The Mask Falling

by Samantha Shannon

  My only possessions were the music box and the parcel from my father. I retrieved the latter from under the wardrobe, though I still had no stomach to open it. Both went into my backpack, along with as much spare clothing as I could fit. Finally, I slid in my weapons, my dossier from Domino, and the ledger I had stolen from Ménard.

  Except for the money and some clothes, Arcturus had brought nothing with him from London. I did, however, find one of the swords from the colony under his bed.

  For the rest of the day, I watched the news from the armchair, too bone-weary to do anything more. All the raconteurs could talk about were the evils of monarchy, and how Scion would soon release Spain from its bonds.

  At noon, there had been a break in the cycle—an announcement that Inquisitor Ménard was investigating the possibility of terrorist involvement in the recent fire in a Type A Restricted Sector. He appeared briefly on-screen, instructing those responsible to come forward and confess.

  He must have known it had been me, but he was keeping that close to his chest. I frowned. This would have been his perfect chance to pin the blame on me and the Mime Order and to somehow turn that against Weaver.

  His face, as ever, gave nothing away. He was too well-trained for that. I wondered what the mood was in the mansion. Whether he feared retribution for his failure to protect the colony.

  Every now and then, Arcturus flinched awake. Each time, he would look around the room with hot eyes. Like something caught in a trap. Seeing me nearby, he would quiet and return his head to the cushion.

  At five, I muted the news. There was nothing left to do but wait for Stéphane. I lay down next to Arcturus and cuddled up to him, my head tucked under his chin. Still half-asleep, he pressed a kiss to my hair and lifted the covers over my shoulders.

  And I let myself imagine it could always be like this. That no matter the consequences of what we had done—and what we had yet to do—he would always be there to face them with me.

  I must have slept. The light outside was dim and blue by the time a sound jerked me awake. It cut into my skull like a bone saw—the doorbell, the one nobody had ever used. All of the agents had keys.

  Somehow, Arcturus kept sleeping. I sat up and listened. Someone with the wrong address, perhaps. Kids playing knick-knack. There were plenty of reasons, none of them sinister, why somebody would ring a doorbell. As I stole downstairs, my attention rolled to the æther.

  I knew that dreamscape. Furious, I slid the chain aside and cracked the door open to find a hooded figure on the doorstep, shoulders dredged with snow. I recognized that tight-lipped mouth.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I said in a cold undertone. “How did you know where I was?”

  Léandre brazened me out. “Ivy told me.”

  “Kindly give her a bump on the head with that crowbar for me.” I started to close the door. “Goodbye, Léandre.”

  “Stop.” He wedged a dirty boot between the door and the frame. “You are to make an alliance with Le Vieux Orphelin. I am his heir. Since you chose to childishly avoid me earlier, I came to resolve this . . . quarrel.” A muscle twitched in his cheek. “There is somewhere we can go. Very close.”

  I glanced over his shoulder. An old black moto was parked against the wall.

  “I have to be back before ten,” I said.

  “You will be.”

  “Fine. Wait there.”

  I shut the door in his face, leaving him to gather snow.

  In the parlor, Arcturus was still asleep. I gave him a gentle shake and whispered his name, to no avail. His scars were still too cold.

  I didn’t like to leave him like this. Still, as much as it pained me to admit it, I did need to thrash out my bitterness with Léandre. As quietly as I could, I laced on a pair of heeled boots and buttoned my coat, then scribbled a note.

  Léandre turned up. I’ll be back before 10.Codladh sámh.

  I left it on the couch beside him. As I turned to leave, something made me look at his face once more. I traced the elegant lines of his brow and jaw, and his lips, soft in repose. At least he was peaceful. I placed a kiss on the top of his head before I left.

  Léandre was in exactly the same position when I stepped outside, as if he had done nothing but stare at the door since I left. We headed east on foot, following the river along the Quai des Grands Augustins.

  Snow tufted around us. We both tensed as a squadron of night Vigiles strode past on the other side of the road, but they were too far away to glimpse our auras, and they seemed preoccupied.

