The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (41 page)

‘We can’t outrun them!’ Pen shouted as they swerved into another turn.

‘I know.’ Jack tore the scarf from his mouth. He sucked in tight concentrated breaths. ‘But I can take my wheels places
they can’t force their hooves.
Please, Mago
,’ he murmured fervently. ‘Just one more mile.’

Eight-foot dunes of precipitecture were rearing in front of them now, bristling with broken railings and jagged spurs of scaffolding. Jack’s face flushed as he wrestled the car around them, on two wheels as often as four.

‘
Just a little further
,’ he was muttering under his breath to the car. ‘
Just a little further
.’

Pen tried to listen past the sound of the wind and the engine until at last she realised there wasn’t anything else to hear. ‘I can’t hear hoof beats!’ she shouted jubilantly over her shoulder. ‘I can’t hear—’

Her voice was obliterated by screaming tyres as the car slipped sideways. The window filled edge to edge with brick. Pen just managed to curl her body around Espel as the car scraped to a halt along the wall.

The vibration of the grazing metal shuddered through Pen’s skeleton. Cray was up and out even before the sparks struck by the fender had landed. He ran around the back of the saloon and shoved the boot open.

‘Jack—’ His voice was tightly controlled. ‘How long have we got?’

‘Five minutes, maybe ten.’ Jack worked breathlessly beside Cray. He was pulling something that clanked from the back of the car. ‘I can’t see them getting those bastard horses past Cadogan Street, but I don’t know how fast they can run in their armour.’

‘No chance you lost them?’ Cray asked.

Jack just snorted. ‘I think we left a trail of rubber on the road half an inch thick.
Damn
, I miss my old car.’

Pen felt gelatinous, like her bones had dissolved, but she managed to clamber out of the car’s uncrumpled side. She hooked her arms under Espel’s shoulders and pulled her out. Her body came limply. Her tattooed face was still slack.

‘Bloody hell, Cray,’ she said incredulously. ‘What did you do, put her in a coma? Is she ever going to wake up?’

‘I put her down deep. She’s got another half an hour or so, maybe a little less,’ Cray replied. ‘The two of you need to be a long way away by then.’

Pen looked up. From where she now stood, she could see what Cray and Jack had taken from the boot – a pair of short assault rifles with stylised chess knights stamped on the handles. The contraband weapons clicked as they jammed clips into them.

‘The
two
of us,’ Pen echoed hollowly.

‘You’ll manage,’ Cray said firmly. ‘My sister never did eat enough, and I reckon you’re stronger than you look. Squat down, let her drape over your shoulders. Just carry her like a sack of coal.’

He pointed towards a crack in the rippling brick wall of the cul-de-sac. It had been mostly swallowed by precipitecture and it looked more like a crevasse in a mountain than the narrow lane it was.

‘Get going. Jack and I’ll give London-Under-Glass’ finest something to think about. Should buy you a bit of time.’

Pen gave him a flat stare. ‘You’ll be killed.’ Her tone said
all that was needed about the acceptability of this solution.

‘That’s right.’ Cray ducked under the strap of his rifle. Jack was already scrambling up a rise in the precipitecture, aiming over it like a rampart.

‘I’m not going to just—’

‘Yeah, you really are,’ Cray interrupted her. His bandana had slipped and there was a wry twist to his homemade lips. ‘Do you know how many men I’ve killed,
Miss
Khan
?

Pen stared at him and sullenly shook her head.

‘Neither do I, but I do know that my hand didn’t shake the last time I pulled the trigger, get me?’ He lifted his chin fractionally, took in the space around him and exhaled slowly. He almost looked proud. ‘This has been coming for a long time. Believe it or not, having the Chevs gunning for me is not a new experience for me. If they get me this time – fine.
But not her
.’

Anger whipped into his voice like a sudden icy wind as he looked at Espel. ‘Not her,’ he repeated. ‘My sister’s not like me – she’s the
opposite
of me. She’s never hurt anyone.’ Tears ran, one by one, his meagre face giving them up reluctantly. He started to talk faster; his words ran into each other, but he didn’t stutter and he didn’t blink. ‘She
couldn’t
hurt anyone. I told her to kill the Face of the bloody Lottery and she couldn’t. She was the best steeplejill in the Kennels, and she had a future, but she came and worked for me, because she believed in me, and she believed in you too, and now she’s sharing her body with psychopath because of a choice you made, so will you
JUST GET GOING
!’

