I smelled something acrid on the wind and risked a look. Smoke was billowing across the ice, carried by a stream of spirits. The capnomancers – they were giving us cover. I took a step back, forcing the others into the cloud. The helicopter banked before it disappeared from view.
The cover might not last. We started moving, faster than on our journey here. Too fast. As we neared the end of the ice a deep fracture coursed beneath my boots and forked off in all directions. There was no time to think. I drove my shoulder into Driscoll, shunting him away from the splintering, just before my foothold collapsed.
For a blinding instant, I thought I was dead.
Somehow I resisted gulping as I plunged into the blackness of the Thames. I went down like a diving bell. Blades impaled my ribs and sliced along my legs, carved me open from navel to throat, but I didn’t let the water in.
As I sank deeper, my lungs bayed for oxygen. I was burning without heat, on fire without flame. I wrestled with the river, screaming inside as it scourged my skin, but my limbs had turned to stone.
London does not forget a traitor, Jaxon whispered from my memory. It will suck you down, O my lovely. Into the tunnels and the plague pits. Into its dark heart, where all the traitors’ bodies sink.
Damn him to hell. I would not die like this. Some deep reserve of strength glowed within me, warming my arms enough to get them moving. My hands tore my boiler suit open; I freed myself from it and clawed through the foul-tasting water, but the darkness was disorienting. Frantic, I kicked and scrabbled, not knowing which way was up, until my head shattered the surface. White breath plumed from my mouth. A vicious current roared against my body, carrying me faster than my shocked muscles could fight.
I was too far from the bank. I was too cold to swim.
I wasn’t going to make it out of this alive.
My head slipped under again. The river took hold of my body with greed.
That was when I felt an aura against mine, and an arm scooping me back to the surface.
My hands found a pair of shoulders. As I gasped and coughed, I found myself faced with Rephaite eyes.
‘Warden—’
‘Hold on to me.’
My arms were so weak, but I managed to sling them around his neck. The muscles of his back shifted fluidly as he swam through the Thames, cutting through it as if the current was just a whisper against him.
I must have blacked out for an instant – then I was aware of being lifted from the river, of water cascading from my body. When the night air hit me, it was as if frost was covering my lungs, creeping around my ribs, glazing every inch of skin. His familiar voice said, ‘Paige, breathe,’ and I did. Warden pressed me tightly to his chest, against heat, and wrapped his coat around me, sheltering me from the snow. I shivered uncontrollably.
He stayed with me until the others found their way to us. Nick kept me awake on the drive to safety, talking to me, asking me questions. I swung between moments of painful clarity, like seeing Driscoll break down in tears, and darker periods, when all I could do was try to keep warm.
We retreated to a safe house in the central cohort. As soon as we were inside, Nick went into doctor mode. On his orders, I took off what was left of my clothing and washed in tepid water. Once he had checked me for open wounds and ordered me to tell him straight away if I felt sick or feverish, I was swaddled in thick blankets and left to dry. I made myself a warm cocoon and focused on preserving heat.
I dozed for a while. When I lifted my head, there was a Rephaite in an armchair opposite me, gazing into a fire. For a chilling instant, I thought I was in Magdalen – that we were in the penal colony again, in that tower, still uncertain of each other.
‘Warden.’
His hair was damp. ‘Paige.’
Prickles raced along my skin. I pushed myself up on my elbows.
‘Dani,’ I said, my voice thick.
‘She is safe. It will never be traced back to her,’ he said. ‘False information about the warehouse was planted across several Scion departments. They have no way of knowing which was the leak.’
Vance must have only suspected that I had someone on the inside, then. As I pinched the blankets closer, I noticed that my hands were steady. I wanted them to shake. I wanted to feel myself responding to my voyants’ lives being pointlessly lost, but I had seen death on the screens since I was a child: it was drip-fed to us every week, breathed into our homes, our lives steeped in it, until blood was as commonplace a thing as coffee – and after all I had seen in the last few months, it seemed I had stopped being able to react. I hated Scion for it.
