The Mime Order

by Samantha Shannon

  “And how well it suits you.”

  “I don’t want them to believe I’m some sort of miracle-worker, Warden. My achievement here is wearing a necklace.”

  “You are free to correct them later. For now, there is no harm in letting them talk. Your job is to heal.”

  We sat in silence for a while, with the lantern between us. How far we’d come in the space of a few weeks. “I have a question for you,” Warden said. “If I may.”

  I drank again. “If it won’t make my head hurt.”

  “Hm.” He paused. “When Jaxon employed you, he seemed willing to pay you any sum of money you desired for your services. Yet you cannot be the wealthy mollisher I once believed you to be, else you would not have been forced to solicit the Ranthen’s patronage. What did you do with your contract money?”

  I’d wondered when he might ask me that.

  “There was no money. Jaxon doesn’t even have a bank account,” I said. “All his money comes from our work and goes into a little jewel-box in his office to be shared between us. That’s our payment. After that, I don’t know where it goes.”

  “Then why continue to work for him?” He watched me. “He lied to you.”

  A husk of laughter came out of me. “Because I was naïve enough to be loyal to Jaxon Hall.”

  “That was not naïveté, Paige. You cared enough for Jaxon to continue working for him. You understood that he was necessary for your survival.” His gloved hand lifted my chin. “You will not need Terebell’s money forever. In the end, loyalty will outweigh greed. When they have hope.”

  “Isn’t hope just another kind of naïveté?”

  “Hope is the lifeblood of revolution. Without it, we are nothing but ash, waiting for the wind to take us.”

  I wished I could believe it. I had to believe it—that hope alone would be enough to get us through this. But hope couldn’t control a syndicate. Hope wouldn’t bring down the Westminster Archon, which had stood strong for two hundred years. It wouldn’t destroy the creatures inside it, who had watched the world for far longer than that.

  Warden dimmed the kerosene lamp. “You ought to rest,” he said. “You have a long reign ahead of you, Black Moth.”

  Across the hall, Ivy was still sitting on the stage, motionless. “I need to talk to her first,” I said.

  “I will find Nick’s medical kit. He left another dose of scimor-phine for you.”

  He made to stand, but I touched his arm, keeping him there. Wordlessly, I leaned into him, so my brow rested against his. Gentle blue fire started in my dreamscape, illuminating it. We stayed like that for a long time, silent and still, Rephaite and human. I could have stayed like that for hours, just breathing him in.

  “Warden,” I said, so quietly he had to lean closer to hear me, “I don’t—I don’t know if . . .”

  Fire played in his eyes. “You are under no obligation to decide tonight.” After a moment, his lips grazed my forehead. “Go.”

  Seeing that he understood lifted a weight from my shoulders. I was a different person now than I’d been before the scrimmage, still in metamorphosis, uncertain of who I might become tomorrow. But I sensed that whatever I decided, he would still be with me. On a whim, I kissed his cheek. He gathered me to his chest, his arms crossed tightly over my back.

  “Go,” he repeated, softer.

  Leaving him to find Nick’s case, I got myself across the auditorium and on to the stage. Pains shot through me, but the medicine held some of it at bay. Ivy didn’t move when I sat beside her.

  “It was brave of you to tell the truth.”

  Her raw hands gripped the edge of the stage. On her right upper arm was the twisted mess of scar tissue where her tattoo had once been, a shock of pink and scarlet that plowed through the undamaged skin.

  “Brave,” she repeated, as though it were a word she didn’t know. “I’m a yellow-jacket.”

  A code understood only by those who had lived through the first nightmare. Her fingernails dug into the burnt flesh.

  “I used to beg Thuban to kill me, you know.” She shook her head. “When I heard about your plan to break out of there, I considered not getting on the train. I had no right to it, after what I’d done. And I was so sure Chelsea had betrayed me.”

  “You thought she told Rags it was you who reported him?”

  “That’s what I thought until I found her. After you told me she was looking for me, I bribed the doorman outside Jacob’s Island. She told me she’d passed my report to Hector and let slip that it was me. And then he told Rags.” There was nothing left in her voice but grief. “She always tried to see the best in Hector. Always trusted him. It killed her, in the end. Wanting a better life than what we had as kids in that slum. I left her and went back to Agatha, thinking she’d be safe . . .”

