Gilded Cage Read online

  ‘Only downside,’ said Ryan, around a forkful of beans, ‘is that the maulers get all the most dangerous assignments. No compensation payable if you get injured or killed, you see.’

  As downsides went, Luke thought that wasn’t insignificant. He didn’t mention Kyneston, remembering Kessler’s taunting and the reaction of the men he’d arrived with. But he had to offer small talk about something, so he told Ryan about the girl he’d met, the one delivering medicine. Ryan frowned.

  ‘Morphine? That doesn’t sound right. There’s no way a kid that age would have access to it. She must have stolen it, been trading it. You should report her.’

  ‘Report her?’

  ‘Safest thing,’ said Ryan. ‘Security here is fierce. Infringements are slapped on you for the smallest thing, and bigger violations add years onto your days. For serious offences, there’s slavelife. Apparently lifer camps make this place look like a palatial estate. But it goes both ways. If you flag up something dodgy, it buys you favour with Security.’

  Luke thought that through. He was pretty sure the girl hadn’t been selling the drug. It had sounded more like she was delivering it to someone who really needed it. And while Ryan’s account of how Millmoor worked made a fair amount of sense, it also sounded a lot like snitching at school.

  ‘So where did you see her?’ Ryan asked.

  In his memory, Luke clearly saw the rusted sign screwed to the wall, the word ‘East’ and the row of five 1s.

  ‘No idea, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘It was my first day. Barely know where I am right now, though I do know that my bed is a couple of floors up. Thanks for the feast, but I’m going to turn in. See you around.’

  He pushed back his chair and left. And despite the million and one thoughts churning in his head, Luke was asleep the minute his head hit the thin, lumpy pillow.

  On Wednesday, he got up and did it all over again. And Thursday. And Friday. On Saturday, he ate his congealed horror of a lunch in record time and was using the remainder of his break to poke around a corner of Zone D he hadn’t seen before (dirty and noisy, like every other corner he’d investigated so far) when a voice spoke from the shadows.

  ‘How’s it goin’, Luke Hadley?’

  As far as Luke knew, only four people in Millmoor knew his name, and only one of them was a girl.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ he asked Renie, who was wedged into the corner behind a tool shed. ‘More importantly, why did you get in?’

  ‘Shopping trip,’ said Renie. ‘And social call. Came to see how you was getting on. Well, you still got all your limbs, so you’re doing awright.’

  She tipped her head back and gave that inappropriately husky laugh. It sounded like she smoked fifty a day. Or like she’d lived her whole life in Millmoor, breathing the tar that passed for air here.

  ‘Shopping? What, for a new turbine?’

  ‘Nothin’ so fancy.’ Renie grinned, and pulled her tunic up a few inches to reveal what must be metres of cabling wrapped round her middle. It was red-and-white striped – the fine, super high-strength variety. (It was amazing how fast you learned about cables in a week of trusting your life to them.)

  So she did steal stuff. Was Ryan right about her?

  ‘But that’s not the main thing. I’m here to ask your help. Reckon you owe me for getting you out of that tricky spot in East-1.’

  Luke spluttered, but Renie carried right on.

  ‘One of your workmates’ kids got her glasses smashed last week. Girl’s blind as a mole, but she don’t need to see properly for her packing job over in Ag-Fac, and things like specs ain’t high on the priority list in Millmoor. Anyway – ta-da! Will you be my delivery boy?’

  She produced a flat plastic case from her back pocket and held it out. Luke opened it. A pair of glasses. He took out the little cloth they were wrapped in and felt around for any secret compartments that might contain drugs. But it was just a hard plastic shell.

  ‘Suspicious, ain’t ya?’ Renie said. ‘That’s good. Now will you take ’em?’

  ‘What’s this all about?’ Luke asked. ‘Because you’re the world’s most unlikely fairy godmother, and I don’t believe for a minute you’re supposed to have that cabling. I may have only just arrived, but I’m not entirely stupid.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re stupid. I think you’re someone who’d do a good turn for another and be glad to. Millmoor changes people, Luke Hadley. But what most folk never realize is that you get to choose how.’

