The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II

by Pollock, Tom

  His family, Pen thought. He thought he could help them out. ‘He called you Sis,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Espel said. ‘I kind of wish he hadn’t done that.’

  It’s your face, not theirs. It wears the marks of the choices you made. Be proud of that. I would be.

  ‘Espel—’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I like you,’ Pen said. ‘I mention it, because what with the lying, the tying-up and the attempted knifing you might not have got that impression.’

  Espel turned up her collar as the freezing wind knifed up the street. ‘Come on,’ she said shortly. ‘We’ve got a long way to go to get back before sunrise.’

  They broke into a jog-cum-scramble over the distorted pavements. Pen felt lighter now. She had allies. She wasn’t alone any more, and that buoyed her. She found she liked the feel of the city under her palms, solid and reassuring. The air had turned so cold it felt sluggish, like freezing water, and she relished the way her cheeks burned as her body cut through it.

  A dog barked at them as they swung past a shuttered-up corner shop. Pen looked up at the sky, the moon still hung high, a pale sliver crescent and—

  A wave of otherness crashed through her, so strong that she lost her rhythm and stumbled to a stop. She stood with her hands on her knees, half trembling, and trying not to laugh.

  ‘What’s got hold of you?’ Espel asked as she came jogging back.

  ‘Oh, nothing much,’ Pen gasped. ‘I just … The moon—’

  Espel’s brow wrinkled. ‘What about the moon?’

  ‘It’s – it’s the wrong way round.’

  Espel squinted skywards. ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘I mean, it’s the opposite way to home.’

  ‘And that’s funny?’

  ‘Apparently’ – Pen was just managing to wrench back control of her breathing – ‘it’s bloody hilarious.’

  ‘I hope you find it quite this entertaining when they’re carving you up for parts, which is what they are most definitely going to do if we don’t get back in …’ She tailed off and went very still, her head tilted back, staring at the sky like a cat.

  Streetlight etched her outline in orange. Her symmetry made her look uncannily beautiful. Pen followed her gaze. The moon had vanished and dense clouds were gathering over it with impossible speed.

  ‘Wha—?’

  The wind redoubled with a sound like something dying. Red dust blew into her eyes and they watered. She felt gravel-like powder trickling down the back of her neck. She inhaled and the musty tang of cement choked her.

  ‘Shit and ugliness,’ Espel swore. ‘Weatherturn. Run!’ She dragged Pen down the street as the wind screamed in and whipped up tendrils of ground brick around them.

  Pen ran in near-blindness – she had to – opening her eyes more than a sliver dissolved her vision instantly into stinging tears. She had no idea how Espel was navigating as she tugged her harum-scarum over car bonnets and walls and fences.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Pen had to spit masonry just to form the question. This wasn’t the way she remembered coming.

  ‘We have to find cover!’ Espel yelled back. ‘Before—’ She broke off and dragged Pen hard to the right. Something whistled through the space she’d just left and crunched into the asphalt by her feet.

  ‘—that,’ she finished. Pen peered back behind her. Through slitted eyes, she just managed to make out a stone chunk the size of her fist.

  ‘Get in front of me!’ Espel ordered. Pen felt the steeplejill come up behind her, close enough that her breath came hot against her neck through her headscarf. She felt a hand pressed lightly against her ribs, another to her hip.

  ‘Run,’ Espel hissed in her ear, ‘and go where I put you.’

  Pen half ran, half staggered through the broken streets, inhaling clouds of blood-coloured brickdust. Small stones rattled off her head and rapped her knuckles and she spat in pain but didn’t falter. A push to her side and she responded, dancing left without thinking. A heavy hunk of brick cratered at her side. An instant later she felt a tug back and she corrected. She felt rather than saw the impact she dodged. She ran on, and somehow Espel ran behind her, guiding her, a presence of rapid footsteps and scraps of breath, her own guardian ghost.

