by Pollock, Tom
Pen felt a pang like a broken rib. She looked at the shattered bottles, the evidence of a homesick Goddess’ addiction.
‘How long?’ Pen breathed. ‘How long since you were caught between the mirrors?’
The highways that were the Mirror-Mater Viae’s lips curled as if in contempt, but she did not answer.
‘Where is the pathway?’ her city-voice demanded. ‘Where is the fissure that leads between cities? I do not remember it, so your sister did not know. Tell me, how can I go home again?’
Pen’s mouth was arid. She thought of Parva and gritted her teeth. ‘You can’t,’ she said.
Mater Viae sighed. ‘I must know. I must. I must remember it for myself.’ The light of her eyes made Case’s skin sickly as she turned to her. ‘Bring another dose, Margarethe.’
‘Please—’
With a little jolt, Pen realised Case was speaking not to Mater Viae, but to her.
‘Please, Parva, just tell her. Tell her where you came through – it won’t make any difference. She will have her way.’
But Pen shook her head, tight-lipped. She had only her obstinacy. She could feel barbs in her skin. Her hands were starting to shake. All she could do now was resist.
Case’s face screwed up in fury. ‘PARVA!’ she screamed at Pen.
Pen flinched back half a step, and in her bag two glass objects clinked together. Before she could stop herself, she shot the bag a guilty, desperate glance.
Case read her expression, and in that heartbeat Pen knew her body had betrayed her.
Then Case lunged for the bag.
‘Wait, wait—’ Pen scrabbled for the straps, but the mirror-stocrat had already torn it from her. Pen felt her heart beating in her throat as Case rooted inside. Her mouth set in a hard line as she withdrew Goutierre’s Eye, and for a desperate moment Pen thought Case might stop there, but then she reached back in and took out the phial of the doorway drug.
Grey fingers articulated like cranes to take the slender tube. The clear fluid inside glowed green under the Goddess’ scrutiny.
‘Well? Is that it?’ Case asked. She was still staring at the glass sphere in her own palm. ‘Can we take her back?’
Mater Viae’s voice was as soft as rain on rooftops. ‘Do what you will with her. I no longer care.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
All the way up through the gloom of the lift shaft out into the brittle light of the lobby and then back into the mirrored seclusion of the main elevators, Pen didn’t say a word. She hugged herself as though her arms were all that were holding her together. Part of her didn’t feel like it had left that nightmare chamber; that part was still deep underground, frozen at the moment when Mater Viae had taken her only way home.
Case stood a little behind her, Corbin’s gun held idly in her hand like it was the most natural thing in the world for a member of the Silver Senate to go armed. Perhaps because of her nonchalance with it, no one challenged her. Pen was only vaguely aware of how fast the broken slave from the basement had slipped back beneath the surface of the reflected city’s chief bureaucrat.
At last, when they reached the door to her apartments, Pen turned to face her captor. ‘All those people,’ she said quietly, ‘didn’t they mean anything to you? Didn’t you ever even think about saying no?’
Case gave her the greyest smile. ‘Oh, I said no. Once.’
Pen parted her lips to ask what happened, but then closed it again. She knew what had happened. She could see the pain of it in every line of the old woman’s face. Case had been punished.
Parva – the only mirrorstocrat Mater Viae had abducted amongst who knew how many half-faces, her sister, the Face of the Looking-Glass Lottery – had been taken to teach Margaret Case obedience.
The only mirrorstocrat … But that didn’t make any sense, Pen realised suddenly. Half-faces had only half the memories of where they came from, so surely the homesick deity in the basement would have needed far more of them to feed her addiction to those memories. There was no reason for her to have preyed so exclusively on them, unless …
Shock was an icy hammer-blow as Pen understood exactly what Case’s bargain with Mater Viae had bought her: no victims amongst the mirrorstocracy. Case had sold double the number of her citizens to the predatory Goddess to keep the handful she cared about safe.
