The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (6 page)

She hammered on the glass with her fist and shrieked, ‘Parva!’ Her voice echoed back off the walls behind the mirror, but her body had no way in.

She slammed her fist forward and the mirror fractured under the blow. Where the glass flaked away, only brick showed.

‘
Parva! Parva!
’

‘Parva?’

It was a man’s voice: old, and abraded by cigarette smoke.
Pen spun around. Mr Krafte, her English teacher, was standing in the bathroom doorway.

‘Parva – are you all right? Why do you keep shouting your name? Good lord, what happened to you—? You know you can’t come in here—’

Pen didn’t answer him.
You can’t come in.
The thought went around her head, over and over:
You can’t come in. You can’t …

… come in.

Mr Krafte recoiled as she barged past him into the corridor. She felt the invisible blood on her fingers soak into the headscarf in her hand.

A chill wrapped itself around Pen’s heart as she rode the tube. She swayed with the motion of the carriage, barely noticing when the back of her head bumped off the little square window. She couldn’t stop seeing that smeared, bloody handprint. She couldn’t stop imagining being hauled across the floor, screaming at the mirror for help, or else, dull and muddled by blood-loss, watching her window onto her only friend disappear as she was dragged through the bathroom door. Pen pictured herself in Parva’s place and felt the terror pick its way over her skin.

She’s only there in the first place because of you.

Her mobile sat dark in her bag. She’d switched it off and even now part of her mind was screaming at her about that, but she ignored it. She knew with a cold certainty what she needed to do.

We never used to do secrets.

But maybe we should have.

Parva had been Pen’s secret: the girl in the mirror, the little fragment of her universe she’d kept solely for herself.
But it wasn’t jealousy that kept Pen from asking Beth for help: it was the fact that she knew with a bone-deep certainty that she’d get it.

In her mind’s eye she saw it: the street-skinned girl, eyes gleaming like hubcaps on a summer’s day, grabbing her railing spear and gesturing for her best friend to lead the way.

The Chemical Synod might know a way, but whatever they would want in exchange wouldn’t be worth it. Beth’s last encounter with the synod had cost her the boy she’d loved, and the price for their help now would likely be just as terrible. Pen couldn’t ask Beth to pay that, not again.

The tube lights flickered and a memory welled up from the dark: an invitation scrawled on bricks in spray-paint.
Meet me under broken light
.

There was a cost when you asked someone you loved to follow you into this world.

*

The abandoned dye factory stood half collapsed on the south bank of the Thames. Patches of dark red lichen were eating the walls, looking like cold, gradual flames. Pen walked towards it, wading through her fear like it was chilly water. At each moment she expected black, oil-soaked figures to emerge and advance on her with symmetrical steps, but no one came.

She scrambled over the chain-link fence, ignoring the corroded warning signs. It took her a full three minutes of clenched teeth and muttered swearing to work herself up
to squeezing past the barbed wire. The second-hand on her watch goaded her with every tick. The metal was chill where it brushed her neck, and she tried not to feel her skin crawling.

Mercifully, the rust had chewed out the lock. Pen leaned on the metal door and the only resistance came from the cobwebs as it shrieked inwards.

Inside, all was darkness. Pigeons fluttered high up, but she couldn’t see any holes where they could have got in. The chill that blistered her skin felt old, as though the factory was a storeroom for years and years of past winters.

A prickle crept up Pen’s back. She started to call out, but her throat was parched by dust, and anyway, there was no point: they already knew she was here. She could feel them watching her, their eyes blending into the dark. She fought not to tremble. She licked her lips and peered into the shadows, trying not to blink, trying not to show them she was afraid. The darkness had eaten her; she couldn’t see her hands, or where she was putting her feet.

Something metal clinked behind her and she spun around, her heart thumping. The door was still there, a comforting rectangle of glare, but the daylight clung close to it and somehow didn’t penetrate any further into the room. The factory darkness had substance, like liquid, like oil. Next to it the light felt weak.

She forced herself to turn back and keep walking, groping ahead with her hands. Something hissed, steam rushing from a punctured pipe, its source camouflaged by echoes.
Pen’s eyes found outlines in the darkness, black on deeper black. Blood thundered in her ears like a tide.