‘You got me out of the water.’
‘Yes,’ Warden said. ‘Tom told me about your endeavour. The scrying squad had sensed a portent, but the Glym Lord was intercepted by a scanner on his way to stop you. Pleione and I followed you in his stead.’
‘Is Glym all right?’
‘Yes. He escaped.’
We had come so close to death. If not for Warden, the river would have swallowed me.
‘Thank you,’ I said quietly. ‘For coming for me.’
With a curt nod, Warden rested his elbows on the arms of the chair and clasped his leather-clad hands in front of him, a posture he had often adopted in the colony. I waited for the axe to fall.
‘Terebell is angry that I went without permission,’ I said, when the silence had gone on for too long. ‘Isn’t she?’
He reached for the table in front of us and held out a steaming mug.
‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘Dr Nygård says your core temperature is still lower than it should be.’
‘I don’t care about my temperature.’
‘Then you are a fool.’
The mug stayed where it was. I took it and drank a little of the saloop, if only to make him talk.
‘Tell me, Paige,’ he said, ‘are you deliberately trying to provoke Terebell?’
A question, not an accusation. ‘Of course not.’
‘You chose to go without her permission. You ignored her order to seek her approval before taking any major decision.’
‘I had a lead,’ I said, ‘and a limited amount of time to follow it.’
Another slight nod.
‘While you were sleeping,’ he said, after another silence, ‘your commanders received a report. Around an hour after your excursion to the warehouse, a polyglot was detained. According to the witness, her aura activated the large Senshield scanner at Paddington station.’
I hadn’t thought it was possible to turn any colder. Polyglots were from the fourth order. An order that Senshield shouldn’t be able to detect.
‘Of course, this could be nothing but hearsay. But if it is true,’ Warden said, ‘then the technology has improved dramatically.’
A dull flutter started low down in my stomach. I tightened my fingers around the mug.
‘It’s not hearsay.’ My voice was hoarse. ‘Vance told me herself that she . . . trapped me, to use me to recalibrate Senshield.’ I wet my lips. ‘I’m seventh-order. How – how could exposure to me help it detect the fourth?’
‘I do not know enough of the technology to guess.’
‘She said something about my . . . radiesthesic signature.’ My breath quickened. ‘If this is my fault, Terebell will—’ I could almost feel the colour draining from my face. ‘We can’t lose your support. Without it, the Mime Order will fall apart.’
‘Terebell is very unlikely to withdraw our financial support as a result of this. It is as much in her interest for the Mime Order to continue as it is in yours,’ he said. It didn’t comfort me. ‘She will reserve judgement until the consequences of your actions become apparent.’
‘They’re already apparent. I fell into a trap. I helped them improve Senshield. And I lost three people. I could have saved at least one of them if my gift had been stronger.’ I couldn’t keep the exhaustion from my voice. ‘I told you I was out of practice. I called you, before we left.’
‘I was engaged.’
&nb
sp; ‘With what?’
‘We were dealing with another Emite. In the suburbs.’
The rigour that went through me had nothing to do with my fall through the ice. While I was fixated on Senshield, the Ranthen were trying to stop us being eaten alive. Enemies were closing in on us from all sides.
‘War requires risk,’ Warden said. ‘This may yet prove to be a strategic error, but you took what precautions you could. No one knew that Hildred Vance had been recalled to the capital, or that she would lay a trap for you. Even Alsafi was unaware.’
‘Three voyants are still dead for nothing.’
‘They knew there was a chance of failure.’ His face was cast into shadow. ‘I asked Alsafi about Senshield’s core. He does not know its location, and as he works in the Archon, we may safely assume that it is not there.’
I looked into the fire. ‘I will find it.’
A log collapsed into the hearth.
‘You should not have gone to the warehouse yourself,’ Warden said. ‘You are Underqueen. If you fall, there will be no Mime Order.’
‘You could always find another human.’