The senator regarded her. If she knew what Pen was thinking, she didn’t let it show on her face. ‘Get some sleep.’ she said. ‘You’re needed in makeup in six hours. The cameras roll in eight and I don’t want you looking haggard.’
Pen’s fingers crooked into claws. From somewhere, new fury bubbled up into her heart. ‘I will not perform for you, Senator. Your mistress’ – she saw Case wince slightly at the word, but she was too angry to even enjoy her discomfort – ‘drank your Parva Khan. I won’t replace her for you.’
‘She was—’ Case began to say.
‘SHE WAS MY SISTER!’ Pen screamed.
Case didn’t flinch; she waited patiently, as though pausing for the ringing of Pen’s voice to fade from her ears, and then spoke with a chilly distaste. ‘I think you’re wrong. I think you will go before the cameras, Parva. There are techniques of persuasion that won’t impact how you look.’
For a second, Pen had no idea what she was talking about. Then she almost laughed. ‘Torture?’ She pointed at her own face. ‘You do know where these came from?’
‘I know the fable you – your sister – told about the barbed wire, if that’s what you are referring to—’
‘You still think it was a fable ?’ Pen hissed. ‘Think about where we just came from. Think about what you just saw.’
Case’s gaze twitched back and forth in incomprehension across Pen’s face. Pen just stared back, marvelling at how completely the old woman had sealed off the secret shame in the basement from the rest of her thoughts.
Pen kept looking into Case’s pale eyes and she saw the moment when that seal cracked. ‘You mean it was—?’
‘Every word of it,’ Pen said. She stood straighter, opened her chest out. Contempt filled her voice. Defying this woman had become like breathing. ‘So what do you think you can threaten me with?’
For half a heartbeat, Case looked shaken, then that old unflappability closed over her features, smooth as thick oil. ‘I’ll have to think of something,’ she said. She threw Pen’s empty satchel back to her and then wrenched the door open. ‘Sleep well, Countess.’
*
The second Pen heard the key turn in the lock, she fell heavily against the door and started clawing at it like she could scratch her way through it. Barbs of splintered wood lodged under her nails, drawing blood that smeared on the grain.
Shaking, she spun, crossed the room in three quick strides and threw herself bodily against the window – but the reinforced glass had been built to withstand chunks of falling brick. It didn’t even flex as she threw herself at it again and again, demented as an insect.
She didn’t stop until her legs went out from under her and she collapsed to her knees. She dashed her arm fiercely across her eyes and stared at the window. It was a bright, cold afternoon in the reflected city and Parva stared out of the glass at her, vague as a ghost.
Maybe, she tried to tell herself, maybe this is better, for her at least. Maybe there was some part of her mirror-sister left that was still her, and for that fragment perhaps, it was better not to remember. Pen tried, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. There was a sob like a boulder lodged under her ribcage and she couldn’t get it out.
She closed her eyes and saw their faces: Parva, and her mum and her dad and Beth, Beth most of all, whom she’d snuck away from without a word. She loved them all so much, and she was never, ever going to see any of them again.
She delved into her leather satchel and took out the last thing inside. The brick eggshell Beth had given her trembled against her palm. Beth would never know why her best friend had left her. Pen’s fingers closed slowly over the fragile, precious thing
, moving beyond her control. She watched from inside herself in a kind of absent horror as her fingers squeezed and the shell cracked. The baked clay shards bit into her palm and she treasured the pain even as she grieved for the memory they represented.
She couldn’t rein in her thoughts. She pictured the Goddess in the basement, squatting in the foundations of the inverted city. She saw her own hand shaking and remembered the junkie-palsy in Mater Viae’s crane-boned fingers.
Tell me, how can I go home again?
Empathy invaded her like a parasite and she recoiled from it. She tried to push it away but it clung to her. In her mind’s eye she saw the Lady of the Streets, cut off from home, from everyone who loved and hated her, from everyone who knew her at all, from everything that made her her.
