The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II

by Pollock, Tom

  ‘Espel told us about you waking from a nightmare in the middle of the night – how you kept repeating, “They’re all looking at me, I have to get out,” over and over, how she tried to persuade you otherwise, but eventually had to settle for following you and how you wandered apparently aimlessly for hours, and she managed to guide you to shelter in the immigration station when the slatestorm struck.’ She paused. ‘I must say, a number of very expensive eyebrows were raised around here when you appointed a former steeplejill as your lady-in-waiting, but it’s lucky you did. I doubt anyone else would have had the instincts to guide you safely through that kind of weather. We all owe the ugly little thing a debt.’ She pursed her lips, as though the idea of being in debt to a half-face amused her.

  Pen stretched slowly. ‘She said that? That I … freaked out?’

  Case nodded, her lined face set in a sympathetic smile. Pen looked at that smile and remembered the undone face of the man in the video. Jack Wingborough’s voice echoed in her mind.

  Auntie Maggie is ever so efficient.

  There was no sign on her face at all of what she was capable of. Even her eyes were kind.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Case said. ‘You think you’re the first of the Lottery’s Faces to have a little wobble? It’s completely understandable.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Of course. Of course,’ she said soothingly. ‘It’s our privilege that we of the mirrorstocracy can see ourselves in the mirror; one of the gazes that defines us is our own. But it is still only one out of thousands of pairs of eyes that we encounter in our lives. And for the Face of the Looking-Glass Lottery, that effect, that dilution of our power to decide who we are, is multiplied a thousandfold again.’

  Case smiled and shook her head. ‘Who amongst us, faced with the prospect of stepping in front of the cameras on Draw Night, would not be afraid of losing ourselves in all those gazes, of having them pin us like a butterfly to card? Who wouldn’t fear that after that they would never be free?’

  Case laughed. It sounded genuine. ‘There have been six Lottery Faces while I’ve held office, and without exception they’ve all been terrified of their first Draw Night. Admittedly, they did not all express their anxiety quite so dramatically as you have, but still. You shouldn’t worry.’

  The amusement in her voice dried up, shrinking like a puddle on a hot pavement. ‘We can’t have you running off again though, Parva,’ she said, ‘so I’ll tell you what. I’m going to tell you a story – one I didn’t tell any of the others, because I think you need to hear it more than they did, and because …’ She hesitated. ‘Well, because we have enough in common that I think you’ll understand.’

  Her brown eyes locked onto Pen’s. ‘The story is about a little girl. Let’s call her’ – her lip quirked – ‘Margarethe. She grew up with her mother in an estate in the Old City, Kylemore Close in Newham – perhaps you remember it from the days before your mirrorbirth?’

  Pen shook her head, although she knew the place well enough.

  ‘Ah well.’ Case shrugged. ‘Margarethe’s mother was very young. She was a bright girl, kind, and very resourceful. You would have liked her, I think. She was only sixteen when Margarethe was born – she was already pregnant with her when she came to London from Gdansk, although she did not know it at the time. Margarethe’s mother had no parents in the Old City, she was alone, so she set about doing what she had to do to look after her little girl. They grew up together, Margarethe and her mother; they were each other’s best friends. On her first day at school, Margarethe cried when her mother left her, and then she sat glumly in the classroom like it was a prison cell, hating the seconds as they passed. Every day for two years she sat at her desk and prayed to be free.’

  ‘And then one day’ – her voice didn’t waver by so much as a semitone – ‘her mother’s colleagues came for her. There was a hammering at the door, and shouting, and the sound of cheap wood splintering, and suddenly a place that had always been safe simply wasn’t safe any more. Margarethe was only eight, and at first she didn’t understand what the big men with knives who crashed into her kitchen were shouting about. She was very frightened, of course, but she tried to tell them that they had it wrong; that her mother was a good person who would never have cheated them like they were saying she had. The men didn’t listen – she didn’t have the power to make them listen. Perhaps, Margarethe thought, her mother would be able to explain.

