The Glass Republic

Book 2: Skyscraper Throne

by Tom Pollock

Genres: YA Fantasy

Synopsis

The Glass Republic is the gripping sequel to The City's Son, and the second book of The Skyscraper Throne trilogy.

Pen's life is about secrets: the secret of the city's spirits, deities and monsters, living just beyond the notice of modern Londoners; the secret of Pen's intricate scars that disfigure her so cruelly; and the most closely guarded secret of all: Parva, her mirror-sister, forged from her reflections in a school bathroom mirror.

Pen's reflected twin is the only girl who really understands her. Then Parva is abducted and Pen makes a terrible bargain to track her down. In London-Under-Glass, looks are currency, and Pen's scars make her a rare and valuable commodity. But some in the reflected city will do anything to keep Pen from the secret of what happened to the sister who shared her face.

Release date: August 1, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 448

Sample

Laughter burst out over the playground. Like a lot of weapons, laughter had two edges, and the tall girl in the green hijab was intimately familiar with both. She listened to it carefully, even while she joked, wary in case it turned.

‘Honestly, I spent a week in training, then I was plunged into this network of underground cage-fighting clubs. The face came from this one girl, vicious little thing half my height – she hid these tiny nails under the knuckles of her gloves. It was totally against the rules, but nobody cared. Every time she hit me it was like getting a facial from a wolverine.’

A handful of students, bundled up against the February cold, clustered around Pen. She resisted the urge to draw the headscarf closer around her face under their scrutiny.

One of her audience, a superior-looking blonde in a fake-fur coat hissed impatiently, ‘But seriously, Parva …’

‘Seriously, Gwen?’ Pen shrugged. ‘Seriously, it was a jealous lover, said if he couldn’t have me, no one could.’

Laughter again, but more hesitant this time, and it quickly petered out. Gwen Hardy’s eyes widened slightly and she said, ‘What … actually?’

‘Sure,’ Pen deadpanned. ‘Or maybe it was an angry cat – mutantly big – Catzilla, basically. Had claws out to here,’ she mimed. ‘I can’t quite remember, mind. It was a while ago—’

‘It was four months ago.’

‘Yeah, but it was only my face, it wasn’t like it was important …’

‘Parva!’ Gwen’s smile was achingly wide. ‘Will you just tell us already?’

Pen licked her uneven lips, wishing her current strategy involved a little less playing court jester to Gwen’s little crew. Still, she had disappeared without warning for three months and returned with a reconstructed lip and a tangled thatch of scar tissue over her cheeks. If you wanted back into school society with all that baggage, you needed the backing of somebody influential.

She made a show of sizing the three of them up, as though deciding how much truth they could take: Gwen Hardy, whom Allah in his loving wisdom had made pretty and bright and hard-edged as a diamond-cutter, stood next to her boyfriend Alan Jackson, who was just as smart, but given to speak only in soft monosyllables. Everything about him was as lean and efficient as the muscular frame zipped into his football team jacket. Next to Alan, and trying not to be too obviously excited about it, was tiny, freckled Trudi Stahl. Trudi had replaced recently graduated nightmare Harriet Williams at the crank-handle of the school’s rumour-mill, and still seemed to be catching her breath at finding herself in such exalted company.

Pen beckoned them forward and they shuffled in, obscuring the shapes and muffling the noise of the younger kids who were kicking tennis balls across the asphalt until a breathless kind of intimacy enveloped them.

‘Well?’ Gwen demanded.

Pen drew in a deep breath and said softly, ‘I was kidnapped by a living coil of barbed wire – the servant a of a demolition god whose fingers were cranes. I was its host, and it sent me to kill Beth Bradley, but she freed me from it instead. I held the monster down with my body while she cut it off with a sharpened park railing.’

There was a long moment’s silence, then Alan made a tchk sound in the back of his throat and laughed. Gwen actually stamped her foot and puffed out a little condensation-cloud of frustration even as she grinned, but it was Trudi who spoke.