Shudders wracked Pen, and she started to sob, the tears coming in great gouts. She curled up on the floor, trying futilely to still herself. She tried to grit her teeth, but they just clacked against each other. She fought to ride out the shudders, her skin vivid with the memory of wire.
It took a long time for her muscles to shake themselves quiet. She let her head loll sideways against the floor. Her hair was sweat-sticky under her headscarf and her eyes felt like pebbles in her skull. She was exhausted. Her mind was a blank.
Gradually, she became aware of a thought like a buried ember in the spent fire of her brain.
I will not perform for you, Senator.
Hours must have passed, because outside the light through the windows was dimming and the cloud-wrought towers burned with sunset colours.
I will not.
Pen tested her legs, and was relieved to find that although she couldn’t really feel them, they uncurled under her. They were knackered, but they were her own. She drew in a long breath, and stood.
She staggered to the window. It was only when she’d tried the handle twice that she noticed the welts of shiny metal around the frame where it’d been welded shut. Case wasn’t fool enough to leave her the same escape route twice. Outside, someone was singing, chirpy at the onset of Draw Night. The glass made his voice reedy.
Trapped, away from everyone who knew her. She looked down at the river, at the evening fire reflected there. It touched a memory.
I will …
She took off her headscarf, folded it carefully and placed it on the floor beside her, then pulled off her boots and her socks. More purposeful, though still not hurrying, she walked into the bathroom and ran the tap. She exhaled.
Bismillah, she thought.
She washed her hands, the way she’d been taught, the way she had for years: left over right and right over left, three times each. Her right palm throbbed in the cold as blood and fragments of eggshell trickled down the paths marked by her scars. She cupped her hands under the tap and scooped water into her mouth and breathed it into her nose. She washed her face and scrubbed at her forearms and dragged her wet palms back over her hair. She worked at the dirt and fluff that had somehow got stuck to her feet and when it was gone she washed them twice more. About halfway through the second time, she began to feel calmer.
She pointed at the ceiling and recited in Arabic the affirmation she’d learned when she was a little girl. Her voice was calm. She didn’t stumble over it. Whatever else it was, it was a part of her. Rituals were important.
Back in the living room, she rewrapped her headscarf. She looked out of the window and, after a brief moment’s hesitation, she turned to her left instead of right towards the fading sunset.
She inhaled deeply and lifted her hands beside her head. She filled her mind and herself with the words as she spoke them, and felt the force of them drive the fear out of her.
‘Allahu akbar,’ she said.
*
When she’d finished the final rak’ah, Pen stood up. She felt taller. The air moved more freely inside her. Her shape felt more like her own. She rubbed her fingers over her thumb tip, but she didn’t scratch her cuticle. Her hand was itching to hold something, to make something.
Her eye fell on the makeup box on the dresser. She picked it up and took it to the window. Her hand trembled, but that was just eagerness – energy – stampeding through her. She wrote quickly, the nub of the eye-pencil squeaking over the glass. In a place where image was everything, the window held the image of London-Under-Glass, Case’s city, and Pen wrote over that image in jagged black letters until, at last, with the last of the energy that infused her she hurled the pencil down.
Heart hammering, she stepped back and read her handiwork.
Above rooftops like wave-crests
Behind a mirror like a sea
Beyond the eyes of anyone I ever knew,
I am still me.
In this city or any other.
In my breaths and my choices, in every word I utter and every thought I think, in love, or in wire, in desperation or fear, in my own skin.
Always,
I. Will. Be.
She settled herself cross-legged on the floor. Her hands, cupped in her lap, were finally still. The last light faded out of the sky. She heard car-horns far below. The guests for the ceremony would be arriving about now, she guessed, done up to the nines in the asymmetric designer evening wear she’d seen splashed across the magazine covers. They’d have brought their families, everyone no doubt giddy at the thought of meeting the Face of the Looking-Glass Lottery. Pen smiled, a tentative expression. A risk. Just for herself.
So sorry to disappoint.
