The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II

by Pollock, Tom

  She’d call out to them, order them to stop. She groped for the window latch, to open it wider, but knife-like shards rattled against the reinforced pane. She flinched, the remembered pain of metal thorns searing her skin.

  ‘Stop!’ she yelled, swallowing against thick fear. ‘Get inside!’ but no one heard her.

  Again she reached for the window latch, but as she did, a shrill whistle echoed across the roofscape and a voice boomed out, ‘That’s enough! Get in.’

  The sky opened on a seam of lightning. The slatestorm redoubled in ferocity. The jacks and jills stowed their tools and, cowering behind what was left of their armour, they turned back towards their hatches.

  Pen let out a shuddering, relieved breath.

  Something black smacked into the windowpane and Pen shrieked and leapt backwards.

  It was a girl, boxed up in cheap tin and leather armour. She hung upside down, arms splayed, her left leg tangled in a rope umbilical. Blood and wet hair streaked her face. She wasn’t moving.

  She wasn’t moving. Slate fell. She wasn’t moving. For horrible long moments Pen watched fragments of the wicked rain erode her skin. Then she lurched for the latch, yanked the window open and let the storm into the room.

  Needles of hot pain erupted on her cheeks, the backs of her hands, her forehead, but she ignored them and reached for the girl with one hand, trying to shield her eyes with the other. Tiny quills of slate embedded themselves in her skin. The girl was slight, fragile as a bird.

  Pen shoved her face into the shredded leather jacket, away from the weather. A hot fug of blood and sweat and dust engulfed her as she wrapped her arms around the girl, taking her weight while she fumbled with the rope.

  It wouldn’t come – the snarl was too tight. There was a wide-bladed knife strapped to the girl’s belt. Pen grabbed it and sawed dementedly at the nylon until it began to fray.

  All at once, the fibres slithered apart and the girl’s weight unbalanced her. Teetering backwards, she just managed to reach out and slam the window closed before she tipped over and smacked her head into the hardwood floor.

  She lay there for a moment, simply breathing, the warmth and stink of the girl sitting on her like a blanket. Then through the skin of the girl’s neck, pressed up against her cheek where they had fallen together, she felt a pulse.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she yelped, louder than she’d meant to. She scrambled out from under the girl and bent over her. ‘Are you – bloody hell, are you alive?’

  The leather-swaddled mass flopped over sideways. The girl’s eyelids flickered in her red-smeared face and she drew in a shuddering breath. Her eyes opened, slowly focused on Pen and stretched in horrified recognition, then they went to the knife Pen still held.

  Pen jumped like she was holding a live snake and dropped it onto the table. The girl’s eyes rolled back.

  ‘Oh, splintered fragging Mago,’ the girl murmured. ‘Not for much longer I’m not .’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘These are very shallow,’ the doctor said, peering through her wire-framed spectacles.

  The girl, the steeplejill, lay back on one of the white sofas, her hair fanning back over Edward’s jacket, which had been laid down to catch the blood. The gore and grit and rooftop grime had been sponged away and her forehead and cheeks had been swabbed with a disinfectant that smelled like it stung.

  The face that had been revealed was utterly symmetrical, split by a silver seam that ran from hairline to chin. The girl was strikingly pretty, but she’d gone out of her way to customise herself: dark roots and eyebrows showed beneath hair bleached white-blonde. A small tattoo of a thunderbolt sat just above each cheekbone. A row of studs stretched all the way up her left ear, and a ring punctured her left nostril. Unsettlingly, her right ear and nostril were dotted with small holes too, as though she regularly switched her piercings from one side to the other.

  Strangest of all were the cuts. The slate shards had opened a myriad tiny wounds in her face, and they mirrored each other perfectly, either side of the silver stitching. If the doctor found anything odd in this she didn’t remark upon it; she just squinted into the lamp and threaded a needle.

  Something Pen couldn’t quite define kept compelling her eyes back to the girl’s face. Maybe it was those cuts, and the knowledge that if she hadn’t acted, they would’ve swallowed that face whole. She’d barely thought about it at the time, but now …

  I saved your life. She tried the words out in her head and shied away from them, from the massive commitment they implied. One decision – a few brief seconds … It scared her that a connection that important could appear so fast.