The last three bellowed words echoed off the surrounding walls and Pen jumped as he slammed the boot closed. For all that Cray sounded furious, his eyes were pleading.

Under the entreaty of those pale blue eyes, Pen bent and let Espel’s motionless form drape over her. She stood straight. The weight was bearable. She looked at Jack, who was lounging on the rubble, rolling a cigarette. ‘What about you?’

The young mirrorstocrat shrugged. He put his roll-up aside and palmed a half-brick from the drift beside him. With a flick of his wrist he sent it spinning into the air and in one smooth motion brought his rifle to his shoulder and fired. The brick erupted in a satisfying spray of powder.

‘Tell you what,’ he said returning to his roll-up, ‘if you’re a better shot you can take my place.’

Pen stared helplessly at the two of them for a moment, then, bent slightly under her burden, she took a couple of steps backwards. The strange shadows of the inverse city closed over her. Cray scrambled up the side of the drift to Jack’s side. They muttered to each other in rapid whispers and took turns taking drags on the cigarette.

The last thing Pen saw before she turned away was them pulling their bandanas up over their mouths: like bandits and like equals.

*

Pen moved through the alleyways at a kind of fast stagger. Espel wasn’t that heavy, but she was dead weight and she kept slipping, pulling her off balance. She could feel sweat
running between her shoulder blades, even in the unforgiving cold of the steel dress.

Warehouses loomed either side of her, their rain-augmented architecture spilling onto the street. The air smelled faintly of smoke and petrol. The walls were scorched. Faceless slogans looped in still-drying spray-paint on the brick and Pen felt a sudden pang for Beth when she looked at them. It looked like London Bridge wasn’t the only district that had seen protests.

Clouds of broken glass glittered like nebulae on the street. Every reflection – every image that excluded the half-faced population – had been shattered.

Pen felt a movement on her shoulder, out of rhythm with Espel’s breathing. The divided girl’s right ankle was beginning to twitch.

Half an hour
, Cray had said.
Maybe less
.

Definitely less
, Pen thought. It was a struggle to swallow. Scraps of remembered phrases flitted through her head as she watched that foot, the right foot, the
id’s
foot, slowly rotate.

‘—
she’s sharing her body with a psychopath—’

‘—
because it hated him, Countess
—’

‘—
it takes an army of doctors, for the rest of her life
—’

An army of doctors, and Espel had only her, exposed and helpless on a freezing street corner. They had to find a place to hide.

For a second, Pen thought she heard glass hooves chiming on asphalt, even though here in the confines of the Kennels it should have been impossible.

Of course,
the Kennels …
She did know of one hiding place here. She set Espel gently down for a moment and then scrambled up a precipitecture drift. The warped skyline of London-Under-Glass became visible above the rooftops. Sirens reached her on the wind. Away to the east, across the river, the clouds glowed with reflected fire. The reflected city was burning.

Pen chewed her lip, waiting until she was sure she had her bearings. It wasn’t far. She skidded and slid back down to the street and was just reaching for Espel when the sound of machine-guns froze her.

It echoed back up from the way she had come. She listened, paralysed, her heartbeat slamming painfully in her chest. Bursts of gunfire answered each other for a couple of minutes and then stopped. Pen eyed the street behind her and a bead of sweat trickled over her temple. Was that it – was that all there would be? She hadn’t heard any cries, but maybe she was too far away for that. She closed her eyes and pictured Jack Wingborough and Garrison Cray. She hoped they’d walked out of that cul-de-sac alive, even though the odds were three to one. She realised with a pang that she’d probably never know.

Stick to the plan, now that you’ve got one
, she told herself. She lifted Espel back onto her shoulder and lurched deeper into the claw-like architecture of the Kennels.

Rained-down bricks piled up like earthworks against the outer wall of Frostfield High, so there was no need to climb in over the gates.

‘Not even for old times’ sake,’ Pen murmured. She eyed some skilful graffiti across the road and rationed herself half a smile. She gripped Espel tightly with both arms. Over the last few streets the steeplejill’s struggles had grown more and more intense.