‘Damn,’ she said. ‘I actually thought we were going to get something there.’

The bell sounded the end of morning break and, chatting, whooping and swearing, Frostfield students converged on the doors to the main block. Anyone under sixteen was at least nominally in a blue and grey uniform. From above, Pen thought, it must’ve looked like a tide of dirty water streaming towards a plughole.

Gwen shouldered her satchel and slung an arm around Alan’s neck. She pulled him in and kissed him ostentatiously. At length she broke away and asked, ‘What’s now?’

‘Maths,’ Alan replied.

She rolled her eyes and Trudi, taking her cue, groaned along.

‘Eff. Eff. Ess,’ Gwen said. ‘With the new woman? Foreign-Chick?’

‘Faranczek.’

‘Whatever. Can any of you even understand a word she’s saying with that accent? I never thought I’d say this, but I seriously miss Salt. Did you get anywhere finding out what happened to him, Tru?’

‘Nothing solid, but a couple of the year 7s are spreading it that he’s been suspended,’ Trudi replied. ‘Apparently some girl said he touched her up.’

Pen felt her stomach muscles clench. ‘Really?’ She managed to keep her voice even. ‘Who?’

Trudi looked a little crestfallen. ‘They didn’t know.’

‘Selfish, lying bitch.’ Gwen snorted in disgust. ‘Whoever she is, she’s just out for attention, and she’s going to screw up our exams while she’s at it. Now, if some boy had said Salt went for him …’

She left it hanging and everyone laughed, including Pen, even though it wasn’t funny and her ears and chest were burning, even though she could feel the laughter pressing its blade against her stomach, because sometimes that was what you had to do.

‘You not coming, Parva?’ Gwen asked when Pen didn’t follow them towards the door.

Pen shook her head. She pulled a cartoon-mournful face and drew an invisible tear down one cheek with a finger.

‘Still playing the trauma card?’ Gwen said with a good-humoured tut. ‘Lucky cow. Still, I don’t blame you. If I could get away with skiving it, I would.’ She tucked her arm through Alan’s, and the untouchable pair sauntered inside. Trudi hung back with Pen. She tucked a coil of red hair behind one ear. ‘You will tell us, though, Parva,’ she said, her voice kind; concerned. ‘The stories are fun and all, and Gwen’s cutting you some slack, but sooner or later you will tell us how your face got so fucked-up.’ She tilted her head and studied Pen’s cross-hatched cheeks. ‘I just wanted to make sure you knew that.’

Pen forced a smile. She felt her scars bend: a dozen mocking, mirroring mouths.

‘Sure, Tru,’ she said. ‘It’ll be good to talk to someone.’

‘That’s what friends are for.’ Trudi rose onto tiptoes, kissed her on the cheek and headed in through the doors.

Pen walked against the tide of the students into the playground. Something cold landed on her eyelash: snowflakes were drifting from the yellowing clouds. She pulled her headscarf tighter around her and shuddered.

You will tell us.

She should have known that was coming. Pen was hanging around with Gwen because her … patronage – she couldn’t think of it as anything other than that – kept the rest of Frostfield off her back, but Gwen didn’t do charity. She wanted to be seen to be the one the damaged girl opened up to, the one who could get the answers to the questions the whole school was buzzing with.

Where did Pen go for those three weeks last autumn?

What was it that had mutilated her face?

And where on earth had Beth Bradley, Pen’s best friend, a girl she never used to be seen without, gone?

Buried in her thoughts, Pen almost walked into the school perimeter wall. She shook herself and bent double against the snow. The wind had started up and now it shrieked up and down octaves and stripped her face raw. She was grateful for it – everyone else would have hurried indoors and there was less chance of being seen.

