by Pollock, Tom
She couldn’t breathe, her lungs clawed at air. She stared up at the man who’d pulled her, and he stared back. His veil was a torn and tattered flag. A familiar scarred smile rippled on the fabric over his throat.
A gunshot shattered the night.
The Faceless man’s head snapped hard to the right, like it had been punched. Liquid jetted from his temple into the streetlight. He swayed on his feet for a second, then he crumpled. He lay where he fell, terribly still. His eyes, inches from Pen’s, were like marbles.
Screams split the crowd. The protestors ran, bolting in all directions. Unable to flee through the thick press of their fellows, some of the Faceless charged the police line, hollering incoherently. More shots, more screams. A boot grazed Pen’s ear as it stamped down. Pen tore herself from the dead protestor’s gaze and threw herself over Espel, covering the steeplejill’s flailing body with her own. An unruly knee knocked the wind out of her, but she managed to cling on. She threaded her hands into Espel’s sweat-soaked hair and gritted her teeth. It took all her strength to keep the divided girl from slamming her head back on the kerb.
Gunfire echoed off the sky.
The thicket of legs around them was thinning. Pen dragged her eyes from Espel’s and looked up. Shrouded bodies were falling around her. The Chevs weren’t indiscriminate; they tracked the protestors who wore black hoodies and bandanas – the bona fide Faceless uniform – and split their skulls with carefully aimed shots. Terrified protestors hurled their firebrand bottles at the marksmen and, as Pen watched, an armoured figure was engulfed in sooty orange fire.
‘Not by your eyes!’ a protestor bellowed.
Pen scrambled to her feet. She tried to pull Espel with her, but her fingers were numb with cold and Espel was thrashing so hard she couldn’t keep a grip.
‘Help me!’ she screamed into the chaos around her. ‘They woke her id! Help me—’
But no one heard her over the boots and the shots and the screaming. A succession of petrol bombs flew like close comets, falling short of the Chevalier line, and shattered flaming on the pavement. At first Pen thought they’d missed, but then she saw the palls of oily smoke begin to roll across the bridge and the staccato rattle of the gunfire faltered. Rifle barrels wavered uncertainly as the marksmen struggled to draw a bead.
Protestors charged, bellowing obscenities and brandishing their banners like clubs. One Chevalier struggled to bring his rifle to bear, but veiled figures swarmed him under, swinging placards with bone-breaking force. Suddenly there was a gap in the line and the Faceless boiled through it. Pen saw them move, indistinct and wraithlike through the smoke. Some simply fled down side streets, but far more hurled half-bricks at the office-block windows that refused to reflect them. They shattered the images that kept them out, and their victorious shouts mingled with the sound of breaking glass.
Pen grappled with Espel. ‘Help me!’ she begged, but no one was listening.
A breeze stirred hairs that had slipped her headscarf. The smoke began to drift across the bridge and Pen eyed it anxiously – its cover wouldn’t last long, and the crowd had thinned. In a few seconds the sharp-shooters would have a clear view again, and she and Espel would be horribly exposed.
A gunshot rang out – this time behind her. She turned her head and saw a streetlight tinkle into fragments. Another shot came and another bulb shattered, then another, then another, each in time to the gun’s report. Someone had obviously reached the same conclusion as Pen.
Shrouded figures flitted around her, vague as shadows at dusk. Her eye lighted on a big man in a dark hoodie. He raised his pistol towards another streetlamp and she saw his ice-pale eyes narrow as he sighted along the barrel of the gun.
‘CRAY!’ she screamed at him, ‘CRAY, HELP ME! IT’S ESPEL!’
He jerked around to face her. For a moment he stared disbelievingly at her, like he’d just seen her step out of a television screen. Then he was running towards her, elbowing and punching his way through the crowd.
‘It’s Espel,’ Pen said as he reached her. Her throat dried, but the Faceless boss didn’t even look at her. He dropped to his knees beside Espel.
‘Sis,’ he whispered, his voice taught with fright, ‘what happened, are you hit, are you bleeding—?’
