it. That’s the whole point right? Where would you
get
something like that? I mean if you were
born
with only’ – she gestured at Espel’s left side – ‘then would the other half even exist?’