The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II

by Pollock, Tom

  Outside, something darted across the mouth of an alley, human-shaped, hooded and impossibly fast.

  Her phone buzzed again.

  Too slow. Look right.

  Through the far window, Pen saw a figure fly across the gap between two rooftops.

  Pen! This is harder than it looks, you know. Try and keep up! Look behind you.

  Pen rolled her eyes and then, very slowly, craned her neck to face the back of the bus.

  Upside down, hanging somehow by her toes from the roof, her nose pressed to the glass, a teenage girl with skin the colour of concrete blew her a long, slow kiss.

  Didn’t think I’d miss your first day back in the madhouse, did you?

  *

  They stood at Frostfield High’s metal gates. It was still early. A few uniformed kids, hunched like Sherpas under their rucksacks, made their way in from their parents’ cars. A couple of them looked, but no one recognised Pen. She glanced back over her shoulder and took in the landscape. East London’s terracotta roofs overlapped like insect-chitin in the long shadows of the tower blocks.

  Beth leaned with one foot against the gatepost, hood up, head down, thumbs flickering while she texted. The spiked iron railing she always carried now rested in the crook of her elbow. She showed Pen her screen. Sure you’re ready?

  Pen exhaled. ‘Nope,’ she said, ‘but I’m not sure I ever will be, so I might as well do it now.’

  Hardcore, Pencil Khan. I’m proud of you. Pavement-grey eyes met Pen’s.

  Beth held her gaze and typed blind. I’ll come in with you if you want, you know that, right? Screw ’em. I’m still enrolled. Just give the word and we’ll be sitting together in French.

  Pen looked at her curiously. ‘When I suggested that before you didn’t seem so up for it.’

  Beth shrugged, a little shyly. Just for me, no. But I’d line up next to you in front of a firing squad if that’s where you wanted me.

  She would too.

  Pen touched her cheek. ‘No thanks, B. I could use a bit of upstaging, mind, but I think you might draw a bit too much focus.’

  Be all right. Got a spear.

  She was joking. Probably. Nevertheless, Pen winced at the thought of Beth prodding the railing into anyone who looked at her funny. There was a wild edge to her friend now and she couldn’t entirely rule that out.

  ‘Still,’ she said, ‘I think it might put a bit of a dent in Operation Normality.’

  She caught the guilty flicker in her friend’s eyes, but her own voice echoed back to her.

  No further down the rabbit hole, B. She’d said it and she had to hold to it; she couldn’t look back.

  Beth stretched out her hand, Pen pressed her palm to hers and they interlaced fingers. She felt the uncanny texture of Beth’s skin graze over her own, warm and rough as summer pavement.

  Beth texted one-handed, I’ll find you at the end of the day.

  The street-skinned girl kicked herself off the gate, tucked the railing under one arm and sauntered into the slowly thickening morning crowd. Pen caught a couple of disapproving glances from older, stuffier-looking pedestrians. Hooded head bent as though against the cold, Beth could have been any teenager who’d eyed up a Monday morning at school and decided she couldn’t be arsed.

  ‘You’re still you,’ Pen muttered to herself turning back to the gates. ‘And school’s still just school.’

  Like that wasn’t the problem.

  Gripping the straps of her rucksack like it was an escape parachute, she pushed past the gate.

  *

  Frostfield’s hallways were the usual cacophony of laughter, shouts, phone-speakers leaking bass, trainers, squeaky lino and slamming lockers. Under it all, Pen heard the muttered snatches and the cut-off gasps. She saw the hurried looks away.

  ‘—look who’s back—’

  ‘—what happened to her?—’

  ‘—where’s her punky little mate?—’

  ‘—She got kicked out for that graffiti stunt, remember?’

  ‘Nah, Salt never made that stick … where is Salt, anyway?’

  Pen knew exactly where Dr Julian Salt was: out on bloody bail. The DI in charge of her case had called her the day before to tell her. The same brown-haired, tired-eyed woman had spent four hours a week ago asking Pen painfully blunt questions in a gentle voice.