  Tears choked her. “You got on the train, Ivy,” I said. “You must have hoped you could still have that life.”

  “I got on the train because I’m too much of a coward to die.” A smile trembled on her lips. “Weird, isn’t it? Even though we’re voyant, even though we know there’s something more, we’re still afraid to die.”

  I shook my head. “We don’t know what waits in the last light. Even dreamwalkers don’t know that.” Ivy chewed on her knuckles, still stroking her scar. “When the Unnatural Assembly gets back on its feet, you’ll be given a fair hearing and a trial by jury. And I promise you this: the Rag and Bone Man will be charged for his crimes.”

  Her face twitched. “That’s all I can ask. Justice.” She finally met my gaze. “I want to see his face, Paige. Before the end.”

  “I’d be curious to see it myself.” Every muscle ached as I pushed myself off the stage. “Chelsea died in my arms. Do you know what she said to tell you?” Silence from behind me. “That you were everything to her, and that you had to make it right.” I walked away. “So make it right.”

  Still Ivy didn’t move or speak. When I got back to the kerosene lamp, I lay down on the coat and rested my hand on the crown—the symbol of the syndicate, the weapon I would use to bring down Scion.

  Warden closed my hand around the syringe. I pushed it into my hip and pressed down on the plunger.

  ****

  With the help of scimorphine and the steady presence of Warden’s aura, I slipped into a fitful doze. It didn’t last long. As the first light of dawn crept into the hall, a cool hand shook me back to life.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart.” It was Nick, and he looked shattered. “You need to see this. Now.”

  27

  The Mutual Friend

  Danica’s Scion-made laptop sat on the floor in front of me, a clear glass screen with a delicate silver keypad. I pushed my weight on to my elbow, unsteady.

  Scimorphine was still slithering through my bloodstream. “What is it?”

  Nobody answered. I rubbed my temple, trying to focus. Nick, Eliza and Danica were all around me, surrounded by bags and suitcases. They must have just returned from Seven Dials. Behind me, Warden was leaning toward the screen, his eyes scorching in the gloom.

  “It started about half an hour ago,” Eliza said. “It’s been on repeat since then. All over the citadel.”

  My gaze focused on the screen.

  The broadcast was silent, with no commentary from ScionEye, though its symbol rotated at the corner of the screen. A line of small text gave the camera’s location as I Cohort, Section 5, in the district of Lychgate Hill. This was the inner courtyard of Old Paul’s, where unnaturals were traditionally executed. The condemned stood alongside each other on a long scaffold, each an arm’s length apart from the next, their bare feet planted on scarlet trapdoors. Their faces had been left uncovered.

  A tight knot worked its way up my throat. I recognised the woman in the middle. Lotte, one of the last Bone Season survivors, dressed in the black shift of a convicted unnatural. A deep cut crossed her forehead. Her hair was bound in a knot at the side of her neck, which was stippled with fresh bruises, like her forearms. I pressed
a finger to the screen, zooming in on them. Charles was on her right, bruised and bleeding—Charles, who had guided other voyants to the train—and on her left was Ella, whose shift was caked with dry vomit.

  “Paige.” I heard Warden say it, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. His voice was far, far away, somewhere I wasn’t. “You must not obey the summons. This is a message to you, and you alone. To lure you out of hiding.”

  As if to confirm it, the screen switched to a white background. The anchor kept rotating in the corner. A mocking little spinning-top.

  PAIGE EVA MAHONEY, SURRENDER YOURSELF TO THE CUSTODY OF THE ARCHON. YOU HAVE ONE HOUR.

  The broadcast returned a moment later, panning over the whole courtyard. I said, “You say this started half an hour ago?”

  Eliza exchanged a glance with Nick before she nodded. “We got here as fast as we could.”

  Pressure radiated from my dreamscape, reaching out through the æther for the others. A drop of red slipped from Eliza’s nostril, and Nick shouted something through the deafening explosion in my skull. I reigned it in with a scream of effort, gathering it inward, cramming it down until blood ran from my nose and flooded my mouth with the taste of metal.

