The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (42 page)

It was a sliver of a chance, barely even a wish’s chance.

Actually, Countess
, Espel’s voice and secret smile drifted up from a remembered darkness,
wishful thinking’s the only thing that’s ever got me anywhere.

She stood and crossed to the abandoned stalls. The screws in one of the door handles were loose, she remembered, and it took only a moment to work it free. She weighed it in her
hand, shooting little looks back at Espel. Both blue eyes looked nervously back.

Pen gripped the loose handle like a wrench, turned and smashed it into the bottom corner of the bathroom mirror, and again, and again. On the third strike, a fragment of mirrored glass the size of her palm flaked from the wall. She gathered it up.

Both sides of Espel seemed to recoil as Pen knelt back beside her.

‘I’m going to free your hands, okay?’

They just stared at her as she reached around behind Espel and began to saw at the blood-crusted plastic that held her wrists.

Neither arm moved as the cuffs frayed apart and Pen let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Pen eased both arms out from behind Espel and laid them on the floor. She sat back on her haunches and watched the divided girl.

‘What now?’ she muttered, mostly to herself.

Espel’s right shoulder twitched. Pen started forward, but she held herself when she saw how slow, how
tentative
the movement was. Very gradually, Espel’s right hand started to rise. Her left eyed rolled to watch it, but the corresponding arm stayed still.

For a moment, the right hand seemed to hesitate over the open front of the steeplejill’s jacket, then, slowly, as if trying not to startle a frightened bird, it descended towards the left.

Pen watched open-mouthed, as Espel’s right hand took
her swollen, cuff-scarred left wrist and gently started to rub feeling back into it. After a few endless seconds it let go and laid across Espel’s stomach. Then, just as tentatively, Espel’s left hand began to massage the tender skin on the right wrist.

At last, the divided girl rested her hands on her stomach. She said nothing. Pen wasn’t sure that she could, but she was breathing evenly. Both eyes closed.

Pen breathed out the kind of quiet, tentative breath that doesn’t want to disturb the world. She shuffled backwards on her bum towards the wall with the sinks on it. One of the pipes that ran over the chapped brickwork was warm. For a second she thought about pulling Espel over too, but she didn’t feel she could disturb her.

Relief broke over her in a wave, pulling exhaustion along behind it.

Have to stay alert
, she told herself.
Stay awake.
But the tiredness settled like silt in her limbs, and she couldn’t bring herself to move away from the warm pipe.

‘Good night, Es,’ she breathed, before her eyelids fell.

Pen woke to the soft sound of someone trying to cry quietly.

Her eyes opened instantly. Weak daylight was visible through the dusty windows. She looked across the floor to Espel, but the steeplejill was lying where Pen had left her; eyes open, staring at the ceiling, blinking slightly out of time every now and then but otherwise intensely still. Little clouds of condensation rolled in the air above her mouth.

Pen rolled away from the pipe. She’d drooled in the night and the cold had cracked her lips under the moisture. The sobbing sounds continued. They were coming from behind her, from the mirror.

Pen stood stiffly. Her eyes were sticky and she felt as if her bones had frosted. She looked into the reflection.

The source of the sobbing sounds looked barely human – she was so small, so tightly curled in on herself. She sat against the far wall of the London bathroom, her arms wrapped around her knees and her face buried behind them so that every inch of skin was covered. The only thing to identify her was the cloud of frizzy red hair.

‘Trudi?’ Sleep made Pen’s voice croaky. ‘What are you doing here?’

The sobs stopped. Trudi’s pale, freckled face rose from behind her denim-covered kneecaps. Pen watched her shocked eyes as they looked back into the mirror, then predictably moved to stare at the empty space where Pen should have been standing to cast that reflection, and then back to the mirror again. Trudi’s mouth began to work silently.

‘I—’ She blinked. ‘I … Am I—?’

‘Don’t look away,’ Pen said quickly, trying to keep her tone soothing. ‘You aren’t mad. Your mum didn’t spike your Coco Pops this morning. This is really happening. What are you doing in here?’

‘I-I-I—’ Trudi stammered, still staring, unable to believe what she was seeing, but seeing it anyway. She answered the question on reflex. ‘I come here to be alone.’