  ‘No,’ Pen had answered, feeling small and resentful, clutching her mum’s hand while she spoke. ‘No we never did … that. But he touched me. No, he never physically forced me. No, it was – it was blackmail. He said he could get Beth put in a foster-home. She’s my best friend. No, she doesn’t know. No, I don’t know why you can’t reach her.

  And, ‘No, the scars were something else. An accident.’

  And she’d trotted out the same ridiculous plate-glass window lie she’d sold her folks – because how could they ever, ever come close to believing the truth?

  It had taken Pen a long time to recognise the black, choking feeling in her throat for the anger it was. Even though she was assured that things were ‘progressing’, even though ‘action was being taken’, the fact that Pen had screwed up her courage and made the call and that Salt was still free for Sunday lunch at home with his wife blistered her with rage.

  ‘Hey, Parva.’

  Pen looked up in surprise. Gwen Hardy’s smile had the voltage of West End signage. Pen blinked and faltered and stammered, ‘G-Gwen.’

  Gwen had nodded approvingly, as if Pen deserved a prize for remembering her name. The hallway was silent now. Everyone was watching. Pen felt their scrutiny like an icy wind. She braced herself for the question she was sure was coming …

  ‘What the hell happened to your—’

  ‘Beth not with you?’ Gwen asked. Pen shook her head, more in confusion than in denial. It was probably the first time that name had passed Gwen’s glossy lips, but she used it with casual intimacy, as if Beth was her best friend, not Pen’s.

  ‘Too bad. Good to have you back anyway. If you want to catch up at lunchtime, you know where we usually sit?’

  Pen inclined her head slowly, trying not to let her puzzlement show. The oh-so symmetrical lines of Gwen’s face creased as her smile grew wider, but the expression never reached her eyes, and it was only when Pen looked past her to the shocked expressions of the other students and heard the scandalised whispers, that she understood what had just happened.

  Pen was marked out, ugly and untouchable. She was ready for that, she’d geared herself up to fight it.

  Gwen Hardy had just undercut it all, and she’d done it on purpose. She’d stepped out and offered the poor unfortunate a refuge, just because she could. Gwen was the only one who didn’t need to fear the social taint the wounded girl carried with her. She was untouchable in a different way, and she’d just used Pen to rub everyone’s faces in it.

  … she’d just used Pen …

  Without warning, the trembling started.

  Everyone was looking at her.

  Her fingertips started to drum on her thigh; she tried to stop them, but she couldn’t.

  Hot and cold shivers rippled her skin.

  —used Pen—

  She blinked fast and images came: a face carved in the collapsed masonry of a building site, cranes like metal claws, metal barbs hooked in her skin. Her chest was tight, as though bound by a wire tourniquet. She remembered blood drying on her cheeks. She fought to still her muscles and hot shame flooded through her as she failed.

  She ran from the hall.

  The banned junior block was the only place she knew she could be alone. She found herself in the bathroom by accident, sitting on the chilly floor and hugging her knees until she stopped shaking. Unsteadily, she stood and gulped chalky water from the tap.

  ‘So,’ she muttered to herself when she’d gathered her breath, ‘that’s what a flashback feels like. Well, okay, we coped, didn’t we? We’ll just have to cope better next time.’

  She’d turned away from the mirror on the wall and instead
snapped her compact open. That was the ritual, and rituals were important.

  ‘It’s all still you,’ she whispered. ‘They just rearranged you a little bit.’

  She looked at herself, caught between the tiny round makeup mirror and the massive frameless slab screwed to the tiles: an infinity of scarred, headscarved girls with smeared makeup stretched back into the reflection, as if there was one for every choice that had brought her here.

  And then, suddenly, all those images of her concertinaed hard together into one.

  An instant later the compact mirror shattered, pain shot through her skull and she cried out. It felt like a fault-line was shaking open right down the middle of her head.

  The world shuddered and blurred around her.

  The tiles were cold against her palms and her knees hurt. She didn’t remember falling. Nausea swelled up, but she fought it back down.

  Her fast, shallow breathing was the only sound in the silence. She rose unsteadily and reached back to steady herself on the sink behind her.

  ‘Pen.’

  It was her own voice. It sounded a little weird, the way it did when she heard it recorded on her answerphone, but still it was unmistakable.