  ‘But Margarethe’s mother didn’t protest. She didn’t even look at the men; she just looked at Margarethe and she was crying, and she said, “Darling, if you love me, then run.”

  ‘So Margarethe ran: she ran and she ran, as hard and fast as she could, to prove to her mother how much she loved her. She darted between the swearing men, dodging the huge hands that reached for her, and sped out of the door and down the stairwell and into the maze of the estate.

  ‘She didn’t stop until she came to a place where she sometimes played: a narrow, weed-choked space between the backs of buildings where washing hung out of windows overhead, and where someone, years before, had dumped an old patina-splotched mirror, propped against a wall. The mirror sat opposite a window, and on bright summer days Margarethe would stand between them, transfixed by the images that stretched like paperchain cut-outs into the reflections on either side. She stood like that now, tearful and scared, just hoping for something to happen and— Well, I’m sure you can guess what did.’

  Pen nodded, but didn’t speak.

  ‘Margarethe’s mirror-sister took a different but similar name and the two girls became fast friends, united by common experience and divided only by the width of a mirror-pane. Even when the newly minted mirrorstocrat was adopted by a rich New City family, she would sneak back to that spot and to the girl she’d been sundered from. She kept faith with her sister for years.

  ‘Neither of the sisters ever saw their mother again. The men never came for Margarethe in anything other than her nightmares, and neither did the council or the police. There was no one to tell her to go back to school; she finally had the freedom she had wished for in the classroom, but those last few seconds in her home had already shown her that freedom was a chimera.

  ‘You couldn’t really be free, she’d realised, because there are too many other people in the world: people who might mean you harm – people who can knock you off the path you want to walk on. The clockwork metaphor is a cliché, admittedly’ – Case winced in apparent embarrassment – ‘but it’s a cliché for a reason: we are all cogs, and the only way you can control yourself is to control all the other cogs that interlock with you, and so control all the cogs that interlock with them, and so on. True freedom is predicated on absolute control.’ She stated it simply, like it was an obvious fact.

  ‘Margarethe’s mirror-sister had by now grown into a powerful young woman, and she knew she would become more so in time. So even though it was risky and her new family didn’t approve, when she was sixteen she snuck back to that place between the towers one last time, and she made both of the girls she saw in the reflection a promise. She promised that she would be free, for both of them. And if total control was what was needed, then that was what she would seek.’

  She shrugged self-deprecatingly. ‘It’s an impossible task, admittedly, but we stumble and we strive and we approximate success as best we can. Now, you may be thinking, “What is the old bag bleating about?” but I think you can probably see my point?’

  Pen didn’t respond. Case rubbed her shoulder fondly. ‘I think you understand how important control is, Parva. I can see it in you. I think it was the loss of control that really scared you last night, but you don’t need to be afraid. We’re on your side: me, the Senate, the mirrorstocracy, the whole of London-Under-Glass is behind you. It’s my city, and I’ve seen to it: this is the biggest and most tightly managed publicity campaign ever seen this side of the mirror.

  ‘You don’t need to be afraid of their gaze, Parva. Let them look. We can control how t
hey see you. The only thing waiting for you tomorrow night is their love.’

  She gently lifted Pen’s head and plumped the pillows, then pulled the duvet further up over her. Pen stiffened as the old woman leaned in and kissed her scarred forehead.

  ‘Get some rest. It’s only a day until the Draw, and we need you as well as you can be.’ She stood. ‘We’ve kept that steeplejill of yours waiting outside – she’s been terribly eager to get in to see you, hopping from one foot to the other.’

  Case arched an eyebrow and then smiled like a parent who thinks they’re cool. ‘You have yourself a good one there, I think, Parva. I like her. But if this … thing you two have is going to continue, I think we’d better give her a raise. Enough so that she can buy herself some freckles and possibly a dimple or two. Just to keep it respectable, you know?’

  Pen felt her gorge rising behind the smile she returned. ‘I’ll ask her about it.’ She kept her tone light. ‘After all, it’s her face.’

