The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II

by Pollock, Tom

  Pen stiffened slightly as Beth pulled her into a hug.

  I’m sorry, Beth typed, after she’d let her go. What did you want to talk to me about?

  ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ Pen said. She braced herself to say Parva’s name, to break the secret of her doppel, and then she stalled. There’s only one world. Her mirror-sister’s smiling face floated in her mind.

  ‘Is there a way to go behind the mirrors?’ It was only as the question left her lips that she realised how long she’d been thinking about it. ‘To where the mirrorstocracy live?’

  Beth frowned. She typed, deleted, and then typed again. Pen half expected to read a suspicious query, but all Beth wrote was: I don’t know. Fil never mentioned one, and neither did Gutterglass.

  She hesitated before adding, The Chemical Synod might know a way, but the price they’d charge wouldn’t be worth it.

  ‘Oh.’ Pen deflated slightly. ‘Okay.’ Her head dipped, but pavement-textured fingers caught her chin.

  Beth’s grey face almost looked like it would crack under her concern. You still writing?

  Pen blinked; she looked away, flustered. ‘Yeah, B. I write all the time.’

  Beth spread her hands, raised an eyebrow: Yeah, but?

  It was true, Pen would jot down half-lines in her notebook, but she invariably scratched them out the next day. They looked so limp and inadequate on the page. She hadn’t written a full verse since she’d left the hospital four months before.

  Pen, are you okay? We never used to keep secrets.

  Pen gently pushed Beth’s phone away. ‘I know, B,’ she said. ‘But maybe we should have.’

  *

  Out of deference to Pen, Beth let herself be guided down the stairs and escorted through the Khans’ front door. She loitered on the frosty pavement, watching as Pen’s slim silhouette returned to her window. She’d watched like this, from the street or the rooftops opposite, more than once over the last few months. She’d seen Pen throwing herself into exercise or holding herself with rigid discipline, demanding ever-greater control over her body. She thought she understood why and it worried her, but she didn’t know how to intervene.

  Tonight, though, Pen did something Beth had never seen before: her arm was crooked in the air as though around an invisible partner, and she danced.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Parva.’

  As soon as Pen heard her name, she knew something was wrong. She felt the premonition of it curl tight up tight in her gut. Gwen had a tone she kept for members of the flock who had stepped out of line: a gentle tone, tinged with sadness and the promise of terrible correction.

  She was using it now.

  Pen eyed the sanctuary of the abandoned junior block, then turned around.

  Gwen, Trudi and Alan stood amidst the playground’s semi-frozen sludge, and they weren’t alone. There was Harry Baker and Faisal Hamed and Leila Akhmal and Susie Thomas and … and— Figures bundled up in scarves and hats crowded behind Gwen’s immediate entourage, all looking expectantly at Pen. Trudi smiled and nibbled on a lock of ginger hair. This wasn’t impromptu. They’d arranged an audience.

  ‘It’s a real shame,’ Gwen said. Her green eyes were tinged with what looked like genuine sorrow. Her voice carried clear in the winter air. ‘I really wanted it to work out for you.’ She reached out and laid a hand on Pen’s cheek.

  Pen flinched backwards, brushing up against Trudi, who had quietly stepped around behind her.

  ‘I wanted us to be friends,’ Gwen carried on, ‘but what kind of friends can we be if we lie to each other, Parva?’

  Puffs of condensation were suddenly coming too fast from Pen’s mouth. She was snatching at breath. She tugged her hijab closer and dug into herself to try to find the bravado she’d faced Gwen with before. She came up with nothing.

  Pen stuttered, her teeth suddenly chattering in the cold, ‘W-w-what— what are you talking about?’

  Gwen’s expression didn’t change. ‘What am I talking about, Tru?’ she echoed.

  ‘We know it was you.’ Like a well-trained pet, Trudi mimicked her mistress, even down to the air of patronising regret. ‘We know it was you who said Salt touched you up.’ She sighed. ‘That’s sad, Parva, really heart-breaking.’

  A rumble of surprise went through the crowd, punctuated by a couple of startled laughs. The teenagers started to spread out, to get a better look at her. They stretched right across her vision, as though they were surrounding her. And then she twigged what the crowd had in common: they were all in her maths class.

