by Pollock, Tom
‘You’re taking time out for desert?’ Pen demanded incredulously.
Espel’s mouth was full, but her expression was eloquent, all hurt innocence: What? She had to work her way through the oversized bite before she could answer. ‘Sorry, it’s been kind of a busy evening, Countess. I’ve not had time for dinner, and I make bad decisions when I’m hungry.’
‘Really? Doesn’t bloody show,’ Pen hissed. ‘I really don’t think this is the time and place for a midnight snack—’
Espel broke her off a hunk. ‘I am willing to bet this’ll change your mind,’ she said.
Pen hesitated. Just for a second an entrenched part of her rebelled at the idea of the cake, even panicked a bit – but Espel was smiling as she offered it, and the inhibition broke in a little carefree shiver.
Pen bit down into rich gooey chocolateyness. Stolen midnight-escape brownie, seasoned with a little hysteria was, it turned out, the most delicious thing in the universe.
‘S’all right,’ she said through the second mouthful. ‘A bit too much cocoa—’
Espel smiled. ‘I’ll make you a better one sometime. You feeling better?’
Another mouthful of brownie and a lungful of air, and Pen had a grip on her hysterics. ‘Better,’ she confirmed. ‘How about you? How’s the decision-making?’
‘Am I in the palace kitchens, taking a cake-break while leading the Face of the Looking-Glass Lottery to put a mystery proposal to the insurgents who ordered me to kill her?’
‘Sure.’
‘Then let’s assume it’s still screwed.’
They wolfed down the rest of the brownie, then greedily sucked the last of it off their fingers.
‘You’ve got chocolate on your lips.’ Espel told her.
‘So have you. Okay, then. Let’s go and meet your terrorist friends.’
*
The rubbish chute was as cosy as advertised. When Espel dragged the hatch aside a sour fug gusted over them. They stared into it together: it was a throat made of rotten vegetables and wetted with sour milk, and it reminded Pen of Gutterglass, the trash avatar, and that made her think of Beth, and all of a sudden her chest was so tight she snatched at her breath and choked.
From somewhere deep below them, a sound echoed up the shaft: a distant crack of air.
Pen glanced at Espel. ‘What was that?’
‘No idea – the incinerator, maybe?’
‘Incinerator?’
‘Yeah, there’s a trapdoor in the floor of the shaft they use when they want to burn the garbage instead of just sending it to landfill – no need to look at me like that,’ Espel added cheerily. ‘They only open it when they’ve got a ton of paper or cardboard or something, otherwise it just stinks the place out.’
‘And you’re willing to stake your life on that?’
Espel gave her a long look. ‘What have I done today to give you the impression that hanging onto my life is a big priority for me?’
And with those reassuring words, she hopped onto the lip of the chute, swung her legs round and vanished into the dark. Pen snatched a breath against the smell and perched on the lip of the chute.
Another distant crack of air echoed up and she shot a worried look down the shaft. Oh well, she thought. It’s either this, or go back to bed.
She pushed off.
A couple of heartbeats later, Pen landed in a pile of squashy, overstuffed binbags. She lay back, letting the cool night air wash over her, but Espel wouldn’t let them idle.
‘Come on, time to move.’ She perched easily on the edge of the skip, looking nervously towards the mouth of the alleyway they’d dropped into. ‘I’ll try and stick to the back ways where I can, but we’ve still got about three miles of wide-open streets to cover before we get to the Kennels.’
‘The Kennels?’
‘Yes, Countess.’ Espel looked at her, rolling up her sleeves over her wiry arms. ‘You didn’t think the Council of the Faceless would be holed up in some swanky Tower Hamlets postcode, did you? We’re heading to the real badlands tonight. I’m taking you to Kensington.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
They ran into the night, past the uncanny architecture. Espel set a punishing pace, but Pen found she could keep up. She relished the burn in her chest, the chance to push her body. She glanced over the edge of London Bridge as they crossed the river. Even in the streetlamp light, she could see the water was bloody with dissolved brickdust. Pen faltered; for a moment she thought she saw an eye blink at her from one of the water’s short-lived facets.