A shape in the darkness solidified into something not-quite human, something thin and threatening and hungry. It
hated
her – Pen could feel its hate. Its jaw opened in a silent howl. It stretched out fingers made of shadow and lunged.

Pen shrieked and ran. She barely managed to stay upright as she threw herself forward. She could feel her feet wanting to turn towards the door, to make her flee, but she wouldn’t let them: they were
her
feet,
her
muscles, and they’d do what she bloody well told them to. She felt invisible things reaching for her, slithering over her skin.

Her knees rose and fell, almost of their own accord. She couldn’t not run, so she gritted her teeth and ran deeper into the dark. From the corners of her eyes she glimpsed nightmare things squatting fatly on heavy haunches with back-bent teeth and empty eye sockets. There were flickers of motion. Heads snapped on thick necks to track her. Even though there was no light, even though there was no way she could see them, she saw them anyway.

Something snorted and snapped by her ear and Pen flinched. She zigzagged, recoiling from the hands she could feel reaching for her, tugging at her clothes and sliding, chill and slippery, upwards to play in her hair. Cold snouts pressed to her neck. The hissing grew louder; there was a
plack plack plack
sound of some viscous liquid hitting concrete. She screamed into the dark again and broke into a
headlong rush. Something firm snagged the collar of her T-shirt and her feet were jerked from under her. Her stomach tumbled in sickening weightlessness for an instant, and then the floor jarred her spine like a hammer.

She lay there, unable to move, wondering, for a horrified instant, if her back was broken, if she was paralysed. She listened to her own wheezing, panicky breaths and felt the slender, invisible things grasping for her out of the darkness. Would it be this moment? Or this? Or this, when they finally touched her? The steam-hiss was right beside her ear as it bled into words:

‘Sssalutationss, Ssurvivor,’ it whispered. ‘Sssundered Sssisster and Insssubordinate Sservant. Misstress’ lasst host. Greetingssss.’

The voice paused. An amused note crept in. ‘Ssorrry to aressst your progresss sso sssuddenly. I shudder to inssinuate that your wisssdom might be ssusspect, but your sssupremely asstute sstrategy of running blind in a darkened chemical worksss was sstarting to sstray a little clossse to sssuicide.’

The voice sighed. ‘Lightsss, pleasse, Ssimeon.’

There was the clunk of a lever being thrown, and glare ruptured the darkness. Pen screwed up her eyes, then opened them gradually to make out a dark figure bending over her. He wore an immaculately tailored suit and had slicked-back hair and a broad, wicked grin. Every inch of him, eyeballs, fingernails and teeth included, was covered in smooth, black oil. A droplet fell from his forehead and splashed onto her lips.

Johnny Naphtha, unofficial voice of the Chemical Synod, London’s Brokers of Everything, snapped the lid shut on the cigarette lighter he was holding and gestured with it. Pen lifted her head to look past her own feet.

She lay on a narrow spur of concrete. The stainless steel vat it jutted over was as wide as a tractor wheel, and half-full of colourless liquid.

‘Well?’ he whispered.

‘Th-thank you,’ she managed. She knew what she had to say, but it was hard to speak. Her heart was galloping like a routed cavalry charge.

‘Yesss?’

‘I – I owe you.’

Johnny Naphtha’s grin grew even wider. He rummaged in one oil-soaked pocket and produced a shiny steel screw, which he flicked into the vat with his thumb. It entered the liquid with a tiny splash, at the exact same time as four other identical screws. Pen saw the other black figures standing on the metal gantries, leaning over her in poses that exactly mirrored Johnny’s.

There was a bubbling hiss and a strange tangy smell as all five screws were dissolved by whatever was in the tank.

‘We’ll work sssomething out. Can you sssstand?’

He led her up a spiralling iron staircase. The other four oil-drenched men converged on them with synchronised strides. They reached the top and ducked through a doorway in the eaves.

The walls of the room beyond were more hole than brick.
Jagged gaps opened out onto the empty winter sky, and pigeons cooed and groomed themselves in the crevices. The birds were all soaked in oil, but that didn’t seem to impede them when they cleared their wings for take-off.

Pen looked down and her stomach plummeted. Most of the floor had crumbled away too. The room, or what was left of it, jutted from the back of the top of the factory, sitting on a spine of rusted iron pillars. Massive gaps yawned either side of her feet, and through them she could see the scrub grass and gravel of the factory yard a dizzying distance below. A narrow path wound between the gaps and the synod trod it together, their footsteps leaving the floor slick with oil. At the far end was a little island of concrete, with two black leather sofas and what looked like an old-fashioned drinks cabinet. The five symmetrical men turned expectantly as they reached this island, each with a hand on his lapel.

Pen swallowed hard and took a step. Her foot slid sickeningly under her and she threw out her arms, fighting for balance. She hissed between gritted teeth and took another step. Oil seeped into the fabric of her trainers. The black birds flapped and called to her.

‘Perhapsss it might go fassster if you didn’t look down?’ Johnny Naphtha suggested.

A derisive laugh burst from Pen’s lips, startling her almost as much as it seemed to surprise them. ‘Thanks, but since down’s where the path is, I’ll look where I like and take my own damn time.’ She looked down again and saw the gaping
holes in the floor, the oiled slickness, the suicidal height. She took another step.

The synod didn’t move until she was on the island with them, then, in identical time, they unbuttoned their jackets. Three of them, with Johnny in the middle, sat on one of the sofas. The other two stood behind, hands clasped, as if for an official photograph.

‘Pleasssse,’ Johnny gestured, and Pen sat opposite. She felt the slick black surface of the sofa soaking into her jeans. They looked at her, and she stared back, wild-eyed. Now that it came to it, she had no idea how to start.

‘Ssstill in sshock,’ Johnny Naphtha muttered to his neighbour, and the other four nodded in identical agreement. ‘Hardly ssssurprising, ssince she burssst in on our experiment.’

‘Experiment?’ Pen said sharply.

‘Of courssse experiment. It’ss been a marvellousss morning. We’ve jusst sssuccesssfully ssynthesissed sssscotophobia. And then’ – he tutted – ‘a tardy tresspassser tainted it.’

They leaned forward, and suddenly there was something shark-like in their faces.

‘By rightss we sshould you make you brew the next batch.’

Pen gripped her knees until they hurt.
Act tough
, she thought,
like B would
.

‘Scotophobia,’ she said, her voice just about even. ‘Fear of the dark.’

The Chemical Synod smiled as one, and Johnny Naphtha
said, ‘Of coursse – the factory floor isss flooded with it. Why do you sssuppose we excissed the light? The phobia wasss the product of the procedure, but to be perfect itss primer chemicalsss needed to be pure.’

Pen just stared at him. Beth had told her about the synod, but seeing them for real made everything feel off-kilter, like the little bones in her inner ear had come loose.

‘Perhapsss a resstorative would sssettle you,’ Johnny said, pointing to the floor. Pen glanced down to see a battered tin cup next to her foot, half full of a dark-red concoction.

Maybe
, she told herself urgently,
that’s been there all along, and I just didn’t notice it. Maybe they
didn’t
just conjure it there.

‘What’s in it?’ she asked.

Johnny pursed his lips. He rolled his black eyeballs as though consulting his memory. ‘A ssselection of ssaltss, kerosssene, cyanide, a little ssad, certain ressolutenesss and cherry juice,’ he said. ‘But only in medicinal quantitiess. I’m quite certain it’ss ssafe.’

Pen pushed the cup politely but firmly away with her trainer.

The synod sighed as one.

‘Sssuit yoursself,’ Johnny said. ‘Ass you ssso ssuccinctly sstated:
take your own damn time
.’

Pen watched the synod, and the synod, patient and inexorable as geological forces, watched her back.

‘I need your help,’ she said at last.

‘Why elssse would you come?’

‘So … How does this work?’

The five oil-soaked men shrugged, their shoulders rising and falling in an undulating symmetrical wave, starting with Johnny and rippling to the two taller figures on the flanks.

‘You sstate a desssire,’ Johnny said. ‘We sset a price. It’ss esssentially sshopping.’

There was a little pebble of tension in Pen’s throat. If they couldn’t help her, she had nothing. ‘I need to go behind the mirrors,’ she said. ‘I need to go to London-Under-Glass.’

There was silence, broken only by the ruffling of oily wings.

Johnny Naphtha hissed slowly through his teeth. He sounded like a bit like a plumber, just before telling you that the last guy was a total cowboy and that the cost of the parts would be roughly equal to the mortgage on a house in Hamp-stead and the price of a couple of kidneys.