by Pollock, Tom
The guards holding the tweed-suited man relaxed visibly and began to undo his restraints. The doctor dabbed delicately at his seamed brow with a handkerchief.
But all Pen could think of was that baleful second mind, its instant of wakefulness and the ferocious, territorial hate of its stare.
Images came to her without warning: wicked tendrils, barbs glinting like steel thorns, lashing round her face, alien predatory thoughts seeping through her scalp. And somehow in that moment, the gleaming metal of the wire was also the metal of stitches – stitches like those down the middle of the man’s face, like Espel’s, like Harry Blight’s, as he’d lain kicking weakly on the floor of the courtroom, throttled by a parasite consciousness.
Parasite.
‘Dad!’ The young boy sounded so relieved to see his father stand. The doctor looked over at him, shrugged and then nodded to the Chevaliers, who let the boy run towards the bed. The doctor was already lifting another of the half-masks from his pack.
Pen thought of it crawling and pressing on the kid’s skin. Parasite. The word seized her throat and squeezed. It wasn’t involuntary when her muscles fired; Pen decided to run.
‘Stop!’ Her yell echoed massively in the space. ‘You can’t!’
She pelted up the platform towards the gates. An armoured figure spun towards her shout, his rifle already set into his shoulder. There was a crack, and a bright tongue of muzzle-flash lit the air. Granite chips flew from the wall a foot from Pen’s face. A second Chevalier dragged the gun away and bellowed at him to cease fire. Pen didn’t break stride. Footsteps pattered rapidly behind her – Espel, swearing as she pounded after her.
Pen crashed through the open ticket barrier with her arm outstretched. ‘Stop!’ she cried raggedly, lurching to a halt in the midst of a crowd of Chevaliers, doctors and bemused half-faced immigrants. Desperately she tried to drag in enough breath to speak. ‘You – you – can’t—’ she gasped.
The boy and the doctor who stood over him both gaped at her. From here Pen could clearly see the words INVERSE DEPICTOR (20) stencilled on the doctor’s pack.
‘C-C-Countess Khan?’ A Chevalier – an officer, by the silver chevrons on his upper arm – stepped carefully between the doctor and Pen’s outstretched, trembling fingers. He pulled off his helmet. His grizzled, near-symmetrical face was incredulous.
‘What … excuse me, ma’am, but what are you doing here ? And who is that?’
Pen glanced over her shoulder. Espel was about a foot behind her. She gave Pen a lethal look from under her blonde fringe. What the hell are you doing?
Pen didn’t know; all she knew was that the thought of this kid being sutured made it feel like someone was wringing her heart out. ‘You can’t stitch him to that thing,’ she stammered. ‘I won’t … I’m …’ she faltered, and then realised there was only one thing she could say. ‘I’m the Face of the Looking-Glass Lottery and I won’t let you.’
‘Ma’am?’ The Chevalier officer wrinkled his brow, looking both confused and more than a little pissed off at whatever fates had decided to dump a lunatic celebrity into the middle of his operation. ‘I’m sorry, but what?’
‘You can’t.’
‘We have to.’
‘You can’t.’
‘Excuse me, My Lady, but it’s the law.’
‘You can’t.’ Pen just repeated it stolidly, raising her chin like it was a weapon. She had only her face and her name to bargain with.
The Chevaliers’ gun barrels were starting to twitch like predators’ muzzles. The black-armoured men shifted slightly, subtly and unhurriedly putting more of their bodies between Pen and the half-faced boy on the bed.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ the officer said, and then added, ‘sI know that your recent experiences must have been … traumatic, but I’m going to have to ask you and your associate’ – he barely glanced at Espel – ‘to accompany Sergeant Price here.’ He spoke slowly, giving her the kind of nervous, sympathetic smile you might reserve for the lady in the old folks’ home who talks to the petunias.
No, Pen thought, no, you can’t think I’m crazy. This doesn’t work if you think I’m crazy. But then— She licked her dry lips as she considered her behaviour, looked at the black helmets and realised every one of them would hold a stitched face. What else could you think I was?