  ‘They’ll need stitching, but they shouldn’t scar,’ the doctor was saying. Her needle hovered casually over the girl’s left eye. ‘Unless of course you want them to?’

  The question didn’t shock Pen as much as it would have done the day before – the memory of the queue snaking from the knife-parlour door was still vivid in her mind. What did shock her was that the question hadn’t been addressed to the blonde girl on the sofa, but to her.

  ‘W-why would I—?’ she stammered for a moment, then noticed the way both the doctor and Edward, looming a couple of feet away so not to blot out the light, were looking at her.

  ‘Why would I want that?’ she asked, forcing calm into her voice.

  ‘Well, it is quite usual for mirrorstocrats to require their staff to maintain certain standards of presentation, milady,’ the doctor said. ‘Normally those standards are the purview of a tailor’s needle rather than a surgeon’s, of course – but I thought with your gifts’ – she gestured to Pen’s own scarred cheeks – ‘it would fit. I could make it rather chic,’ she said, happily musing on the idea. She whipped a scalpel from her bag and slashed the air a fraction of an inch from the girl’s face in hypothetical cuts. Pen’s stomach muscles clenched as she watched.

  ‘I’m sure the girl wouldn’t mind,’ the doctor added as an afterthought. ‘After all, it is all the rage at the moment.’

  Pen didn’t know how the doctor could have missed how wide her patient’s eyes were, but she had the distinct impression that the girl would mind, quite a bit, actually.

  ‘Just put her back the way she was,’ Pen instructed, forcing calm into her voice. The injured steeplejill relaxed fractionally. ‘Besides,’ she continued, ‘she’s not on my staff.’

  The doctor gave a disappointed sigh and raised one wire-thin grey eyebrow.

  Edward coughed uncomfortably. ‘That’s your prerogative, of course, ma’am,’ he said, ‘but I doubt Slater’ll let her back into his precipitecture crew. Not after she let Your Ladyship get all cut up on her behalf.’ He glared down at the steeple-jill, who didn’t meet his eye.

  Pen’s own cuts had been cleaned and treated first, despite being minor enough to need only tape. Tiny white squares of the stuff dotted her cheeks and chin – she looked like she’d been trying to put her makeup on with a sharp rock while drunk.

  She pointed to the older ridges of scar tissue. ‘I’ve had worse,’ she said.

  ‘As you say, Milady,’ Edward said with a harrumph. He’d crashed into the suite like a whipped ox when Pen hollered and had almost bundled the blonde girl back out of the window before Pen could explain she was an invalid rather than an invader. He’d insisted on checking the steeplejill’s leather-and-tin armour for weapons before he agreed to call the basement for the duty medic. Even now, with the scrawny girl as frail as a sick hatchling and dressed in only a cotton vest and shorts, he eyed her suspiciously. Maybe he thought she was liable to explode.

  Four attacks in two months, she thought. That’s liable to make people a little paranoid.

  ‘Caught in a slatestorm without a helmet,’ he muttered disgustedly. ‘Letting the tile cut your rope – and you yourself a steeplejill. Mother Mirror, how did you ever get on the Palace Crew with skills like that?’

  Even lying bleeding on the sofa, the girl stiffened. ‘Weren’t nothing to do with my ski
lls.’ Her voice was tight, barely audible. ‘Slater bet the Precipitect from the Savoyeur Crew an eyebrow. He didn’t wanna lose it, so we kept working – that’s all.’

  Edward snorted. The doctor tutted and waved him out of her light. She leaned over the blonde girl with her threaded needle. ‘Dextress or sinistress?’ she asked.

  ‘Sinistress,’ the girl replied, her pale blue eyes never blinking, and never leaving the tip of the needle.

  The doctor nodded, and with quick, efficient tugs began to draw closed the cuts on the left side of the girl’s face. As she did so, the mirroring cuts on the right side sealed themselves in perfect synchronicity, as if by magic.

  Pen felt her mouth dry out. She did her best not to show her astonishment.

  When the doctor had finished, she packed away her tools and dropped a curtsey towards Pen. ‘I meant to say earlier, ma’am’ – she gave a delighted smile – ‘it’s an honour, truly. The images don’t do you justice.’ She let herself out.