The old junior block jutted out into the playground in front of her, bandaged up in hi-vis tape like an injured brick limb. Some workmen had found asbestos in it while Pen had been gone and the whole structure had been cordoned off. Orange cones marked out the edge of the forbidden zone.

Secret spaces can open up so fast in the city, Pen thought.

Wary of the CCTV, she squeezed herself in behind the tangle of spiny evergreen bushes that grew by the wall and edged her way towards the fire escape at the back.

The air inside was dank and cave-like, but out of the wind it felt warm. What little light penetrated the muck-smeared windows silhouetted little funeral cairns of bluebottles. Pen picked her way along the corridor, climbing over a couple of toppled-over lockers, and ducked into a doorway on the right.

It had been the girls’ bathroom once. Toilet-stall doors stood open, plastic seat lids down and covered in dust. Sinks jutted from the wall like pugnacious chins, with a long frameless sheet of mirror-glass still screwed in above them.

Just to be sure, Pen checked inside the stalls, but she was alone in the room.

Anxiety bubbled in her throat as she stepped up to the mirror. She saw herself up close: the scars criss-crossed her cheeks like cracks in broken glass. Luckily Dr Walid had owed her father a favour from their university days, so he hadn’t charged when he rebuilt her nostril and her lower lip using a graft taken from her thigh. Camouflage, carefully applied, could conceal the border between them and the surrounding tissue, but it left a flat texture, a wrongness that couldn’t be disguised.

There was only so much you could hide from people if they got too close.

‘It’s all you, Pen,’ she whispered. ‘They just rearranged you a little bit.’

Gradually her gorge subsided. It helped to be here, in this mildewed, tumbledown bathroom, the only place in the world she could find someone who understood.

She leaned over the sink and rapped on the mirror with her knuckles. ‘Hello? Hello?’

Her voice echoed hollowly off the tiles.

Hello? Hello?

‘Hello.’

In the mirror, Pen saw a slender girl walk out of one of the toilet stalls; the same stalls Pen had looked into and knew were empty. The interloper stepped up behind her, put her arms around Pen’s waist and settled her chin on her shoulder. Pen felt the pressure from the girl’s hug and the comfortable heat from the cheek next to her own, but she didn’t bother looking sideways; she knew she’d see nothing there. She kept her eyes on the glass, studying the reflection that appeared not to be cast by anyone at all.

The clothes were different; the girl in the mirror had obviously been shopping. She wore tighter jeans, a stylishly cut leather jacket and a pair of heels that meant she had to stoop slightly to hug Pen. The girl’s headscarf looked new too, an expensive-looking raw silk in pigeon-grey.

The face though – the face was identical: fine-featured, brown-skinned, even down to the intricate asymmetry of the scars.

Pen looked into the mirror and saw her reflection doubled. Two copies of her looked back.

The girl next to her reflection broke into a grin and the slashes that framed her mouth became something quite beautiful. ‘You look good, girl,’ she said.

Pen’s new face was like a bully: the unstable, manipulative kind who sticks close to you like they’re your needy best friend, demands constant attention and care and then ridicules you the moment anyone else shows up.

After she came out of hospital, Pen spent hours at her dresser, skin camouflage cream open before her. She patted over the little ridges of twisted, discoloured skin with the sponge, the way she’d been taught, trying to change what she saw in the mirror back into someone she recognised.

The first week, she hadn’t worn any makeup at all. Burning with the energy of what she’d survived, she’d tried to catch the eye of total strangers and started conversations at the Number 57 bus stop about the weather or Downton Abbey. She’d been pugnaciously cheery, daring them to look at her.

It hadn’t been worth it.

Only little kids would let themselves gape openly; adults just became fascinated with the their own feet, not wanting to be caught staring, and more and more Pen had started to hide her new face.