‘Because being alone hurts less when there’s no one around?’ Pen said. She didn’t blink as she held Trudi’s gaze. She didn’t like knowing how the other girl felt. She resented the surge of empathy. ‘When did Gwen cut you loose?’

‘After I … After you—’ Trudi was trembling now. ‘She said she was disgusted with me.’

She didn’t say a word to stop you, though, did she?
Pen thought. She remembered the flush in Gwen’s perfect cheeks as Trudi set fire to her hijab. She remembered the audience she’d helped arrange, and swallowed back a little angry bubble.

‘What is this?’ Trudi breathed. ‘Some kind of Dickensian guilt thing?’

‘Yeah, I’m the ghost of Christmas Shut-the-fuck-up-and-listen.’ Pen’s voice snapped around both rooms as her patience gave way.

Trudi flinched. ‘Parva, I’m s—’

‘I’d love to have the time to care,’ Pen cut her off. ‘Want to make it up to me? Get your phone out.’

Trudi obeyed, not taking her eyes from Pen’s as she rummaged in her bag.

‘Send a text to this number.’ Pen recited the digits from memory. Trudi’s fingers trembled and she typed them in. ‘Tell her “Pen’s in the mirror”, and tell her where. Tell her to come now, and tell her …’ Pen felt her throat constrict. ‘Tell her my harmony is very much fractured.’

‘Tell who?’ Trudi asked.

‘A girl you used to know.’

Trudi didn’t question her further, but when she was done keying the message in she stared in chagrin at her phone screen.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Pen demanded.

‘No signal.’

‘THEN FIND ONE!’ Pen shouted it at her through the glass.

Trudi scrambled to her feet. ‘I really am sorry, Parva,’ she said quietly. Pen didn’t answer, just watched as she fled into the corridor.

Pen hugged herself, feeling the fake barbs of her dress. She paced over the lino. She thought about seeing Beth again, and the anticipation fizzed in the back of her throat. She wished she had some way of telling the time. Four transits of
the narrow room and it already felt like hours. Pen scratched at her cuticles and muttered to herself under her breath, trying to get straight what she’d say to Beth: how she was sorry she’d left, how she couldn’t come back, how – and the pit of her stomach began to squeeze – how there was someone far worse coming in her place.

And goodbye
.

She snatched a breath. Goodbye would be the last thing she’d have to say.

She was so distracted she didn’t notice at first that Espel was fidgeting.

She scrambled to the steeplejill’s side in alarm, scared the fragile truce in the divided girl had been broken, but neither hand moved to cross the border marked by the silver seam. They just twitched and pattered on the floor. Espel’s head rolled first this way then that, her neck craning as though she was trying to see. Pen followed her frantic gaze and froze.

Just visible through the tear in the lino, next to Parva’s old bloody handprint, the concrete floor was trembling.

It was a tiny vibration, a minuscule fraction of a point on the Richter scale, but it was definitely there, and it was getting stronger.

Fear galvanised her muscles. She gathered Espel to her and lifted her in her arms, ready to flee. But she hesitated. She looked back into the reflection of the empty London bathroom. She imagined Beth arriving, finding no one there. She agonised, torn between the mirror and the door.

Espel stirred against her.

They aren’t looking for you
, Pen thought.

She hefted Espel’s slight body across to the last toilet stall on the left and kicked the door open. She sat the steeplejill on the closed toilet seat, frantically trying to arrange her legs so they wouldn’t show through the crack at the bottom of the door.

‘They aren’t looking for you,’ Pen told her. ‘You don’t have anything they want. Stay quiet – stay still. Whatever happens, whatever you hear, stay still.’

She looked back at the rip in the lino. She didn’t know what had brought Mater Viae’s clayling soldiers abroad, but she couldn’t shake the bone-deep feeling that they were coming for her. It had to be – there had to be something about the doorway drug or her mirror-sister’s memories or, or
something
that had drawn the Lady of the Streets to hunt her again. Espel had been born in the reflected city. She’d never even seen the home Mater Viae craved.

‘You don’t have anything they want,’ she repeated, desperately wanting to believe it. The expressions either side of Espel’s seam were unreadable as Pen stepped out of the stall and pulled the door closed. She exhaled hard.

‘
Okay
,’ she whispered. She turned, and screamed.

