The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (35 page)

Even strapped into the back of the SUV, the shock at finding Parva and fear of the Masonry Man’s chase still vivid in her mind, Pen could feel the buzz about the reflected city. It was the day before Draw Night. The Looking-Glass Lottery was about to have a winner.

It was close on midday, and the palace’s crenelated shadow fell across the surrounding blocks like a claw. Security had obviously been stepped up for the big night: half a dozen
guards, bulked massively by their heavy armour, stood by the entrance, drumming their fingers on their machine-guns. Mounted Chevaliers urged their black-shrouded horses up and down the street. A pair of vast plasma screens had been mounted on the metal framework on the front of the palace. They beamed Pen’s mirror-sister’s smile down over the little square below.

‘Now, Countess …’ Corbin looked back at her. ‘Are you going to walk in quietly, or are we going to have to stage some kind of accident?’ He looked a little sick as he spoke, like a man threatening his own daughter, but he also looked scared enough to be capable of anything.

Pen didn’t answer. She was horribly aware of Espel on the seat beside her and the guns holstered at her captors’ hips. When the door was opened, she got out slowly.

‘Countess! Welcome back!’

‘Countess Khan, always a delight.’

They cast slightly puzzled looks at her outfit, but their confusion didn’t impact their eager smiles. Pen returned those smiles carefully, listening to Corbin’s footsteps, close behind hers. She could see in his shadow how his hand was casually resting on his belt next his side-arm. In the polished floor, Pen watched her reflection walk alone to the last lift on the right.

The doors hissed open, Pen stepped in, and this time Corbin did join her. When Espel moved to follow, a black-armoured forearm blocked her way.

‘Just the Countess,’ Corbin said.

Pen saw the muscles lock up in Espel’s symmetrical face. She was very, very scared, and Pen didn’t think it was for herself.

Pen reached past the Chevaliers and laid her hand on Espel’s breastbone, just where her leather and tin jacket opened up. The warmth of her skin through the cotton was startling.

Pen made the promise looking right to her eyes: ‘I’ll find you at the end of the day.’

The lift doors slid shut slowly, eclipsing the girl who’d believed in her.

The Chevalier spoke into his radio. ‘This is Corbin. We’re in the elevator.’

‘
Understood
,’ the answer crackled back.

A mechanism whirred into life behind the stainless-steel walls. There was a clunk, like something locking into place under the floor, and a hiss as hydraulic clamps released. Pen’s stomach lurched upwards.

The lift was going down, and fast
–
but only the floor was moving. The lift cage itself dwindled above them, dangling forlornly at the limit of its cable.

The lift was never meant to descend this far,
she thought.
This is a jury-rig.

The light from inside the lift-car diminished quickly, but Pen could still make out the shaft’s steel supports where they fed into the concrete of the Shard’s foundations. The walls were so smooth that it almost looked like they weren’t moving at all, but Pen kept her hands clamped close to her
sides. Judging by the surge in her stomach, they were dropping so fast that the passing concrete would strip her fingertips bloody if she touched it. Neither she nor Corbin spoke.

The light gave out long before they hit the bottom. The foundations felt impossibly deep and cold, like an ancient grave sunk into the bedrock beneath London’s clay. The weight of the city seemed to concentrate itself over her with terrible potential. By the time they slowed she was desperate for light and barely holding in the panic.

At last the platform slowed and clicked to a halt. A rough tunnel stretched into the dark in front of them. Meagre illumination etched the cracks around a closed door at the far end.

‘I don’t have to threaten you again, do I?’ Corbin’s tone was pleading.

She must attend my mistress.

Compelled by a curiosity so much worse than her fear, Pen started walking. To distract herself from the man and the gun behind her, she studied the tunnel walls. They were rippled, almost organic-looking, and with a little thrill of understanding Pen saw that the undulations in its surface were thousands of overlapping handprints: the shaft had somehow been
pushed
into existence by an army of miners.

Sounds came to her, muted by the concrete, so quiet that Corbin’s booted footsteps almost drowned them out: low, staccato noises punctuated by sudden pauses. Pen strained to listen. There was something familiar about them.

It was only when she realised the pauses matched the frequency of her own ragged breaths that she knew what she was hearing: voices. Dozens of voices, crying.

