Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (12 page)

What if she leaves? What if she thinks I
’
m not coming?

Now
, she urged herself, echoing the Mistress’ words,
before she gets away
.

Don
’
t lose this chance, don
’
t let her stray
.

The thought was like a door opening in her mind: a clear direction away from the poisonous turmoil surrounding Salt, and she fled towards it. The wire bridled as Pen’s urgency trickled through to her, but the link between them went both ways and she could feel it becoming the Mistress’ urgency too. A gust of wind picked up and she swayed for a moment. Then the spindly steel legs uncoiled and bore her onwards.

The bathroom was like a cave, cool and dank. The barbs on Pen’s feet scratched the lino as she walked in.

‘Espel? Es?’ She groped for a switch and the neon tubes on the ceiling hummed to life. Pen stared into the long, frameless sheet of mirror-glass screwed to the wall above the sinks. Her face blinked back at her from its nest of wire. Other than her reflection, the room was empty.

For one sick moment she thought she was too late, but then she remembered that half-faces like Espel didn’t cast reflections – the steeplejill could be an inch from the glass on the other side and shouting her head off and Pen would neither see nor hear her.

‘Es?’ she called again. She could feel her pulse, beating at the base of her throat like a trapped bird. ‘If you’re there, slam a door or something – find a way to show me.’

She stared at the row of cubicles in the reflection, but none of the doors moved.

Disappointment filled her stomach like concrete. Her gaze roved over the reflection’s empty lino floor.
Stupid
, she
thought,
of course she
’
s not there – she never was. Even if that Mirrorstocrat was telling the truth, she
’
s leading the Faceless now, why would she make time for you?

Her head weighed heavy. Her eyes ached. She turned reluctantly towards the door.

Only then did she notice the patch of mirror – just to the right of the middle sink – that had steamed up.

She stared at it. A rough oval of fog was growing on the glass, as though someone was breathing on it. Pen felt her own breath catch in the back of her throat as a clear space appeared in the middle of the condensation: the perfect print of a right hand.

She ran to the mirror and pressed her own hand against it. The glass felt almost cold enough to blister, but Pen tried to imagine that a little of the warmth from Espel’s hand was bleeding through from the reflected world to hers.

Questions bubbled up in her: how had Espel escaped the Masonry Man? Had she found a way to put her id back to sleep? What must she
think
of her, standing here all wrapped up in wire? But when she opened her mouth, Pen didn’t have the heart to speak. She didn’t want to hear her lonely voice echoing off the tiles. And what did the answers matter anyway? Es was here. Es was
here
. That was what counted.

She let her forehead fall against the glass and watched tears she couldn’t feel run down her nose and trickle down the mirror.

She didn’t know how long she stood like that, overcome with relief, only that it was blissful and she hated the sounds
and images that, black and insistent as oil in water, drifted back to the surface of her mind: a vagrant shadow crossing a car park; a voice in her ear …

Something must have shown on her face because the glass above her hand fogged again and a question mark cut itself into the condensation, the line of it as thick as a finger.

Pen imagined Espel mouthing on the other side of the glass:
What
’
s wrong, Countess?

‘I …’ Pen’s mouth was startlingly dry. ‘Nothing. I just …’ But she tailed off.

The question mark remained, unimpressed by her denial.

‘I have a friend,’ she said at last. ‘He’s going to do something awful to himself, something that will almost certainly kill him, and it was me who gave him the means.’

The invisible finger inscribed a capital Y next to the question mark.

‘Because it’s necessary – because somebody has to, and there wasn’t anyone else.’

An unseen palm obliterated the writing. Fresh fog clouded the glass and ghostly letters inscribed and underlined themselves.

Wasn
’
t?

Pen laughed humourlessly. ‘Yeah, well: that’s the point.’ She looked at her reflection and the strands of barbed shadow that obscured her eyes. She tried to imagine she looked predatory, dangerous, but she didn’t really; she just looked like her.

‘Now there’s someone else – someone I
want
to hurt’ – the
words came up out of her, vicious and true – ‘and I’m pretty sure that I have the power to make him do it instead.’

For the first time, she let the idea fully crystallise in her mind. She imagined snatching Salt in his sleep with her steel tendrils, sending the barbs burrowing under his skin before she shoved him out of some doorway to wait for the claylings to come through the floor.