  Luke hesitated, curling his fingers round the small case. It had assumed a strange and disproportionate weight.

  He slid it into the trouser pocket of his boilersuit. Renie bared her gappy teeth in a grin and Luke couldn’t help smiling back.

  She reeled off delivery instructions before twirling on one toe and fading back into the shadows.

  ‘Tell ’im compliments of the Doc,’ her voice rasped. Then she was gone.

  5

  Bouda

  The House of Light – or the New Palace of Westminster, seat of the Parliament of Equals – was four centuries old. Yet it stood as ageless and unblemished as the day it was made.

  As their chauffeured Rolls pulled in beneath the Last King’s Gate, Bouda Matravers craned past her papa’s ample form to admire it. Its crenellated spires were as lofty as a French cathedral and its gilded roof glittered like a Russian palace. But only those familiar with it noticed these details. Tourists and field-tripping students gawped at the House’s walls, each a sheer and seamless expanse of glass.

  Inside was the debating chamber that housed eight tiered ranks of twinned seats, 400 in total. Here the lord or lady of each estate sat, with their heir beside them. Bouda was one of those heirs. But no one on the outside peering in would ever see them.

  That was because the House of Light’s windows looked onto a different place entirely: a shining world, in which nothing could be clearly distinguished. The more curious fact – witnessed only by the Equal parliamentarians and the dozen commoner parliamentary observers permitted to enter the chamber – was that the view through the windows was exactly the same on the inside. On whichever side of the glass you stood, that eerie, incandescent realm lay on the other.

  Cadmus Parva-Jardine had known what he was doing when he Skillfully raised up this building from nothing on that day in 1642, Bouda thought, as she swung her legs out of the car. The Great Demonstration, history called it. Commoners often misunderstood the term, thinking it a mere exhibition of the man’s incredible Skill – a show of strength. But Bouda knew it to be far more than that. The House of Light demonstrated the glory, the justice, and the sublime inevitability of Equal rule.

  Nothing expressed that rule better than today’s special date in the parliamentary calendar. Excitement fluttered within her as she steered her father, Lord Lytchett Matravers, inside the House and through spacious corridors hung with red silk. Papa was unsteady on his feet. Her sister Dina had put him on some kind of healthy-eating plan again. However, Bouda suspected that the glasses of tomato juice Daddy had drunk at breakfast had actually been Bloody Marys, and strong ones.

  But then it was Proposal Day, so perhaps a little celebration was warranted.

  The very first Chancellor’s Proposal had been made by Cadmus. It had established Britain as a republic, governed in perpetuity by the Skilled. In the centuries since then, the annual Proposals had ranged from the sensible – such as 1882’s suspension of the legal rights of commoners during their slavedays – to the sensational. Chief among the latter was the 1789 ‘Proposal of Ruin’. This had urged Britain’s Equals to obliterate the city of Paris and crush the revolution of French commoners against their Skilled masters. That had been narrowly defeated – an unforgivable act of cowardice, in Bouda’s opinion.

  The first Proposal she had heard and voted upon had been Lord Whittam Jardine’s last. This was seven years ago, at the end of his decade-long incumbency as Chancellor. He had unsurprisingly proposed removing the one-term restriction up
on the office.

  Bouda had been just eighteen and newly installed as Appledurham’s heir. But her sights were already firmly set on a match with Gavar Jardine, so Bouda had supported the Proposal. Her father did likewise. (Daddy had never been able to refuse her or Dina anything.) The vote went against Whittam. But Bouda had eventually achieved her goal, and was now engaged to Kyneston’s heir.

  It wasn’t Gavar himself that she wanted, though. That fact wasn’t lost on Bouda as she caught sight of her fiancé. She and her father passed through the great doors to the debating chamber, and she felt the Skillful wards tingle across her skin. Gavar stood straight ahead, beneath the marble statue of his ancestor Cadmus.

  He was as handsome as any girl might wish, but his skin was blotchy with anger and his mouth set in a petulant sneer. Beside him was his father. Both men were tall and auburn-haired, their shoulders squared back. But where Gavar’s emotions were plain in his face, his father’s expression gave away nothing at all. All Bouda could tell from their watchful posture was that they weren’t happy, and that they were waiting for someone.