Memory burst over her.

Barbed tendrils undulating like insect legs, dragging her through the maze under St Paul’s. Agonised voices crooning to her. The Wire Mistress’ claws in her scalp, in her mind, dripping itself through her like slow poison.

The Wire Mistress.

She slowed, sucked in by the terrible gravity of memory. Every step pulled her deeper into the past.

‘
She must attend my mistress.
’

At the end of the tunnel, a loud
crack
stopped her in her tracks.

It had come from behind the closed door, deafeningly loud, but it wasn’t the volume that froze her muscles. It was the fact that she’d heard that sound before, echoing up from the rubbish chute in the kitchen. With a sudden, cold certainty, she knew it wasn’t an incinerator.

On the ground in front of her, the handprints dappled together like ripples on water. A Masonry Man breached from the centre of the distortion, his arms outstretched. Pen jerked back hard, but the intruder wasn’t reaching for her. Instead, he plunged his emaciated hands into the wall and dragged the concrete aside like a curtain.

The crying grew instantly louder as a tiny niche was uncovered in the wall. A man in a dusty brown tweed suit crouched protectively over a young boy in a school uniform.
The space was too small for him to stand up fully, and it had no light source. The captive man blinked as the weak glimmer from the tunnel caught his brand-new seam. His child continued to sob, oblivious. His features gave way to empty skin at the halfway point.

Pen stared uncomprehendingly at the little family from Victoria Station.

The father moved fast, trying to put himself between the grinning, skeletal jailor and his son, but the Masonry Man just shoved him contemptuously to the ground. The child screamed once as concrete fingers closed on his wrist, and then fell silent, his eye wide in terror.

‘Wait!’ the man yelped. ‘Please – I’ll—’

But whatever threat or promise he was going to make was lost as the Masonry Man dragged the tunnel wall back into place, sealing him back into darkness.

Without turning its concrete gaze on either Pen or Corbin, the Masonry Man pushed through the metal door at the end of the corridor, yanking the stumbling child after it. Corbin gestured to Pen. The air was like hot clay in her throat as she stepped into the room beyond.

Something crunched underfoot. Pen looked down and saw broken bottles and flasks covering the floor; fragments in all shapes and sizes. The dregs that clung to them glinted like mercury. The sea of shattered glass stretched out into the darkness as far as Pen could see.

The room’s sole source of illumination was a lamp on a desk that sat in a little island of clear space near the door.
A solitary figure sat there, bent over a stack of paper as though in study. The lamp was set so that Pen could only see one of the figure’s hands as it flicked absently at the corner of a page. A heavy-based tumbler sat next to it. The Masonry Man dragged its kicking, jerking captive onto a tarpaulin spread in front of the desk.

The child found his voice again and shrieked almightily. The figure behind the desk started and tilted the lamp towards its visitors. It was only when she peered out from behind her paperwork that Pen recognised Margaret Case.

‘For Mago’s sake, can’t you see he’s terrified?’ Case snapped at the grey-skinned man. ‘Let him go. Just … get out of my sight, would you? I’ll deal with it from here.’

The Masonry Man’s grin didn’t diminish, but he let the boy go. He arched like a diver and plunged back into the floor.

‘Case,’ Pen started, but the mirrorstocrat ignored her and dropped to one knee in front of the trembling boy.

‘I know,’ she said softly. ‘I know, I know. They’re scary, I know.’ She looked into his single eye, her wrinkled face open and empathic. ‘But listen to me: I promise he’ll never touch you again. It’s over. You’ve been incredibly brave, all right? Your father’s going to come in here in a moment and it will all be over. You were so, so brave.’

It was her best reassuring headmistress voice, and against all expectation it worked. As the boy’s cries quietened, Pen wondered if, somewhere in the jumbled half of the memories he retained from the Old City, he’d once had a teacher just like her.

‘Look at you, you’re shaking.’ Case went behind her desk and took something from a drawer. ‘Here, drink this. It’ll help.’

The small bottle caught the light from the desk lamp as she held it out. The liquid inside glinted like mercury.