  Except she hadn’t spoken.

  ‘Pen—’ The voice came from behind her, where there was only a tiled brick wall and mirrored glass. It sounded confused, and very, very frightened. ‘Pen, please …’

  Pen sucked her reconstructed lip between her teeth and bit it.

  She looked back.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Gwen’s not so bad,’ Pen said, stretching out on the cold concrete floor. ‘At least, not next to the crowd she runs with. They’re …’ She groped for the right word.

  ‘Toxic?’ the girl behind the mirror put in. For reasons of mutual convenience, they’d agreed she was ‘Parva’ rather than ‘Pen’.

  ‘I honestly think that if Iran stockpiled Gwen Hardy’s friends, the Americans would invade. There’s probably a UN convention just against Trudi Stahl.’

  Parva laughed, the sound echoing through the glass. ‘Well, here’s to your new crew—’ The reflected girl rummaged around in her ostrich leather handbag and, to Pen’s astonishment, pulled out a bottle of wine. ‘I hope they make you happy.’

  ‘You’re drinking now?’

  ‘Pen,’ Parva said patiently, ‘in the last four months I’ve been kidnapped by a barbed-wire monster, ridden to war at the head of an army of giant scaffolding wolves and rejoined school in the middle of term. There’s only one girl I know who deserves a drink as much as I do, and I’ll happily share.’ She unscrewed the cap and swigged straight from the bottle before offering it to the lips of Pen’s own mortified reflection.

  Pen shrank back. ‘But I never—’ she started.

  Her double grinned at her through the mirror and said, ‘But I’m not you any more.’

  Pen knew that. She’d plied Beth with careful questions, feigning idle interest, and learned as much as she could about the mirrorstocracy and their city behind the mirrors. The girl on the other side of the glass had come from her – she was composed of all the infinite reflections of her that had been caught between the two mirrors – but that was when their coexistence had ended.

  Pen and Parva had diverged from that moment in time like beams of refracted light; now Parva had her own feelings, her own life, built up in the weeks since she’d first stepped into whatever lay outside the bathroom door in the reflection. She drank wine, ate meat and swore like a squaddie with haemorrhoids. Much to Pen’s chagrined envy, she’d even managed to land herself a job, although she wouldn’t say doing what.

  But still, she had been Pen: for nearly seventeen years they’d been one. Parva had seen everything Pen had seen, felt everything Pen had felt. It was like having a sister, a bizarre twin – a twin who understood everything. Not even Beth could do that.

  ‘I want to show you something.’ Parva blew softly over the neck of the bottle and the liquid pipe-sound echoed through both bathrooms. ‘Give me your hand.’ In the mirrored bathroom she extended her own hand towards Pen’s reflection.

  Pen reached into the empty space in front of her and felt warm, invisible fingers close over her skin.

  ‘What are you—?’

  ‘Shhh.’ Parva was digging in her handbag again. She pulled out a phone and earbuds and put one bud into her own ear and the other into the ear of Pen’s reflection.

  Pen heard the crackle of an old-fashioned waltz and felt her double’s ghostly hand on the small of her back.

  ‘Come on,’ Parva said, ‘one–two–three, one–two–three!’

  And then they were off, dancing to the creaky music. Pen followed the rhythm uncertainly, her feet stumbling a little, her arms curved around empty air. In the mirror, she saw her expensively dressed double leading her.

  ‘One–two–three, one–two–three – that’s it.’

  Pen felt her arm lifted over her head and she spun under it as Parva whooped. Pen found herself laughing as they pirouetted around the tumbledown toilets like they were in a nineteenth-century ballroom.

  ‘Where did you learn this?’

  ‘One–two–three. It’s the job, they’re teaching me all kinds of things, it’s—’

  ‘Ow!’ Pen abruptly broke away. She hopped in a circle as pain spiked through her foot.

  ‘Sorry!’ Parva winced. ‘I’m not used to leading, and, uh … the shoes are new too.’

  ‘Yeah, I noticed them.’ Pen slid down the bathroom wall and tugged off her trainer and her sock. The impression of Parva’s vertiginous heel had gone all the way through to the skin, but at least there was no blood. ‘You have to go back to Reach to hoist you into them?’

