The Mime Order (61 page)

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 when 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.

I will cut the strings from the limbs of the puppets.

Above me, the tower pealed out six o’clock.

I walked up a flight of steps and down a long corridor, where the eyes of granite busts watched from all sides. The paintings melted into waves of dark oil and gold.

“Wait,” I said.

My guard stopped at the threshold. Alone, I walked under the archway.

I will rip the anchor from the heart of London.

Four figures stood at the other end of the vast gallery. On the far left was Scarlett Burnish. Her hair was the red of the carpet, and a red smile tipped her lips. Not like blood. Too bright, too false. Stage blood.

On the far right, Gomeisa Sargas towered in his high-collared robes, a chain of woven gold and topaz strung between his shoulders. There was hunger in his stare. In a moment of sheer madness, I had the urge to congratulate him on such an admirably human expression of malice.

Frank Weaver was beside him, stiff and gaunt as a corpse. It was as if they’d switched species.

And there she was. Nashira Sargas, blood-sovereign and butcher. Argentate and beautiful. Ravenous and terrible. Standing between humans as if they were equals—as if they were her friends, these mindless mannequins.

“You have not been summoned, Vigile,” she said. “I hope you have the fugitive, or I will have your eyes put out.”

Her voice called to me from a dark part of my memory.

“Hello, Nashira,” I said, in a voice that wasn’t mine. “It’s been a while.”

To her credit, she didn’t look surprised. Not so much as a flicker of curiosity.

“
Wise of you to come in another’s body, 40,” she said, “but we have no use for an errant spirit in a stranger’s skin.”

“We were willing to show clemency,” Scarlett Burnish said. She looked exactly as she did on the screen, as though she’d been moulded from polished vinyl, but her tone was cooler. “If you had surrendered yourself to the custody of the Archon in person, we would gladly have freed them all.”

I stood perfectly still, looking up at the enormous Scion anchor behind the four seats. “Don’t you tell enough lies, Scarlett?”

She fell silent.

High on the platform, the Grand Inquisitor, Frank Weaver, said nothing at all. He was no more than a mannequin after all. Nashira walked down the steps, her long black dress spilling behind her.

“Perhaps I misjudged you after all.” She touched a gloved finger to my host’s cheek. “Have you not the courage to give me your life in exchange for theirs, Underqueen?”

So she knew.

“You’ll spare theirs,” I said, “or I’ll take his.”

In a single movement, the Vigile’s pistol was in my hand and aimed at Frank Weaver’s heart. His body gave the briefest start, but he still made no sound as a red dot hovered on his chest. Scarlett Burnish moved toward him, but I fired the pistol between them. She froze.

“To prevent London slipping back into human control,” Weaver said, robotic, “I am willing to lay down this mortal life.”

Gomeisa laughed, a sound like grinding metal. “It seems you were wrong, Nashira. 40 is willing to take a fellow human’s life for her own ends.”

“I am,” I said. “For all the lives he’s taken in your name.”

The Sargas made no attempt to shield their Grand Inquisitor. “Even if you topple this pawn where he stands, you will not stop
what
is coming,” Gomeisa said. “Not if you cleave your mountains and raze your cities. Not if you lay down your life in pursuit of our downfall. Our influence is buried deep in the mortal coil, rooting us like an anchor to this earth.”

“I’m a dreamwalker, Gomeisa,” I said. “I recognize no anchor to this earth.”

But I’d lost. They didn’t care if I shot Frank Weaver; all they’d do was find another willing servant.

I had no leverage.

“If it helps to ease your guilt”—Gomeisa watched the screen with no emotion—“we were always going to do this, whether you presented yourself or not. These lives will pay for the one of ours that you took in the colony, and even that is not enough for the loss of the blood-heir.”

Kraz Sargas. The Rephaite I had killed with a bullet and a flower. Scarlett Burnish touched her earpiece.

“Lower the anchor,” she said.

On the screen, the Grand Executioner walked to the switch that had murdered so many of my people. As his gloved hand reached toward it, Lotte wrenched her arms from behind her back—someone must have smuggled her a blade—and cut right through the binding on her lips. Blood unfurled from her mouth, but her eyes were sparkling with wild triumph.

“BLACK MOTH RULES IN LONDON,” she screamed at the camera. “VOYANTS, DO YOU HEAR ME? BLACK MOTH RULES IN—”

The broadcast cut off. Something small and vital fractured into pieces. I was a live wire, a lit fuse, an exploding star on the verge of supernova. My spirit crested against the inside of my dreamscape, rearing up to meet the storm that gathered in my mind. Iridescent colors framed my vision. They blinded me, like splinters of the sun.