Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (19 page)

Pen swallowed hard.

A mirror, or at least a large fragment of one, was propped up against the base of a tree. Without another word, Gutterglass produced a test tube, crouched down, tilted her wrist and tipped a clear liquid onto the glass.

The liquid trickled and ran over the surface of the mirror, but slowly, like oil rather than water. Pen watched the edge of the liquid advance. And behind that edge, with a suddenness that was like a trick of the eye, the glass itself disappeared.

Pen crouched down in front of the mirror. She saw grass and trees, but no reflection of herself. She held out a hand, and a spring breeze from another city stirred the hairs on her skin.

She looked up at Gutterglass, who smiled shyly around her bottle-cap teeth.

‘I finally cracked it,’ she said.

Later that day, Pen and Gutterglass, Astral the Blankleit and Ixia the Sodiumite, Petris and his clutch of battered Pavement Priests – all that remained of their little band – stood in a rough circle beneath the radio mast and watched while Beth dug.

Pen had asked her five times if she could help. She and Gutterglass pleaded and argued with her – they’d pointed out she was too sick, she was in shock, she wasn’t up to it – but Beth held firm. So they watched as she struggled with the rusting spade that Glas’ rats had scavenged for her. Beads of oily sweat zigzagged through the tiny streets on her forehead and dripped into her eyes. Once she dropped the spade and Ixia levitated it up for her, but Beth bared her teeth so suddenly and hostilely that the Sodiumite girl dropped it again. Beth dragged it from the dirt and dug on. She worked for three hours while the sun sank towards the horizon. The two Lampfolk’s filaments were dim as embers and the sun’s last rays refracted through their skins to wash in rainbows over the grave.

No one said anything until the very end, when Beth turned the last spade of earth back in on top of her father’s body. She bent, gathered a handful of soil and then, because there was nothing else to do with it, let it run back through her fingers onto the mound.

‘
Goodbye
.’ The word came so softly that Pen barely heard it. Beth closed her eyes and every light in every window in the city of her face went out. For a full minute she stood there, a black silhouette of a girl with the wind billowing her hoodie and tugging at her hair, then she turned and staggered out of the circle. Her gait was so unsteady Pen scrambled forward to help her, but Beth stopped her with an outstretched hand.

‘
I
’
m okay, Pen. I can handle myself. Besides, you
’
ve got a date
,’ she spoke in a steam-pipe whisper. Pen could see her lips pulling as she tried to smile. ‘
You
’
d better go
.’

She shambled over to one of the tower’s legs, broke out her markers and began to draw. Astral knelt behind her to give her light. Pen knew that by the time the sun rose Paul Bradley’s image would smile out from the steel, better than any eulogy.

Gutterglass walked over, but seemed to hesitate before offering Pen the glass phial. ‘As I showed you, Miss Khan,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t waste it, and make sure—’ She broke off, and Pen looked up at her.

‘Make sure what?’

‘Nothing,’ Gutterglass said, still watching the phial. ‘Nothing you need to be told, I’m sure.’

Make sure I come back?
she wondered.
Was that what you were going to tell me? Do you really think I
’
m ready to jump ship, Glas?

Pen curled her fingers around the doorway drug.
Carry on, or stop. That
’
s all you can do. And you can
’
t stop. They have a name for that
.

The Mistress’ wires uncurled under her and bore her upwards. First grass and trees and then roads and rooftops flowed away under her as she stalked across the city. Behind her, the radio mast, now the world’s tallest gravestone, reared black against a sepia sky. At first she felt dry and airless. She passed through London in a kind of stupor. If she’d been attacked, she would have been all but helpless; her mind was locked back in the moment the falling earth had blotted out Paul’s face.

In the back of her head, though, in the quiet, a voice was whispering to her. At first she didn’t listen, but it kept on, over and over, and eventually she let herself hear it.

It felt like a betrayal of Beth, but she couldn’t stifle the excitement building in her chest.
Espel
. She squeezed the phial in her right hand; she’d held it all the way here, too scared of it breaking to put it in her pocket.
Espel
. She even felt a smile tug at the corner of her mouth: a real smile – one to welcome the world in, not a shield to keep it out.

She was going to see Espel.

