The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (30 page)

‘Pen! Stay with me!’ a familiar voice called to her.

She fired.

Espel fell, bearing Pen to the ground with the slow inevitability of an avalanche.

‘Pen …’

Pen looked over the steeplejill’s shoulder. The monster half-submerged in the wall was a girl. Grey-red blood oozed, slow as cement, from the ruined eye socket, over a face Pen knew as well as her own. The girl in the wall seemed to be trying to focus on Pen, to meet her eyes with her own, but the blood meant she couldn’t focus. She tried
to reach up to clear it, but the wall trapped her arm, sealing around it just above a mark shaped like a tower-block crown.

‘Pen,’ she whispered. ‘Stay with me.’

‘Beth?’ Pen croaked. The hammer and echo of machine-gun fire died slowly in her ears, replaced by the soft hum of electronics and the
shush
of distant traffic through a window. She felt soft, warm sheets over her.

‘Beth? Who’s Beth?’ a dry voice asked.

Pen opened her eyes.

She was lying in Parva’s bed, back in her apartment in the palace. She was wearing pyjamas. Her hijab was gone, and there was a thick, sticky dressing on the back of her head where it had struck the ground.

The lights in the room were out, but the city glow seeping in around the curtain outlined a tall, thin figure sitting patiently on the edge of her bed. The figure reached out and flicked on the lamp on the dresser, illuminating her wrinkled face.

‘Who’s Beth, Parva?’ Senator Case asked again.

‘Senator?’ Pen squinted in the sudden light. Awareness of her situation crashed in on her: she’d been found without bodyguards, miles from the palace in the middle of the night, loudly trying to flout London-Under-Glass’ border laws. Groggily, she tried to think of a plausible explanation. ‘I—’

‘Maggie.’ Case corrected gently. ‘And save your strength. Your new lady-in-waiting told me everything when I interviewed her an hour ago.’

‘Maggie – I – she did?’

‘Indeed.’ Case smoothed her already immaculate grey suit. It must have been before five in the morning, but she showed no signs of having been roughly woken or hurriedly dressed. Pen wondered if she ever slept.

‘Espel told us about you waking from a nightmare in the middle of the night – how you kept repeating, “They’re all looking at me, I have to get out,” over and over, how she tried to persuade you otherwise, but eventually had to settle for following you and how you wandered apparently aimlessly for hours, and she managed to guide you to shelter in the immigration station when the slatestorm struck.’ She paused. ‘I must say, a number of very expensive eyebrows were raised around here when you appointed a former steeplejill as your lady-in-waiting, but it’s lucky you did. I doubt anyone else would have had the instincts to guide you safely through that kind of weather. We all owe the ugly little thing a debt.’ She pursed her lips, as though the idea of being in debt to a half-face amused her.

Pen stretched slowly. ‘She said that? That I … freaked out?’

Case nodded, her lined face set in a sympathetic smile. Pen looked at that smile and remembered the undone face of the man in the video. Jack Wingborough’s voice echoed in her mind.

Auntie Maggie is ever so efficient.

There was no sign on her face at all of what she was capable of. Even her eyes were kind.

‘It’s all right,’ Case said. ‘You think you’re the first of the Lottery’s Faces to have a little wobble? It’s completely understandable.’

‘It is?’

‘Of course.
Of course
,’ she said soothingly. ‘It’s our privilege that we of the mirrorstocracy can see ourselves in the mirror; one of the gazes that defines us is our own. But it is still only one out of thousands of pairs of eyes that we encounter in our lives. And for the Face of the Looking-Glass Lottery, that effect, that
dilution
of our power to decide who we are, is multiplied a thousandfold again.’

Case smiled and shook her head. ‘Who amongst us, faced with the prospect of stepping in front of the cameras on Draw Night, would
not
be afraid of losing ourselves in all those gazes, of having them pin us like a butterfly to card? Who wouldn’t fear that after that they would never be free?’

Case laughed. It sounded genuine. ‘There have been six Lottery Faces while I’ve held office, and without exception they’ve all been terrified of their first Draw Night. Admittedly, they did not all express their anxiety quite so dramatically as you have, but still. You shouldn’t worry.’

