Our Lady of the Streets

by Tom Pollock

  ‘What is it?’ Espel asked.

  ‘Nothing – I’m just hoping you’re looking past the wire.’

  ‘No need to worry, Countess, I’m looking past the clothes.’

  ‘Es!’ Pen grinned despite herself, but it faltered on her face. Espel’s words hung in the air around her. They were a little too slow, spoken with a fraction too much effort.

  Pen looked closer. There was something a little strange about Espel’s smile too: it was asymmetrical – startlingly so in the perfect symmetry of Espel’s face. The left side of it was stretched fractionally wider than the right.

  Es saw her staring and her smile twisted a little further. ‘Yes, Countess, there are still two of me.’

  Pen gaped at her and stuttered, ‘But—But … they said you were leading the Faceless now. I just assumed—’

  ‘Assumed what?’ Espel’s tone hardened. ‘That the other half of me had gone back for her beauty sleep? Sorry, honey, we’re both wide awake in here.’

  ‘But, how …?’ Pen couldn’t get over her shock. ‘How do you talk, how do you even walk when you’re …’

  For a moment there was no sound but the dripping of a pipe somewhere inside the walls. Espel’s smile was like granite now, and Pen was starting to think she’d somehow screwed this up already.

  Then, both to her awe and utter relief, Espel laughed. ‘Split in two?’ The blonde girl knocked gently on her left temple. ‘Sharing my head? We compromise, Parva. We work together, we adapt.’

  She made a steeple with the fingers of both hands. ‘We both know what the other’s thinking, so motor skills and coordination aren’t as hard as you’d think, not now we’re not trying to kill each other, at least. Half the time I don’t even think of us as “us” any more. It’s not so different to how it used to be.’

  She caught Pen’s sceptical look, and her expression turned a little wry. ‘All right, it’s different,’ she conceded calmly. ‘It’s harder – a lot harder, but so what? How many voices do you have to make peace with when you get out of bed every day?’

  Pen held her – their – gaze for a moment, then nodded slowly. ‘More than I used to,’ she admitted.

  ‘Well then,’ Espel said as if that settled it. Both her winter-blue eyes were bright, and her smile returned. ‘It helps that both of us want the same things,’ she added.

  ‘Oh? And what might those be?’

  ‘A roof to climb, a storm to sculpt, mac and cheese like my bro used to make it, and you.’

  ‘In that order?’ Pen asked archly.

  Es shook her head and twirled a finger in the air. ‘Reverse it,’ she said.

  Pen looked straight into Espel’s eyes. There were two minds looking back at her, she knew, one for each half of that symmetrical face: one belonged to the girl she’d fallen for, the first girl she’d ever kissed, and the other to the living mirrored prosthetic that had been stitched onto the right side of her face at birth. That second mind – her inverse depictor, her intimate devil, her id – had been awakened from what should have been its lifelong slumber only a few months earlier and now it was taking up half the space inside Espel’s head. And somehow, they were able to deal with each other.

  How many voices do you have to make peace with when you get out of bed every day? The voice that spoke in the back of her mind could almost have been her own.

  Interleaved and intertwined

  With the fibres of your mind.

  ‘Shhh,’ she muttered.

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ Espel protested.

  ‘I know,’ Pen said.

  ‘So why shush me?’

  ‘I wasn’t, I’m just making peace.’ She put her hand onto Espel’s neck and pushed it upwards into her hair.

  Both sides of Espel beamed at her.

  The hell with it, Pen thought, and kissed them both.

  Espel exhaled hard when they broke off. ‘Wow.’

  ‘What?’ Pen asked. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘That that kiss was even better than I remember.’

  ‘How do you know that wasn’t that third mind at work?’ Pen countered.

  ‘Good point.’ Espel cocked her left eyebrow. ‘Want to get together for a threesome?’

  ‘Es!’ Pen felt the tips of her ears catch fire.

  ‘What?’ Espel’s face was all innocence. ‘I’m just saying, there are bold new adventures ahead here, Countess. I’m not knocking the kissing, you understand. Far from it. I just don’t think we should knock the, uh—’

  ‘Knocking either?’ Pen suggested.