  For her, she realized, as Lord Jardine caught her eye.

  Cold trickled through her. What was wrong? She was so close now to her prize of marriage into the Founding Family that she didn’t know what she’d do if thwarted.

  She swiftly sorted through the possibilities. Nothing had happened that she knew of that might jeopardize the alliance. She hadn’t woken up one day ugly or Skilless, nor had her father’s vast wealth vanished. Indeed, the only stumbling block on their way to the altar had been provided by Gavar, in the form of a bastard child sired on some slavegirl. Bouda’s affront at the brat’s existence had been surpassed only by the fury of Lord Jardine, but she had contained her emotions. Her future father-in-law had been impressed with Bouda’s cool response to the whole distasteful episode.

  She nodded an acknowledgement to them then looked around the chamber. Thankfully Lord Rix, who was Daddy’s best friend and her and DiDi’s godfather, was waiting over by the Matravers seats. He could keep Daddy entertained with his usual convoluted anecdotes about racehorses. She waved at Rixy and gave her papa a kiss on the cheek, a whispered ‘Be with you in a minute’, and a gentle shove in the right direction.

  Then she hurried to hear what Whittam and Gavar had to tell her.

  It was nothing she could ever have expected.

  ‘You can’t be serious?’ she hissed.

  ‘Silyen informed me of it only last night,’ said her future father-in-law. While he spoke, Gavar was watching the chamber to see if they were noticed, but only Rix was looking their way, concern plain in his face. ‘While buttering a bread roll at dinner, as casual as you like. I assure you, it was as much of a surprise to me as it appears to be to you.’

  ‘Appears to be?’ Bouda didn’t care for the insinuation in those words. But she couldn’t make sense of what Lord Jardine had just told her. ‘Silyen has bargained with the Chancellor, using Euterpe Parva – and he’s asked Zelston to Propose abolition? We’ll be a laughing stock if this gets out. How could you let it happen?’

  ‘I let it happen?’ Whittam’s eyes were flat and assessing. ‘You are quite certain your sister has nothing to do with this?’

  ‘My sister?’

  And there, thought Bouda, was the one aspect of her life she couldn’t control: her daft, darling sister, Bodina. Dina was a fashionista, a party girl, and prone to handing wads of Daddy’s cash to ridiculous causes such as animal rescue, international poverty relief – and abolition.

  It said much for Bodina’s naivety that the money she was so happy to spend was derived entirely from slavery. The Matravers fortune was maintained by Daddy’s BB brand, named for his daughters. It churned out electrical goods by the million for export to the Far East. It was said that half the homes in China were equipped with BB hairdryers, foot spas, rice cookers and kettles. It was BB’s use of slave labour – the corporation had factories in several slavetowns – that kept prices competitive.

  It was a source of fond exasperation for Bouda that despite her sister’s scruples about slavery, Bodina was perfectly willing to live off its proceeds. With her love of travel and couture, DiDi burned through cash.

  ‘Why on earth would Silyen do something at Dina’s behest? They barely know each other.’

  Whittam’s face twisted; he had no answer for that. So this was pure speculation. Relief flooded through Bouda. Her arrangement with the Jardines wouldn’t be ending today, over this.

  ‘Your sister is attractive.’ The lord of Kyneston shrugged. ‘She has a certain nubile charm that might turn a boy’s head.’

  ‘If you think that would have any effect on him, my Lord, then you plainly don’t know your youngest son at all.’

  At his father’s side, Gavar gave a vulgar snort. Bouda and her husband-to-be might have little in common, but one thing they could agree on was their dislike of Silyen.

  ‘No,’ she pressed, indignation rising at her future father-in-law’s blatant attempt to shift the blame for Silyen’s outrageous act from his family to hers. ‘All Bodina thinks about right now is her heartbreak, and the next party to help her get over it. You need to look closer to home for an explanation. It was only a matter of time: Jenner, a Skilless abomination; Gavar, father to a slave-born brat; and now Silyen, an abolitionist. Congratulations, your sons are quite the set.’

  And she really shouldn’t have said that. Coolness and control at all times, Bouda.