  Pen felt her stomach clench. Like any bully who had a shortlist of victims, Salt had been popular with everyone who wasn’t on that list.

  ‘We all know it’s bullshit,’ Gwen said. ‘After all, Salt hated you – it was obvious; we all saw it. And you had it in for him, you and Beth Bradley and that graffiti stunt. Now that I think of it, you always were grabbing after attention, weren’t you?’

  She tailed off, looking solemn, then said, ‘Don’t you feel at least a little bad? Lying like that?’

  Pen’s chest was tight. For an instant she felt invisible metal barbs digging into her skin, inside her elbow, between her fingers, pricking her throat.

  ‘Still’ – Gwen’s smile was positively beatific – ‘we’re not here to punish you, Parva. We’re here to help. We understand it’s not your fault. It’s a compulsion.’

  ‘All it takes is the truth,’ said Trudi, but she wasn’t smiling. ‘All you have to do is tell the truth, here and now. Admit he never touched you, and tell us how you really got those scars.’

  Pen’s hand went to her face without her willing it. She could feel the panic like another too-tight layer of skin, just under the surface.

  Trudi had to come up on tiptoe to speak into Pen’s ear. ‘Tell us. You did it to yourself, didn’t you?’

  Pen recoiled. She tried to retreat, but there was nowhere to go; the crowd was hemming her in, trapping her like wires – like a metal cage. They’d all heard what Trudi said. They were all letting themselves stare at her now. Little black oblongs appeared in gloved hands: phones, filming her.

  ‘You did it for attention. You did it so people would look at you.’ Trudi snorted. ‘So let us look.’ Her wool-gloved hand flashed out towards Pen’s hijab, but Pen snatched it tight around her. She could feel her pulse hammering where her fingertips rested against her neck.

  ‘Yeah!’

  Pen felt a sick little lurch at the first call from the crowd. It was Leila Akhmal. She’d always liked Leila.

  ‘Tell us—!’

  ‘Let us look—!’

  ‘Tell us—!’

  ‘Lose the scarf—!’

  Another hand went to grab her hijab, then another, then another, rubbing over her scars through the thin fabric. Pen gripped the headscarf and hunched over, trying to twist away as they pressed in. She didn’t say anything – she was scared of hearing her voice come out thin and squeaky and pathetic; she was scared of them laughing at her. She lashed out with one arm and felt someone catch the wrist and twist it. Pain flashed up her arm. Someone barked a laugh. Pen caught a glimpse of Gwen. She looked excited, nervous – she’d lost control.

  ‘Let it go! Let it go! ’ Trudi was all but yelling it at her now. ‘Let it go!’ Pen shook her head dumbly, like a dog. Her head was ringing.

  ‘No?’ Trudi almost snarled. There was a clinking metal sound, and suddenly everything was still. A memory flashed into Pen’s head: Gwen’s boyfriend Alan, igniting a roll-up from a stainless steel Zippo, accompanied by exactly that sound. Her eyes found him, but he was patting his pockets in consternation. Pen looked sideways, and there was Trudi, her red face flushed and blotchy with excitement, a naked flame dancing wickedly above her fingers.

  For a moment, there was total, breathless silence.

  ‘Do it!’ a voice called from the back of the crowd.

  And then, as casually as if she was lighting a cigarette for a friend, Trudi Stahl reached out and set fir
e to Pen’s hijab

  The stench of burning hair and fabric rushed into Pen’s nostrils. Heat touched her neck, and then a prickling pain rushed over her skin. She choked, gagged, and pulled her arm free. In her panic she struck out, and something fleshy cracked under the base of her palm.

  She dragged the burning scarf off her head and flung it into the dirty slush.

  The flames guttered out, leaving grey-black wounds in the green cloth. The cold wind balmed her neck. She bent over and gathered the scrap of ruined fabric. Then, trembling, she straightened and took in the crowd.

  No one was laughing. Trudi sat on the frosted pavement, blood spilling from behind the hand which was clamped over her nose, but no one moved to help her. They just stared at Pen, and she stared back, letting them look. Her rebuilt lip curled of its own accord and she spat at them, like an angry cat.

  And then she ran. They parted for her silently, and she rushed through them before they could see her cry.

