The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (34 page)

‘
A diversion?
What do you want me to do, breakdance?’

Pen hesitated. ‘Can you?’

‘Not even close.’

‘Well … do something else, sing, or scream “fire!” or anything,’ Pen begged. ‘Just distract her friend – just for a minute, please.’

She didn’t give Espel a chance to argue; she just shoved the steeplejill into their path as the half-faced Parva and her redheaded friend approached the alley. ‘HEY – excuse me, ladies,’ Espel said loudly as she barrelled between them. She spread her arms, made herself as big as she could, trying to block the redhead’s line of sight to her companion.

‘Uh – there are important precipitecture works taking place. The whole side of the street is structurally unsound,
very
dangerous—’

The girls stared at the strange steeplejill.

‘What?’ the half-faced Parva started. ‘Precipitecture? But everyone else is—’

Her protest ended in a yelp as she was dragged into the alley by her wrist, pushed against the wall and had a hand clapped over her mouth.

Pen held her there for a second. Everything about her was
symmetrical on either side of the silver seam. Her scars, her pores, everything, except …

Around the girl’s brown eyes, the tiny red filament cracks of capillary were slightly different.

She remembered Jack Wingborough with the distorting half-mask pressed to his face.

‘The only real market for them is Mirrorstocrats on the run from their own governments. Most have them it bonded to their skin – it’s safer – it means it won’t peel off at an inconveniently public moment.
’

Most of them have it bonded to their skin …

The girl’s eyes were wide. Pen pressed a finger to her lips and the girl gave a shuddering little nod before Pen lowered her hand, and then hissed in excitement, ‘
Mother Mirror! Countess Parva Khan?
What are you—? I’m – I’m a
huge
fan.’ She proudly brushed her fingertips through the air over the makeup-lined scars on her right cheek.

‘They’re lovely,’ Pen said. ‘The best I’ve seen. I … I was just passing and I just – I wanted to tell you that.’

The girl beamed incredulously.

Pen said apologetically, ‘Sorry for all the spy-movie stuff. I’m trying to stay incognito, hence the somewhat unfortunate wardrobe choices.’ She gestured to the steeplejill armour she was wearing and gave the half-faced girl a conspiratorial smile.

‘What’s your name?’ Pen asked.

‘Aisha.’

Pen swallowed what felt like a boulder of air, but her smile
stayed on as she said casually, ‘Great headscarf too, Aisha.’ The name was like brambles in her mouth. ‘The colour’s wonderful. I’d totally love one like it.’

The half-faced girl blushed with pleasure, and Pen could almost see her imagining telling her friends that the Face of the Looking-Glass Lottery had taken a fashion tip from her.

‘Could you let me know where you got it?’ Pen asked.

‘Oh sure, I …’

It wasn’t until Pen saw confusion cloud the girl’s face that she was certain. She’d only seen that expression once before, but it was one she would never forget. It was the look her father had worn three days and a lifetime before, when Pen had asked him why he’d moved to Wendover Road – the look of someone reaching inside themselves for a memory that had been scoured away.

Aisha – the girl who had been Parva Khan – swallowed. A symmetrical frown crinkled her skin. ‘I’m really sorry.’ She sounded genuinely distressed. ‘I just … I can’t remember. It’s completely gone out of my head.’

Pen nodded. Her gracious smile hurt her cheeks. ‘Don’t worry about it – I just wondered.’ She paused and looked out of the alley-mouth. ‘New at school?’

The girl looked at her incredulously. ‘How could you possibly know that? I only started here yesterday.’

‘You walk like a new girl,’ Pen said, as if it were a real explanation. ‘I’m good at reading people. Were you … were you happy, where you were before?’

Aisha-who-had-been-Parva scuffed her feet. ‘It was okay,’ she said in a voice that suggested it really hadn’t been. ‘It’s early days, but this is better.’

Pen remembered the mercury-coloured solution her parent’s memories had made. She looked into those oh-so-familiar brown eyes and wondered what bottled memories this girl had drunk to replace those stolen from her.

Johnny Naphtha’s oil-slick voice whispered back from inside her memory: ‘
Thisss potion iss highly proprietary,
’
he’d said as he’d placed it into her hand.
‘
Itss preparation iss a ssecret we have sssupplied to only one other persssonage.
’

But somehow, that secret had travelled to this side of the glass.