He faltered when he saw the cuffs binding her, red gumming the white plastic where they’d cut into her wrists. Tentatively, Cray put his hand on Espel’s shoulder and pulled her onto her side.
He recoiled hard when he saw the muscles warring in her face.
‘How?’ His voice was flat.
‘It was me,’ Pen told him. ‘It was because of me. Case did it because I … because of what I said. I’m— I’m so sorry.’
When Cray looked at her then, there was nothing in his eyes, nothing at all. He lifted his gun and pointed it at her forehead.
Pen didn’t flinch. ‘Please,’ she said quietly, holding his gaze. ‘We have to help her.’
For a long moment, Cray eyed her down the barrel of his pistol. Then he moved with sudden purpose. He tucked his gun into the waistband at the back of his trousers, bent and took Espel’s lapels in both hands. With a grunt of effort, he dragged his sister bodily off the floor. Her feet jerked and twitched in the air like a hanged woman’s.
‘Hey—’ He spoke gruffly and his head dipped from side to side as both of his eyes sought Espel’s left one. ‘Hey, I’m here, okay? I’ve got you. I love you, Sis. Okay? I love you.’
Pen couldn’t be sure, but she thought Espel’s thrashing eased fractionally.
Cray dropped to one knee, turned his struggling sister in his grip and jammed an arm under her chin. He jabbed his other elbow into the back of her neck and started to count under his breath. Even without the streetlight, Pen could see the tears blotting into his bandana. Gradually, Espel’s jerking slowed and she went limp. For a dreadful second, Pen thought Espel’s brother had suffocated her. But then she saw the slow rise and fall of her chest under her jacket. The divided girl’s muscles reunited in unconsciousness.
‘Jack,’ Cray was shouting into a mobile phone, ‘I need you. North side. Now.’
He heaved Espel’s prone form onto his shoulder and stood up. ‘Come on,’ he said to Pen. ‘We have to get her out of here before …’ His voice tailed off.
‘Before what?’ Pen asked.
‘That.’
She followed his gaze.
Hundreds of armoured Chevaliers were swarming down the approach from the train station. At this distance they looked like beetles, their armour glinting like a carapace, but they were closing fast. They carried short, ugly machine-guns with flaring muzzles: indiscriminate wide-burst weapons.
Bravado left the rioters like a tide going out. At first in ones and twos, then fives and sixes, then finally as a single dense mêlée of arms and legs, the veiled figures fled back across the bridge.
The Chevalier machine-guns deafened Pen as they opened fire.
She ran with the crowd, weaving through the protestors, dragging in painful breaths. Cray, just ahead of her, was more direct; he bulldozed up the centre of the road, slapping obstructing rioters aside with his spade-like hand. Espel bounced unconscious on his shoulder. They were almost at the far end of the bridge before Pen risked a look back. She watched men and women fall to the blaze of suppression fire like cornstalks in a hurricane.
She collided with a knot of bodies: the protestors in front of her had stopped running. She tried to sidestep and wriggle through, but there was no way between them. They were pressing back into her, trying to flee back the way they’d come.
Towards the gunmen? Pen thought in panicky bewilderment. She shoved at the protestors and they shoved back. Even in their hunted terror, she saw their eyes widen as they touched the cold metal of her dress and looked at her properly. She tried to look past them, to see what could have turned them around.
All around her, bodies churned in a slow, suffocating vortex as those fleeing from both directions clashed. Her arm was sna
gged between two figures moving opposite ways and her elbow bent the wrong way. Pain flared through it and she just managed to pull it back in, even as hooded figures lost their footing and stumbled under the crush.
Pen heard a crunch and a choking scream as an off-balance foot caved in a cheekbone.
She gritted her teeth and clawed the figures away from her. She threw herself forward in her fake barbed-wire dress, forcing them to flinch. She used those fractional hesitations, those tiny spaces, to wriggle her way to the edge of the crowd. She grabbed the post of a shattered streetlamp and pulled herself up onto the bridge’s balustrade.
As her eyes rose above her neighbours’ heads, she saw what they were running from.