The amusement in her voice dried up, shrinking like a puddle on a hot pavement. ‘We can’t have you running off again though, Parva,’ she said, ‘so I’ll tell you what. I’m going to tell you a story – one I didn’t tell any of the others, because I think you need to hear it more than they did, and because …’ She hesitated. ‘Well, because we have enough in common that I think you’ll understand.’

Her brown eyes locked onto Pen’s. ‘The story is about a little girl. Let’s call her’ – her lip quirked – ‘Margarethe. She grew up with her mother in an estate in the Old City, Kylemore Close in Newham – perhaps you remember it from the days before your mirrorbirth?’

Pen shook her head, although she knew the place well enough.

‘Ah well.’ Case shrugged. ‘Margarethe’s mother was very young. She was a bright girl, kind, and very resourceful. You would have liked her, I think. She was only sixteen when Margarethe was born – she was already pregnant with her when she came to London from Gdansk, although she did not know it at the time. Margarethe’s mother had no parents in the Old City, she was alone, so she set about doing what she had to do to look after her little girl. They grew up together, Margarethe and her mother; they were each other’s best friends. On her first day at school, Margarethe cried when her mother left her, and then she sat glumly in the classroom like it was a prison cell, hating the seconds as they passed. Every day for two years she sat at her desk and prayed to be free.’

‘And then one day’ – her voice didn’t waver by so much as a semitone – ‘her mother’s colleagues came for her. There was a hammering at the door, and shouting, and the sound of cheap wood splintering, and suddenly a place that had always been safe simply wasn’t safe any more. Margarethe was only eight, and at first she didn’t understand what the big men with knives who crashed into her kitchen were
shouting about. She was very frightened, of course, but she tried to tell them that they had it wrong; that her mother was a good person who would never have cheated them like they were saying she had. The men didn’t listen – she didn’t have the
power
to make them listen. Perhaps, Margarethe thought, her mother would be able to explain.

‘But Margarethe’s mother didn’t protest. She didn’t even look at the men; she just looked at Margarethe and she was crying, and she said, “Darling, if you love me, then run.”

‘So Margarethe ran: she ran and she ran, as hard and fast as she could, to prove to her mother how much she loved her. She darted between the swearing men, dodging the huge hands that reached for her, and sped out of the door and down the stairwell and into the maze of the estate.

‘She didn’t stop until she came to a place where she sometimes played: a narrow, weed-choked space between the backs of buildings where washing hung out of windows overhead, and where someone, years before, had dumped an old patina-splotched mirror, propped against a wall. The mirror sat opposite a window, and on bright summer days Margarethe would stand between them, transfixed by the images that stretched like paperchain cut-outs into the reflections on either side. She stood like that now, tearful and scared, just
hoping
for something to happen and— Well, I’m sure you can guess what did.’

Pen nodded, but didn’t speak.

‘Margarethe’s mirror-sister took a different but similar name and the two girls became fast friends, united by
common experience and divided only by the width of a mirror-pane. Even when the newly minted mirrorstocrat was adopted by a rich New City family, she would sneak back to that spot and to the girl she’d been sundered from. She kept faith with her sister for years.

‘Neither of the sisters ever saw their mother again. The men never came for Margarethe in anything other than her nightmares, and neither did the council or the police. There was no one to tell her to go back to school; she finally had the freedom she had wished for in the classroom, but those last few seconds in her home had already shown her that freedom was a chimera.

‘You couldn’t really be free, she’d realised, because there are too many other people in the world: people who might mean you harm – people who can knock you off the path you want to walk on. The clockwork metaphor is a cliché, admittedly’ – Case winced in apparent embarrassment – ‘but it’s a cliché for a reason: we are all cogs, and the only way you can control yourself is to control all the other cogs that interlock with you, and so control all the cogs that interlock with
them
, and so on. True freedom is predicated on absolute control.’ She stated it simply, like it was an obvious fact.

‘Margarethe’s mirror-sister had by now grown into a powerful young woman, and she knew she would become more so in time. So even though it was risky and her new family didn’t approve, when she was sixteen she snuck back to that place between the towers one last time, and she made both of the girls she saw in the reflection a promise. She
promised that she would be free, for both of them. And if total control was what was needed, then that was what she would seek.’