  ‘I would never be so crude,’ Espel said.

  Pen guessed she was trying to assume a pious face, the effect of which was only slightly ruined by the fact that the two sides of her clearly had different ideas of what ‘pious’ meant.

  ‘Expression not working for me?’ she asked Pen after a moment.

  ‘You just look like you’re trying to do really hard sums.’

  They both laughed. ‘Okay, so what’s new in the old city, Countess?’ Espel indicated the tips of the Mistress’ coils, which were twitching a little restlessly on Pen’s shoulders. ‘What’s with the retro fashion statement?’

  Pen felt the laughter dry up in her throat. She moistened her fingertips with the doorway drug and brushed back the mirror’s edge where it was trying to creep back in. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s quite a story …’

  And she told Espel the tale, all of it: from Mater Viae’s demolition of London, her return to the Wire Mistress, their botched intelligence grab, the decimation of their little resistance band, to Paul’s death.

  Espel listened in silence and when Pen was done, the steeplejill sucked her teeth as though appraising the situation. ‘Shit,’ she said.

  ‘As one-syllable summaries go, that about nails it.’ Pen leaned forward with her elbows on the edge of a sink, stretching out her back. ‘We’re screwed, Es. No army, no home, and I think B’s ready to drop any minute. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I don’t even know if there’s anything we can do.’

  Espel licked her lips. She did it strangely, in two distinct halves, her tongue ran first anti-clockwise round the top and bottom of the left-hand side, then vanished back into her mouth before re-emerging to go clockwise round the top and bottom of the right. ‘You could come through to me,’ she said.

  Pen looked up at her and Espel bent forward until their eyes were level. Her expression was wistful, hopeful, and a little ashamed. ‘You could do some real good over here, Countess. This place is right on the edge of open revolt against the Mirrorstocracy. The three-quarters of the Chevalier regiments who are half-faces have finally worked out their bosses aren’t doing anything for them and most of them fight for us now. We’ve got more and more people joining up every day, Half-faced and Mirrorstocrat both. It was you who did that, the Looking Glass Lottery’s own face speaking out against it.’ She sounded like she could still barely believe it had happened. ‘If you came back now, you could put us over the top.’

  She paused as though musing, then said, ‘Also: the kissing. The kissing could continue, which I for one find very persuasive all by itself.’

  Pen smiled, but only to cover the fact that her heart was going double-time in her chest as she thought about it. In the future, assuming she had one, she knew she’d look back on this moment and wonder if she’d got this right. She was tempted – there was no point pretending she wasn’t. The fact that Espel was almost certainly right and she could do far more good in London-Under-Glass only made it worse.

  And yes, there was the kissing, and those bold new adventures to be had.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said at last. ‘There’s someone I need to be here for. A promise I can’t break.’

  Es sighed, and then said, ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.’

  ‘It’s okay, I’m glad you did. And for what it’s worth, the kissing was very persuasive. Oh, hey!’ Pen said it like she’d just thought of it. ‘You could always come through here.
I know I must have really sold it to you with all the gloom and doom earlier—’

  ‘You did actually,’ Espel said. ‘I’m a sucker for a desperate last stand. Only I’m kinda tied up here leading my aesthetic terror insurgency.’

  ‘Must be hectic,’ Pen said with a mock-sympathetic shrug. ‘Sounds like it’s going well at least?’

  Espel’s expression soured and the humour left her voice. ‘Recruitment’s going well, but the crackdown is more vicious than anything I’ve ever seen. Case is replacing her lost Chevs with battalions recruited solely from the Mirrorstocracy.’

  ‘I’ve met them,’ Pen said.

  ‘Lucky you,’ Espel said drily. ‘They’re clumsy and they’re badly trained, but they’re hired for brutality and in that they excel. They just go round to the neighbourhoods of suspected Faceless and shoot everyone. They don’t even pretend to ask questions. Even then we could probably take care of them if it wasn’t for the claylings.’