A line of mounted Chevaliers was advancing from the north end of the bridge, urging their bandaged-up horses at an unhurried canter. They held thin black lances high, the butts resting in their stirrups. At a signal from the officer in the centre, they reined in their steeds.
The officer surveyed the swirling mass of trapped protestors, inscrutable behind his dark visor. He raised one gauntleted hand. Below him, the men and women in the crowd were screaming.
The officer let his hand drop.
The Chevs pulled cords at the necks of their mounts and, as one, the black bindings fell away. Pen heard a gasp, and only a heartbeat later recognised it as her own.
The horses snorted and tossed their heads, the fog erupting from their nostrils glittering in the air like diamond dust. They stamped, and the impact of their hooves on the pavement chimed like bells. The horses blazed with reflected streetlamp light: perfect living sculptures of mirrored glass.
Lance points fell in a breaking wave. With a clatter like vast windchimes, the Glass Chevaliers charged.
The protestors broke and fled as best as they could. Those at the sides of the bridge jumped into the water, or else were shoved over by the terrified throng. For most, though, there was simply no time.
The glass cavalry smashed into the crowd with sickening force.
Where the lance points struck flesh, Pen saw blue electricity arc. The victims dropped sharply, spasming onto the ground in the path of the horses. Some of them were churned into a bloody meal of bone and cloth under the weight of the glass hooves, but others …
One of the horses reared up over a fallen Faceless, and Pen hissed in shock.
She could see the cowering protestor reflected in the glass of the horse’s belly, between the straps that held the rider’s saddle in place. His image ran slick through the curved, distorting panes of the Chevalier mount’s flanks. Pen was close enough to make out the seam that divided the prone man’s face.
I can’t afford to just go spilling my image into every passing mirror the way you can, she remembered Espel saying. Image is essence, after all …
And that essence, Pen realised, was being ripped from the prone man by the mirror-mount’s skin. It was a thief of images: a reflection-vampire.
The man shrieked like his heart was being torn out of his chest, his screams so loud that even with all the other cries that plagued the night air, his was the only voice Pen heard. His hood sagged horribly over his left cheek, like it was caving in. Flesh-coloured vapour boiled over his bandana towards the rearing horse.
Then, as sharply as if they’d been switched off, his screams cut out and he slumped back on the tarmac. The gap between his hood and his scarf was half-filled by a plane of tarnished mirror, and half-filled by nothing at all.
The Chevalier wheeled his mount and urged it deeper into the crowd, but the flesh-coloured reflection still spilled through its flanks. In the midst of it, something like a distorted eye blinked.
Pen reeled. She had to cling to the lamppost to keep herself from falling. Desperately, she tried to peer between the running bodies.
What if they’ve fallen? she thought frantically. What if he’s dropped her? How will I know? In their hoods and masks they all looked the same.
But then her eyes found Espel, still spread across Cray’s shoulders like an absurd cloak. The Faceless boss had somehow slipped through the cavalry line and was pounding along the opposite pavement towards the bridge’s northern end. As Pen watched, a Chevalier wheeled his mount and spurred it after them. Pen leapt down from the balustrade and started to run.
Cray was quick for a big man, very quick for a big man with an unconscious teenager draped on his back, but the glass horse was immeasurably faster. Pen had barely made it halfway across the road when blue lightning flashed out from Cray’s spine to the Chevalier’s lance.
Cray’s back arched violently. His toes scraped along the pavement as every muscle in his body tensed. Then he crashed forward onto his face. Espel rolled limply off his back and sprawled in the gutter. The Chevalier yanked hard on his reins and his horse reared, the organic glass of its hide flexing. Lying in its shadow, Cray began to scream.
Pen’s legs burned as she drove them harder. Spittle flew through her gritted teeth. She ran herself between the horse and its prey, her arms spread wide, blocking the line of sight between Cray and the mirror-mount’s lethal hide.
In the curves of the horse’s belly she saw her own reflection begin to flex and ripple. She raised her hand to her eyes. Her fingers guttered like a flesh-hued flame, but there was no pain, just a gentle feeling of heat, a fizzing over her skin. The glass horse’s eye was stretched wide; its blunt teeth ground in effort. Pen’s image flowed through all of its surfaces, but no matter how much she gave it, she still felt no loss.