She shrugged self-deprecatingly. ‘It’s an impossible task, admittedly, but we stumble and we strive and we approximate success as best we can. Now, you may be thinking, “What is the old bag bleating about?” but I think you can probably see my point?’

Pen didn’t respond. Case rubbed her shoulder fondly. ‘I think you understand how important control is, Parva. I can see it in you. I think it was the
loss of control
that really scared you last night, but you don’t need to be afraid. We’re on your side: me, the Senate, the mirrorstocracy, the whole of London-Under-Glass is behind you. It’s my city, and I’ve seen to it: this is the biggest and most tightly managed publicity campaign ever seen this side of the mirror.

‘You don’t need to be afraid of their gaze, Parva. Let them look. We can control how they see you. The only thing waiting for you tomorrow night is their love.’

She gently lifted Pen’s head and plumped the pillows, then pulled the duvet further up over her. Pen stiffened as the old woman leaned in and kissed her scarred forehead.

‘Get some rest. It’s only a day until the Draw, and we need you as well as you can be.’ She stood. ‘We’ve kept that steeplejill of yours waiting outside – she’s been
terribly
eager to get in to see you, hopping from one foot to the other.’

Case arched an eyebrow and then smiled like a parent who thinks they’re cool. ‘You have yourself a good one there,
I think, Parva. I like her. But if this …
thing
you two have is going to continue, I think we’d better give her a raise. Enough so that she can buy herself some freckles and possibly a dimple or two. Just to keep it respectable, you know?’

Pen felt her gorge rising behind the smile she returned. ‘I’ll ask her about it.’ She kept her tone light. ‘After all, it’s her face.’

Case laughed, though Pen wasn’t joking. She hesitated, her hand on the door handle. ‘Parva,’ she said casually, ‘we’re all grateful to Espel’s quick thinking last night of course, but it is … regrettable that the only shelter available was the station. I don’t know how much you remember about the Faceless attack.’

‘The Faceless attack?’ Pen said sharply.

‘That’s right,’ Case said evenly. ‘They bombed the place out – the Chevaliers were heroic, but because of the storm, they arrived too late to stop the terrorists’ racist onslaught. It claimed the lives of every one of the new immigrants. A terrible tragedy, a terrible crime.’ She paused. ‘I have personally spoken to every one of the Chevaliers and medical staff who survived the attack, and they all agree that that is what happened. Just as they all agree that they never saw the most beautiful woman in London-Under-Glass last night. As far as they were concerned, she must have been tucked up in her bed here in the Shard, where she belongs.’

Pen swallowed hard under Case’s gentle but unblinking gaze.

‘In the name of control?’ she asked. Her voice sounded thin in her ears. Case smiled thinly but said nothing.

‘I don’t remember anything about a Faceless attack last night,’ Pen said at last.

‘Of course not,’ Case said. ‘How could you? It was miles away.’

She opened the door. Outside Pen saw Espel, nervously shifting from foot to foot. She was back in the black blouse and trousers Pen had lent her – and Pen couldn’t help but notice that despite having been the one nearly snatched by the concrete-skinned creature, the half-faced girl wasn’t getting the pillow-fluffing treatment. She looked haggard, but just about together.

The steeplejill ducked her head low to the senator. Given Espel’s disdain for formality, Pen could only conclude that she was very,
very
afraid of the old mirrorstocrat.

‘Your mistress is awake,’ Case told her. ‘Look after her, the way you always do.’

As soon as the door closed, Espel rooted in her pocket and threw something to Pen. When she looked at the small, cold, surprisingly heavy object she started: nestled in her palm was Goutierre’s Eye.

She stared in astonishment for a few seconds before she realised the marble’s core was dull and motionless and there was a bloom of small cracks on one side.

‘Where did you get it?’ She turned the thing over, examining it.

Espel smiled slightly sheepishly. ‘From my mum,’ she said. ‘Reflectionday present. It’s a toy, Countess – official merchandise. I took it with me everywhere. It won’t fool anyone for long, but it’s the right size and from a distance …’ She shrugged. ‘I thought it might be useful to have something to switch the real eye for.’