She tested herself, like prodding a mouth ulcer with her tongue to see when the pain would come. She waited for the revulsion, the pity and the horror at what she was thinking of doing to him. None came. There was no satisfaction either, no eagerness, just a dreadful anger, rolling through her like a forest fire, and the vague sense that this might feed it, if only for a moment.

She met her own brown eyes and imagined Espel’s blue ones looking back.

‘You’d tell me I shouldn’t, right?’ she said. ‘That it’s not my choice to make?’

Pen felt a ripple of surprise as she read the message that came back to her.

Sounds like you
’
re the only one who can make it
.

And underneath,

Whatever you choose, Countess, I
’
m here
.

Without hesitating, Pen leaned forward and put her lips gently to the glass, then rested her forehead against it and closed her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, then straightened and, reluctantly, she took her hand from the mirror.

‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Knowing Beth, she’ll send out a
search party if I’m not back by daybreak, and I have a detour to make. Could you … could you be back here in three days?’

If I
’
m breathing, I
’
m here
.

The mist faded slowly from the mirror until all that was left inscribed was
If
.

Pen nodded ruefully, lifted her chin and walked away.

It probably shouldn’t have surprised Pen that Salt snored.

He lay wedged at the end of the cereal aisle, curled into a heap of T-shirts and jumpers he must have salvaged from the clothing section. Even hanging right over him, Pen could barely see him. A pair of hollow-eyed women were tending a campfire in the stripped-bare crisps and snacks aisle next door, but the weak light it threw out didn’t reach Salt’s face. If it hadn’t been for his breath, rasping in and out of his throat like a struggling lawn mower, it would have been easy to pretend he wasn’t there at all, that his shape was just a trick of the light, another Salt-shadow, thrown across the floor by her mind.

Another snore ripped out of him; he scratched himself and shifted onto his back and his face rolled into the light. Pen thought she saw his eyelids flicker and her heart almost stopped. She imagined his eyes snapping open, fixing on her; she imagined him smiling that old, coldly certain smile.

She was shivering, she realised. Barbs scraped lightly over the backs of her hands as they trembled. She was breathing
fast, but whether from fear or eagerness, she couldn’t tell. Everything about her body felt very distant to her; the wire was more real than her own arms or legs. A detached calm flooded her mind.

In the next aisle, the two women chattered low over their crackling fire. One of them laughed softly.

Pen bit down hard on her lip. From the edge of her field of vision, black barbed strands curled down towards Salt’s sleeping form, but when her tendrils reached him, they flinched away. She could feel their tips, hovering a fraction of an inch from his skin, but it was almost more than she could bear to make them touch him.

Steeling herself, she threaded the wires under him, very gently, so as not to wake him. With the barbs carefully turned outwards she painstakingly laced them around and between his legs and behind his back. His arms were clutching some dream-treasure to his chest and she bound them there, letting her ligatures flex with the movement of his lungs. She wrapped the wire around his neck, and then, finally, with sudden violence, she lashed it around his mouth.

He woke instantly, eyes bulging in his head, blinking desperately and searching for whoever was doing this to him. A scream was stifled deep in his throat. He looked over Pen without seeing her; the shadows in the ceiling were too deep for his eyes to penetrate. Pen watched him curiously. It was no effort at all to hold him. It was incredibly strange to feel his muscles straining so violently against her wires but unable to stir even a hair’s breadth.

She marvelled at her own dispassion. She kept expecting her calm to crack, but it held and held, even as her heart beat faster and harder.

She shortened the slack in the wire between them an inch at a time. Gradually, he rose up off the floor towards her.

A line of shadow crossed his face as he was hoisted above the level of the shelves that lined the aisles. Suddenly she could see the sweat glimmering under his nose and latticing his forehead. She could see his teary eyes, pale and round; like tiny moons reflected in puddles.

Feeling only mild curiosity, Pen twisted one of the strands which bound him and buried its barbs into the side of his neck.

The pain echoed; she could feel it in her own skin, but dully. His panic raced through her veins, but left her untouched. Her calm held. She saw his sight wavering in front of her own and now she could see herself through his eyes – she came slowly into view, pressed flat to the ceiling like a giant insect, clinging onto the ceiling with hundreds of barbs.