  Léandre stopped at the end of the Pont Neuf, and we sized up the building that loomed to our right. Its bell towers presided over a public square, where vendors sold postcards and paintings.

  “La Grande Salle,” I said.

  “Once she was called Notre-Dame. She belonged to all Paris, and Paris belonged to her. It has been almost nine hundred years since her first stone was laid.” Léandre folded his arms. “This is where Ménard married Frère. In a fortnight or so, they will hold a masked ball here. The Butcher of Strasbourg is not a theatrical man by nature, but, much like Le Vieux Orphelin, he understands the power of a symbol. A guillotine. An anchor. A building like this.”

  It was a spectacular feat of construction. The cathedral still had its rose windows, though the kings that had once reigned above its doors had been decapitated. A compromise between two factions: the anachorètes who believed that all religious buildings should be demolished, and those who recognized its beauty and wanted to cut away pieces of it until it was fit for Scion. The wooden spire had burned away in a fire set by the anachorètes.

  “I’m fairly sure we won’t be invited,” I said, “so I’ll assume you didn’t bring me here to ask for the first dance.”

  “No,” he said. I was starting to wonder if Léandre had ever cracked a smile in his life. “I heard you liked to climb in London. I am learning. I know the world below Paris. I would like to learn the world above.” His expression was mildly pained. “Your advice would be . . . helpful.”

  I took the measure of the building. This was one kind of olive branch I could get behind.

  “You have chalk?” I asked Léandre. In answer, he passed me a pair of textured gloves. “All right. Let’s see what you can do.”

  ****

  And that was how I came to be clinging to a Gothic cathedral in Paris as dusk painted the citadel in shades of blue and gray. I had expected guards—Nick and I had often had to dodge private security when we climbed buildings in London—but clearly Scion had better things to do than watch a glorified clock.

  We climbed up the south-facing side. Léandre needed little guidance. His long arms and legs gave him a spider-like ease. I occasionally pointed out a handhold if he fell behind, which he acknowledged with a grunt.

  The cathedral offered crockets and ledges in abundance, as if she wanted us to scale her. I had spent a long time underground of late, but this was what my limbs had always itched to do. To make every building my ladder and stairway.

  Climbing made me miss Nick so much it ached. I wanted to know that he was all right. Weeks had passed since I had left him on the dock in Dover. I hoped that wherever he was in Sweden, and whoever he was with, he was reclaiming the rooftops from Birgitta Tjäder.

  Nick was used to leading a double life. He would have worked out how to be a rebel and a spy.

  Léandre hurdled a balustrade and began to climb again. Just ahead of him, I grabbed onto a stump that must once have been a gargoyle. When I was high enough, I hoisted Léandre up by the arm, onto the edge of the roof, which provided us with a bridge to the bell towers. Its sides were alarmingly steep, treacherous with ice. We shimmied along it.

  We finally stopped in the open-air gallery at the front of the cathedral. Paris sprawled before us. Léandre sat down and huffed into his hands, legs over the edge. I stayed on my feet.

  “Not bad,” I said. A curt nod. “You go first, then. Since you brought me up here.”

  “I do n
ot apologize for leaving the prisoners behind.”

  I let out a mirthless laugh. “Great start.”

  “You saw what happened,” he said to me. “The Passage des Voleurs collapsed. I told you from the beginning that there was a risk of that.” He took a leather pouch from inside his coat. “If we had gone with your plan, all of those people would have drowned.”

  “Instead, most of those people are dead in a forest. Or worse,” I said. “You allowed me to believe that we would try to save all the prisoners.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You knew exactly what you were playing at.” I stared out at the blue lights of the citadel, the dark slick of the river. “I don’t want lies or half-truths anymore. I’ve had plenty of those from too many people.”

  Léandre took a narrow sheet of paper from the pouch. He held it open with one hand and used the other to sprinkle a line of shriveled aster petals across it.

  “I knew you would make a fuss if I was honest,” he said. “That you would be irrational.”

  “It isn’t irrational to care about people, Léandre. I might have been too optimistic to believe we could save them all,” I conceded. “Maybe it just isn’t possible to break into a government-controlled facility and get everyone out alive.”

  “That was my opinion,” Léandre stated. “Would you have listened to me if I had been frank?”

  I ground my jaw.

  “I fought to get those prisoners out of the palace,” he continued. “Ankou and I waited until everyone was through the reservoir before we stopped defending the entrance. Even when the soldiers came inside.”

  “You should have told me your plan from the start. I could then have told you that sending them all into the Forêt de Meudon was not an option,” I said. “You don’t know what’s in those woods.”

  “I didn’t then. I think I do now.” Léandre glanced sidelong at me. “Something chased us to the cemetery. An aura like a swarm of flies.” He rolled the cigarette and skimmed the tip of his tongue along the edge of the paper. “Les Emim, no?”

  “Yes.” I finally sat beside him, bracing my heels on a ledge, and took off the gloves. “Most of what was in the pamphlet was real. Based on things that happened in the first colony.”

  “But the pamphlet depicts the Rephaim as saviors,” he said. “And those guards in Versailles were not.”

  “Rephaim aren’t good nor evil. They’re as complicated as we are. Having said that,” I said, “a fair number of them do want us dead, mutilated, or enslaved, so best to always approach with caution. As for the pamphlet, someone edited it without my permission.”

  Léandre took a vesta case from his coat and removed a match, which he used to light his roll-up, releasing the cloying scent of aster.

  “If it means anything to you, I am sorry.” He pocketed the case. “Not for the plan itself, but for hiding it. Now that I know you want honesty, no matter how brutal, I am happy to deliver it.”

  “I can’t imagine everyone appreciates that attitude,” I said. “Does Le Vieux Orphelin?”

  “Yes. He does.” He exhaled blue-tinged smoke. “When he rules this citadel, things will change, Underqueen. As soon as the Man in the Iron Mask is gone, he will summon all of the leaders of the Nouveau Régime, and there, we will confront that bastard, Le Latr—” His eyes narrowed. “What is happening down there?”

  I followed his gaze to the Quai des Grands Augustins. As soon as I saw what he was looking at, I stood. Multiple squadrons of Vigiles had descended on the quay in armored vehicles, red lights glinting, no sirens to betray their approach.

  With my heart north of its rightful place, I waited. They were moving out of sight of our vantage point. I identified their drivers in the æther and waited for them to keep moving up the quay.

  Then I felt the convoy stop. And I felt where it stopped.

  On the corner of Rue Gît-le-Cœur.

  “No.” The word left me as a rasp. “No. They can’t—”

  Léandre had risen. “Your bodyguard.”

  Like a shock of iced water, fear drenched me. Without a strategy, without a single thought for caution, I turned on my heel and ran for the roof. The golden cord quaked as I screamed his name through it.

  arcturus, run!

  Léandre intercepted me. He pinioned my waist with both arms—stopping me, like he had stopped me in the tunnels. “Paige, wait,” he snarled in my ear. “You can’t help him now—”

  “I can.” Labored breaths sawed through me, hard as sobs. “I can. Let me go, let me go to him—”

  “You are not going down there to get shot or arrested,” he snapped. “You think you’re going to fight off all those squadrons on your own, Underqueen? What are you, a fucking tank?”

  My knees could barely hold me. With a last flare of strength, I shoved Léandre off and threw myself back to the edge of the gallery, grabbing onto a column to keep myself from falling. Without the sirens to warn him, and with little strength to run or fight, Arcturus would not escape.

  arcturus, go, now!

  A vibration rang in answer. I sensed him move—my heart soared—before the Vigiles stormed in, and his dreamscape was in a moil of them, and it was too late, he was lost.

  What followed was a torture I had never thought possible. Unable to see the arrest, I lived every moment of it in the æther. The blow that brought him down. (I buckled, as if they had struck me as well.) His stillness. (I slid down the column, onto stone.) The slow drag to the vehicle.

  I let out a low sound of denial, my head vised in my hands. Léandre was beside me, and I could hear him speaking, but all I could do was cling to the feel of that ironclad dreamscape, as if by holding onto it I could keep Arcturus from what was to come.

  He was going back to his dark room. The one he had never truly escaped. Nashira had no more use for him now. She knew from experience that he was too strong to give way under torture, that all she could do was dispose of him.

  The vehicles drove off. A few Vigiles remained behind, presumably to lie in wait for me. With a last flicker, Arcturus disappeared from my perception. I pressed my brow to the column.

  “Paige.” Léandre broke the terrible silence. “Did they take him?”

  It was a moment before I could speak. “Yes.”

  By unspoken agreement, we stayed in the gallery. Safer up here. Only when a dreamscape came to my attention did I stir from my detached state.

  Ducos was on her way back to the safe house. I needed to intercept her before she ran straight into the Vigiles.

  “I have to get down there.” I sounded distant even to my own ears. “Léandre, you should go.”

  “Paige, wait.” Léandre grasped my shoulder. “If not for you, I would have lost the two most important people in my life—my sister and Le Vieux Orphelin.” His face was set. “I will help you get Warden back. To repay that debt. The other perdues will help you, too, once the Man in the Iron Mask is dead.”

  “I’m going after Arcturus first.”

  The last time Nashira had seen him, I had been in his arms. She was the only other person who knew the truth about us, because she had seen it with her own eyes. Her cruelty might be my only hope. She would want to punish him for that betrayal before she took his head.

  I had time to save his life.

  “If you’re serious about helping me,” I said to Léandre, “get yourself safely back to Passy. I’ll find you there.”

  Lips pursing in the fuzz of his beard, Léandre squinted across the citadel, his low-set eyebrows knitted.

  “I will expect you soon. Be careful, marcherêve,” he said gruffly. “They will be looking for you, too.”

  I clambered back to the roof and started to edge along it. Arcturus had taken bullets to shield me, dived into an ice-cold river to drag me from its grip. Now it was my turn.

  Climbing down was unbearable. Even as every instinct screamed at me to hurry, I had to place my boots and hands with care—not just so I wouldn’t fall, but to make sure
no sharp-eyed Vigiles caught a glimpse of me. Twice I slithered on the ice and almost plunged to my death. In my wake, the bells rang out.

  When I was low enough, I let go of my handhold and flumped into a snowdrift, then beat the flakes from my coat, hitched my scarf up to hide my face, and started walking. Ducos was approaching from somewhere near the University of Scion Paris.

  I sped up. As soon as I glimpsed her on Rue Serpente, I crossed the street to stop her.

  “Isaure,” I called.

  Ducos looked up from under a snow-flecked umbrella, lips parting with her intake of breath. “Flora.” She pulled me left, into a doorway. “Cordier got you out in time, then?”

  “Cordier?”

  “Yes, Cordier. She called me to tell me that your safe house was under attack. We were cut off, so I came—” Ducos stopped, her hand tight as a cuff around my arm. “You didn’t see her?”

  “No. I was across the street when it happened. Somehow they didn’t spot me.” My voice shook. “Ducos, Warden was still inside. They took him.”

  The cords of her throat shifted. “Stay calm.” She brought me under her umbrella. “Is your dossier still in the safe house?”

  “Everything.” My breath came in white gusts. “Everything is.”

  The ledger that exposed the corruption in the Parisian syndicate. The music box and the parcel from my father. If Scion had found my backpack, they had everything I possessed in the world. Everything but the mask I had left in the appartements privés.

  Ducos checked the street, then started to walk again, taking me with her. She linked our arms as if we were the closest of friends, dipping her head close to mine as she spoke.

  “Here is what’s going to happen,” she said under her breath. “Stéphane is nearby. You are going to get in their car and leave this district. You will be installed in a safe house in Rue Vernet, and you will stay there until I tell you otherwise. Meanwhile, when the coast is clear, I will see if there is anything left at Rue Gît-le-Cœur.”