The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II

by Pollock, Tom

Pen slumped into her seat. Tears surged up in her throat and she swallowed them back. She sought inside herself for something, anything that could galvanise her against the despair that was welling out from the core of her. She felt a flicker of anger and she concentrated on it, cradling and stoking it like an ember.

  She remembered the bullet wound in Corbin’s chest; she remembered his desperate, trembling failure to speak. A shiver passed over her as she realised she’d probably never know if he’d died there.

  She battened herself down as she started to tremble. I will not pity you, she told herself. She fixed the little half-faced boy in her mind, the blank look in his single eye before Corbin shot him. I am not sorry, she said inside her head, over and over again, hating the way it made her feel like a liar. I am not sorry.

  Pain spread through the back of her left hand and she looked at it. She’d gouged bloody lines across the tangle of scars with her right.

  In the front seat, Cray and Jack were still arguing.

  ‘I know one of the nurses at St Janus—’ Cray’s voice was quiet, almost like he was trying to convince himself. ‘ He could—’

  ‘One nurse? It would take an army of doctors, round the clock, for the rest of her life. And even then … You know I don’t want to say this, Garrison but she’s—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Cray told him.

  ‘Mate, please.’

  ‘No, I mean, shut up. I’m trying to listen.’

  The young mirrorstocrat fell silent. Cray bent his earless head, and Pen strained to listen too. At first all she could hear was the engine and the hiss of the tyres on the tarmac. Then, very distant but growing louder with alarming speed, came a sound like wind-chimes.

  ‘Jack,’ Cray said simply, ‘floor it.’

  Pen looked back through the back windscreen just as six glass horses galloped from a side street and thundered after them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The battered saloon lurched forward as Jack stamped on the accelerator. Through the rear windscreen, Pen saw the Chevaliers react, goading their horses to greater speed. The chime of their hooves on the road almost blotted out the engine’s roar.

  ‘They can’t catch us, right?’ she asked. ‘I mean, this is a car. They’re only on horses—’

  Cray was frantically winding his window down. He had his gun out. ‘WHAT ABOUT THEM LOOKS LIKE NORMAL HORSES TO YOU?’ he yelled over the blast of air. He pulled himself half out of the car, leaning like a windsurfer, and started shooting.

  The glass horses seemed to gallop ever faster, eating up the road with their ringing hooves. The beasts burned with reflected streetlight, growing brighter and brighter, until Pen couldn’t look at them straight. The lamps they left in their wake were dark, as though they were leeching the energy they reflected. Their hooves blazed and blurred under them like shooting stars.

  They were closing.

  At some hidden signal, the Chevaliers bent low over the necks of their steeds. Behind each of them, a second black-clad rider became visible, each holding a long-barrelled rifle. They aimed with practised ease from their jolting mounts.

  Pen threw herself flat over Espel as the rear window dissolved. Glass splinters sprayed over her, nicking the back of her neck. The wind screamed in through the gap.

  ‘New plan,’ Jack shouted to Cray over the roar. ‘No place like home!’

  Cray fired off one last, futile shot and slid back inside the car. Jack spun the wheel and the saloon veered left. A rippling column that might have been the reflected Centrepoint appeared and then vanished behind them.

  Pen levered herself up. The wind rippled her headscarf against her face and she clawed it back. The architecture blurring past on both sides was growing more clotted as they sped further west. Jack swerved the car around the low brick drifts that stretched into the road, but the mirror-mounts jumped them like fences on a steeplechase without breaking their charge. The passenger-side mirror exploded into fragments as a bullet hit it.

  ‘Little close, Jack,’ Cray grated.

  ‘Righto!’

  Jack jinked the car into a series of tight corners, and stomach acid leaped into Pen’s mouth. They straightened up along a narrow side road. A fraction of a second later, three Chevaliers tore around the corner behind them, but they’d taken the turn too fast. The horses veered sideways as their riders wrestled with their reins. Hooves scrabbled on concrete as the mirror-mounts fought for traction. Their lips peeled back from their slab-like teeth as their glowing glass legs tangled. The horses screamed strange, crystalline screams as their momentum overcame them.