The beeping from the computer startled her. She didn’t move for a long time, but the beeping just went on, a high, repeated tone as polite and insistent as a tax collector leaning on a doorbell. Finally, more curious than anything, Pen went to the monitor on the desk.
The words Incoming Call were flashing in reverse script on the screen. Pen hit a random key, and a little thorn of anger stabbed into her heart as Case’s face materialised onscreen.
‘Countess.’ Her voice came through the computer speakers. ‘I trust you slept well.’
‘Bugger off, would you, Senator?’ Pen said sweetly.
‘You’re due in makeup. Please come down to the fiftieth floor.’
The bolt clunked back in the door.
‘Nicely timed.’ Pen was unimpressed. ‘Did you have someone waiting on the end of a phone to unlock it when you said that?’
Case ignored Pen’s scorn. ‘Please come down to the fiftieth floor,’ she repeated.
Pen eyed the little camera set into the monitor frame, snorted and shook her head.
Case stared back. There was no recognisable emotion on her wizened face. Without another word, she stepped away from the camera.
Pen hissed. The thorn in her heart was suddenly huge.
With Case out of the way, Pen could see the room behind her. It was the little dressing room just off the Hall of Beauty where she’d struggled into the barbed-wire dress. There were two other people in there along with the senator.
The first, on her knees on the floorboards, was Espel. Her arms were behind her back, and the way her shoulders were strained made it look like her wrists were tied. She stared at the camera. Either side of her silver seam, her eyes were huge with panic. Tears ran symmetrically down her face, their tracks conditioned by the identical topography of her cheeks.
The second figure was Corbin. He stood over her in formal black uniform, silver braid criss-crossing his shoulders. He had one hand woven tightly into Espel’s hair, and with the other he held a silver syringe pressed to the side of her neck.
What do you think you can threaten me with?
I’ll have to think of something.
Case’s tone didn’t change even a little. ‘Please come down to the fiftieth floor,’ she repeated.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
‘Steady now, Countess,’ Case’s voice buzzed from the tiny speaker in Pen’s ear. ‘Wait for your cue.’
She stared up the corridor towards the lights in the Hall of Beauty. Beau Driyard’s speech echoed hollowly back to h
er as he warmed up the crowd. Someone she’d never heard of had introduced someone else she’d never heard of, who’d introduced someone whose name she’d seen on a couple of tabloid front pages, who’d introduced Driyard, and now he was introducing her. Each time, the cheers of the spectators seated in the hall had grown louder: a crescendo of celebrity.
‘… had the privilege of working with many times in the past,’ Driyard’s voice swelled to a suave, but faintly lascivious climax, ‘to bring you the images of her extraordinary story. The Face of your Looking-Glass Lottery: my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, Senators and honoured guests, please join me in welcoming: the Countess of Dalston, Parva Khan!’
The crowd in the hall exploded into hysterics.
‘Do please join your public,’ Case murmured.
With small, resentful steps, Pen obeyed, wobbling in her vertiginous heels. Her scars stood out starkly on her face, emphasised by carefully applied makeup. The barbed-wire dress rustled and hissed as she moved as though it was alive.
She glanced down at the phone Case had given her. On its screen, above the discreet inverted message reading , she could see Espel on her knees. Corbin stood behind her with that wicked needle pressed to her neck. Both of their seam-split faces were bent away from the camera, towards the dressing room’s tiny TV screen. It was an image-circuit, a closed loop: what Corbin saw on his screen would determine what Pen saw on hers.
Pen’s eyes were drawn inexorably to the point of that needle. She could see Espel’s fear; she could taste it like a thin trickle of poison down the back of her throat.
We’re doing this for you, Parva.
Pen’s skin remembered the fond squeeze of Case’s fingers in the courtroom, and her own fingers curled at the memory of a time when even that simple motion had been beyond her.
Intimate Devil …
Harry Blight’s torn expression flickered behind her eyelids when she blinked.
The cheers broke over her like storm-swells as she crossed the threshold to the hall. She paused and rocked on her feet. Some trick of acoustics had held the sound in check until she stepped through the door.