  Panic welled up in Pen then, at not being in control, at not knowing from one instant to the next where her body would step. She almost stumbled to a halt, but Espel barrelled into the back of her and she staggered and was off running again. She forced herself to give way to Espel’s touch, forced herself to trust. She felt her panic morph into something else, a primal concentration that made her blood pound as her feet flowed over the ground. She was ruled by an urgent instinct – survive this.

  For a half-instant, in the howl of the wind, she thought she heard a voice whisper, I will be.

  The terrain under their feet evened out, but they slipped and slid on cloud-strewn gravel.

  They could have been running through an alley or pelting up a main street, Pen had no way of telling as they burrowed through the opaque air. Bricks crunched on the ground like a premonition of breaking bones.

  She’d never run this hard before, not even in the grip of the Wire Mistress. Pins and needles stung and slithered through her muscles, but she gritted her teeth and drove herself on. She knew she was faltering, slowing; any second now she would fail, and she would fall.

  Lights burned through the brick haze ahead of her, windows, maybe, or headlamps. Espel shoved her towards them and as they drew closer, a dark archway fuzzed into visibility.

  A doorway! Pen threw herself at it. Pain jabbed through her toe as it caught on a step. For a brief moment, Pen flew, then she hit the floor with a bruising thud. Everything was black. She tried to push herself up, but her muscles wouldn’t answer any more. It was as though her nerves had short-circuited and sparked out. She screwed up her eyes, waiting for the shattering impact of falling masonry, but none came.

  The floor was smooth and cold under her. For long seconds she just lay there. She felt Espel’s body lying beside her own, intensely hot after the cold night air, and reflexively she curled a little tighter into her warmth. She could feel the steeplejill’s breath going in and out. Pen felt a kind of bliss at simply being alive. She could have lain there forever with the girl who’d brought her through the storm.

  It took her a long time to notice how the noise of the storm had deadened. Voices murmured and chuckled close by.

  ‘Please bear with us,’ a voice boomed over her. The echoes of the artificial crackle of the PA system charted the borders of a vast space. ‘The storm has interrupted the power supply to the lights. If you will remain where you are for just a few moments longer we should be able to restore them.’

  Espel moved, and an instant later a hand grabbed Pen’s collar and pulled. She stifled a yelp of relief as her legs unfolded beneath her. ‘Dark’s a bit of luck,’ Espel muttered by her ear. ‘Let’s move, quick, before they bring the emergencies on.’

  Pen let herself be herded sideways, fumbling through the darkness. Her hands found a wall and pattered along it until she came to a doorway. There was a sudden, coarse smell of bleach and urine.

  ‘In,’ Espel whispered, ‘and stay out of sight.’

  Who can see in this? Pen thought, but she obeyed as best she could. Her shoes almost skidded on the slick floor. Something hard jabbed into her back.

  ‘Where are we?’ she hissed.

  ‘As of midnight?’ Espel’s voice was taut. ‘Immigration Centre South-West One.’

  ‘Immigration what?’

  There was an echoing clunk and the blindness of darkness was exchanged for a blindness of blazing white neon.

  Pen squinted as her eyes adjusted, and then she gaped in recognition. ‘Bloody hell,’ she breathed. ‘It’s Victoria Station.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  They were peeking around the doorway of the men’s loos on Platform One. The hard thing in her back was the spar of a turnstile. Abov
e them, the vast iron-and-glass roof was folded and crinkled like industrial origami. The platforms were all empty and she could see out over the track-trenches, through the open ticket barriers to the concourse. She could make out inverted logos for Burger King and Marks and Spencer, though the lights were out and the concession booths shuttered.

  She felt a brief pang at their familiarity. Must’ve ripped off the Old City brands out of nostalgia, she thought wryly.

  She frowned then, puzzled. Just beyond the ticket barriers, a row of booths sat across the middle of the concourse. Uniformed figures sat behind Plexiglas, drumming their fingers and muttering to each other. An occasional nervous laugh rang out. Next to each booth was a green canvas camp bed. Doctors in white coats sat and kicked their heels, chewed on their cuticles and looked anxiously towards the tracks. Black-armoured Chevaliers prowled up and down nearby, curling and uncurling their hands around the stocks of their machine-guns.