‘Quit gawping!’ Espel tugged on her hand, but Pen resisted, still staring at the spot where the eye had been. Espel pointed upriver, where a barge puttered under Southwark Bridge. Dark shapes moved on the deck, pausing to bend low over the side. ‘They’ll recognise you.’
‘They’re miles away,’ Pen protested.
‘They’re face-fishers,’ Espel said, ‘panning for cheap treasure. Any idea the kind of eyesight it takes to spot an eyelash floating in the river? And the completely silly vision it takes to do it at night? If they look up, they’ll see you, and then they’ll tell all their friends and we’ll be wading through a horde of adoring fans to see the Faceless. So move.’
Where they could, they clung to narrow, empty lanes, which forced them to zigzag across the mirror-image of the Square Mile. Back home, this was the city’s financial centre. Here, restaurants and chi-chi bars jostled with garishly outfitted knife parlour pop-ups with kids in sleeping bags queuing outside. Pen shuddered to see them, too excited to sleep, chatting and rubbing their hands together against the cold.
They ran along the embankment, the metal-latticed underside of Blackfriars Bridge passing over their heads. Across the river, the Lottery billboard was floodlit, allowing Pen’s mirror-sister to bathe London-Under-Glass in her smile twenty-four hours a day. Exactly as in her own city, the stranded arches and buttresses of the old demolished rail bridge stood clear of the water like the petrified remains of a sea-monster.
They ran until Pen’s feet throbbed and she felt little electric shocks jumping through her forearms as she pumped them, and then they ran some more.
Glass and steel gave way to concrete, and then to old red-brick residential streets. Graffiti looped and whorled over the walls, peeling posters advertised rock acts, doorsteps became litter-cluttered. The buildings around them grew weirder, more distorted, their roofs and gables clotted with rained-down masonry. They started to have to hurdle drifts of set mortar where they jutted out into the street.
‘Not … being … rude …’ Pen managed between gasps, ‘but … ain’t it your … colleagues’ job to … clear this … stuff?’
‘Good precipitecture crews are expensive – not that us jills and jacks see much of it ourselves, mind.’ Espel wasn’t remotely out of breath. ‘And this borough’s dirt-poor. What with the demand from the big East End mansions and the government contracts, neighbourhoods like this just can’t hope to afford us. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea,’ she muttered as she vaulted a heap of crushed bits of bollard, ‘home, sweet shitty home. It’s good to be back.’
‘How … does … anyone … get a car… down here?’ Pen asked.
Espel somehow managed to spare the breath for a laugh. ‘Cars? You’re kidding, right? We can barely afford mascara. We damn sure don’t have cars.’
The obstacles grew higher, jagged parapets of brick the girls had to scramble over. Espel climbed with an easy control. Her shirt rode up where she reached for an overhang and Pen found herself watching the muscles in her lower back work. It was hypnotic. Pen reached for handholds blind, not wanting to take her eyes from that pale ellipse of revealed skin. She suddenly thought of Espel watching her as she’d put the wire dress on her, and her face began to heat up.
She felt her fingers miss their grip a fraction of a second before the bottom dropped out of her stomach. She landed in an inelegant heap at the base of the overhang, chastised by a trickle of small stones that bounced of
f her head.
‘Countess!’ Espel hissed in frustration from the top of the drift. ‘Pay attention, would you?’
Pen blushed furiously and looked hurriedly away from the steeplejill. She found her eyes no more than an inch from the wall.
Pay attention, would you?
The mortar here was unnaturally smooth: fine, evenly spaced grooves ran through it as though it had been cut with tiny teeth. ‘Wait, what the—? Es, this can’t have just fallen naturally. It’s been worked with tools. It’s—’ She hesitated and then said, ‘It’s deliberate, isn’t it?’
Espel, crouched at the top of the drift, said nothing.
We don’t have cars, Pen thought. ‘They’re roadblocks,’ she said, understanding at last. The steeplejills and jacks who’d grown up in this poor zone had made it impassable to the cars of the rich – and not just their cars. Pen eyed a chunk of railing spiking from one of the brick drifts and remembered the Chevaliers’ strange mounts. You wouldn’t get a horse to charge up this street, no matter how well trained it was.