‘My Lady.’ The sergeant the officer had indicated, a heavy-set Chev with a breastplate curved to accommodate his paunch, stepped forward and offered her his hand. ‘With me, please—’
Thunder boomed outside and falling masonry rattled against the roof. Pen felt like a cornered animal. She could not let this happen, but she couldn’t think of a way to stop it.
The sergeant took off his helmet. He had a kindly enough face. His right cheek was patched with a few expensive freckles. ‘If you’ll just come with me, ma’am, and we’ll get you back to the palace when the storm abates.’
Another wave of thunder shook the sky, and the whole station reverberated. The very floor seemed to shudder—
No, not seemed. It did.
The concrete was trembling under their feet, and it didn’t stop shaking when the thunder subsided. Pen felt her teeth clatter together as she staggered. The Chevaliers and immigrants fought for balance, staring downwards in baffled fright. Pen felt her throat narrow. Whatever this was, they didn’t understand it either.
The floor shivered like the skin of a drum. Ripples moved under the polished surface, distorting it into almost recognisable shapes.
The sergeant tracked the disturbances with his rifle. ‘What—?’ he murmured as one of the shapes ghosted towards him. ‘What in Mago’s name—?’
Splitting the stone like water, a grey hand speckled with cement scree burst upwards and seized the sergeant’s ankle. He bellowed and squeezed the trigger. With a deafening rattle-roar the weapon unloaded into the spot between his feet.
Pen leapt back from the noise. She lost her balance and the floor jarred through her spine as she fell. Eye-level with the ground, she saw the last of the bullets chip splinters from the surface of the granite tiles. They didn’t penetrate.
She blinked and her breath came in fast gasps. The grey hand was gone. For an instant she thought that she’d imagined it – that the sergeant had imagined it; that somehow they’d both fallen victim to some storm-induced psychosis.
But then he screamed, ‘Oh Mago, oh Mother Mirror,’ he yammered desperately. ‘My leg!’
It was sunk into the solid concrete up to the shin.
‘Oh Mago, the weight—’ His symmetrical face was utterly bloodless, his lips spittle-flecked. ‘I can feel it crushing … It’s crushing my foot—’
‘You’ll be okay, Price.’ The officer’s voice was panic-stricken and not at all reassuring. ‘We’ll get you out. We’ll – uh … we’ll—’ He fumbled for his radio.
The sergeant howled in pain again and Pen’s heart shuddered, but her pity turned into fear as the floor rippled again, an inch from her face.
She scrambled upright. The Chevaliers, Espel, the doctors and the immigrants all backed into a close little knot around her and the sergeant. The fug of their sweat choked her.
In the spaces between their bodies. Pen saw shapes cruising under the surface of the floor, effortless as hunting rays, they described a predatory circle around the trapped crowd. The Chevalier sergeant moaned.
‘Everybody stay very still,’ the officer ordered. ‘Just keep still.’ He fumbled for his radio. ‘Command, this is SouthWest Border Team One, over.’
‘Come in South-West One.’
‘Command, we are under attack, repeat, under attack. Send immediate back-up.’
‘Negative, South-West One. Storm’s too heavy. Back-up not available until abatement.’
‘Command, I have no idea how, but we have the Face of the Looking-Glass Fragging Lottery here. Send back-up, right now!’
The hesitation on the line was audible. Then, ‘Stand by.’
The sergeant had lapsed i
nto a feverish muttering. Right next to Pen, the man in the brown suit trembled. His eyes darted from the floor to his reflected son, then to the dark archway that opened onto the street and back again. His symmetrical expression was sick with fright. ‘We can’t,’ he whispered.
He grabbed his boy around the waist, lifted him bodily in one arm, and with a terrified howl, hurled himself towards the station’s open exit.
Pen counted his footsteps by the echoes they cast into the silence. He managed five before the creature struck.
It breached the floor with sickening grace, leaping, its shadow bleeding over the running man’s back. The creature was man-shaped, naked and skeletal, wrapped in a concrete skin that dripped from it like liquid. Its hollow-cheeked face was like a skull. It howled silently and brought its crooked, too-long fingers down on the man’s shoulders. It dragged him down like a leopard pinning prey. The man didn’t cry out but his child shrieked as they fell. The floor opened liquidly around them as they hit it, and the boy’s scream was cut off abruptly as it closed over them. A rippling scar marred the concrete where it had sealed over.