‘Not one that the syndicate would accept. There is no time for another scrimmage.’ He paused. ‘And there is no other human that I trust as I trust you.’
I looked him in the face, trying to find the truth. He was offering me a chance to let him back in. Exposing a vulnerability, a break in all that Rephaite armour. This was a door I needed to open.
‘I need to speak to the others about Vance,’ I said. ‘I’ll . . . report to you with what we’ve decided. I’m sure you’d like to get back to Terebell.’
Warden held my gaze, then said, ‘As you wish.’ He stood. ‘Goodnight, Paige.’
5
Back in Time
The image of Vance’s face was too fresh for me to get any more sleep. I dressed and left the fire behind, taking a blanket with me. From what I remembered of the escape, most of the voyants in the team had been returned to their cells, but Maria and Nick had stayed, as had Tom and Glym, who had met us on the way to safety. I found them in the next room, where Maria was sitting up, ladling broth into her mouth. Nick got up and crushed me to his chest.
‘Paige,’ he said. ‘I tried to reach you, sweetheart. I tried. If Warden hadn’t been there—’
‘But he was.’ I patted his back. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You saved Driscoll’s skin, you know,’ Maria said. ‘He would have gone under if you hadn’t pushed him.’
I looked her over. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Bullet graze. I’ve had worse.’
Trepidation stirred in my stomach. I sat down beside Nick, keeping the blanket around my shoulders.
‘Warden told me about the report,’ I said. ‘That the fourth order can be detected.’
‘Let’s not worry too soon, Underqueen,’ Glym said. ‘The mime-lord who reported it is uncertain that the captured voyant was a polyglot. More likely she was from one of the lower three orders.’
‘We need to find out quickly if it’s true. If the fourth order can be detected—’
‘There’s no evidence of that yet,’ Tom soothed. ‘It would be . . . bad, I admit—’
‘Bad?’
‘All right, very bad, but it’s just like Glym says. It’ll be nothing but misinformation. Or scaremongering.’
‘I disagree,’ Maria said. I glanced at her. ‘I know Vance, and trust me, she wouldn’t lie unless she had to. She said to Paige that she was using her to change Senshield. That means she was.’ She paused to draw a breath. ‘Paige, if this is the case, which we must assume it is, the syndicate must never know.’
Silence followed her words. She was right: if they knew that my error had threatened the entire fourth order, the Unnatural Assembly would almost certainly move to depose me.
‘Tell me more about Vance,’ I said eventually.
She interlocked her fingers on her stomach. ‘I’ll tell you what I know of her,’ she said, ‘but she already knows everything about you.’
From the way that face had looked into my soul, even through a screen, I didn’t doubt it.
‘Let’s have a little history lesson,’ Maria said. ‘Hildred Diane Vance joined ScionIDE at the age of sixteen and served in the Highlands for five years. During that time, as Tom will remember, she helped crush several uprisings in what was then called Scotland.’
Tom, who had been watching her from beneath the brim of his hat, now came into the lamplight.
‘Believe it or not, I’m a wee bit younger than Vance,’ he said. ‘I remember how people whispered her name when I was a lad, even in Glasgow. Like they were scared she might be able to hear them.’
‘Sounds like she was very young to have so much power,’ I said.
‘So are you,’ Maria pointed out.
The thought of any similarity was unsettling.
‘Young Hildred’s superiors noticed her appetite for slaughtering unnaturals, and they rewarded her for it. Her rise through the ranks was meteoric. She’s now seventy-five, and the longest-serving member of Scion’s upper echelon.’
I had to wonder how close she was to the Sargas. She sounded like their sort of person.
‘When Vance moved against the rebels in the Balkans, she knew the names and backgrounds of all of our leaders. She’d planted double agents among us within days of her feet touching Bulgarian soil.’ A shadow winged over her face. ‘She soon learned that my unit’s commander, Rozaliya Yudina, was one of our best. She also learned that Rozaliya had once had a younger brother, who had died before the family left Russia. Somehow Vance knew that, amidst all her other suffering, this was Roza’s weak spot.