  Case laughed, though Pen wasn’t joking. She hesitated, her hand on the door handle. ‘Parva,’ she said casually, ‘we’re all grateful to Espel’s quick thinking last night of course, but it is … regrettable that the only shelter available was the station. I don’t know how much you remember about the Faceless attack.’

  ‘The Faceless attack?’ Pen said sharply.

  ‘That’s right,’ Case said evenly. ‘They bombed the place out – the Chevaliers were heroic, but because of the storm, they arrived too late to stop the terrorists’ racist onslaught. It claimed the lives of every one of the new immigrants. A terrible tragedy, a terrible crime.’ She paused. ‘I have personally spoken to every one of the Chevaliers and medical staff who survived the attack, and they all agree that that is what happened. Just as they all agree that they never saw the most beautiful woman in London-Under-Glass last night. As far as they were concerned, she must have been tucked up in her bed here in the Shard, where she belongs.’

  Pen swallowed hard under Case’s gentle but unblinking gaze.

  ‘In the name of control?’ she asked. Her voice sounded thin in her ears. Case smiled thinly but said nothing.

  ‘I don’t remember anything about a Faceless attack last night,’ Pen said at last.

  ‘Of course not,’ Case said. ‘How could you? It was miles away.’

  She opened the door. Outside Pen saw Espel, nervously shifting from foot to foot. She was back in the black blouse and trousers Pen had lent her – and Pen couldn’t help but notice that despite having been the one nearly snatched by the concrete-skinned creature, the half-faced girl wasn’t getting the pillow-fluffing treatment. She looked haggard, but just about together.

  The steeplejill ducked her head low to the senator. Given Espel’s disdain for formality, Pen could only conclude that she was very, very afraid of the old mirrorstocrat.

  ‘Your mistress is awake,’ Case told her. ‘Look after her, the way you always do.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  As soon as the door closed, Espel rooted in her pocket and threw something to Pen. When she looked at the small, cold, surprisingly heavy object she started: nestled in her palm was Goutierre’s Eye.

  She stared in astonishment for a few seconds before she realised the marble’s core was dull and motionless and there was a bloom of small cracks on one side.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ She turned the thing over, examining it.

  Espel smiled slightly sheepishly. ‘From my mum,’ she said. ‘Reflectionday present. It’s a toy, Countess – official merchandise. I took it with me everywhere. It won’t fool anyone for long, but it’s the right size and from a distance …’ She shrugged. ‘I thought it might be useful to have something to switch the real eye for.’

  Pen squinted critically. ‘Be better without the cracks.’

  ‘Well, I’ll go back in time immediately and tell my ten-year-old self to be more careful, shall I?’ Espel said tartly. She dropped herself onto the edge of the bed and eyed the closed door. ‘So what did Case say to you?’ she asked. She drew her knees up under her chin and hugged them.

  ‘Same as she said to you, I expect,’ Pen said. ‘“You weren’t there, you didn’t see anything. Any resemblance last night may have born to anything except another Faceless terrorist attack is purely coincidental, and likely the product of my overstressed mind this close to Draw Night.” Oh, and she told me to give you a raise.’ Pen looked up from picking the skin off her scarred cuticles, a cheap little self-demolition she hadn’t indulged for months. ‘Am I even paying you?’

  Espel managed a smile. ‘Not as such, no. Been meaning to talk to you about it, but things kept coming up.’

  ‘Things like killing me with knives?’

  ‘And saving your arse from a brick storm.’

  ‘Well, if you will let trifles distract you …’ Pen mocked an indifferent shrug.

  Espel’s smile staggered over the line into a laugh. For a moment it felt like they could have been anywhere, they could have been home. Two friends, sitting on a bed in the middle of the night and laughing.

  Except it was different, Pen thought, watching the way Espel’s face broke into symmetrical dimples. She’d never looked at anyone like that, not even Beth. Beth was safety. Beth was home, Pen knew her better than anyone. Being with Espel was different, charting the lines and shapes of her felt like discovery, it made something nameless and exciting swell inside Pen’s chest.

