The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (27 page)

From under his hood Cray’s eyes stared unblinkingly at Pen, and for long seconds she
willed
him to see.

‘Mago,’ he whispered at last, ‘you’re the wrong way round.’

Surprise eddied around the demolition site. Those Faceless
figures further back craned in to see, muttering to themselves in shock.

‘You’re her, aren’t you?’ Espel came right up to Pen. Her blue eyes were huge. ‘Her mirror-sister – the original. You came through the mirror, not
reflected
through, but actually physically here. How did you—?’ She faltered, unable even to frame the question. ‘Just,
how
?’

Pen said ruefully, ‘It doesn’t matter—’

‘Like hell it doesn’t – it’s impossible. No one’s ever—’

‘If “never has” was the same as “never could”, Es,’ Pen said, ‘all of history wouldn’t have happened.’

‘Just ’cause it’s real now, doesn’t mean it has to be for ever?’ There was a kind of wonder in Espel’s voice, and Pen smiled at her.

Cray was eyeing his gun like it was the last thing in the world he understood. He exhaled heavily.

‘Let me be sure I’ve got this,’ he said. ‘Parva Khan goes missing and you, her mirror-sister,
somehow
come through the reflection to find her. You deliver yourself to
us
, and rather than thank Mago for the stupidity of my enemies, put a pair of bullets in you and take everyone to the pub to celebrate, you want me to help you find the Face of the Looking-Glass Lottery, an institution, lest we forget, that I’ve spent every waking moment since I was thirteen trying to tear down.

‘You’re right,’ he added, ‘“how” doesn’t matter. What I want to know is
why?
Why in the splintered mirror would I ever do that?’

Pen licked her uneven lips. This was it, her pitch. Behind her back, she clenched her bound hands. ‘To tear down the Lottery,’ she said, ‘you don’t need to destroy its face, only its eye.’ She held his pale gaze until she was sure he understood.

‘Kill me – kill Parva,’ she said, ‘they’ll just find another girl – scar her up, if they’re feeling nostalgic – and the whole bloody circus carries on. But I’ve got access to Goutierre’s Eye, the one irreplaceable part of the machine that makes the whole system work.’ She jerked her head at Espel. ‘She’s seen it. She knows I can steal it. Help me find my sister and I promise you, they’ll never see it again. No Eye, no Engine. No Engine, and the promise of the Lottery crumbles like a stale cake.’

She watched him struggle with the idea. It was a stretch, she realised. To him – to everyone here, the image of a thing was the thing itself. Parva
was
the Lottery. It was incredibly hard for him to see it any other way.

At last he spoke. ‘Your counterfeit countess is quite a find, Sis,’ he said to Espel. He nodded over Pen’s shoulder and she felt cold metal slide between her wrists. Pins and needles exploded in her fingertips as the bindings fell away.

‘Welcome to the Revolution.’

The meeting dissolved efficiently and without fuss. The Faceless pulled off their hoodies and bandanas. Shorn of their disguises, they were revealed to be a broad mix of half-faces with various degrees of patching, and even a few mirrorstocrats. Pen watched them in puzzlement, wondering why people apparently so keen to hide their identities should so willingly ditch their disguises while still in full view of one another.

But they used their real names,
she realised.
They already know who each other are. They don’t need to hide from each other
.

She caught strange, silent exchanges between them as they hurried away into the labyrinth: narrowed eyes, blushes, sudden embarrassed looks away, and then she understood.

Constantly judging each other,
Espel had said.
Ranking each other. We rely on other people’s eyes.
They’d been raised in the mirrorstocracy’s hierarchy and that kind of thinking was stickier than tar. They couldn’t help it. Covering their faces wasn’t just some directionless gesture of rebellion; it helped them ignore the aesthetics they’d been raised to judge each other by.

It wasn’t about anonymity but
equality.

Garrison Cray was the last to drag his disguise off. Pen bit back a little yelp of shock.