She reached Frostfield a little after midnight. She hurried inside, her pulse loud in her ears. When she walked through the bathroom door and saw a fog of breath already on the mirror, a handprint marked out inside it, it took all her self-control not to just hurl the phial to shatter against the glass. Instead, she carefully unscrewed the cap and, just as Glas had instructed her, stopped the phial with each of her trembling fingers in turn, barely wetting the tips with the doorway drug. This concoction was highly concentrated; she needed only a tiny bit. She had to make it last if she wanted to keep the way open.

Pen swallowed. She felt like there were fireworks going off inside her ears. Her world shrank until it was just that mirror, and then just that handprint. She laid her own hand against it. The glass tingled against her fingertips where they touched it and then faded to cold mist. Pen closed her eyes, took a breath and pushed her hand forward.

Warm fingertips met her own.

The breath held in her throat bubbled out into a delighted laugh and she opened her eyes. The mirrored surface was shrinking away from her palm like water evaporating in a hot pan. Beyond it, in an exact inversion of the Frostfield bathroom, stood a lean blonde girl with tattooed cheeks, a crooked smile and a silver seam stitched in and out of the skin down the very centre of her utterly symmetrical face.

Pen slipped her fingers through Espel’s and pulled her into her arms. She squeezed her as tightly as she could,
breathing in her soap-and-slate smell, cherishing the warmth of her narrow body and the feel of her hair against her cheek.

They stood like that for a long time, poised on the threshold between the city and its reflection.

Eventually Espel whispered in her ear, ‘I’m happy to see you too, Countess, and the wire looks great, but the barbs are kind of killing the mood.’

‘Oh! Sorry!’ Pen let her go, searching anxiously for signs of broken skin, but she couldn’t see any. Espel pushed her fringe out of her eyes with her left hand. She wore the black hoodie and bandana that was the Faceless’ de facto uniform, and a broad grin. She looked really, really good.

‘Wow,’ Espel said slowly, taking Pen in. ‘So that story about how you got your scars was really true, huh?’

Pen shrugged. She was painfully aware that when their romance had started, she hadn’t been packing sixty feet of barbed-wire accessories.

‘What is it?’ Espel asked.

‘Nothing – I’m just hoping you’re looking past the wire.’

‘No need to worry, Countess, I’m looking past the
clothes
.’

‘
Es!
’ Pen grinned despite herself, but it faltered on her face. Espel’s words hung in the air around her. They were a little too slow, spoken with a fraction too much effort.

Pen looked closer. There was something a little strange about Espel’s smile too: it was asymmetrical – startlingly so in the perfect symmetry of Espel’s face. The left side of it was stretched fractionally wider than the right.

Es saw her staring and her smile twisted a little further. ‘Yes, Countess, there are still two of me.’

Pen gaped at her and stuttered, ‘But—But … they said you were leading the Faceless now. I just assumed—’

‘Assumed what?’ Espel’s tone hardened. ‘That the other half of me had gone back for her beauty sleep? Sorry, honey, we’re both wide awake in here.’

‘But, how …?’ Pen couldn’t get over her shock. ‘How do you talk, how do you even
walk
when you’re …’

For a moment there was no sound but the dripping of a pipe somewhere inside the walls. Espel’s smile was like granite now, and Pen was starting to think she’d somehow screwed this up
already
.

Then, both to her awe and utter relief, Espel laughed. ‘Split in two?’ The blonde girl knocked gently on her left temple. ‘Sharing my head? We compromise, Parva. We work together, we adapt.’

She made a steeple with the fingers of both hands. ‘We both know what the other’s thinking, so motor skills and coordination aren’t as hard as you’d think, not now we’re not trying to kill each other, at least. Half the time I don’t even think of us as “us” any more. It’s not so different to how it used to be.’

She caught Pen’s sceptical look, and her expression turned a little wry. ‘All right, it’s different,’ she conceded calmly. ‘It’s harder – a lot harder, but so what? How many voices do you have to make peace with when you get out of bed every day?’

Pen held her –
their
 – gaze for a moment, then nodded slowly. ‘More than I used to,’ she admitted.

‘Well then,’ Espel said as if that settled it. Both her winter-blue eyes were bright, and her smile returned. ‘It helps that both of us want the same things,’ she added.

‘Oh? And what might those be?’

‘A roof to climb, a storm to sculpt, mac and cheese like my bro used to make it, and you.’

‘In that order?’ Pen asked archly.