Pen skidded down the rubble inside the wall, but kept her balance. She peered through the dim backwash from the streetlights. The layout of the warped buildings exactly mirrored that at her own school, and she felt a stab of relief when she saw the orange tape bandaging the junior block.

The abandoned bathroom was as cold as its counterpart in her own city, and it smelled of the same must. The chill from the lino numbed her bare feet. She groped in the familiar place for the switch and the halogen tubes in the ceiling flickered on, their bluish light somehow sucking even more heat from the room. Pen’s eye fell on a rust-brown
stain beside a rip in the lino, smeared into the shape of a hand.

She couldn’t help looking in the mirror. A girl in a barbed-wire dress and dusty hijab, with makeup running over her scars, stared back at her from a place she’d never set foot in again.
Home
.

Pen stifled the thought as soon as it rose.

As gently as she could, she laid Espel down. When she caught sight of the steeplejill’s face, the pain was like all of her ribs breaking.

Espel’s teeth were gritted, the eyes on both sides of her seam stretched and staring, wide as madness. Veins stood clear on her forehead under sticky strands of blonde hair. Under her jacket, Pen could see her arms straining against the cuffs that kept her from strangling herself.

Pen knelt beside her. She tried to take the weight of Espel’s head. ‘It’s— It’s—’ She tried to say
okay
– it was all she could think of, but the lie was too big and its sharp edges caught in her throat.

Desperately, she tried to think of something –
anything
– she could do to ease the girl’s pain, but what was there? The instant she’d –
they’d
– awakened – Pen felt sick as she corrected her thought – a brutal territorial struggle had recommenced inside Espel’s skull, a fight for the one thing everyone ought to be able to call home. Garrison was right: Espel was trapped inside her own body with a psychopath, and it was because of Pen. Es’s ‘intimate devil’ was awake; it knew her, and it wanted to destroy her. It was her inverse, her opposite.

Opposite.

Time seemed to run slow, slower than freezing water, as slow as glass, as Pen turned the idea over in her mind. She looked into the mirror and saw the scarred girl reflected there, the face that wasn’t hers, not really. She met the blue eyes Espel Cray shared with her brother. Garrison’s words kept playing in her head, but it was she who spoke them aloud.

‘My sister’s the opposite of me,’ she breathed.

It was a strand of hope, cobweb-fine.

Pen pressed her hands to Espel’s temples, trying to hold her still. She sought the steeplejill’s left eye with both of her own, just like her brother had done on the bridge.

‘Listen to me, Es,’ she said. ‘Please, listen to me.
Parva
was my inverse, remember? She was the opposite of me. Please, please lie still.’ Pen was starting to gabble, she could feel her own desperation reaching up to choke her. She struggled to slow herself, to make herself make sense.

‘She was my
opposite
, but she didn’t hate me, not at all. So maybe –
maybe
– your id isn’t born to hate you either. Maybe it’s only fighting you because you’re fighting it. So …’ Pen felt the barb-scars tug at her scalp. She had to force the words out of her throat. She knew how terrible a thing this was to ask.

‘Stop.’

She swallowed hard. ‘Stop fighting it. I know you can feel it in there with you. I know how scary that is, but stop. It’s not its fault – it’s not
her
fault. Stop.’ She dashed away her tears and refocused both her eyes on Espel’s right.

‘Both of you,’ she pleaded, ‘stop.’

For a terrible second Espel’s head strained against her grip, and then went suddenly still. The blue eyes roved, frightened, as though searching for a coming attack, but the breathing was easier and the muscles stayed slack.

Pen watched them for long minutes: the girl who’d believed in her, and her terrible, blameless passenger. Her eye lighted on the mirror, on the glass. An idea occurred.

At first she recoiled from it – it was too terrible a risk; what if she was wrong? Harry Blight’s contorted features flashed in front of her exhausted eyes. She sat back on her haunches and looked around the abandoned bathroom, searching it for other ideas, but nothing came. Out there in the night, a battle was raging for control of the inverted city. Who knew if she and Espel would have any friends left on this side of the mirror by sunrise? And even if they did, even if Jack and Cray had somehow survived, neither of them had had the first clue what to do with a girl with a woken id. The Chevs would be hunting for them; they’d find them eventually and a stray bullet could kill Pen, leaving Espel trussed and waiting for her captors.