  ‘Claylings?’

  ‘Didn’t you know? That Goddess who’s taking a wrecking ball to your city left a whole fragging garrison in mine. Nominally they’re under Case’s command, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the orders were actually going the other way.’ Something set hard behind Espel’s eyes. ‘It was bad enough when the secret police used to knock on your door in the middle of the night. It’s a lot worse now they come up through the floor.’

  Pen looked up sharply. ‘They’re taking people? Still? Like they did before?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you know why? It can’t be to feed Mater Viae any more – She’s here now.’

  Espel spread her hands. ‘We assumed it was just out of a general commitment to the repressive government cliché, only’ – she frowned – ‘only there’s the new districts.’

  ‘What new districts?’

  ‘That’s the thing: they don’t even have names yet. About three months ago, right around the time the kidnappings got going again, new boroughs in the city opened up to the north.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘London-Under-Glass is a reflected city: it exists only as a mirror to the old place. It’s why we build upwards, and why we have to grow all our food in greenhouses with soil dug out of the parks. Beyond our city limits, where your mirrors stop, it’s barren grey dust and a barren grey ocean all the way to Mirrorkech.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it’s growing, Countess. There are new roads and buildings and post offices and parks, and for all I know sewers to the north. No one lives in them; no one’s building them; they just appear. You can see them from the tops of the taller precipitecture towers in Kenneltown.’

  Pen felt her throat dry. There was a hollow roaring sound in her ears. She tried to swallow three times, but couldn’t. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You can see them from the taller—’

  ‘No, before that: no one’s building them. So they’re growing?’

  Espel nodded.

  ‘You sure? Have you sent anyone to check them out?’

  Espel’s face darkened. A furrow appeared either side of her face. ‘Alexei,’ she said shortly.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He didn’t come back.’

  Dizziness hit Pen in a wave. She leaned back slowly from the sink.

  ‘Parva?’ Espel asked. ‘What is it?’

  But Pen wasn’t looking at her. Her thoughts were back with Paul Bradley as he stepped into a pool in Canada Square, a pool that he said felt like it had taken something from him. She blinked, and there was Gutterglass, crouching over him as the blood they couldn’t stop poured from the small cut on his forehead. She heard the trash-spirit’s voice as clearly as if she was standing in the dusty bathroom with them, saying, ‘His hair’s not growing.’

  ‘Parva! What is it?’

  Pen blinked and then focused back on Espel. She’d climbed halfway through the mirror, which was twitching and threatening to seal back around her. Her face was furrowed with worry around her silver seam.

  Pen’s throat felt full of dust as she answered.

  ‘Mater Viae – I know what She’s up to.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Beth hadn’t slept. The picture of her dad had taken shape over the course of the night and it felt desperately urgent that she finish it now. Everything felt more urgent now; there wasn’t enough time for anything.

  The sun had just risen and she was weighing up the merits of adding colour versus keeping it black and white when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around and her stomach clenched.

  Pen was breathless, little licks of sweat-slicked hair were coming loose around the edges of her hijab. Her expression was tense as she gasped, ‘Up …’ She pointed to the top of the tower. ‘We need to check—’

  Beth didn’t know what lay behind Pen’s frantic instruction, but she’d spent a sizeable chunk of the last five years reading her friend’s face and right now it said: Don’t ask, just do. Trust me.

  Beth capped her marker and dropped it into the grass, dusted off her hands, turned to the tower leg and started to climb. Her muscles were searing under her skin before they reached the first gantry.

  Remember this, Petrol-Sweat? she thought, to take her mind off the climb. Remember the first time we came here: the steel, and the spiders, and the dark? I damn near chucked myself off the top of it.

  Fil’s voice muttered wryly back to her, I remember. Fun times. Mind you, if you spent a little less time reminiscing about the good old days and paid attention to your hand-holds, you might not be about to slip off that … WATCH IT!’

  The steel was suddenly frictionless under her fingers and then it slid out from under them. Beth grabbed for a hanging cable, but her reflexes were slow and she grasped only air. She fell.