  Parva smiled from the mirror. Jokes about the slain Crane King were part of their routine. They felt weirdly daring, disarming the memories of their abduction.

  ‘I managed by myself,’ she said. ‘Just.’

  ‘Pretty fancy. Are they from the new job too?’ Pen clutched theatrically at her heart. ‘That’s it: that’s the lethal dose. I am now officially too jealous to live. Fancy new shoes, fancy dancing lessons – at least say your new boss is a slave-driving creep.’

  Parva shrugged. ‘Sorry, sis. The new boss is really sweet, actually. Everyone is – well, most of the time.’

  ‘Most of the time?’

  Her mirror-sister frowned. ‘It’s nothing really, just … the very top people here – only some of them, mind, and only some of the time – but … The way they look at me. I feel like they’re watching me when my back’s turned. Sometimes – sometimes I can’t shake the feeling they mean me harm.’

  Pen sighed. That sounded familiar. ‘I reckon, after everything, maybe feeling like that’s normal for us, you know?’

  ‘I guess.’ Parva chewed her reflected lip. ‘They just look at me funny.’

  ‘Hate to be the one to break it to you, hon,’ said Pen, ‘but you are toting three-fifths of the western world’s total supply of scar-tissue around on your face.’ She smiled gently. ‘So, are you actually going to tell me what this magic new job is?’

  Parva was about to speak when the distant sound of the period bell carried through the closed window.

  ‘Tell you next time,’ the girl in the mirror said. It was what she always promised, like Scheherazade, keeping back one last story.

  Pen pouted and headed for the door. ‘Whatever. Have fun at work.’

  ‘Pen, wait.’

  Pen paused in the doorway. The lonely note in her double’s voice was stronger now.

  ‘How’s Beth?’

  ‘Chatty,’ Pen said drily. ‘Supposedly she’s still living at home, but I don’t think Paul sees her much. Things are okay, but a bit …’ She struggled to phrase it. ‘She thinks I—’

  ‘—blame her,’ Parva finished quietly. ‘You do, a little. I do. It’ll take time.’

  Pen didn’t reply.

  ‘Listen …’ Parva hesitated. ‘Do you think … do you think she’d c
ome here? I get why you haven’t told her about me yet, but – well, it would be good to see her, you know?’

  Pen imagined leading the silent, grey-skinned girl here; letting her in on this one last secret, and a resentful flare ignited in her throat. She loved B, but this was her sanctuary, her respite from the life she was living because of Beth.

  The resentment burnt out fast. She loved B, and so did Parva. And unlike Pen, Parva hadn’t seen their best friend in months. ‘I’ll ask her.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Parva smiled in relief. ‘What you got now?’

  ‘English: Richard Three.’ Pen mimicked a movie-trailer voice: ‘The hunch is back!’

  Parva snorted at the weak pun. ‘With jokes like that, it’s a good thing you’re pretty.’

  ‘Narcissist,’ Pen countered.

  Her double laughed. ‘Get out.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Beth pulled her hood up and crossed the threshold into the sewers, gripping her iron railing like a spear. She fed on the city around her with every step she took, drawing power and information through the bare soles of her concrete-grey feet:

  A railwraith clatters across Blackfriars Bridge like an iron heart attack. A pair of streetlamps flicker angrily at each other across Electric Avenue as an argument between Sodiumite sisters flares up into insults and duelling challenges. Masonry Men move through the walls of an old house in Hampstead, rippling the brickwork and making it groan, while in an upstairs bedroom, a mother reassures her frightened daughter, whispering, ‘Old houses just creak a bit, sweetheart.’ Pylon spiders race along cables beneath the pavements, whispering to each other with white noise, static and stolen syllables.

  Underneath the distortion there was a familiarity to the arachnoid voices that made Beth’s chest ache.

  It was a typical London night, only not quite typical, because deep in the tunnels ahead was something very unusual, and so subtle that had she not been within a hundred feet of it and listening intently for that very thing, she would have missed it utterly:

  A tiny sphere of perfect silence.

  It was no bigger than her clenched fist, but she could hear the way London’s other sounds contorted around it. It had to be what she was looking for.