Infinite reflections, she thought, awed and sickened. She, like a mirrorstocrat, was immune. The mirror-mount was a weapon designed for the half-faced alone.
The horse’s front legs crashed back to earth and Pen threw herself flat. She sprawled over Cray’s prone form, just missing its glass hooves. Its rider struggled to position his lance, then hurled it aside and groped instead for the pistol strapped to his thigh.
Pen felt Cray’s arm shift under her. The Chevalier was still fumbling with the straps on his holster when Cray, screaming obscenities, leaned out from behind Pen and fired.
The Chevalier’s visor exploded inwards. He slid sideways from his saddle and hung, his legs tangled in his stirrups. Pen stared, utterly frozen. The man’s face, framed by the jagged plastic of his shattered helmet, was a bloody crater.
The horse whinnied against the sudden weight on its right flank and wheeled away, dragging its rider with it.
Pen felt like a firework had gone off inside her head. The gun was still loud in her ears. She felt like she should be yelling herself hoarse, but all she could do was stare. Everything felt distant and muffled.
Cray got his feet under him and crouched in front of her. She gazed at him incuriously. He said something, and it took her a moment for her to make sense of the words.
‘Thank you,’ he said again, and Pen nodded numbly. Reflexively she shook his hands off her.
The skin crinkled around his eyes in a way that might have been a smile. ‘Come on.’
Pen helped him lift Espel’s unconscious form out of the gutter. Now she wasn’t struggling, it was easy; the steeplejill was almost frighteningly light.
An engine growl became audible over the sound of the carnage further up the bridge and headlights washed over them as a battered saloon pulled up onto the bridge. Pen stiffened, ready to fight, but Cray held up a hand.
‘It’s okay.’
The car’s brakes squealed. The driver’s door was open before it had stopped moving. A familiar gangly figure emerged.
‘When I say I need you now, Jack,’ Cray said testily, ‘it’s normally safe to assume I mean before the fragging riot cops show up.’
‘Oh goody,’ Jack Wingborough snapped back. He jerked his head at the mêlée still churning further up the bridge. ‘Do let’s discuss this now. I can’t think of anything better we could be doing …’
His sarcasm faltered as he watched Pen and Cray hoist Espel onto the back seat. Pen scrambled in beside her, while Cray jum
ped in the front.
‘What happened to Es?’ Jack demanded as he slid back behind the wheel.
‘I put her out,’ Cray said shortly.
‘Why?’ Jack asked, but his voice was hoarse, and the pallor of the skin visible in the rear-view mirror said he already knew.
Jack threw the car squealing into reverse, spun it into a 180-degree turn and stamped on the accelerator. The battered saloon leapt forward like a startled cat. The shouts and sounds of gunshots and the light of burning petrol faded behind them.
Pen watched as Cray looked back. She saw him take in all the ordinary people who’d adopted his image, who, just for one night had become him. He pulled his bandana slowly aside. His makeshift mouth was anguished. She knew he would always believe he’d betrayed them.
‘Where am I going?’ Jack demanded. ‘Garrison, give me some bloody pointers.’
‘St Janus,’ Cray said. His voice was flat.
‘You bloody fractured?’ Jack sounded incredulous. ‘You want me to take a girl with a woken id to a military hospital? What are we supposed to do, just give ourselves up?’
Cray didn’t answer.
‘Garrison, please,’ Jack said. ‘I’d walk under a mirror-mount for her – you know I would – but there’s no way they’d treat her. They’d take one look at her, cut the cuffs off her and let her throttle herself. There’s no way for her to have been split that isn’t an official punishment. She’s marked.’
Marked, Pen thought. On the seat next to her, Espel’s symmetrical features were still at rest. Streetlamps painted tiger stripes over her through the car’s windows as they drove. Red blotches marked her skin where the muscles under it had contorted, where they would again when she woke. Branded. Scarred.