She took to running in the middle of the night, keeping her eyes on the pavement so she wouldn’t see the Sodiumites dancing their burning dances inside the streetlamps. She ran until the freezing air turned to fire in her lungs and sweat drenched the scarf tied around her hair. She looked up strength-training regimes on the internet and practised them in her bedroom until calluses armoured the inside of her fingers and she could do chin-ups on the lintel over her door. The thrill as her body responded to her felt like defiance and she watched in satisfaction as her ribs emerged through her tightening skin. She became a little more careful about what she ate, then a little more, then a little more. Food felt risky; it could unpick the changes she had willed on herself. She’d chop and mix the chickpeas and spinach on her plate, prod at them with bread but take very few bites. Every refrained-from mouthful burned in her chest like another victory. She did her best to ignore the worried looks from her parents.

You know best, Pen, she told herself. It’s your body. Yours. Everything’s going to be fine.

Prayer had become almost impossible.

It wasn’t as though she’d never missed Salah, back in the time that she was beginning to think of as simply ‘Before’. She’d often overslept, or been out with Beth, or been so busy she’d just forgotten, but this was different. At first, she was careful to make the time: she wanted prayer to be something she could hold on to. But the familiar words of the rak’ah felt awkward in her mouth, and she faltered before she finished, feeling horribly, intimately insincere. Eventually she’d stopped trying. When her dad tried to lead prayer at home, she told him she was going to pray in her room instead; she’d just stared at him, using her scars, until his protestations had faded away.

Once she had her morning makeup routine down to forty-five minutes and her hands no longer shook when she held the sponge, she went back to school.

The 57 drove her past a building site on Dalston High Road. From the upper deck Pen glimpsed cranes, spindly as winter trees, through the chilly fog. They were still, their motors stopped and voiceless, but she shrank back in her seat anyway. There was a flicker of movement inside the bulb of one of the still-lit street lamps and for an instant she saw a hand silhouetted against the glass.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and read, Look left.

Outside, something darted across the mouth of an alley, human-shaped, hooded and impossibly fast.

Her phone buzzed again.

Too slow. Look right.

Through the far window, Pen saw a figure fly across the gap between two rooftops.

Pen! This is harder than it looks, you know. Try and keep up! Look behind you.

Pen rolled her eyes and then, very slowly, craned her neck to face the back of the bus.

Upside down, hanging somehow by her toes from the roof, her nose pressed to the glass, a teenage girl with skin the colour of concrete blew her a long, slow kiss.

Didn’t think I’d miss your first day back in the madhouse, did you?

*

They stood at Frostfield High’s metal gates. It was still early. A few uniformed kids, hunched like Sherpas under their rucksacks, made their way in from their parents’ cars. A couple of them looked, but no one recognised Pen. She glanced back over her shoulder and took in the landscape. East London’s terracotta roofs overlapped like insect-chitin in the long shadows of the tower blocks.

Beth leaned with one foot against the gatepost, hood up, head down, thumbs flickering while she texted. The spiked iron railing she always carried now rested in the crook of her elbow. She showed Pen her screen. Sure you’re ready?

Pen exhaled. ‘Nope,’ she said, ‘but I’m not sure I ever will be, so I might as well do it now.’

Hardcore, Pencil Khan. I’m proud of you. Pavement-grey eyes met Pen’s.

Beth held her gaze and typed blind. I’ll come in with you if you want, you know that, right? Screw ’em. I’m still enrolled. Just give the word and we’ll be sitting together in French.

Pen looked at her curiously. ‘When I suggested that before you didn’t seem so up for it.’

Beth shrugged, a little shyly. Just for me, no. But I’d line up next to you in front of a firing squad if that’s where you wanted me.

She would too.

Pen touched her cheek. ‘No thanks, B. I could use a bit of upstaging, mind, but I think you might draw a bit too much focus.’

Be all right. Got a spear.

She was joking. Probably. Nevertheless, Pen winced at the thought of Beth prodding the railing into anyone who looked at her funny. There was a wild edge to her friend now and she couldn’t entirely rule that out.