  Eventually, Espel’s smile faded. ‘Those … things, last night …’ she said, and trailed off. Her eyes were glassy.

  Pen recognised that expression. She’d worn it herself: the look of someone’s whose world was breached. The reality she’d always accepted was leaking out of it like air pressure from a crashing plane. The masonry-skinned man who’d come so close to taking her was as alien to Espel as Espel had once been to Pen. She’d been stolen, if only for a few seconds, by something other.

  Pen threaded her fingers between the steeplejill’s. The scars on the back of her hand stood out as she squeezed sympathetically. ‘People,’ she said quietly, ‘not things.’

  Espel looked up. ‘You know them?’

  ‘Not them, exactly, but their like. Yes.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Espel demanded.

  The hunger in her voice startled Pen, but she knew where it had come from: these things had almost killed her and now she was determined to understand them. Pen flinched a little from the intensity of her stare, but started, ‘I saw them once in the Old City, at St Paul’s. There was digging and I – I saw them die. Those ones were just people – civilians, I suppose – but I think the ones that attacked last night were soldiers. They were disciplined; when they swam under the floor they held formation. I think they had a mission – they were very specific about what they took.’

  ‘The immigrants,’ Espel said.

  ‘Whatever they were after, the new arrivals had it,’ Pen agreed. ‘They snatched them, but they didn’t kill them – you noticed that too, right? The Chevaliers, the doctors, them they killed, but they carried the immigrants away alive and whole, back under the – under the …’ She tailed off, staring at the raised lesions on the back of her hand. She exhaled a little ‘oh’ of realisation and rocked back hard on the bed.

  ‘What is it?’ Espel asked in alarm.

  ‘The floor,’ Pen said softly. ‘When they dived back into it, it didn’t seal properly. It rippled’ – she turned her hand in front of her – ‘it scarred. I couldn’t see it on the news reports about the other stations’ attacks because their floors had been wrecked by explosives, but last night—’

  ‘So the floor rippled,’ Espel said. ‘So what?’

  ‘So … I saw the bathroom where Parva was snatched – the floor was scarred just like that.’ She exhaled hard, as though that could push off the weight she suddenly felt on her chest.

  ‘That’s why they took her – they were looking for new arrivals. Those things have got my sister.’

  And suddenly her mind was wit
h Parva, being dragged under the floor of the reflected bathroom, concrete flowing close over her skin like thick water. Pen shuddered at the terror she must have felt.

  ‘Grenades,’ Espel said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Grenades. You said the other stations on the news were wrecked by explosives. Last night, when the reinforcements showed up, the Chevs were packing these launcher-things, grenades. When they fired them they kind of … burrowed into the ground before they went off. Don’t you see? They came prepared. They knew what they were fighting – they’d done it before. Mirror-fuck,’ she swore. ‘Have we just found ourselves in the middle of some kind of secret war?’

  A secret war. Pen thought. That’s a bad habit.

  Espel was already digging in her pocket for her mobile phone ‘I have to warn Garrison,’ she said. ‘We’ve got people looking for your sister right now. What if one of them finds her, and those things along with her? Goutierre’s Eye or no, it won’t be worth them getting buried alive for.’

  Espel went to stand up, but found she couldn’t because Pen’s fingers were clamped hard around her wrist. In Pen’s other hand the replica marble glimmered as she turned it in the light of the table lamp.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, Eye or no Eye, Garrison has to call off the—’

  ‘Eye, or no eye,’ Pen echoed her. ‘I.’ She exhaled hard and released Espel’s wrist. ‘I am so bloody stupid – no, scratch that, you are so bloody stupid.’ She levelled a finger at Espel. ‘I’d never heard of Goutierre’s bleeding Eye until three days ago. You’re the one who’s been collecting souvenirs since you were ten—’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Espel demanded.

  ‘The Device, the Lottery Device. Think about it. How does it work?’

  ‘It scans the winner, and then the Eye checks every mirror in the city for matching—’ She broke off and stared at Pen.