The air dissolved into thunder as the Chevaliers opened fire.
Panicked, they poured ammunition into the floor, trying to get at the four-limbed shapes that rippled its surface. The immigrants shrieked at the noise and broke, chasing hither and thither like startled deer. Pen found herself running too, without even thinking. The shattering noise galvanised her muscles. She couldn’t stand still. She could feel her heart lodge in her throat. She stared desperately at the floor for signs of breaching fingertips.
The floor in front of Pen erupted. She froze in terror as the creature surfaced. With widespread arms, fingers hooked like claws, and a mouth set in a silent, sickening howl it came for her.
There was a sharp rattle of gunfire. Sparks flew from the creature’s side and it stopped. It shuddered as though hurt, though the bullets had barely chipped its flank.
The creature’s head turned on its neck with organic smoothness, and Pen looked where it looked. Twenty feet away a Chevalier was lowering his gun from his shoulder, clumsy with fright.
The creature jagged sideways. It didn’t run, it slid friction-lessly through the surface of the tile, careering into the Chevalier and grabbing him like a rag before plunging him backwards into the station wall. Pen saw the Chevalier’s legs twitch spastically and then stop, sticking out of the otherwise unbroken brick.
The creature turned back towards her.
Pen stared at it for a heartbeat – its cavernous ribcage, grey concrete muscles flexing over its bones, fingers spread wide, a fine, flexible webbing of cement stretching between them. Then with a serpentine flex of its spine, it dived back into the floor.
Something yanked Pen backwards by the collar. She yelped and spun, her fists held up in useless pugnacity.
‘Countess!’ It was Espel, her face taut with disbelief. ‘Do you want to make fragging tracks or what?’
The steeplejill half pushed, half dragged her until her legs started working again. They ran. The main exit was perhaps fifty feet away across the lethal concrete. Screams blended with the gunfire as those around them were picked off, but the grey figures themselves made no sound as they burst upwards, tangling their emaciated limbs with their victims and bearing them under.
It’s the immigrants, Pen thought. They’re only going for the immigrants.
Only the new arrivals were being hauled alive underground. The tracksuited girl was dragged down screaming, but half a second later her head broke back through the surface, bobbing and gasping as the once-solid floor lapped at her chin. She drew breath to shriek again, but grey fingers clamped over her half-mouth and yanked her back with terrible strength.
The Chevaliers were ignored, or where their desperate rifle-fire stung the creatures, disposed of with imperious brutality. The trapped sergeant was bellowing incoherently, jamming new clips into his gun and pumping them out at any patch of floor he could see moving. As Pen watched, one of the creatures sprang up behind him, seized his chin and twisted his neck to an impossible angle. He dropped, a sack of twitching meat. Pen heard the crack as his falling bodyweight broke the bone in his trapped leg.
Pen’s heart lurched for him, but she didn’t stop running. Her feet kicked into a fallen rifle and even as she stumbled she bent and gathered it up, cradling it clumsily like an armful of firewood. They were almost there, almost out. The archway yawned hugely in front of them and beyond it she could hear the crash and clatter of the storm and see the flickering chunks of brick falling through the sodium dusk. Espel was five yards ahead now, despite her shorter stride, her head low like a greyhound—
—but then she was breaking, yelling, skidding as she fought to turn. Beyond her, Pen saw the grey stone on the inside of the archway flex.
A grinning figure stepped smoothly out of the stone, shedding mortar.
Desperately, Pen tried to brake too. Her heels slid under her and she reeled backwards. Time took on a nightmarish slowness as she fell. She watched the grinning man reach back into the inside of the arch. The cement-etched muscles in his forearms stood out as he gripped, and the wall moved.
Pen’s breath caught. He was dragging the wall. There was no sound, no shriek of rending concrete; in his grip the masonry was as pliable as cloth and he pulled it across the arch like a curtain. She watched in horrified awe as the doorway narrowed and vanished.
Espel wasn’t so lucky as to fall back; her momentum was too great and she over-balanced forward. The grinning creature gathered her eagerly in its stony arms. It braced her against its chest, lifting her feet from the floor. Pen saw the wall ripple around it as it backed slowly into the concrete where the doorway had been. Espel kicked and spat like a child in a tantrum, her blue eyes wide with terror. She screamed.