‘Still,’ she said, ‘I think it might put a bit of a dent in Operation Normality.’

She caught the guilty flicker in her friend’s eyes, but her own voice echoed back to her.

No further down the rabbit hole, B. She’d said it and she had to hold to it; she couldn’t look back.

Beth stretched out her hand, Pen pressed her palm to hers and they interlaced fingers. She felt the uncanny texture of Beth’s skin graze over her own, warm and rough as summer pavement.

Beth texted one-handed, I’ll find you at the end of the day.

The street-skinned girl kicked herself off the gate, tucked the railing under one arm and sauntered into the slowly thickening morning crowd. Pen caught a couple of disapproving glances from older, stuffier-looking pedestrians. Hooded head bent as though against the cold, Beth could have been any teenager who’d eyed up a Monday morning at school and decided she couldn’t be arsed.

‘You’re still you,’ Pen muttered to herself turning back to the gates. ‘And school’s still just school.’

Like that wasn’t the problem.

Gripping the straps of her rucksack like it was an escape parachute, she pushed past the gate.

*

Frostfield’s hallways were the usual cacophony of laughter, shouts, phone-speakers leaking bass, trainers, squeaky lino and slamming lockers. Under it all, Pen heard the muttered snatches and the cut-off gasps. She saw the hurried looks away.

‘—look who’s back—’

‘—what happened to her?—’

‘—where’s her punky little mate?—’

‘—She got kicked out for that graffiti stunt, remember?’

‘Nah, Salt never made that stick … where is Salt, anyway?’

Pen knew exactly where Dr Julian Salt was: out on bloody bail. The DI in charge of her case had called her the day before to tell her. The same brown-haired, tired-eyed woman had spent four hours a week ago asking Pen painfully blunt questions in a gentle voice.

‘No,’ Pen had answered, feeling small and resentful, clutching her mum’s hand while she spoke. ‘No we never did … that. But he touched me. No, he never physically forced me. No, it was – it was blackmail. He said he could get Beth put in a foster-home. She’s my best friend. No, she doesn’t know. No, I don’t know why you can’t reach her.

And, ‘No, the scars were something else. An accident.’

And she’d trotted out the same ridiculous plate-glass window lie she’d sold her folks – because how could they ever, ever come close to believing the truth?

It had taken Pen a long time to recognise the black, choking feeling in her throat for the anger it was. Even though she was assured that things were ‘progressing’, even though ‘action was being taken’, the fact that Pen had screwed up her courage and made the call and that Salt was still free for Sunday lunch at home with his wife blistered her with rage.

‘Hey, Parva.’

Pen looked up in surprise. Gwen Hardy’s smile had the voltage of West End signage. Pen blinked and faltered and stammered, ‘G-Gwen.’

Gwen had nodded approvingly, as if Pen deserved a prize for remembering her name. The hallway was silent now. Everyone was watching. Pen felt their scrutiny like an icy wind. She braced herself for the question she was sure was coming …

‘What the hell happened to your—’

‘Beth not with you?’ Gwen asked. Pen shook her head, more in confusion than in denial. It was probably the first time that name had passed Gwen’s glossy lips, but she used it with casual intimacy, as if Beth was her best friend, not Pen’s.

‘Too bad. Good to have you back anyway. If you want to catch up at lunchtime, you know where we usually sit?’

Pen inclined her head slowly, trying not to let her puzzlement show. The oh-so symmetrical lines of Gwen’s face creased as her smile grew wider, but the expression never reached her eyes, and it was only when Pen looked past her to the shocked expressions of the other students and heard the scandalised whispers, that she understood what had just happened.

Pen was marked out, ugly and untouchable. She was ready for that, she’d geared herself up to fight it.

Gwen Hardy had just undercut it all, and she’d done it on purpose. She’d stepped out and offered the poor unfortunate a refuge, just because she could. Gwen was the only one who didn’t need to fear the social taint the wounded girl carried with her. She was untouchable in a different way, and she’d just used Pen to rub everyone’s faces in it.