  One of the beasts skidded flank-first into the front wall of a newsagent. A fraction of a second later, its fellows collided with it. With a brittle shriek of glass the horses shattered into fragments.

  ‘Mother Mirror, Jack – where did you learn to drive?’ Cray shouted.

  ‘Benefits of a private education,’ Pen heard the grin in the young mirrorstocrat’s voice. ‘I totalled three Porsches before I was fifteen.’

  The air howling through the shattered rear window was cold enough to hurt Pen’s face, but she didn’t dare look away. Even as the heap of armoured bodies and broken glass dwindled behind them, she saw the three remaining horses eased around the turn by their riders. One by one, the lights around them flared, stretched to touch their hides and went out. The vampiric steeds blazed as they accelerated up the centre of the road. They were closing the distance with sickening speed.

  ‘We can’t outrun them!’ Pen shouted as they swerved into another turn.

  ‘I know.’ Jack tore the scarf from his mouth. He sucked in tight concentrated breaths. ‘But I can take my wheels places they can’t force their hooves. Please, Mago,’ he murmured fervently. ‘Just one more mile.’

  Eight-foot dunes of precipitecture were rearing in front of them now, bristling with broken railings and jagged spurs of scaffolding. Jack’s face flushed as he wrestled the car around them, on two wheels as often as four.

  ‘Just a little further,’ he was muttering under his breath to the car. ‘Just a little further.’

  Pen tried to listen past the sound of the wind and the engine until at last she realised there wasn’t anything else to hear. ‘I can’t hear hoof beats!’ she shouted jubilantly over her shoulder. ‘I can’t hear—’

  Her voice was obliterated by screaming tyres as the car slipped sideways. The window filled edge to edge with brick. Pen just managed to curl her body around Espel as the car scraped to a halt along the wall.

  The vibration of the grazing metal shuddered through Pen’s skeleton. Cray was up and out even before the sparks struck by the fender had landed. He ran around the back of the saloon and shoved the boot open.

  ‘Jack—’ His voice was tightly controlled. ‘How long have we got?’

  ‘Five minutes, maybe ten.’ Jack worked breathlessly beside Cray. He was pulling something that clanked from the back of the car. ‘I can’t see them getting those bastard horses past Cadogan Street, but I don’t know how fast they can run in their armour.’

  ‘No chance you lost them?’ Cray asked.

  Jack just snorted. ‘I think we left a trail of rubber on the road half an inch thick. Damn, I miss my old car.’

  Pen felt gelatinous, like her bones had dissolved, but she managed to clamber out of the car’s uncrumpled side. She hooked her arms under Espel’s shoulders and pulled her out. Her body came limply. Her tattooed face was still slack.

  ‘Bloody hell, Cray,’ she said incredulously. ‘What did you do, put her in a coma? Is she ever going to wake up?’

  ‘I put her down deep. She’s got another half an hour or so, maybe a little less,’ Cray replied. ‘The two of you need to be a long way away by then.’

  Pen looked up. From where she now stood, she could see what Cray and Jack had taken from the boot – a pair of short assault rifles with stylised chess knights stamped on the handles. The contraband weapons clicked as they jammed clips into them.

  ‘The tw
o of us,’ Pen echoed hollowly.

  ‘You’ll manage,’ Cray said firmly. ‘My sister never did eat enough, and I reckon you’re stronger than you look. Squat down, let her drape over your shoulders. Just carry her like a sack of coal.’

  He pointed towards a crack in the rippling brick wall of the cul-de-sac. It had been mostly swallowed by precipitecture and it looked more like a crevasse in a mountain than the narrow lane it was.

  ‘Get going. Jack and I’ll give London-Under-Glass’ finest something to think about. Should buy you a bit of time.’

  Pen gave him a flat stare. ‘You’ll be killed.’ Her tone said all that was needed about the acceptability of this solution.

  ‘That’s right.’ Cray ducked under the strap of his rifle. Jack was already scrambling up a rise in the precipitecture, aiming over it like a rampart.

  ‘I’m not going to just—’

  ‘Yeah, you really are,’ Cray interrupted her. His bandana had slipped and there was a wry twist to his homemade lips. ‘Do you know how many men I’ve killed, Miss Khan ?