‘The surviving insurgents were thin on the ground when Vance set the trap. She knew that Rozaliya’s death would devastate the morale of the remaining militants. So Vance’s soldiers found a boy. But not just any boy. A boy who looked like Roza’s lost brother. During our final stand, this ten-year-old was thrown on to the street and told to scream at Roza for help. And Roza hesitated.’ Her fist clenched. ‘The boy had been given a toy bear to hold. Inside was a plastic explosive.’
The small amount of warmth in my body disappeared.
How much did Vance already know about me? My official record would give her a decent starting point. Jaxon might have told her things, if he had sunk that low. It was clear she knew at least a little about how my gift worked. And she knew I had a father.
‘One reason Vance is lethal is because she doesn’t underestimate her foes,’ Maria said. ‘I suspect we escaped today because she truly didn’t think we’d be mad enough to take the ice.’
‘So we outfoxed her with our stupidity,’ I said.
‘Exactly. But she’ll remember that you took that risk.’ She tapped her temple. ‘It goes into her mental database. The more she learns about you, the better she becomes at predicting you.’
This was making the other staff in the Archon seem feeble. Vance was a puppet with a brain, and that made her far more dangerous than Weaver, who did not think for himself.
‘What we need to work out now,’ I said, ‘is if she’s brought more than a few paratroopers with her. Are we taking on an army?’
Glym made a sceptical sound.
‘No. ScionIDE won’t come here,’ Maria said firmly. ‘This is the heart of the empire. Martial law has never been, and will never be, declared in London. They have to give an impression of peace in the capital, or the whole idea of empire will collapse from within.’
Nick shifted closer to me. ‘Then why is Vance here at all?’
‘To deal with Paige, most likely,’ Glym said. ‘The syndicate will go back to its old ways without her. It will no longer be a threat.’
It was true. The syndicate could survive if I was captured, but it might never again be the cradle of a revolution.
‘We need another lead.’ I rubbed my arms, which were peppered with goose bumps. ‘Nick, talk to Dani again. Glym, go to Paddington and establish the truth
of the report – whether the fourth order really is detectable. We also need to prepare for whatever Vance is planning next, which means that all of the Unnatural Assembly have to be properly armed, for starters. Tom, I want you to negotiate a better agreement with the arms dealers.’
When I got up, Maria said, ‘And where exactly are you going?’
‘To make sure that Jack Hickathrift has evicted the remaining members of the Seven Seals.’ I buckled my jacket. ‘Best I prove to Terebell that I’m following some of her orders, if not all.’
‘Hildred Vance is on your trail, kid. You shouldn’t be wandering off.’
‘If I lie low, she’s already won. We might as well go to the Archon and bow to the Rephaim now.’ I stepped into my boots and laced them. ‘For the time being, we keep what happened at the warehouse between us. We’ll regroup with the others at the Mill tonight.’
I hadn’t been back to I-4 since the scrimmage. The thought of being close to Seven Dials, at the time, had been too painful.
The commanders wanted me to take bodyguards. I refused, but agreed to have Eliza with me. As we waited beneath a streetlamp for our rickshaw to arrive, hands bunched into our pockets to keep them out of the cold, Nick emerged from the safe house.
‘I want to come with you,’ he said.
‘I need you to liaise with Dani. We have to know if she can find out anything more about Senshield, even if it’s just—’
‘Paige,’ he said, his voice thick, ‘please.’
When I took a second look, I understood. There were crescents of shadow under his eyes.
‘I know why you want to do this,’ I said gentler, ‘but Vance is on to us, Nick. I need you focused.’
‘You think Zeke will make me lose focus.’ He shook his head. ‘Does that mean you’re not focused, either?’
It took me a moment to recognise what he was implying. What he had just implied in front of Eliza. When it sank in, my jaw hardened. Even Nick looked shocked at himself, but it was too late: it was clear from Eliza’s face that she had caught the scent of a secret.
The Song Rising Page 8