… she’d just used Pen …

Without warning, the trembling started.

Everyone was looking at her.

Her fingertips started to drum on her thigh; she tried to stop them, but she couldn’t.

Hot and cold shivers rippled her skin.

—used Pen—

She blinked fast and images came: a face carved in the collapsed masonry of a building site, cranes like metal claws, metal barbs hooked in her skin. Her chest was tight, as though bound by a wire tourniquet. She remembered blood drying on her cheeks. She fought to still her muscles and hot shame flooded through her as she failed.

She ran from the hall.

The banned junior block was the only place she knew she could be alone. She found herself in the bathroom by accident, sitting on the chilly floor and hugging her knees until she stopped shaking. Unsteadily, she stood and gulped chalky water from the tap.

‘So,’ she muttered to herself when she’d gathered her breath, ‘that’s what a flashback feels like. Well, okay, we coped, didn’t we? We’ll just have to cope better next time.’

She’d turned away from the mirror on the wall and instead snapped her compact open. That was the ritual, and rituals were important.

‘It’s all still you,’ she whispered. ‘They just rearranged you a little bit.’

She looked at herself, caught between the tiny round makeup mirror and the massive frameless slab screwed to the tiles: an infinity of scarred, headscarved girls with smeared makeup stretched back into the reflection, as if there was one for every choice that had brought her here.

And then, suddenly, all those images of her concertinaed hard together into one.

An instant later the compact mirror shattered, pain shot through her skull and she cried out. It felt like a fault-line was shaking open right down the middle of her head.

The world shuddered and blurred around her.

The tiles were cold against her palms and her knees hurt. She didn’t remember falling. Nausea swelled up, but she fought it back down.

Her fast, shallow breathing was the only sound in the silence. She rose unsteadily and reached back to steady herself on the sink behind her.

‘Pen.’

It was her own voice. It sounded a little weird, the way it did when she heard it recorded on her answerphone, but still it was unmistakable.

Except she hadn’t spoken.

‘Pen—’ The voice came from behind her, where there was only a tiled brick wall and mirrored glass. It sounded confused, and very, very frightened. ‘Pen, please …’

Pen sucked her reconstructed lip between her teeth and bit it.

She looked back.

‘Gwen’s not so bad,’ Pen said, stretching out on the cold concrete floor. ‘At least, not next to the crowd she runs with. They’re …’ She groped for the right word.

‘Toxic?’ the girl behind the mirror put in. For reasons of mutual convenience, they’d agreed she was ‘Parva’ rather than ‘Pen’.

‘I honestly think that if Iran stockpiled Gwen Hardy’s friends, the Americans would invade. There’s probably a UN convention just against Trudi Stahl.’

Parva laughed, the sound echoing through the glass. ‘Well, here’s to your new crew—’ The reflected girl rummaged around in her ostrich leather handbag and, to Pen’s astonishment, pulled out a bottle of wine. ‘I hope they make you happy.’

‘You’re drinking now?’

‘Pen,’ Parva said patiently, ‘in the last four months I’ve been kidnapped by a barbed-wire monster, ridden to war at the head of an army of giant scaffolding wolves and rejoined school in the middle of term. There’s only one girl I know who deserves a drink as much as I do, and I’ll happily share.’ She unscrewed the cap and swigged straight from the bottle before offering it to the lips of Pen’s own mortified reflection.

Pen shrank back. ‘But I never—’ she started.

Her double grinned at her through the mirror and said, ‘But I’m not you any more.’

Pen knew that. She’d plied Beth with careful questions, feigning idle interest, and learned as much as she could about the mirrorstocracy and their city behind the mirrors. The girl on the other side of the glass had come from her – she was composed of all the infinite reflections of her that had been caught between the two mirrors – but that was when their coexistence had ended.