  *

  ‘Parva!’ Pen’s voice echoed shrilly off the tiles, both in this tumbledown bathroom and the one behind the mirror. ‘Parva!’

  She folded in the middle like a hand puppet, hands on her knees, gulping down snotty, tearful breaths. There was a strange taste to the air, a metallic tang that mixed with the dust and the sour scent of her own scorched hair.

  ‘Parva!’ She knew someone would hear her – people had seen her run in. Someone would come, if they weren’t coming already, to drag her out of this forbidden zone, away from her mirror-sister. A rat scuffled out of a cracked pipe and skittered over the floor, its tail twitching. It scampered back and forth over the same bare patch of lino, licking at it with quick stabs of its tongue and emitting little squeaks. There was no other sound, no familiar voice. Pen’s gaze roved over the mirror, but she only saw herself.

  Her scarred face was tear-swollen. Streams of diluted eyeliner meandered down the topography of her cheeks. Her hair was ragged and tangled where the scarf had been pulled away. The thin bald jags where the Wire Mistress’ barbs had killed the follicles showed starkly.

  ‘“You did it to yourself, didn’t you?”’ she echoed, a little hysterically. She had chosen to follow Beth into her strange city, after all. ‘It’s all you, Pen.’

  She stepped up close to the mirror and the rat fled, chit-tering, from under her feet. She laid her hands flat on the cold surface and called again, ‘Parva!’ Her breath misted the glass, but there was no answer from behind it – of course there wasn’t. Her mirror-twin would be at work now. They hadn’t arranged to meet. It was just instinct that had driven Pen here; instinct, and sheer, blind hope.

  She slumped, touching her forehead to the mirror,

  And froze.

  Directly between the feet of her reflection was a puddle of dark red liquid. Pen inhaled reflexively, and choked as she realised what the source of that metallic smell was.

  Blood.

  Numbly, Pen crouched down, and scraped her fingers over the apparently dry lino on her side of the mirror. They came away damp, and the invisible stuff that coated them was tacky when she rubbed her thumb across their tips.

  She stood and looked back into the reflected bathroom. Next to the dark red pool, the floor was marked with a half-print of a hand, a familiar shape with its long, thin fingers. It blurred into a long streak that swept backwards across the lino, petering out long before it reached the door … as though the owner of that hand had been dragged out of the room. The lino beside that streak was torn, and underneath, she could see the concrete floor was rippled and puckered, almost as though it was scarred.

  She hammered on the glass with her fist and shrieked, ‘Parva!’ Her voice echoed back off the walls behind the mirror, but her body had no way in.

  She slammed her fist forward and the mirror fractured under the blow. Where the glass flaked away, only brick showed.

  ‘Parva! Parva!’

  ‘Parva?’

  It was a man’s voice: old, and abraded by cigarette smoke. Pen spun around. Mr Krafte, her English teacher, was standing in the bathroom doorway.

  ‘Parva – are you all right? Why do you keep shouting your name? Good lord, what happened to you—? You know you can’t come in here—’

  Pen didn’t answer him. You can’t come in. The thought went around her head, over and over: You can’t come in. You can’t …

  … come in.

  Mr Krafte recoiled as she barged past him into the corridor. She felt the invisible blood on her fingers soak into the headscarf in her hand.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A chill wrapped itself around Pen’s heart as she rode the tube. She swayed with the motion of the carriage, barely noticing when the back of her head bumped off the little square window. She couldn’t stop seeing that smeared, bloody handprint. She couldn’t stop imagining being hauled across the floor, screaming at the mirror for help, or else, dull and muddled by blood-loss, watching her window onto her only friend disappear as she was dragged through the bathroom door. Pen pictured herself in Parva’s place and felt the terror pick its way over her skin.

  She’s only there in the first place because of you.

  Her mobile sat dark in her bag. She’d switched it off and even now part of her mind was screaming at her about that, but she ignored it. She knew with a cold certainty what she needed to do.

  We never used to do secrets.

  But maybe we should have.

  Parva had been Pen’s secret: the girl in the mirror, the little fragment of her universe she’d kept solely for herself. But it wasn’t jealousy that kept Pen from asking Beth for help: it was the fact that she knew with a bone-deep certainty that she’d get it.