Es shook her head and twirled a finger in the air. ‘Reverse it,’ she said.

Pen looked straight into Espel’s eyes. There were two minds looking back at her, she knew, one for each half of that symmetrical face: one belonged to the girl she’d fallen for, the first girl she’d ever kissed, and the other to the living mirrored prosthetic that had been stitched onto the right side of her face at birth. That second mind – her inverse depictor, her intimate devil, her id – had been awakened from what should have been its lifelong slumber only a few months earlier and now it was taking up half the space inside Espel’s head. And
somehow
, they were able to deal with each other.

How many voices do you have to make peace with when you get out of bed every day?
The voice that spoke in the back of her mind could almost have been her own.

‘Shhh,’ she muttered.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ Espel protested.

‘I know,’ Pen said.

‘So why shush me?’

‘I wasn’t, I’m just making peace.’ She put her hand onto Espel’s neck and pushed it upwards into her hair.

Both sides of Espel beamed at her.

The hell with it
, Pen thought, and kissed them both.

Espel exhaled hard when they broke off. ‘Wow.’

‘What?’ Pen asked. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘That that kiss was even better than I remember.’

‘How do you know that wasn’t that third mind at work?’ Pen countered.

‘Good point.’ Espel cocked her left eyebrow. ‘Want to get together for a threesome?’

‘
Es!
’ Pen felt the tips of her ears catch fire.

‘What?’ Espel’s face was all innocence. ‘I’m just saying, there are bold new adventures ahead here, Countess. I’m not knocking the kissing, you understand. Far from it. I just don’t think we should knock the, uh—’

‘Knocking either?’ Pen suggested.

‘I would
never
be so crude,’ Espel said.

Pen guessed she was trying to assume a pious face, the effect of which was only slightly ruined by the fact that the two sides of her clearly had different ideas of what ‘pious’ meant.

‘Expression not working for me?’ she asked Pen after a moment.

‘You just look like you’re trying to do really hard sums.’

They both laughed. ‘Okay, so what’s new in the old city, Countess?’ Espel indicated the tips of the Mistress’ coils, which were twitching a little restlessly on Pen’s shoulders. ‘What’s with the retro fashion statement?’

Pen felt the laughter dry up in her throat. She moistened her fingertips with the doorway drug and brushed back the mirror’s edge where it was trying to creep back in. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s quite a story …’

And she told Espel the tale, all of it: from Mater Viae’s demolition of London, her return to the Wire Mistress, their botched intelligence grab, the decimation of their little resistance band, to Paul’s death.

Espel listened in silence and when Pen was done, the steeplejill sucked her teeth as though appraising the situation. ‘Shit,’ she said.

‘As one-syllable summaries go, that about nails it.’ Pen leaned forward with her elbows on the edge of a sink, stretching out her back. ‘We’re screwed, Es. No army, no home, and I think B’s ready to drop any minute. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I don’t even know if there’s anything we
can
do.’

Espel licked her lips. She did it strangely, in two distinct halves, her tongue ran first anti-clockwise round the top and bottom of the left-hand side, then vanished back into her mouth before re-emerging to go clockwise round the top and bottom of the right. ‘You could come through to me,’ she said.

Pen looked up at her and Espel bent forward until their eyes were level. Her expression was wistful, hopeful, and a little ashamed. ‘You could do some real good over here, Countess. This place is right on the edge of open revolt against the Mirrorstocracy. The three-quarters of the Chevalier regiments who are half-faces have finally worked out their bosses aren’t doing anything for them and most of them fight for us now. We’ve got more and more people joining up every day, Half-faced and Mirrorstocrat both. It was
you
who did that, the Looking Glass Lottery’s own face speaking out against it.’ She sounded like she could still barely believe it had happened. ‘If you came back now, you could put us over the top.’

She paused as though musing, then said, ‘Also: the kissing. The kissing could continue, which I for one find very persuasive all by itself.’

Pen smiled, but only to cover the fact that her heart was going double-time in her chest as she thought about it. In the future, assuming she had one, she knew she’d look back on this moment and wonder if she’d got this right. She was tempted – there was no point pretending she wasn’t. The fact that Espel was almost certainly right and she
could
do far more good in London-Under-Glass only made it worse.

And yes, there was the kissing, and those bold new adventures to be had.