She drew him up until he was six inches below her face, then let him dangle parallel to her. She could feel the muscles in his jaw working frantically. She thought about unbinding his mouth, but she had no real interest in hearing him speak. She breathed in, and the harsh scent of his aftershave scraped her sinuses.

The smell was like a white-hot knife in her head, shattering
her calm around her. She blinked and shuddered. She was back in her body and she was panicking. All the anger and the fright and the maddening, maddening
helplessness
unravelled violently in her stomach.

Oh
 – suddenly, she was frantic –
Help! How can it feel like this
, she thought furiously,
still?
After all she’d been through, after everything she’d seen and done, even with the wire wrapped around her like armour, even with him hanging helpless as a doll under her?

How can he possibly still make me feel like this?

And it did still feel exactly the way it had before, when she was standing alone with him in an empty classroom with no one to see, and no one to tell, with his stubble scraping along her cheek.

Our secret ….

The sheer
unfairness
in those two words still felt like it was ripping her open from the inside out. The wire whispered to her,

She drew in a breath to scream at him, but she hesitated. The fire in the next aisle danced in the corner of her eye. The women there still hadn’t noticed her.

I am so sick of secrets
, she thought.

‘FUCK YOU!’

It was the loudest she’d ever heard her own voice, and
Salt flinched violently. The women in the next aisle over looked around, then up, startled, and then bolted, screaming.

Pen didn’t even watch them go. ‘I’m sick of pretending,’ she snapped at the man dangling beneath her. ‘I’m sick of hiding, sick of sneaking and telling half-truths. I’m sick of my own deepest secrets. All because of
you
.’

You
, she thought, eyeing him furiously.
You, who I had to bury inside myself, bundled up with everything that was most private, everything that was most mine, until all of me felt tainted by it. You, who made me feel like I had no choice, who made me feel like I was nothing. You, who left me nothing in myself to turn to
.

‘It was
you
,’ she said again, and now she saw his eyes widen as he recognised her voice.

And just like that, looking into his tear-streaked, terrified face, she finally knew what she wanted, and it wasn’t this – this scrambling over ceilings like a spider in the night.

Someone I want to hurt
, she’d said to Espel, and that was a part of the truth, but only part.

What she wanted, what she
craved
, was to see him
broken
, his
secret
broken. That secret was the chain he’d bound her with, and she wanted it shattered in pieces on the floor. She wanted it out in public, where everyone who knew her and everyone who knew him could hear. She wanted to see their eyes turn from him in disgust as he crumpled under the shame of what he’d done.

And nothing, she realised with a clarity that felt like elation,
nothing else
would satisfy her. She understood then just how hard and how deeply she’d been clinging to the idea
of his trial, even as the world had broken around her. She needed that verdict, that vindication, and the thought of giving it up just so he could die in secret, even if it was at her hands, even – she swallowed – to spare Mr B – No, that was too much to sacrifice.

‘
I
’
ll decide what I want from him
,’ she’d told the wire. No one else had the claim on him that she had.

She met his gaze.

‘You remember,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

He stared up at her.

‘You remember,’ she repeated, her voice as cold as the barbs that held him. She slackened her grip on his neck, just enough for him to nod.

‘I could have killed you in your sleep,’ she said. ‘I could do worse than kill you now.’

He tried to close his eyes, but she brushed a barb across the lids and they snapped back open. A fresh wave of his terror drenched her; she smelled him piss himself.

‘I’ll be back for you,’ she promised. She uncoiled her wires and he plummeted back onto the heap of soiled clothes.

Pen retracted her barbs from the ceiling and dropped after him, the wires wrapped around her softening her landing. For a moment she stood and looked down at him from her own height. He gaped up at her in mute terror. She opened her palm and dropped a two-barb link of wire at his feet, where it burrowed into the clothes he slumped on. He scrambled back, his eyes frantic, his jaw gibbering,
but no sound coming out. In the base of her mind, Pen suggested to the Mistress that it might like to keep the wire close to this man, and she assented without demur.

Pen turned and walked away without looking back.

A dawn light was promising itself in the open doorway. Behind her, Dr Julian Salt finally found his breath and began to scream.