  In her mind’s eye she saw it: the street-skinned girl, eyes gleaming like hubcaps on a summer’s day, grabbing her railing spear and gesturing for her best friend to lead the way.

  The Chemical Synod might know a way, but whatever they would want in exchange wouldn’t be worth it. Beth’s last encounter with the synod had cost her the boy she’d loved, and the price for their help now would likely be just as terrible. Pen couldn’t ask Beth to pay that, not again.

  The tube lights flickered and a memory welled up from the dark: an invitation scrawled on bricks in spray-paint. Meet me under broken light.

  There was a cost when you asked someone you loved to follow you into this world.

  *

  The abandoned dye factory stood half collapsed on the south bank of the Thames. Patches of dark red lichen were eating the walls, looking like cold, gradual flames. Pen walked towards it, wading through her fear like it was chilly water. At each moment she expected black, oil-soaked figures to emerge and advance on her with symmetrical steps, but no one came.

  She scrambled over the chain-link fence, ignoring the corroded warning signs. It took her a full three minutes of clenched teeth and muttered swearing to work herself up to squeezing past the barbed wire. The second-hand on her watch goaded her with every tick. The metal was chill where it brushed her neck, and she tried not to feel her skin crawling.

  Mercifully, the rust had chewed out the lock. Pen leaned on the metal door and the only resistance came from the cobwebs as it shrieked inwards.

  Inside, all was darkness. Pigeons fluttered high up, but she couldn’t see any holes where they could have got in. The chill that blistered her skin felt old, as though the factory was a storeroom for years and years of past winters.

  A prickle crept up Pen’s back. She started to call out, but her throat was parched by dust, and anyway, there was no point: they already knew she was here. She could feel them watching her, their eyes blending into the dark. She fought not to tremble. She licked her lips and peered into the shadows, trying not to blink, trying not to show them she was afraid. The darkness had eaten her; she couldn’t see her hands, or where she was putting her feet.

  Something metal clinked behind her and she spun around, her heart thumping. The door was still there, a comforting rectangle of glare, but the daylig
ht clung close to it and somehow didn’t penetrate any further into the room. The factory darkness had substance, like liquid, like oil. Next to it the light felt weak.

  She forced herself to turn back and keep walking, groping ahead with her hands. Something hissed, steam rushing from a punctured pipe, its source camouflaged by echoes. Pen’s eyes found outlines in the darkness, black on deeper black. Blood thundered in her ears like a tide.

  A shape in the darkness solidified into something not-quite human, something thin and threatening and hungry. It hated her – Pen could feel its hate. Its jaw opened in a silent howl. It stretched out fingers made of shadow and lunged.

  Pen shrieked and ran. She barely managed to stay upright as she threw herself forward. She could feel her feet wanting to turn towards the door, to make her flee, but she wouldn’t let them: they were her feet, her muscles, and they’d do what she bloody well told them to. She felt invisible things reaching for her, slithering over her skin.

  Her knees rose and fell, almost of their own accord. She couldn’t not run, so she gritted her teeth and ran deeper into the dark. From the corners of her eyes she glimpsed nightmare things squatting fatly on heavy haunches with back-bent teeth and empty eye sockets. There were flickers of motion. Heads snapped on thick necks to track her. Even though there was no light, even though there was no way she could see them, she saw them anyway.

  Something snorted and snapped by her ear and Pen flinched. She zigzagged, recoiling from the hands she could feel reaching for her, tugging at her clothes and sliding, chill and slippery, upwards to play in her hair. Cold snouts pressed to her neck. The hissing grew louder; there was a plack plack plack sound of some viscous liquid hitting concrete. She screamed into the dark again and broke into a headlong rush. Something firm snagged the collar of her T-shirt and her feet were jerked from under her. Her stomach tumbled in sickening weightlessness for an instant, and then the floor jarred her spine like a hammer.

  She lay there, unable to move, wondering, for a horrified instant, if her back was broken, if she was paralysed. She listened to her own wheezing, panicky breaths and felt the slender, invisible things grasping for her out of the darkness. Would it be this moment? Or this? Or this, when they finally touched her? The steam-hiss was right beside her ear as it bled into words: