Mental clarity.
My mind was clear as ice. There was no cloud inside it. My vision was sharp, and my gift seethed inside me.
There hadn’t been a first dose.
‘Come here, girl,’ the Vigile said.
I stared at my hands. Steady.
Artifice.
Alsafi. He must have swapped the syringes. Hock had shot something into my veins, but it must have been water. And now the building was almost empty; there was only a skeleton staff in the Archon while everyone attended the Jubilee. Until the celebrations ended, only a handful of Vigiles stood between me and Senshield.
Perseverance.
The Vigile drew his gun and aimed it at my head. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Now.’
‘What are you going to do?’ I said softly. ‘Shoot me? Not without the Suzerain’s permission.’
The gun stayed where it was, but I had stared death in the face once before, looked down the barrel of a gun and lived. He swore and returned his weapon to its holster. Took his keys from his belt and sifted through them. That was his mistake. Rage was pounding through my body, bubbling in my blood. It had set me on fire, and like the moth I was, I burned.
When the Vigile opened my cell door, I was ready. I sprang at him and slammed my body into his. As we fell to the floor, I clapped a hand over his mouth and nose, squeezed hard, and wrested the gun from his grasp. My arms were shaking, and he was clawing at my neck and hair, breaking skin – but I hit him with the pistol, over and over, bludgeoning his skull with all my strength, until blood glinted and his head rolled to one side. I grabbed his set of keys, hauled his dead weight into the cell, and locked the door with trembling hands.
Footsteps were approaching from somewhere to my left. I ran the other way, keys in one hand, pistol in the other, my bare feet feather-light on the marble.
I would help Marilena Brașoveanu ruin their night of glory. If I had to die tonight, I would release the Mime Order.
My head was throbbing as I rounded a corner, hoping against hope that nobody was paying attention to the cameras. I could feel the æther again, clearly enough to avoid the Vigiles patrolling the Archon and to know that Hildred Vance was nowhere near.
I felt for the room with the glass pyramid and found it instantly. Following the signal, I limped across the marble floor, trying to ignore the drumbeat in my bruises. I could sense two squadrons of Vigiles, spread over a vast building. In one corridor, I had to duck into the Minister for Finance’s office to avoid a lone one, who I hadn’t detected until it was almost too late. I stayed for several minutes behind a curtain, soused in icy sweat. A wrong move could get me hauled back to my cell, and I wouldn’t get out again. I might not be drugged, but I was physically weak – I couldn’t fight my way to the core.
When I was sure the Vigile wasn’t returning, I stumbled out of the office and back into the labyrinth, up the stairs to the next floor. Senshield was somewhere above me.
The central second-floor corridor was empty, dimly lit by sconces. The darkness calmed me, just a little. The signal above me wavered, and I paused briefly to think.
If the core was high up, it was most likely in a tower. The Archon had two, one on each end of the building. Inquisitor Tower was the one that housed the bells. The other one . . .
I sifted through the Vigile’s keys. Not one was labelled Victoria Tower. But then, only Vance and the blood-sovereigns were supposed to know where Senshield was; no one else would have access.
With fresh resolve, I set off again. Most of the doors I had seen in this building were electronic, but if the Vigiles carried keys, they must also have mechanical locks in case of a power failure – and those locks could be picked.
An alarm began to drill, raising my pulse. Either my empty cell had been discovered, or Brașoveanu’s act of defiance had activated some kind of security alert. Metal blinds were scrolling over the windows, and blue-white emergency lighting had sprung up on either side of me. Adrenalin streaked through my muscles, keeping the ache at bay. I avoided a few more Vigiles before I finally staggered into a corridor with a thick ebony carpet, lined by windows on one side. At the end of this corridor was an arched, studded door, and set into this door was a small plaque reading VICTORIA TOWER. My breath came fast as I approached it. The core was now almost directly above me.
I tried the handle, not expecting it to work.
It gave way beneath my hand.
Slowly, I brought my weight against the door, opening it. A trap, surely. Vance wouldn’t have left the tower vulnerable while she was at the Jubilee. And yet – whatever lay beyond, it was my one and only chance. I stepped into the darkness and closed the door behind me.
A draught blew at my hair. There were no lights in the tower.
A balustrade was wrapped around a kind of well in the floor; the draught was coming up from there. When I risked a glance, I saw that the well dropped straight down into an entrance hall. A squadron of Vigiles ran through it, shining their torches. As soon as they were gone, I hit the staircase, fighting the weakness in my body, my head spinning from exhaustion and pain. I forced myself to continue, gripping the rails to crane myself up every step. My muscles had wasted during my coma and imprisonment; my knees had almost forgotten how to carry me. When I fell the first time, I thought I wouldn’t get back up. My hands reached for the next step, but it seemed as if I was at the foot of a mountain, staring up at the distant summit.
You have risen from the ashes before.
I grasped the railing again. One step. Two steps.
The only way to survive is to believe you always will.
When I reached the top of the stairs, I fell to my knees and hunched over myself, trembling uncontrollably. There was light nearby. Almost there. I picked myself back up.
My soft footsteps broke the silence. I was at the highest level of the tower, right beneath its rooftop.
Now I could see that a glass pyramid, illuminated from beneath, made up the centre of the ceiling. And there it was, suspended underneath that pyramid: the image I had seen in Warden’s dreamscape, stolen from the mind of Hildred Vance. The core. The entity that powered every scanner, all of Senshield. And now I was this close to it, I could sense what it was.
A spirit.
An immensely powerful spirit, somehow trapped inside a glass sphere. The æther around it was in turmoil, alive with vibrations. Our guesswork had been right.
This was it.
‘Paige Mahoney.’
The back of my neck prickled.
I knew that voice.
A woman stepped from the shadows, into the pale light from above. It made her face skeletal.
‘Hildred Vance,’ I said softly.
She must have devised some way to hide her dreamscape from me. They knew so much more about the æther than we did.
Vance stood with a rod-straight back and no expression. I had convinced myself that I would be able to face the Grand Commander without fear, but sweat chilled my brow as we regarded each other. The iron hand of the anchor, the human embodiment of Rephaite ambition. The woman who was responsible for the murders of my father and my cousin.
A rigour went through me.
She had hunted me across the country. She had used my aura – my intimate and fragile connection to the æther – to enhance her machine. She had shaped my life since I was six years old.
Thirteen years later, she was finally in front of me.
Vance looked from the core to my face. The crow-black eyes regarded me with something I thought at first was contempt, but it wasn’t that. There was no heat in the stare. No passion. If Jaxon was right, and we were devils in the skins of men, then Vance had shed her skin already. I was in the presence of a human being who had spent far too much time among Rephaim. Decades too long.
She didn’t care enough for my life to feel anything towards me. Not even hatred. Her expression, if it could be called that, told me I was nothing to her but an enemy war asset that should have been destroyed
.
‘Even before I saw you in my dreamscape, I knew what you were searching for; what you planned to do. You wanted Senshield.’ She glanced at it. ‘I confess, you almost had me fooled. You responded as anticipated to the march on Edinburgh: a replication of the events of the Dublin Incursion, calculated to make you surrender in order to avoid the same bloodshed you witnessed as a child. All went to plan. You appeared broken in mind and body. And yet . . . and yet, I suspected an ulterior motive.’
I watched her.
‘The Trojan horse,’ she said. ‘An ancient stratagem. You presented yourself like a gift to your enemy, and your enemy took you into their house. You realised that, after all your striving, if you were captured, we would take you right to the core – all you had to do was deliver yourself into our custody.’ Her bony hands clasped behind her back. ‘Unavoidable civic duty called me away tonight. You used the opportunity to escape. I assume you had help from an ally in reaching this part of the building.’
‘None,’ I said. As I spoke, her gaze darted to the core again. ‘It’s brave of you to step out from behind the screen, Vance. And I have something to ask you, if you’ll indulge me. Do you remember the names of all the people whose lives you’ve stolen?’
Vance didn’t answer. She must have calculated that there was no strategic advantage to saying anything.
‘You didn’t just kill my father, Cóilín Ó Mathúna. Thirteen years ago, you killed my cousin, Finn Mac Cárthaigh, and an unarmed woman named Kayley Ní Dhornáin.’ Saying their names to her face made my voice quake. ‘You have killed thousands of innocent people – yet when I was in your dreamscape, it was my dream-form with blood on its hands. Do you really think I’ve taken more life than you have?’
Her silence continued.
She was waiting. I was trying to work out why, when I saw her gaze move, ever so slightly, back to the core. That was the fourth time.
She was nervous.
There really was a weakness. It could be destroyed.
Time seemed to slow as I looked at the core. I searched it with my eyes, then with my gift.
It took me a few moments to find the ectoplasm. A vial of it, locked inside the sphere, holding the spirit firmly in place and emanating a greenish light. One of Nashira’s boundlings – her fallen angels. I could feel the thousands of delicate connections that branched out around it, reaching towards every Senshield scanner in the citadel, in the country.
I didn’t know its name, so I couldn’t banish it. But surely if I destroyed the casing that imprisoned the spirit, it would disperse its energy into the æther and sever those connections.
Surely.
I raised my gun. At the same time, Vance pointed a pistol at my exposed torso.
‘It will kill you,’ she said, ‘and achieve nothing. The spirit will continue to obey the Suzerain. It will continue to power Senshield.’
I stayed very still.
She could be telling the truth. She could be bluffing.
‘You will die in vain,’ Vance said.
Perhaps I would.
But there had to be a reason she was suddenly talking, telling me how Senshield worked. There could be no gain in that. She would only be this free with her information if she was . . .
If she was lying.
And Hildred Vance only lied when it was necessary.
‘You know a lot about human nature, Vance,’ I said, taking my time over each word, ‘but you made one, fatal error in your calculations.’
She looked at the core, then back to me.
‘You assumed,’ I said, ‘that I had any interest in leaving here alive.’
Vance stared into my eyes. And somewhere in their depths, deep in those pits of darkness, was a flicker, just the softest flicker, of something I hadn’t truly believed she was capable of feeling.
Doubt.
It was doubt.
I pulled the trigger.
When the bullet struck it, the sphere broke apart, releasing years of bridled energy, and gave up the vial of ectoplasm. It shattered at my feet. I hurled myself to the floor and scrambled away from Vance’s gunfire, my fingers slipping through Rephaite blood. Before I could get up, the spirit, freed from its prison, came flying towards me – and seized me by the throat.
A poltergeist. It was enraged, murderous. The Suzerain had commanded it to stay, to power the machine, and I had disturbed it. It slammed me between the wall and the floor. I choked on blood. The gun flew out of my hand.
Vance was a strategist. She knew when to retreat. As she backed towards the door, the spirit cast me aside and raced across the room to slam it shut. Vance stopped dead. She was blind to the æther, unaware of where the threat would go next. Pulling myself on to my hands and knees, I looked up at what was left of the sphere.
She had been right; Senshield was still active. Its light remained as bright as ever.
‘You belong to the Suzerain.’ Vance addressed the spirit, her voice full of authority. ‘I am also her servant.’
I crawled across the floor, towards the gun.
If I was going to die tonight, I would take the Grand Commander with me.
My movements distracted the fallen angel. It whipped away from Vance, pitched me on to my back, and brought its weight to bear against my body. A wall of unseen pressure descended on me like a shroud. Sparks erupted from the wreckage of the sphere and threw wild shadows on the walls as the spirit smothered me inside and out, flinging my aura into a frenzy. Sweat froze on my skin. I couldn’t breathe. All I could see was the light from the core.
I didn’t know how to fight back. I didn’t know how to stop fighting, either. Desperately, I tried to dreamwalk, but I was so weak. All around us, the corporeal world was straining at the seams.
Veins of colour glistened behind my eyelids. My dreamscape was on the verge of collapse. As the air was drained from my lungs, I saw Nick smiling at me in the courtyard, surrounded by blossoms, sunlight in his hair. My father, the last day I saw him alive. Eliza laughing at the market. I saw Warden, felt his hands framing my face and his lips seeking mine behind the red drapes. The amaranth in bloom. And I heard Jaxon’s voice:
Perhaps our game is only just beginning.
As my vision darkened, some small instinct made me hold out my left hand, as if I could push the spirit away. My arm was forced back, but I kept my palm turned outward. The scars there felt white-hot, scars I had received in a poppy field when I was a child.
And I felt something change. I was pushing it away.
The pain began as a tiny point, a needle pushing through the middle of my palm. As it grew, a wordless scream racked my body –and just for a moment, some of the pressure released. Just enough for me to gasp in one more breath. And with that breath, I whispered, ‘Go.’
What happened next was unclear. I remember watching the glass pyramid shatter. It must have exploded in a split second, but in my mind, it lasted for eternity. I was flung in one direction, Vance in the other.
Then came an arc of blinding white, and the world turned to oblivion.
24
The Crossing
1 January, 2060
New Year’s Day
I had woken like this once before, thinking I was dead.
The æther was calling me into his arms, telling me to abandon all my cares, to leave my tender bones behind. My eyelids parted, just enough to see a pale hand clad in shards of glass. The rest of my arm sparkled, armoured in diamond and glazed with molten ruby. Even my lashes were frosted with gemstones. I was a living jewel-box, a fallen star. No longer flesh, but crystalline.
Wind howled through the part of the roof where the angel had passed through. Splinters tinkled from my hair as I turned to see the ceiling. The white light had been extinguished. All that was left of Senshield was a cavernous hole in the æther, marking a place where a spirit had dwelled for many years. Over time, it would stitch itself back together.
There was one thing I wanted to know before I left. My hand shoo
k as I rotated it. The fallen angel had carved a word into my skin, joining the fragmented pieces of the scars.
KIN
I lay back in my bed of glass. A friend had once told me that knowledge was dangerous. When I let go, I would have all the knowledge of the æther; this mystery would soon be solved. And I could find the others. Even if they didn’t know, I would stay with them. I would watch over them. I would help them win the next stage of the game, the war that had begun today.
Footsteps came through the glass, drawing me back. A moment later, my head and shoulders were lifted into the crook of an arm, and Rephaite eyes were smouldering in the gloom.
‘Dreamwalker.’
His features gradually sharpened.
‘Leave me,’ I murmured. ‘Leave me, Alsafi.’
He took hold of my left hand and pried my fingers open, revealing the marks on my palm.
‘I’m not worth it.’ I was so tired. ‘I’m done. Just go.’
‘Some would disagree with your assessment of your worth.’ He released my hand. When he scooped an arm under my knees and lifted me, I groaned. My skin bristled with broken glass. ‘This is not your time.’
He carried me through the ruins, pushing the pistol into my limp hand. The fight wasn’t over. As he opened the door, I caught sight of Hildred Vance in the corner. Her body was angled away from us, but I could see that she was as broken as I was. She bled just like the rest of us. I wanted to tell Alsafi to turn back, to make sure she was dead, but I blacked out before I could.
When I came round, Alsafi was almost at the bottom of the stairs, and my cheek was pressed against his doublet. When he entered the corridor with the black carpet, I lifted a hand to his shoulder.
‘Dreamscape,’ I whispered. My gift had been weakened, but I felt it. A Rephaite. ‘Nashira.’
Alsafi stopped in his tracks. There was no other way out of the corridor.
‘Stay quiet.’ He spoke quickly. ‘If anything happens to me, go to the Inquisitorial Office. There, you can access a tunnel that will take you out of the Archon. I have a contact – they are waiting for you there.’
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