  ‘Come on, you.’ Edward jerked his head at the unfortunate steeplejill. ‘Let’s find out what Slater wants to do with you.’

  He bet an eyebrow, Pen thought, shuddering inwardly. He didn’t want to lose it, so we kept working.

  ‘Wait,’ she said.

  Edward froze bent over, halfway to picking up the blonde girl. Pen felt a curious satisfaction at arresting the big man’s progress. It was like super-strength by proxy.

  ‘I want to have a word with our guest,’ she said. ‘Alone.’

  Edward frowned at the word guest.‘Ma’am? I really don’t think that’s—’

  ‘No, you don’t think, Edward,’ she snapped. ‘Not for me. I’m perfectly capable of doing that for myself.’ The tone was imperious and harsh. It sat as awkwardly in Pen’s mouth as a foreign curse, but the bodyguard recoiled anyway.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, wincing, but his treatment of the wounded girl forestalled any guilt on Pen’s part.

  ‘I’ll be right outside if you need me, ma’am.’ He threw another full-bore glare at the interloper on the couch, and stomped from the room.

  Pen exhaled hard. Her heart was still drumming. ‘Oh,’ she breathed to herself, ‘kay.’

  She went to the bar. She didn’t recognise any of the labels, so she picked one at random and poured out a neat shot of something that smelled like it was designed to scour plumbing. She offered it to the tattooed girl, who hesitated before taking it.

  Just in time, Pen remembered to pour herself a shot too. Get into character, she thought. Her eyes watered at the fumes coming off the liquid.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Pen asked. She kept her distance, leaning against the bar.

  ‘Espel, ma’am,’ the blonde girl said in that soft, brittle voice. Her eyes stayed fixed on a spot of carpet a few feet in front of her. There was a tension to her stillness. Without actually moving, she gave the impression of being fidgety.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Pen said. ‘You can look.’

  The blue eyes blinked and flickered upwards.

  Pen lifted her glass and tilted it gently against sealed lips. On the sofa, the tension in Espel’s shoulders eased a little more and she sipped from her own glass.

  ‘Is it true? What my bodyguard said?’ Pen asked. ‘Are you really going to lose your job over this?’

  Espel shrunk a little further into herself. ‘It’s possible, ma’am,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  Espel hesitated. ‘Because it was … careless of me – getting blood drawn from so famous a face on my account.’

  There was a moment when it looked like she was trying to smile, then, all at once, her brittle composure just snapped. Her face crinkled and folded in at the edges, symmetrical as origami. ‘I only made the Palace Crew two weeks ago.’ She uttered one of those little chokes that’s supposed to be a laugh but doesn’t fool anyone, and sucked at the lip of her shot glass.

  Pen’s heart started to trip a little faster. An idea came to her as the steeplejill was speaking. She winced inwardly at it, but it was the best she had. She sat down beside Espel; the girl’s tears made identical progress down her cheeks.

  ‘You know me, right?’ Pen said. ‘You know who I am.’

  At this absurd question, Espel managed a small smile. ‘Of course, ma’am.’

  Pen piled ahead before her nerve could fail. ‘Do you … trust me? Sorry, stupid question, you only just met me. Still, hopefully after I say this, you will, trust me, I mean.’ She was gabbling; she always gabbled when she lied, as though she could make up for the paucity of truth in her words by supplying them in bulk. Slow down. She exhaled slowly.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘I’m going to make a confession and then I’m going to make an offer. And hopefully you’ll listen to both, because if you don’t – well, I’ll be honest, I’m screwed.’

  Espel couldn’t have looked more scared if Pen’d been tossing and catching a cut-throat razor while singing the theme from Barney the Dinosaur. The steeplejill drained the rest of her glass.

  ‘You know I went missing a few days back?’ Pen asked. Espel nodded, her eyes still wide.

  ‘Of course you do. It was probably all over the news. Well, the Glass Chevaliers pulled me out of the Thames this morning – maybe that was on the news too?’

  Espel nodded again. She shot a betrayed look at her empty glass, as if to say What have you got me into?

  ‘Thing is,’ Pen went on, ‘what I bet hasn’t been on the radio is this: I can’t remember who I am.’

  Espel’s voice came out as a dry croak. ‘Ma’am?’