  Wire closed around her, as gently as the silk strands of a moth’s cocoon. Her descent slowed, and then moments later, she started to rise again.

  ‘Nice catch, Pen. Now put me back on the tower,’ she called, and when Pen ignored her, ‘Pen, put me back on the bloody tower! I can do my own climbing!’

  Pen didn’t seem inclined to take the chance.

  ‘This is your fault, you know,’ she muttered, her cheeks burning with embarrassment as well as fever.

  Inside her skull, Fil’s voice wasn’t having any of it. Me? You’re the one who’s driving, Beth. I’m just the comic relief on the car stereo.

  Beth endured the rest of their ascent in huffy silence. When they reached the highest platform, the wires unwound themselves and deposited her on the steel. Tiny spiders swarmed around Beth’s feet, winking in and out of existence, their static voices lost in the wind. The cold air up here pierced her hoodie, finding every chink and crack in her street-laced skin. She clung to the struts of a satellite dish and tried not to let her teeth chatter. Her fever must have flipped.

  Pen stood next to her, lashed to the mast itself with strands of barbed wire. Insects scrambled past them, heading for the pinnacle of the tower, with bits of garbage clamped in their mandibles. A moment later, Gutterglass leaned out from the mast above them, silhouetted against the half-light, his bin-bag coat streaming out behind him. A pigeon shot by in a flutter of wings, bearing his eggshell eyes higher still.

  ‘Thames preserve us.’ Gutterglass had to shout over the wind. Beth was shaken by the awe in the trash-spirit’s voice. ‘I can’t see the end of it.’

  ‘What?’ she asked, and Glas pointed a garden-wire finger.

  Beyond the twisted wreck of the Wembley Arch, where the dense crosshatch of architecture thinned and gave way to fields, a spur of dirty grey concrete and reddish roof tile stretched to the horizon. Beth didn’t need an A-to-Z to know those buildings hadn’t been there a couple of months before.

  Glas’ voice turned grim. ‘I can see terraces without windows,’ he said. ‘Those streets are infected.’

  ‘Mater Viae did this?’ Pen’s voice was hollow with fright. ‘But why? It could be halfway to Birmingham by now �
� what’s it all for? I don’t get it.’

  But Beth did. The understanding that came was sudden, but coldly unshakeable. She looked down at the cross-weaving metal struts of the tower, remembering.

  ‘The cranes.’ She spoke so quietly the words were almost lost in the wind. ‘The Lady of the Streets and the King of the Cranes.’

  ‘What?’ Pen looked at her.

  ‘It’s what She does, Pen. It’s what She’s always done. It’s what She wants, and who She is. She’s a mother, and the City is Her child – She wants to see it grow. That’s all Reach was, in the beginning: he became a force of demolition, yes, but he was a force of construction first. He just got out of hand.’

  She swallowed out of reflex, even though the voice she was speaking with would never parch her throat. ‘For three days and nights, when She first came through, the cranes came awake – She woke them. But the cranes are unpredictable and dangerous. So I guess She had a better idea – Her time behind the mirror gave Her a better idea. She’d already learned how to separate people from their memories, so why not take something else too? So She made a deal with the Chemical Synod: She started to steal the growth She wanted for the city straight from the people who lived in it. She put the cranes back to sleep, before they ever properly woke up in the first place. And we were too busy thanking our lucky stars for small mercies to ask why.’

  ‘An organic city,’ Gutterglass murmured, ‘capable of growing hundreds of miles in only a few weeks – and bringing its sickness to everything it touches.’

  ‘B …’ Pen took her hand, her voice suddenly urgent. ‘What can we do? We have to do something. We have to stop Her somehow. If it just keeps growing …’ She tailed off and an angry lash of barbed wire slammed into the tower hard enough to make it lurch alarmingly.

  ‘We have to stop Her!’ she said again, and this time there were tears in her eyes. She turned to Gutterglass. ‘She could just keep on, couldn’t She? Taking more land, more people, more growth, and so more land – where would it stop?’

  ‘In principle?’ Gutterglass shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it would have to.’