  Someone must have told them I was Underqueen, that I posed a real threat to them at last. That was why they’d been so quiet, why Nashira hadn’t thrown her iron fist down on I-4 the minute I’d escaped her colony with my head on my shoulders. She’d wanted me to think there was hope, to believe that I could raise an army, before she broke me.

  If I entered the Westminster Archon, I would never come out. If I didn’t, the voyants on the screen would die, and every voyant in London would believe that I had done nothing to save them.

  “Paige,” Jos said, “we can’t let them die.”

  “Shh.” Nell gathered him into her arms. “Nobody’s going to die. Paige won’t let them. She saved us, didn’t she?”

  “You want Paige to hand herself in?” Eliza shook her head. “That’s exactly what they want.”

  “They won’t hurt her. She’s a dreamwalker.”

  “That,” Warden said, “is precisely why they will hurt her.”

  “You stay out of this, Rephaite,” she snarled. “Those are human lives, and if you think they’re less important than yours, you can go fu—”

  “He’s right,” Nick said quietly. “If we lose Paige, we lose any influ-ence we have over the syndicate. We lose the war before it’s started.”

  Nell choked out a scream of frustration. Tears filled Jos’s eyes, and he clung to her shirt like a child of half his age.

  A high-pitched whistle filled my ears, a shriek inside my skull. A hand shook my arm. “Paige,” Eliza said, her voice harder than usual, “you can’t go. You’re Underqueen.” Her grip tightened. “I left Jaxon because I believed you could do this. Don’t make me regret it.”

  “You have to try, Paige,” Nell said. “For the others.”

  “No.” Tears shone in Jos’s eyes. “Lotte wouldn’t want Paige to die.”

  “She wouldn’t want to die herself, either!” Her tone made Jos cringe. Nell turned her glistening eyes on me, her cheeks pink with anger. “Look, I was friends with Lotte in the colony. You weren’t a harlie. Your keeper was good to you. Don’t treat us the way they did. Like fodder.”

  They were looking to their Underqueen to make the call. I gazed at the screen. All three of the prisoners’ mouths were sealed with dermal adhesive.

  I said, “I’ll go to the Archon.”

  “Paige, no,” Nick said hotly, echoed by Eliza. “You know they won’t let you walk out of there alive.”

  “Nashira will be counting upon your altruism.” Warden’s voice was soft. “If you present yourself at the Archon, you play into her hands.”

  “I said I was going,” I said. “Not that I was going in person.”

  There was a short silence. Nell and Jos looked at each other, but the remaining Seals understood.

  “It’s too far,” Nick murmured. “More than a mile. You did too much at the scrimmage. If you overstretch yourself—”

  “You can drive me closer to the Archon. Keep my body in the back of the car.”

  Nick looked at me for a long while. Finally, he closed his eyes. “I don’t see another choice.” He took a deep breath. “Danica, Warden, both of you come with us. Eliza, stay here and look after the others.”

  “But Paige is hurt,” Jos said.

  “She’s fine.” Nell just watched. “She knows what she’s doing.”

  I pushed myself on to my arms, my teeth gritted. Sickening pain punched a fist through my skull, poured fire down my side and branched out across my ribcage, breaking the loose grip of scimorphine.

  Without complaining, Danica picked up her backpack of equipment and slung it over her shoulders. Nick lifted me into his arms, supporting my head with one hand, and followed her out of the music hall to the car, with Warden bringing up the rear. He sat in the back on my left side. On my other side, Danica took out my oxygen mask and made her adjustments. Nick locked the doors before he started the engine.

  This was their declaration of power, the promise that Scion would bring down the full might of their empire on the heads of my fellow clairvoyants. Even if I turned back now, the gears of war would still be turning.

  The rusted car raced toward I-1, its engine clattering. There were Vigiles everywhere, but Nick avoided them, taking the narrowest streets at high speed. My wounds throbbed, and a headache pounded like a drum between my eyes.