Pen drew in a shuddering breath. Confusion and relief and fright and loss and other emotions she didn’t even know the names of jostled in her chest. Then a violent energy seized her. For a moment she was almost overwhelmed by the urge to scratch the symmetrical face away with her fingernails, to peel back the distorting mask, to beg her mirror-sister to remember what they’d been through together, to remember
her
. The desire screamed its way up from her chest—

—but then she thought of the girl’s carefree laugh, and she trapped the urge before it could become action.

‘
It’s early days.
’ The voice in her head sounded just like hers. ‘
But this is better.
’

‘I’d better let you get on,’ Pen said. ‘It’s only your second day. You don’t want to be late.’

‘Look, it’s been such a total honour—’ the girl started.

Pen waved that away. ‘I know it’s an ask, but do you mind keeping quiet about this?’

‘Incognito, right?’

‘You got it.’

The girl ducked her head in acknowledgement, until all Pen could see was the green headscarf, then she ran to rejoin her friend.

‘Aisha!’ Pen heard the redheaded girl say. ‘Where did you go? One minute there was this mental steeplejill all up in my face and the next, you weren’t there any more.’

‘Oh—’ Aisha’s voice faltered for a second. ‘I thought I saw someone I recognised, but it wasn’t her.’

*

‘Well,’ Espel asked as she slipped back beside Pen, ‘are we done?’

Grief was a thread being drawn tightly through Pen as she answered, ‘Yeah, we’re done.’

Espel looked out at the street. ‘So that girl … is she—?’ She tailed off.

‘Is she what?’ Pen asked. Espel didn’t reply. ‘Es? Is she
what
?’

It was only when Pen looked up that she saw Espel was frozen. Her expression was a tight mask of fear, and she was pointing.

Pen followed the line of her finger. On the street, unnoticed amongst the agglomerations of rained-down materials, right under the feet of the students, the pavement rippled in a four-limbed shape.

It was only visible for an instant, then it vanished. When it returned, a split second later, it was pointing at them. The squat hump that was its head swayed slowly from side to side, distorting the concrete, as though it was sniffing for them.

They were watching her
, Pen thought. Cold fear blossomed at the base of her skull.

‘Run,’ she whispered. Espel sprang like a greyhound from a trap, Pen tearing after her, back down the alleyway, the way they’d come. The ground shifted as the creature surged after them.

Pen’s blood pounded in her ears, artillery-loud. The armoured jacket was stiff and clumsy and she frantically ripped it open. Her messenger bag flew out behind her, dragging her like a parachute and she clawed it back to her side.

Espel ran beside her, breathing raggedly. Fear sparked through Pen with every footfall. Every step felt like it invited the grey man’s grip.

‘
Pen!
’ Espel shrieked as a hand the colour of clay erupted from the wall in front of them, fingers splayed like spiders’ legs. It groped, grotesquely blind. Pen seized Espel by the scruff of her neck and yanked her under the forearm that followed it. They didn’t even break step.

More quiet explosions, more
traps.

Hands grasped at them from all directions, reaching from the walls. Pen didn’t have the breath to scream. She hurled herself despairingly at the thicket of limbs. Concrete fingers touched her skin; they were as warm as flesh. She spun off
one thick forearm and hit another. Mortar glistened on them like afterbirth. She fell to her knees and started dragging herself on her elbows through their fingers like they were wire – like they were
barbed wire
. They hemmed her in, their hands on her mouth, stopping her breath, burying her alive in the open air. She hissed and kicked and clawed at them in panic. Soft clay lodged under nails like clotted blood.

Clear sweet breath rushed suddenly into her lungs: she was through!

She scrambled back to her feet. Espel stumbled along beside her, blood seeping from the side of the steeplejill’s neck. The edges of the wound were stained with clay fingerprints.

Pen remembered the sinuous speed of the predators in Victoria Station.
Why haven’t they caught us up yet?
she wondered.

They ran for ten more unhindered breaths, perhaps forty strides, before Pen risked a glance over her shoulder.