Pen and Parva had diverged from that moment in time like beams of refracted light; now Parva had her own feelings, her own life, built up in the weeks since she’d first stepped into whatever lay outside the bathroom door in the reflection. She drank wine, ate meat and swore like a squaddie with haemorrhoids. Much to Pen’s chagrined envy, she’d even managed to land herself a job, although she wouldn’t say doing what.

But still, she had been Pen: for nearly seventeen years they’d been one. Parva had seen everything Pen had seen, felt everything Pen had felt. It was like having a sister, a bizarre twin – a twin who understood everything. Not even Beth could do that.

‘I want to show you something.’ Parva blew softly over the neck of the bottle and the liquid pipe-sound echoed through both bathrooms. ‘Give me your hand.’ In the mirrored bathroom she extended her own hand towards Pen’s reflection.

Pen reached into the empty space in front of her and felt warm, invisible fingers close over her skin.

‘What are you—?’

‘Shhh.’ Parva was digging in her handbag again. She pulled out a phone and earbuds and put one bud into her own ear and the other into the ear of Pen’s reflection.

Pen heard the crackle of an old-fashioned waltz and felt her double’s ghostly hand on the small of her back.

‘Come on,’ Parva said, ‘one–two–three, one–two–three!’

And then they were off, dancing to the creaky music. Pen followed the rhythm uncertainly, her feet stumbling a little, her arms curved around empty air. In the mirror, she saw her expensively dressed double leading her.

‘One–two–three, one–two–three – that’s it.’

Pen felt her arm lifted over her head and she spun under it as Parva whooped. Pen found herself laughing as they pirouetted around the tumbledown toilets like they were in a nineteenth-century ballroom.

‘Where did you learn this?’

‘One–two–three. It’s the job, they’re teaching me all kinds of things, it’s—’

‘Ow!’ Pen abruptly broke away. She hopped in a circle as pain spiked through her foot.

‘Sorry!’ Parva winced. ‘I’m not used to leading, and, uh … the shoes are new too.’

‘Yeah, I noticed them.’ Pen slid down the bathroom wall and tugged off her trainer and her sock. The impression of Parva’s vertiginous heel had gone all the way through to the skin, but at least there was no blood. ‘You have to go back to Reach to hoist you into them?’

Parva smiled from the mirror. Jokes about the slain Crane King were part of their routine. They felt weirdly daring, disarming the memories of their abduction.

‘I managed by myself,’ she said. ‘Just.’

‘Pretty fancy. Are they from the new job too?’ Pen clutched theatrically at her heart. ‘That’s it: that’s the lethal dose. I am now officially too jealous to live. Fancy new shoes, fancy dancing lessons – at least say your new boss is a slave-driving creep.’

Parva shrugged. ‘Sorry, sis. The new boss is really sweet, actually. Everyone is – well, most of the time.’

‘Most of the time?’

Her mirror-sister frowned. ‘It’s nothing really, just … the very top people here – only some of them, mind, and only some of the time – but … The way they look at me. I feel like they’re watching me when my back’s turned. Sometimes – sometimes I can’t shake the feeling they mean me harm.’

Pen sighed. That sounded familiar. ‘I reckon, after everything, maybe feeling like that’s normal for us, you know?’

‘I guess.’ Parva chewed her reflected lip. ‘They just look at me funny.’

‘Hate to be the one to break it to you, hon,’ said Pen, ‘but you are toting three-fifths of the western world’s total supply of scar-tissue around on your face.’ She smiled gently. ‘So, are you actually going to tell me what this magic new job is?’

Parva was about to speak when the distant sound of the period bell carried through the closed window.

‘Tell you next time,’ the girl in the mirror said. It was what she always promised, like Scheherazade, keeping back one last story.

Pen pouted and headed for the door. ‘Whatever. Have fun at work.’

‘Pen, wait.’

Pen paused in the doorway. The lonely note in her double’s voice w. . .