‘Shhh …’ Espel laid a finger on her lips ‘I have no idea what you’re implying – and even if I did, it would be completely illegal.’ But there was a wicked smile on her symmetrical face.
A flash of memory brought up news footage of the Iraq war: gunshots crackling in the background as American troops fought house to house. Pen saw the kind of nightmare it would be to take these streets that way. She felt a kind of awed admiration. On the quiet, Espel and her friends had turned this little nook of London-Under-Glass into a fortress.
The rained-down architecture loomed and curved over them like a landscape from a child’s nightmare. Espel had just led Pen under the jut of one cliff-like bay window when a fine curtain of dust trickled down in front of them.
‘Wait,’ the steeplejill hissed, blocking Pen’s path with an arm. She bent forward low over the ground, frozen but for a twitch around the eyes, like an animal listening for a predator. Pen felt her heart begin to drum. She tried to listen to, to strain some meaning from the city’s soft night-time noise.
There was a scratching overhead. Espel looked slowly upwards, and Pen followed her gaze.
More than fifty feet above them, just poking over the edge of the roof of the house, naked pink and squashy-looking was unmistakably a set of bare toes.
Espel blanched, and Pen barely had time to think, What, assassins can’t afford shoes any more? before the skinny blonde girl was away, scrambling up the house front with a steeple-jill’s ease. The ridges of precipitecture soon obscured her. Not sure what else to do, Pen hunkered down, looked up at the suspicious toes and listened.
‘Hey.’ Espel’s voice was all nonchalance as it drifted down. ‘What’s up?’
The toes immediately shifted, pointing resolutely in the opposite direction from the one the steeplejill had spoken from.
‘It’s okay,’ Espel said gently. ‘I won’t look unless you want me to.’
A little choked noise came from above the toes, acknowledgement in what might have been a girl’s voice.
She turned away, Pen thought. She can’t cover her face – that gets you beaten up here – but she doesn’t want Espel to see.
‘What happened to it?’ Espel’s voice was so soft Pen could barely hear it.
The owner of the toes choked back snot. Her answering voice was tear-raw and frightened.
‘Sold it,’ she whispered.
‘Debts?’
A silence that might have included a nod.
‘Loan sharks?’ A darkness trickled into Espel’s voice like blood into water. ‘Round here? Tell me who and I’ll—’
‘No,’ the other girl whispered. Her syllables were unsteady, like she was shaking, but whether that was fear or cold, Pen couldn’t tell. ‘Just … skin-taxes. Me ma fell behind and I thought, I thought I could help …’ She tailed off.
The scuffed tips of Espel’s boots appeared next to the toes over the edge of the roof.
‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘The girls at school didn’t think the new look suited?’
Another possibly-nod-filled silence.
‘Well, they’re fools then.’
A tear-choked laugh. ‘You think so?’ the voice above the toes asked.
‘Definitely,’ the steeplejill said. ‘Fuck them, and fuck what they think. It’s your face. Not theirs, yours. It bears the marks of the choices you made. Be proud of that. I would be.’
‘Really?’ The owner of the toes sounded like she barely believed that was possible.
‘Really.’ Espel’s voice held no doubt at all. ‘With your choices? I’d be proud as anything.’
They stood for a while together in silence. Pen watched the toes wriggle in the cold. She heard their owner’s teeth chatter, and an embarrassed laugh. The toes shuffled back out of sight.
‘So,’ Espel said, ‘I ask again, what’s up?’
‘Nothing,’ the girl said. She sounded almost shy. ‘I’m just looking at the view.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay then.’
Pen heard the scuffle and scratch of climbing, more dust trickled and Espel reappeared, shuffling crabwise down over a window ledge.
‘Wait …’ The girl’s voice drifted from the roof. ‘The way you talk – you must be—? Are you one of … one of them?’
Espel was close enough for Pen to see her symmetrical smile.
‘Go back inside,’ she called back. ‘Get some sleep.’