He had no face below his eyes, just a blank sheet of parchment-like skin. His nostrils were elliptical holes, flat to his face. Where his mouth ought to have been, the skin had been razored open and the edges of the cut stitched back on themselves, like a turned-up hem on a pair of trousers. The two sides of his makeshift lips flexed symmetrically around the silver seam as he breathed.

He looked up at Pen, the blue eyes set hard, defiant. Pen steeled herself and met his gaze as though there was nothing unusual about him, even though all around she could feel the atmosphere chill as the other Faceless couldn’t help but look away from that blank, symmetrical absence. Even Espel was staring fixedly in the opposite direction.

For a second she thought Cray would speak, but he just turned and stalked away.

A few minutes was all it took for the terrorists to desert their lair, vanishing like water into the maze’s cracks. At last only Pen, Espel and Jack Wingborough remained.

The turncoat aristocrat pulled something slippery from his back pocket that glittered in the dim light. He caught Pen watching him as he smoothed it over the right side of his face, then, with a magician’s flourish, he whispered, ‘Ta da!’

Pen stared. Suddenly, the mirrorstocrat was a half-face. His features were precisely symmetrical – he even had a silver seam running down the centre of his face.

‘Did you just – is that— Is that an id?’ she whispered incredulously. Harry Blight’s jerkily kicking body flashed alarmingly into her mind.

‘Mago, no!’ Jack said in alarm. ‘I’m a sympathiser, but I don’t want to
empathise
.’ He shot a guilty look at Espel, who was leaning against the wall with her hands behind her. ‘Sorry, Es.’

‘S’all right, you posh tit. I don’t blame you,’ Espel said absently, not taking her eyes off Pen.

‘Here, there’s no reflection – look.’ Jack leaned in towards Pen and teased at the seam on his forehead with his fingernail. It peeled back, onion-skin fine, revealing his own asymmetric features again. The seam marked the edge of a half-mask. Where it had lifted clear, Pen could see the mask was a mostly transparent film, clouding to opacity in the few places where Jack’s right side didn’t quite match his left. They were tiny changes, but it was startling how completely they reconfigured his face.

It was like her camouflage makeup, only infinitely more subtle: a distorting lens to allow him to pass for normal.

‘It’s illegal as hell, obviously,’ he said, ‘since the only real market for them is mirrorstocrats on the run – usually from their own governments. Most have it bonded to their skin – it’s safer – it means it won’t peel off at an inconveniently public moment.’ His voice dried slightly. ‘But I …’

Pen understood. He hadn’t yet given up on someday being beautiful again.

‘Good luck.’ The Third Earl of Tufnell Park clapped her on the shoulder and jogged away up the tunnel.

Espel led Pen back into the labyrinth. It was only when they emerged onto a quiet side street, no more than ten minutes and three corners later, that Pen realised how convoluted the route Espel had taken her in on had been. The endless pathways of the rubble maze existed in a tiny space – an illusion of immensity.

They sprayed clouds of silver breath into the air as they stepped back onto the ice-speckled pavement.

‘Espel,’ Pen asked at last.

‘What.’ Espel wouldn’t look at her.

‘What happened to Cray’s face?’

‘Skin taxes, just before the election ten years ago.’

‘They—?’ Pen found herself stammering, even though she wouldn’t have believed London-Under-Glass’ government could do anything more to shock her. ‘They
taxed
his face off?’

Espel snorted. ‘Not quite. The rates went up, same as they always seem to just before elections – funny, that, since you vote according your registered features. Cray’s family couldn’t get the funds together to pay and he was thirteen and stupid and thought he could help them out.’ Pen saw the steeplejill’s jaw set in the cold streetlight. ‘He broke into the Marquess of Finsbury’s mansion looking for something to nick … His Lordship gave the Chevs leave to help themselves to whatever they wanted off him. He’s lucky he’s still got his eye.’

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.