  An angry flush bloomed above the salamander-printed neckerchief at Lord Whittam’s throat, and crept up his face. Gavar’s fists had clenched. These Jardine men and their touchpaper tempers.

  ‘I apologize unreservedly,’ she said, ducking her head and baring her neck submissively. ‘Forgive me.’

  She gave it a few moments for her sincerity to sink in, then looked up and met Whittam’s eyes. Beside him, Gavar looked fit to throttle her, but to her great relief his father’s face was composed.

  ‘You apologize like a true politician, Bouda,’ he said, after a pause in which Bouda was quite sure she did not breathe at all. ‘Promptly and prettily. One day, you may find that’s not enough, but for now it will suffice. We will discuss this later, once we are sure that my youngest son’s words were not some jest in remarkably poor taste. Come, Gavar.’

  He turned and Gavar trailed after him to Kyneston’s twinned seat in the centre of the first tier. It was directly opposite the carved majesty of the Chancellor’s Chair. The old joke ran that this gave the Jardines the shortest possible distance to walk to their preferred seat in the House.

  Lord Whittam intended for Gavar to sit there one day. Bouda knew that her wealth made her an acceptable bride. But in their arrogance, it hadn’t occurred to the Jardines to wonder why Bouda herself might seek such a match.

  She took a calming breath and made her way to the Appledurham estate seat at the centre of the second tier, right behind the Jardines. Its prominent position had been secured through hard work, not heritage. None of Bouda’s ancestors had been present the day the House of Light rose shimmering from the ashes of the royal Palace of Westminster.

  No, Bouda’s family fortunes were of more recent date. A couple of centuries ago Harding Matravers, heir of an impecunious and obscure line, had decided to put his derided Skill for weatherwork to good use. He scandalized the genteel Equal society of the day by taking to the seas as captain of a cargo ship, only to sail back from the Indies an obscenely wealthy man. No one had raised a murmur when he did it again the very next season.

  By the third year, half the great families of Britain were in his debt, and soon after a loan default meant the Matravers seat in the seventh tier had been traded for one far better situated, whose spendthrift lord had offered it as collateral.

  Even after all this time, the taint of trade hung about the Matravers name. There was only one thing that would expunge it, Bouda thought.

  Her glance darted down over the Jardine father and son, and l
it on the angular shape of the Chancellor’s Chair. The shallow, high-backed seat was borne upon four carved lions. A shattered stone was lodged beneath it: the old coronation stone of the kings of England. Lycus the Regicide had broken it in two. This had been the throne of the Last King – the sole object spared in Cadmus’s incineration of Westminster Palace.

  In the centuries since the Great Demonstration, no woman had ever sat there.

  Bouda intended to be the first.

  Reaching the seat where her father sprawled, fingers locked across his claret velvet waistcoat, Bouda bent and kissed his cheek, prodding him lightly in the stomach. Lord Lytchett tossed back his mane of ivory hair and hauled himself upright to make room for his darling girl. She slipped easily through the narrow space and into the heir’s chair on his left.

  As Bouda sat, smoothing her dress, a thunderous sound echoed through the high chamber. It was the ceremonial mace, striking the outside of the thick oak doors. The doors opened only for those qualified by blood and Skill: lords, ladies and their heirs. Not even Silyen, for all his supposed gifts, would be able just to walk in here. But Cadmus had created a provision – one long overdue for reform, Bouda thought – for a dozen commoners to witness parliamentary proceedings.

  ‘Who seeks admittance?’ quavered ancient Hengist Occold, the Elder of the House, in a voice that didn’t seem loud enough to be heard on the other side.

  ‘The Commons of Great Britain most humbly seek admittance among its Equals,’ came the formal response, in a clear female voice.

  The old man’s hands worked in the air with surprising deftness, and the doors swung inward to admit a group of people.

  Outwardly, there was nothing to distinguish the twelve well-dressed newcomers from those who filled the chamber. But these were merely the OPs, the Observers of Parliament. Voteless. UnSkilled. Commoners. Not, Bouda thought, that you’d know it from the way that bitch Dawson, their Speaker, was decked out in the height of Shanghai fashion.