The steeplejill dropped the last six feet and landed in a crouch. As she straightened up, her smile slid away. Anger made her symmetrical face as dark as a blood-bruise.
‘What was it?’ Pen asked, unable to stop herself. ‘What did she sell?’
‘Eyebrow.’
‘Seriously?’ Pen’s surprise almost made her laugh, but she managed to stifle it. ‘That’s all? Just an eyebrow and she was going to … that’d drive her to—?’ She looked up into the achingly empty distance the roof.
Espel rounded on Pen, her expression far more violent than when she’d had a knife in her hand. ‘Oh, you don’t think that’s enough?’ she hissed. ‘Hard as it may be for perfect little you with all your perfect little scars to understand, all that girl had was her half a face. She needed every bit of it. All right she was never going to be beautiful, but she could get by, she was okay.’
She shook her head slowly. ‘Not any more. She’s ugly now – that’s what they’ll say, those hyenas she used to call friends. She’s slipped below them, and they won’t be seen with her any more. She’ll be getting whispers and muttered comments and chickenshit anonymous messages online.’ Espel’s lip curled in disgust. ‘The system rolls into action.’
Pen blinked. ‘I – I don’t understand,’ she said.
Espel’s expression was almost pitying. ‘Why do you think they make it illegal to cover your face, Countess?’ she said. ‘They want us to look at each other like that, constantly judging each other, ranking each other. And we all do it too.’
She shrugged, angry and helpless. ‘Half-faces can’t afford reflections. We can’t see ourselves the way the mirrorstocracy do. We have to rely on other people’s eyes to tell us what we’re worth. And they’ve turned every pair of eyes in the city into their weapon. Imagine what those eyes are telling that poor girl now.’ Espel jerked her head up at the roof. ‘That she’s lesser.’ She spat the words. ‘That she’s partial. Imagine how she’ll feel every time she sees a billboard of you and it reminds her of what she lacks.
‘Why do you think we hate the Lottery so much? Every stamped ticket is a surrender: it’s one of us holding up our hands and saying, “I’m not good enough. I’m ugly and worthless.”’ Her blue eyes were hard in the night. ‘Compared to people like you.’
People like you. Pen recoiled hard from those three words, just like she always had. Strands of anger wound themselves around her throat like wires. She wanted to protest, to say, Of course I know. She burned to talk of scar
s and surgery and camouflage makeup.
Instead, she said, ‘In the Old City, where I came from, it’s the other way around. It’s symmetry that’s beautiful.’
‘I’ve heard,’ Espel said. ‘So?’
‘So: this thing – beauty? – it’s arbitrary. People just make it up.’
Espel snorted, unimpressed. ‘Just ’cause something’s made up, doesn’t mean it’s not real.’
‘I know,’ Pen said. ‘But just because it’s real now doesn’t mean it has to be forever.’
Espel held her gaze for a heartbeat, then her lip quirked. She unslung the bag from her shoulder and yanked down the zip. Stuffed inside were two black hoodies and a pair of black cotton bandanas.
With a little lurch Pen remembered the video Margaret Case had shown her, the two hooded figures and the screaming blank unface between them. Sweat beaded clammily between her headscarf and scalp.
‘Careful, Countess. Keep talking like that, people might mistake you for a revolutionary.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
As they wound their way deeper into the reflected city, they left the roads behind. Canyons of jagged, rained-down brick rose around them, with walls dozens of feet high. They squeezed through narrow crevasses and wriggled on their bellies through tiny cracks in apparent dead ends. There was no glass or metal to reflect here; London had no answer to this place. It existed only here.
The walls around them pressed in tighter and rose higher, shutting out everything but a narrow sliver of sky, even the tallest landmarks. They arched overhead in almost organic curves, like fingers grasping fingers. The masonry was rough, but like the roadblocks, obviously worked with tools.
A shiver of realisation went down Pen’s neck. It’s a labyrinth, she thought.
In the heart of their slum neighbourhood, hidden in the mess of its sheer neglect, the Kennels’ steeplejacks had carved out a fastness.