There was a weight on Pen’s chest: the Chevalier rifle. She lurched to her feet, threw herself across the few feet that separated her from the steeplejill, swinging the weapon around in a tight arc. As the muzzle fell over the eye socket of the grey monster, she fired.
The roar of the weapon split Pen’s skull. The recoil nearly took her arm out but she clung to the trigger for dear life. The creature’s mouth gaped in silent agony. It threw its arms wide and Espel crashed forward into Pen. The floor cracked hard into her head before she even knew she was falling.
Stars erupted and the world swam dully. She heard an explosion as if from a long way off. Her head lolled sideways and she saw a ragged hole ripped in the wall. Black-armoured figures poured through it, past her, firing at the floor: fat, slow projectiles from heavy guns which bored deep before exploding and ripping up the ground. Pen heard more dim detonations and shrapnel buzzed past her face like flies.
Another bolt of dizziness rocked her head back. Espel was warm and heavy on top of her. The steeplejill was pressing her down, protecting her body with her own. Over Espel’s shoulder she could see the grey man, its face still howling, its half-submerged arms still thrust wide as if in an embrace.
Pen felt a jolt of recognition and stared at the thing’s right arm in disbelief, struggling against the darkness that seeped in at the corners of her vision. Carved into the inside of the concrete man’s right wrist was a design she recognised: city tower blocks, arranged to form the spokes of a crown.
‘Parva!’ Espel cried. ‘Stay with me!’ But Pen could barely hear the words. Blackness welled up and she let it take her.
III
THE LOOKING-GLASS LOTTERY
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘Parva! Stay with me!’
A monster had Espel in its grip. She kicked and struggled and cried. Wiry grey arms bound her, trapped her, dragging her backwards …
Pen felt the weight of the gun in her hand. As slowly as the blonde girl was receding in front of her, her own muscles moved slower yet. She swung the weapon around. Its muzzle eclipsed the creature’s stretched grey eye.
‘Pen! Stay with me!’ a familiar voice called to h
er.
She fired.
Espel fell, bearing Pen to the ground with the slow inevitability of an avalanche.
‘Pen …’
Pen looked over the steeplejill’s shoulder. The monster half-submerged in the wall was a girl. Grey-red blood oozed, slow as cement, from the ruined eye socket, over a face Pen knew as well as her own. The girl in the wall seemed to be trying to focus on Pen, to meet her eyes with her own, but the blood meant she couldn’t focus. She tried to reach up to clear it, but the wall trapped her arm, sealing around it just above a mark shaped like a tower-block crown.
‘Pen,’ she whispered. ‘Stay with me.’
‘Beth?’ Pen croaked. The hammer and echo of machine-gun fire died slowly in her ears, replaced by the soft hum of electronics and the shush of distant traffic through a window. She felt soft, warm sheets over her.
‘Beth? Who’s Beth?’ a dry voice asked.
Pen opened her eyes.
She was lying in Parva’s bed, back in her apartment in the palace. She was wearing pyjamas. Her hijab was gone, and there was a thick, sticky dressing on the back of her head where it had struck the ground.
The lights in the room were out, but the city glow seeping in around the curtain outlined a tall, thin figure sitting patiently on the edge of her bed. The figure reached out and flicked on the lamp on the dresser, illuminating her wrinkled face.
‘Who’s Beth, Parva?’ Senator Case asked again.
‘Senator?’ Pen squinted in the sudden light. Awareness of her situation crashed in on her: she’d been found without bodyguards, miles from the palace in the middle of the night, loudly trying to flout London-Under-Glass’ border laws. Groggily, she tried to think of a plausible explanation. ‘I—’
‘Maggie.’ Case corrected gently. ‘And save your strength. Your new lady-in-waiting told me everything when I interviewed her an hour ago.’
‘Maggie – I – she did?’
‘Indeed.’ Case smoothed her already immaculate grey suit. It must have been before five in the morning, but she showed no signs of having been roughly woken or hurriedly dressed. Pen wondered if she ever slept.