Pen drew in a breath, to scream, to protest, to try to warn the child, but a black-gauntleted hand clamped under her jaw, holding it shut. She tried to struggle, to elbow Corbin, but he slid his other arm under her shoulder and locked her up with humiliating ease. She made sounds in her throat, but they were too quiet. The boy was too scared, too enraptured by the glimmer of the elixir he’d been offered. He didn’t even look round.

Pen could only watch as the half-faced child tilted the bottle to his mouth. Little gobs of liquid ran out of the imperfect seal of his half-lips. They dribbled over the empty skin of his unreflected side, carving runnels in the dirt that caked it, and splashed onto the tarp with flat
plack plack
sounds.

He hesitated, uncertain, and Case moved fast, as fast as Pen had with her parents, sliding a gentle hand behind the boy’s head and easing the bottle away. The boy gave way pliantly. He stared into space.

Case sighed. Pity and distaste warred on her face as she looked at the child.
As ugly as they come.
Espel’s description of the immigrants flashed back to her.
Blatantly incomplete.

‘Corbin,’ Case said, ‘let her go.’

The grip on Pen eased and she tore herself free. She spun, hawked savagely, and spat at Corbin’s face, but he didn’t
even blink as the spittle hit his eye. She tried to claw at him, to kick him, rage fountaining through her. He fended her off absently, his face ashen.

Pen turned and ran to the little boy; she dropped to her knees in front of him. ‘Hey,’ she said to him urgently. ‘Hey.’

He looked at her, but his single eye showed no recognition, no sign he understood her words. He was like a half-finished doll. Pen felt something heavy drop into the pit of her stomach.

‘What … what did they make you forget?’ she said quietly.

‘Everything,’ Case said softly. She slumped against the edge of her desk. ‘Corbin, could you take this one? I’m tired.’

Corbin’s jaw tightened. He stepped almost respectfully around Pen.

‘Don’t use your own,’ Case told him. She pulled an automatic pistol from another desk drawer and handed it to him. ‘Here. This one doesn’t leave the room.’

The boy didn’t even flinch as Corbin levelled the gun at his head. He couldn’t remember to be afraid.

Pen felt the world lurch around her. Much too late, she tried to move. ‘Wai—’

The shot ripped all sound from the world. Pen was close enough to feel the heat of the bullet, the warmth of the blood. She recoiled, lurching to her feet and staggering backwards. She kicked bottles and heard them clink through the buzzing in her ears.

The glass.

The shot.

That percussive
snap
of air and explosive—

Now, she knew exactly what the sounds she’d heard echoing up into the kitchen had been. And she knew that there had been a sound like it for every one of the bottles strewn on the floor.

Pen screamed at Case, at Corbin, shrieking at them as senseless as an animal. She dragged in high, hysterical breaths.

It was a long time before she managed words.

‘
How— How
could you—?’

‘What else would you like us to do with them?’ Case snapped back. ‘Shelter them? Free them? Turn them loose on the street? They can’t even remember how to
eat
, Parva. Mother Mirror, pull yourself together, would you?
This
’ – she shook the bottle – ‘is all of him. You understand? There was nothing left in that body but muscle reflexes.’

Her voice was flat, expressionless, but her eyes were bloodshot and pouched deep. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel it, Pen realised. It was just that the part of her that felt it was screwed down so hard it was dying.

Absolute control.

Corbin knelt and began rolling the body up in the wet tarpaulin.

‘Bring in a fresh tarpaulin, would you?’ Case told him. ‘I thought we were done, but she keeps demanding more. They’re lasting less and less. You—’

Resentment burned in her face as she looked at Pen. ‘Follow me.’

Pen could barely feel her legs. When she tried to walk, she almost fell. Corbin left off rolling up the corpse to support her, but she hissed like a cat and raked her fingernails across his face. Three bright red scratches appeared on each of his cheeks. He fell back, staring at her.

Case looked at them both, snorted in disgust and stalked away.

‘I’m surprised you’ve got the guts to do all this yourself,’ Pen called after her.

‘You think it’s got anything to do with guts? How many people do you think I can afford to have find out about this?’ Case looked despairingly about her. She kicked bottles out of her path with her expensive shoes. ‘Such a fucking mess,’ she muttered.

She looked back over her shoulder. ‘Are you coming or not?’