  Pen spread her hands helplessly. ‘I don’t remember being kidnapped. I don’t remember this place. I don’t remember this room. I don’t remember being a countess. Everything from when I came here, when I got reflected through, four months ago, to this morning, it’s all gone.’ Her voice quavered as she lied, and she hoped it would be mistaken for depth of feeling. ‘It’s this big white field in my mind. I’ve got no bloody clue why my face is decorating every other billboard and half the buses in this city. Maybe I got hit on the head or something, I don’t know. But I’m scared.

  ‘This morning Senator Case showed me a video. These people, these guys in the hoodies, they’d taken a man’s face away. The senator said they wanted to do the same to me.’

  Espel’s knuckles paled slightly where she gripped her glass. ‘The Faceless,’ she said, her voice harsh as bleach.

  Pen wondered if she’d lost someone in one of the attacks.

  ‘They think the Faceless are after you.’

  ‘And I don’t know why,’ Pen said. She didn’t need to fake the fear in her voice.

  Espel just stared at her.

  ‘Even Senator Case doesn’t know how much I’ve forgotten,’ Pen said, her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘She’d panic if she did. Draw Night’s only a week away and you know how important that is.’

  Espel nodded fervently. Her eyes had widened at the mention of Senator Case’s name.

  ‘Besides,’ Pen went on, ‘I know Maggie only wants the best for me.’ She dropped the senator’s first name, ostentatiously familiar. ‘But she’ll only tell me what she thinks I want to hear – what she thinks won’t scare me. But I’m already scared, and I need someone I can trust to be completely honest. Someone I can keep close. And it just so happens’ – Pen licked her lips and made her pitch – ‘that I have an opening for a lady-in-waiting, and the way I hear it, you could use a job.’

  Espel’s eyes were wide and blue as tiny oceans. She opened her mouth and closed it. For agonising seconds, she said nothing at all.

  And then, still wordless, she held out her empty shot glass in front of her.

  Pen let herself breathe out. She grinned at Espel, grabbed the bottle from the bar and topped her up.

  When at last Espel found her voice, it was barely audible. ‘Um … Where do you want to start, My Lady?’

  ‘How about the basics,’ Pen said sheepishly as she poured. ‘Who am I
? Who do you know me as?’

  Espel knocked the shot back in one. She looked shaken by the question, then, slowly, an incredulous smile blossomed onto her face. ‘That’s easy. You’re Countess Parva Khan,’ she said. ‘You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Pen blinked. ‘Say again?’

  ‘You’re the most beautiful woman in the world, ma’am.’

  ‘Oh … okay.’ Pen sat down sharply, missed the edge of the sofa and smacked her tailbone on the floorboards. ‘Ow!’ she cried, and Espel started forward in alarm.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.

  I’m just—’

  —the most beautiful—

  The world blurred for a moment. The billboards, the way people had been looking at her, the queue for the knife parlour – she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, but the words still left her throat dry and a hollow roaring in her ears like distant traffic.

  ‘I’m— Really?’

  Her new lady-in-waiting nodded. She traced her own pale cheek with the edge of her shot glass as if echoing the lines of Pen’s scars. ‘The other cities sulk about it, of course, but even Mirrorkech and Zerkalograd haven’t got anyone close to your kind of asymmetry. You’re the first Face of the Lottery for forty years who wasn’t from one of the three big families, the only first-generation mirrorborn to hold the position ever. Papers have been calling you “a triumph for diversity”.’ Her lip twisted in apparent amusement.

  ‘You disagree?’ Pen asked

  ‘Oh, no, Countess. I’m sure you are, in your way. It’s just—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, you know.’ Espel shrugged. ‘Mirrorborn mirrorstocracy versus naturalborn mirrorstocracy—’ She mimed weighing the ideas in her hands like sacks of flour. ‘You’re all mirrorstocrats. I’m just a half-faced kid from The Kennels. It’s all a little out of my class.’

  Pen frowned. ‘What do you mean, “half-faced”?’

  Espel stared at her like she’d just asked what a nose was. She gestured to the seam running down the centre of her forehead. ‘It means what it says, Countess. I’m skin-flinted, visage-strapped – I’m a sinistress, a leftie. I’ve only got half a face.’