A dark figure gazed at her through the rust-splotched mirror. The irises in its eyes glowed softly, the green of traffic lights. Pen recoiled from the rooftops that overlapped on its cheeks like scales, from the black cable hair that coiled over its ears, from the church spires that showed between its lips as it mouthed:
Pen.

No sound, just the shape of her name.

Pen started hard. And now she saw the black Chemical Brothers hoodie the girl wore – and she saw it
was
a girl. The architecture of her face made sense in a new and familiar way.

‘Beth?’ she said, in utter astonishment.

She ran over to the mirror, put her hands on the glass. Beth did the same, keeping right by the side of Pen’s reflection.

Why?
she mouthed.

Tears spilled out of Pen’s eyes and splashed on the sink. ‘No, B – please just listen. I’m sorry, okay, I’m so, so sorry. But there’s no time—’ It felt like everything she had to say to Beth was compacting up hard in her throat, churning together, making it hard to breathe. She could feel the tremor in the floor through the lino now. The halogen tubes rattled in their ceiling fittings. ‘Mater Viae’ – she saw Beth start at the name – ‘she’s—’

There was a soft explosion in the floor behind her, followed by the sound of footsteps.

Pen turned slowly. The Masonry Man stalked towards her, its cadaverous ribcage swelling and shrinking in time to something that wasn’t breath.

‘
Come
,’ it said in its frail draught-voice. It extended a hand. ‘
Come
.’

Pen stumbled backwards. The barbs in her dress scraped over the mirror-glass. ‘No,’ she said.

The clayling creature took another step, and then it hesitated,
looking past Pen into the mirror. Suddenly it looked uncertain. ‘
Mistress?
’ it breathed.

Pen’s pulse slammed as she looked back over her shoulder. Beth was staring into the bathroom, although the light of her green eyes never touched it, rebounding from the silver and glass in her world. Her throat was straining; Pen could read the words off her lips.

Pen, what is it? What’s wrong?

She couldn’t see the concrete-skinned predator, only the fright written on her friend’s face.

The Masonry Man looked confused for a moment. It studied Beth and then, in a shockingly human gesture, it shook its head. Pen heard concrete sinews grind in its neck. She steeled herself as it, less sure now, it resumed its advance.

‘It’s all still you, Pen,’ she whispered.

Whatever happened, wherever it took her, she told herself, that would be true.

The stall door banged open behind the Masonry Man and Pen jumped. Mater Viae’s servant turned with a sinuous, liquid grace.

With halting steps, Espel walked into the bathroom. Pen watched her in dry-mouthed astonishment. She walked the way a baby walked, concentrating first on one leg, and then the other. The steeplejill watched each foot as it moved, both sides of her divided face set in fearful concentration. With awe, Pen saw Espel overbalance and correct herself, as though the bathroom lino was a high-wire. Espel’s eyes flickered back and forth, and Pen wondered at the extraordinary
negotiation, the
collaboration
, that must be taking place behind them.

Run
, she thought, incredulous hope rising in her.
Get away.

But then Espel opened her mouth. ‘Mmmee—’ The word was stretched, the lips and tongue not quite coordinated, but it was completely comprehensible. ‘Iiit’s m-me.’

Her jaw worked silently for a moment, then she spoke with more confidence. ‘I hhave it. I know whaaat you’re looking for. She t-told me. Sh-she gave it to me. C-come and g-get it.’

‘Es, no!’ Pen shouted. ‘She’s lying—’

The Masonry Man hesitated, daintily poised on the balls of its concrete feet. Its pupilless eyes fell first on Pen, then on the disturbing presence of Beth in the mirror, and then it turned back to Espel and took a step forward.

Pen heard the sound of a lid being spun against a screw thread, and then a
flick
, like water hitting glass. There was a change in the air pressure behind her, a breeze, as though someone had opened a window. She tried to push off the mirror behind her, to get between the clayling and Espel, but her fingers groped nothing but air. Much too late, she tried to run.

Grey hands clamped around her chest, their pavement scales crushing and bending the barbs on her dress. She struggled, but the arms that held her were as strong as cranes.

‘
Beth, no!
’ she tried to say, but in her desperation Beth was squeezing her so hard she couldn’t draw the breath and it
came out as a shapeless wheeze. Pen felt herself dragged backwards. She felt London air on her cheek. Liquid edges of mirror-glass entered her field of vision as they rushed back towards each other.