‘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.