  It looked like a cross between a border checkpoint and a field hospital – and it felt like everyone in it was waiting for something.

  ‘Espel,’ she whispered, ‘I go through Victoria Station every other week at home. How come I’ve never seen this little circus reflected in a shop window or something?’

  ‘During the day it’s a regular terminus,’ Espel muttered back. ‘They only set up the border on nights when they’ve got a big influx. We were incredibly lucky we got in.’ She sounded puzzled, suspicious even. ‘After the other attacks, this place ought to be crawling with a lot more Chevs than this – especially tonight.’

  ‘Why toni—?’

  Pen was cut off by the shriek of brakes and the chunter of steel wheels on track. A lone engine, black and beam-eyed, pulled slowly into the station, dragging a single windowless carriage behind it. The Chevaliers’ white chess-knight insignia stood out starkly on the polished black metal. The train was covered in slab-like armour plates. It looked like a prison on rails.

  The checkpoint lurched into activity. Doctors readied saline drips and checked surgical tools, Chevaliers jogged in loose formation to meet the slowing train, forming a semicircle around its single set of doors as it stopped. They stood, half crouched, weapons ready.

  Their visors were down and Pen couldn’t see their faces, but their shapes were fearful, somehow.

  ‘New arrivals,’ Espel whispered, her voice tense.

  There was a hiss-clunk of hydraulics and the doors to the carriage slid open. Pen flinched reflexively at the sound, then tried to peer between the black-armoured bodies, to see what it was that could be so dangerous. A soft snow of brickdust trickled down from above her as Espel’s fingers tightened on the doorway’s edge.

  ‘When half-faces are reflected through for the first time, Chev patrols sweep them up and hold them in internal camps so no one’ll have to look at them. They’re only half of who they used to be – half of their old memories and faculties. They’re disorientated, confused. They can’t officially enter ’til they’ve been processed at the border. The trains visit the camps at night and bring them in.’

  Something moved inside the train. Pen’s view was obscured by a Chevalier’s shoulder-plate. She shuffled sideways for a better look. The figure became clear as it emerged and relief and disappointment mingled bitter at the back of Pen’s throat.

  It was just a man in a shabby brown suit, his right profile towards her as he walked along the side of the train. He kept his head down, placing his feet with the extreme but not excessive care of someone being watched by twitchy men with guns. ‘What’s the big deal?’ Pen hissed. ‘Why’s it so important no one sees them?’

  ‘Daddy?’

  As the high, frightened voice emerged from the carriage, the man in the brown suit looked around, revealing the left side of his head.

  At the exact halfway point on his face, where Espel’s seam was on her, his features simply stopped. After his right nostril, his nose rejoined his face in a sharp plane, like dough cut with a razor, his mouth vanished beneath it. His left side was barer than a shop window mannequin, a rough half-oval of skin beneath his sweat-drenched hair.

  The Chevaliers crowded the man without touching him, hemming him in with their rifle barrels like they were frightened he was going to flip out and attack someone.

  Espel’s fingers trembled against her lips. Pen frowned and prised them carefully away. She looked up at her companion. ‘What?’ she said.

  Espel didn’t answer. She was staring fixedly at the floor.

  ‘What is it?’ Pen whispered. ‘Why are they being so rough with them?’

  ‘They’re ugly.’ Espel’s jaw looked like she was fighting some rebellious instinct. ‘They’re so empty – so blatantly incomplete.’

  Pen thought about the way even the Faceless had looked away when Cray had revealed the ravaged blank that was his face. It was that lack, that absence of feature that they found so hideous. And the Chevaliers here had none of the seditious group’s self-restraint. She could see their fear of the new immigrants in their posture, hear it in their snapped commands.

  Under the Chevaliers’ watchful glares, more figures emerged from the carriage: a middle-aged woman with bleached hair and a tiny skirt, a kid in a baggy Millwall tracksuit and a baseball cap, a younger child in school uniform – the tweed-suited man ran back and wrapped him up in a hug – a businesswoman, and others, two dozen or so in total. All of their faces gave way to nothing at the halfway point. They looked around themselves with their half-mouths agape as the Chevaliers herded them toward the checkpoint. The woman with the bleached hair had a compact, and her single eye searched it frantically, looking in vain for a reflection.