  Pen stared at him and sullenly shook her head.

  ‘Neither do I, but I do know that my hand didn’t shake the last time I pulled the trigger, get me?’ He lifted his chin fractionally, took in the space around him and exhaled slowly. He almost looked proud. ‘This has been coming for a long time. Believe it or not, having the Chevs gunning for me is not a new experience for me. If they get me this time – fine. But not her.’

  Anger whipped into his voice like a sudden icy wind as he looked at Espel. ‘Not her,’ he repeated. ‘My sister’s not like me – she’s the opposite of me. She’s never hurt anyone.’ Tears ran, one by one, his meagre face giving them up reluctantly. He started to talk faster; his words ran into each other, but he didn’t stutter and he didn’t blink. ‘She couldn’t hurt anyone. I told her to kill the Face of the bloody Lottery and she couldn’t. She was the best steeplejill in the Kennels, and she had a future, but she came and worked for me, because she believed in me, and she believed in you too, and now she’s sharing her body with psychopath because of a choice you made, so will you JUST GET GOING!’

  The last three bellowed words echoed off the surrounding walls and Pen jumped as he slammed the boot closed. For all that Cray sounded furious, his eyes were pleading.

  Under the entreaty of those pale blue eyes, Pen bent and let Espel’s motionless form drape over her. She stood straight. The weight was bearable. She looked at Jack, who was lounging on the rubble, rolling a cigarette. ‘What about you?’

  The young mirrorstocrat shrugged. He put his roll-up aside and palmed a half-brick from the drift beside him. With a flick of his wrist he sent it spinning into the air and in one smooth motion brought his rifle to his shoulder and fired. The brick erupted in a satisfying spray of powder.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said returning to his roll-up, ‘if you’re a better shot you can take my place.’

  Pen stared helplessly at the two of them for a moment, then, bent slightly under her burden, she took a couple of steps backwards. The strange shadows of the inverse city closed over her. Cray scrambled up the side of the drift to Jack’s side. They muttered to each other in rapid whispers and took turns taking drags on the cigarette.

  The last thing Pen saw before she turned away was them pulling their bandanas up over their mouths: like bandits and like equals.

  *

  Pen moved through the alleyways at a kind of fast stagger. Espel wasn’t that heavy, but she was dead weight and she kept slipping, pulling her off balance. She could feel sweat running between her shoulder blades, even in the unforgiving cold of the steel dress.

  Warehouses loomed either side of her, their rain-augmented architecture spilling onto the street. The air smelled faintly of smoke and petrol. The walls were scorched. Faceless slogans looped in still-drying spray-paint on the brick and Pen felt a sudden pang for Beth when she looked at them. It looked like London Bridge wasn’t the only district that had seen protests.

  Clouds of broken glass glittered like nebulae on the street. Every reflection – every image that excluded the half-faced population – had been shattered.

  Pen felt a movement on her shoulder, out of rhythm with Espel’s breathing. The divided girl’s right ankle was beginning to twitch.

  Half an hour, Cray had said. Maybe less.

  Definitely less, Pen thought. It was a struggle to swallow. Scraps of remembered phrases flitted through her head as she watched that foot, the right foot, the id’s foot, slowly rotate.

  ‘—she’s sharing her body with a psychopath—’

  ‘—because it hated him, Countess—’

  ‘—it takes an army of doctors, for the rest of her life—’

  An army of doctors, and Espel had only her, exposed and helpless on a freezing street corner. They had to find a place to hide.

  For a second, Pen thought she heard glass hooves chiming on asphalt, even though here in the confines of the Kennels it should have been impossible.

  Of course, the Kennels … She did know of one hiding place here. She set Espel gently down for a moment and then scrambled up a precipitecture drift. The warped skyline of London-Under-Glass became visible above the rooftops. Sirens reached her on the wind. Away to the east, across the river, the clouds glowed with reflected fire. The reflected city was burning.

  Pen chewed her lip, waiting until she was sure she had her bearings. It wasn’t far. She skidded and slid back down to the street and was just reaching for Espel when the sound of machine-guns froze her.