  “I’ll park under the Hungerford Bridge, near the floating restaurants,” Nick said. “You have to be quick, Paige.”

  I had to try. For Lotte and Charles, who had helped me in the colony. For every voyant who had been killed in our escape. For every Bone Season in history.

  The theatre of war would open tonight. I was Underqueen now, with the might of the syndicate at my back, as I’d promised Nashira that day on the stage. They had poisoned the syndicate from the inside, leaving it to rot while they ruled over our citadel.

  There had to be something better than this. Something worth the price we would pay. Not just these endless trials, these harrowed days. Beggars crawling in the gutters, crying for mercy to a world that didn’t hear. Quaking in the shadow of the anchor. Fighting for survival in the shadows—every minute, every hour, every day of our short lives.

  We already existed on a level of hell. And we would have to walk right through this hell to leave it.

  Nick braked hard under the bridge and parked on the pavement, close to where a pleasure-barge twinkled with blue lanterns, full of amaurotics drinking mecks and laughing. Behind them, on a screen no one was watching, the prisoners stood on their scaffold, waiting for me.

  Danica tied the mask’s straps at the back of my head. “You’ve got ten minutes before this thing runs dry,” she said. “I’ll shake your body, but it might not work when you’re so far away. Watch the clock.”

  There were no Vigiles nearby. I looked at Warden, sitting in silence beside me. His would be the last face I saw, the last face in my mind, before I stepped into the nest of the enemy. He inclined his head, just slightly. Not visible enough to be seen by the others. Just enough to give me strength.

  The mask lit up, pushing oxygen into my body. I took one last breath of my own before my spirit twisted free of its restraints and rose into the night.

  In my purest spirit form, where my vision was no longer fixed to insufficient eyes, London was an infinite cosmos of its own. A vast galaxy of tiny lights, each emitting a unique color. All the millions of minds, bound by one underlying current of energy, strung together by a web of thoughts, of emotions, of knowledge and of information. Each spirit was a lantern in the glass orb of a dream scape. It was the highest form of bioluminescence, one that transcended the physical aspects of color and crossed into a spectrum no naked eye could see.

  Identifying single buildings was difficult in the æther, but I knew the Westminster Archon whe
n I saw it. The whole place had the look of death and fear, and its insides were crowded with hundreds of dreamscapes. I passed into the first person I saw. When I opened my eyes, I was tucked inside another person’s flesh.

  I could feel difference in my body. Shorter legs, wider waist, an aching right elbow. But behind these new eyes, and this Vigile’s visor, I was utterly myself.

  All around me were sleek walls and gleaming floors and lights too bright for these new eyes. The stranger’s heart pounded. Even though I was disorientated and afraid, the feeling was invigorating. Like I’d shucked a threadbare set of clothes and pulled on a luxurious dress.

  With effort, I moved the woman’s legs. It was something like moving a puppet, and when I caught sight of myself in a gilded mirror, I could see that she was walking like one: jerky, drunken, completely graceless. The sight entranced me. I was myself. I was not myself. The woman looking back at me was perhaps thirty, and a thread of blood was leaking from her nostril. My suit of armor.

  I was ready.

  ****

  The Westminster Archon loomed above me, a palace of black granite and wrought-iron. The clock was red.

  Whichever Vigile I’d possessed commanded the rest of the unit. Their guns snapped up when I turned on my heel. They marched after me like a wake, flanking me on all sides: six, twelve, twenty of them. I didn’t know if it was my heartbeat I could hear, or the footfalls of my guard.

  My boots fell on the red marble floor of the Octagon Hall, the lobby of the Archon. Twisting pillars rose high above me, stretching to the great star-shaped ceiling, where gilt shone in the light of a beautiful chandelier.

  I will destroy the doctrine of tyranny.

  This was the very center of Scion. Heart of the heartland. All around me, the walls were encased by vast arches, carved with the likenesses of every leader of the republic since 1859. They looked down from their lofty heights, their faces full of shadow and judgment. Above them were the eight tympana, painted with richly imagined scenes from Scion’s history.

  I stood in the light for what seemed like forever, a grain of dust between the stars: one above, one below.