  The first immigrant had reached the checkpoint now and Pen could see him shaking his head, raising his hands, pleading in confusion. Behind the Plexiglas, the border official stared fixedly over his shoulder as he jotted down details, and then gave a curt nod.

  A Chevalier gestured with his gun, pointing the man towards one of the camp beds and he collapsed onto the canvas and allowed his limbs to be secured with leather straps.

  A spider of unease walked up Pen’s spine. ‘Espel, what are they doing?’

  Espel looked at her. Behind her pale eyes, Pen saw guilt, relief and horror struggle with each other. ‘Obeying the law,’ she whispered. Her fingers were resting absently on the artificial right side of her face. Her id.

  An image leapt unbidden from Pen’s memory: Espel, sitting drunkenly in her borrowed palace apartment. My id might not be pretty, but it does its job, keeps me legal.

  Pen knew, quite suddenly, exactly what the doctors were there for.

  Cosmetic – she heard the jingle in her head – prosthetic, completing your aesthetic …

  Crouching beside the camp bed, a young male doctor pulled on surgical gloves with the sharp, efficient movements of someone not allowing himself to feel. In the bed, the brown-suited man’s single eye roved frantically from the doctor’s face to his hands as he tapped air bubbles from a needle, and then slid it in behind his patient’s ear. Instantly the muscles in the man’s half-face sagged into paralysis, the eye revolving to rest looking at the bisected nose. As the doctor moved to delve into his medical pack, Pen saw drool glimmer on the brown-suited man’s lower lip.

  ‘Dad!’ the boy in the school uniform shouted, his fear made to sound strangely hollow by his half-mouth. He tried to start forward, but he was caught around the midriff by a black-armoured arm.

  The doctor lifted something flat from his pack and peeled plastic from the top of it. Pen felt a terrible pressure squeezing her heart as she leaned out to look.

  It was a half-oval, made of some kind of fabric; it had the suppleness of thin rubber but it shone dully like tarnished steel.

  Metal shrieked over concrete and Pen jumped and almost swore. The man in the bed was struggling, his limbs jerking in their restraints in defiance of the slack expressionless of his face. He’d managed to drag the bed an inch across the floor. A curt gesture from the doctor an
d two Chevaliers pinned him back down on the bed. Pen heard a low gurgling sound – a cry of fear, trapped in a chest with no lips to give it shape – but the man couldn’t turn away, couldn’t even roll his eye to watch as the doctor fitted the silver half-mask snugly over the right-hand side of his face.

  The doctor pulled an oddly shaped tool from his pocket and ran it swiftly down the centre of the patient’s face. A series of sharp clicks filled the air, and when the doctor moved aside, Pen could see a row of neat metal stitches bisecting the man from hairline to chin, joining the metal mask to his skin.

  And then the metal on the man’s face started to move. Ripples ran across its surface like a breeze over a pond. The metal stretched and warped into a new topography, shrinking and tightening in some places and sagging into fulsomeness in others. It bulged towards the bridge of the man’s nose and opened like a seam to continue the line of his mouth. A crater sank to mimic his eye socket.

  Only when the shape was complete did the colour arrive: it billowed in like ink through water, eddying until it settled and the man in the bed was utterly, perfectly symmetrical. The new eye blinked and rolled in its socket until it was staring furiously across the steel-stitched border at its rival.

  The man’s left hand, secured in its leather cuff, curled into a fist.

  ‘Now,’ the doctor barked. One of the attendant Chevaliers grabbed the patient’s head and pulled it hard to the side. The doctor stabbed another syringe in behind his left ear. For a second, Pen saw the id’s eye stretch in outrage and pain, she watched it panic as it scrabbled to hold onto its newly granted consciousness, then, inevitably, the lid slid over it like nightfall. The man in the bed blinked and shuddered, and when his eyes opened again they moved in unison.