  It echoed back up from the way she had come. She listened, paralysed, her heartbeat slamming painfully in her chest. Bursts of gunfire answered each other for a couple of minutes and then stopped. Pen eyed the street behind her and a bead of sweat trickled over her temple. Was that it – was that all there would be? She hadn’t heard any cries, but maybe she was too far away for that. She closed her eyes and pictured Jack Wingborough and Garrison Cray. She hoped they’d walked out of that cul-de-sac alive, even though the odds were three to one. She realised with a pang that she’d probably never know.

  Stick to the plan, now that you’ve got one, she told herself. She lifted Espel back onto her shoulder and lurched deeper into the claw-like architecture of the Kennels.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Rained-down bricks piled up like earthworks against the outer wall of Frostfield High, so there was no need to climb in over the gates.

  ‘Not even for old times’ sake,’ Pen murmured. She eyed some skilful graffiti across the road and rationed herself half a smile. She gripped Espel tightly with both arms. Over the last few streets the steeplejill’s struggles had grown more and more intense.

  Pen skidded down the rubble inside the wall, but kept her balance. She peered through the dim backwash from the streetlights. The layout of the warped buildings exactly mirrored that at her own school, and she felt a stab of relief when she saw the orange tape bandaging the junior block.

  The abandoned bathroom was as cold as its counterpart in her own city, and it smelled of the same must. The chill from the lino numbed her bare feet. She groped in the familiar place for the switch and the halogen tubes in the ceiling flickered on, their bluish light somehow sucking even more heat from the room. Pen’s eye fell on a rust-brown stain beside a rip in the lino, smeared into the shape of a hand.

  She couldn’t help looking in the mirror. A girl in a barbed-wire dress and dusty hijab, with makeup running over her scars, stared back at her from a place she’d never set foot in again. Home.

  Pen stifled the thought as soon as it rose.

  As gently as she could, she laid Espel down. When she caught sight of the steeplejill’s face, the pain was like all of her ribs breaking.

  Espel’s teeth were gritted, the eyes on both sides of her seam stretched and staring, wide as madness. Veins stood clear on her forehead under sticky strands of blonde hair. Under her jacket, Pen could see her arms straining against the cuffs that kep
t her from strangling herself.

  Pen knelt beside her. She tried to take the weight of Espel’s head. ‘It’s— It’s—’ She tried to say okay – it was all she could think of, but the lie was too big and its sharp edges caught in her throat.

  Desperately, she tried to think of something – anything – she could do to ease the girl’s pain, but what was there? The instant she’d – they’d – awakened – Pen felt sick as she corrected her thought – a brutal territorial struggle had recommenced inside Espel’s skull, a fight for the one thing everyone ought to be able to call home. Garrison was right: Espel was trapped inside her own body with a psychopath, and it was because of Pen. Es’s ‘intimate devil’ was awake; it knew her, and it wanted to destroy her. It was her inverse, her opposite.

  Opposite.

  Time seemed to run slow, slower than freezing water, as slow as glass, as Pen turned the idea over in her mind. She looked into the mirror and saw the scarred girl reflected there, the face that wasn’t hers, not really. She met the blue eyes Espel Cray shared with her brother. Garrison’s words kept playing in her head, but it was she who spoke them aloud.

  ‘My sister’s the opposite of me,’ she breathed.

  It was a strand of hope, cobweb-fine.

  Pen pressed her hands to Espel’s temples, trying to hold her still. She sought the steeplejill’s left eye with both of her own, just like her brother had done on the bridge.

  ‘Listen to me, Es,’ she said. ‘Please, listen to me. Parva was my inverse, remember? She was the opposite of me. Please, please lie still.’ Pen was starting to gabble, she could feel her own desperation reaching up to choke her. She struggled to slow herself, to make herself make sense.

  ‘She was my opposite, but she didn’t hate me, not at all. So maybe – maybe – your id isn’t born to hate you either. Maybe it’s only fighting you because you’re fighting it. So …’ Pen felt the barb-scars tug at her scalp. She had to force the words out of her throat. She knew how terrible a thing this was to ask.