The masonry men had broken from the walls, blinking brick-dust from their featureless eyes like sleep – but there were too many of them. The narrow alley couldn’t contain them all, and in their eagerness to thrust themselves free they’d emerged
into one another.
Their arms were thrust through the concrete of each other’s wrists; knees burst through thighs and teeth through shoulders: a nightmare clot of torsos and limbs and heads. They grimaced in pain, their innards churned by the intruding bodies of their fellows.

Hope filled Pen as she ran.

But then a dark shape shifted in the heart of the mass. As if driven by some predatory instinct, a single Masonry Man burst outwards in a spray of bloody brickdust. Pieces of clay and concrete bodies fell around him, torn open by his escape. There were sudden and terrible gaps in skin, revealing grey arteries and grey organs. Gouts of thick cement oozed from wounds. Pen could see their throats working as they screamed silently.

The escapee threw his head back in a soundless, grief-stricken howl, even as he gave chase.

*

Pen and Espel put their heads down and sprinted, but the precipitecture drifts slowed them. Exhaustion burned in Pen’s muscles like fever and the world shuddered and shook in time with her breaths. She snatched a sideways glance – Espel was horribly pale. Blood seeped through her fingers where they were clamped to her neck.

From a nearby street, Pen heard the growl of an engine.
A car
, she thought muzzily.
Open road
. It was a slim chance, but Pen wore Parva Khan’s face and the driver might let them in. She grabbed Espel by the forearm and dragged her round a corner towards the sound.

They burst onto what looked like an empty road, then a cloud of exhaust engulfed them as a black blur tore past. Tyres screamed like agonised animals as the blur braked and resolved into an SUV which skidded to a stop. There was a white chess knight stencilled on the door that faced them.

The door opened and Pen stared in utter disbelief as the shaven head of Captain Corbin emerged over it. A squad of black-armoured figures boiled out of the vehicle behind him, all hefting squat grenade-launchers.

Espel ran towards them, her instinctive distrust of Chevaliers utterly obliterated by her terror of what hunted her, but Pen found herself slowing. She eyed them uncertainly.

How can you be here, now – how could you
know
?

There was no chance this was a coincidence.

A tremor rippled under Pen’s feet and she heard a soft explosion behind her, then the grating sound of concrete feet on asphalt. Corbin grabbed a weapon and aimed it over her shoulder. She wondered how close the monster was, how far she could dive, if she’d be able to evade the fireball that would blossom out from the stricken creature.

But then Corbin spoke, and the word he used sat strangely in the mouth of a man holding a grenade-launcher.

‘
Please
,’ he said. He sounded desperate. ‘Please. Let us take her.’

‘
No.
’

Pen felt her heart slow. She saw Espel stiffen in shock. As one, they turned.

The creature stood only yards behind them, its concrete-coloured ribcage flexing silently as it drew deeply on something that couldn’t have been air. It opened its mouth onto a tunnel-like throat. Pen could see the effort as it fought to distort its throat into something that could speak. ‘
She knows
.’ The voice was high, almost inaudible: a whistle of
air through concrete. The thing spoke in draughty gusts, and Pen found herself straining to hear it. ‘
The agreement is breached.
’

‘Please,’ Corbin repeated. ‘Please – we need her. We’ll … we’ll give you as many others as you want, but let us keep her.’

‘
The agreement is breached.
’ The thing was as intractable as its flesh. ‘
There can be no return.
’

The Masonry Man opened its arms as for an embrace. The wounds where it had ripped itself clear of its fellows still oozed concrete. Pen watched the liquid progress down its forearm, running in the channels between protruding veins, over the device of the Towerblock Crown.

‘
She must attend my mistress
,’ it wheezed. ‘
Take her above, or I will take her below
.’

Pen looked back at Corbin. All the blood had fled his seam-split face.

‘I understand,’ he said.

They drove back to the palace, and Parva Khan smiled on them every inch of the way.

She beamed out from billboards and bumper-stickers and posters pasted against walls. She flickered on TV screens glimpsed through front-room windows. Men bundled up against the cold perched on stepladders, hung bunting and fixed flags over their doors, all printed with Pen’s reverse image. On the street, greetings were exchanged on gusts of steaming breath and smiles passed back and forth like gifts between strangers. It felt like all of London-Under-Glass was adorned with her scars.