The Mask Falling

by Samantha Shannon

  A Vigile knelt beside Onésime and gathered him up, while another started trying to wake Kotzia.

  “Remember our deal,” I said to Ménard, then slipped between his guards and took the stairs back to the ground floor. From there, I faltered down the front steps, into the snow, out through the wrought-iron gates to Rue du Faubourg.

  Kornephoros was nowhere to be seen. I was alone in the middle of the night, with no overcoat or gloves to fend off the freezing wind. As the realization of what had just happened sank in, my shivering grew worse. Someone had hauled me off the street and chained me up for some unknown purpose, either before or after abducting Luce Ménard Frère.

  I thought I knew who. I had no idea why.

  The sirens joined their voices. The noise was deeply unsettling, loud enough to vibrate in my bones. Some denizens leaned out of windows above me, as if waiting for a sign.

  “Hey, is this a joke?” one of them shouted across the street.

  Several people ran straight past me, even though I wore no mask. It was too dark for them to see Paige Mahoney. Where they were going, I had no idea.

  Ducos would know what was happening. I groped for the phone and selected the only number in the contact list. When I held it to my ear, all I could hear was a long tone. I tried to search the æther for anyone I knew, but the pain was too much, and I gave up. Out of options, I started to walk, not sure where I was going—only that I had to move, because I had someone to find. Either Cade knew how I had ended up in chains, or he had been the one to chain me.

  Even though it was the middle of the night, the streets were thronged with people. Voices shouted in anger and confusion, but their voices sounded far away, too far to hear. Snow tumbled into my hair and caught on my lashes.

  I was almost at the river when the streetlamps flickered and went out. Every single one.

  More shouts went up. Some screams, too, high and thin. In the near distance, I could see the bright glow from the screens on the wide Pont de L’Inquisition. By the time I reached the nearer of the two, I was so cold I could no longer feel most of my face, or any of my fingers.

  scioneye emergency transmission

  regular announcements have been suspended

  stand by for further instruction

  les annonces régulières ont été suspendues

  tenez-vous prêts pour des directives supplémentaires

  I stared at it until my vision blurred again, trying to read between the lines. There were no platitudes from Scarlett Burnish, no gentle voice telling us to remain calm, and no indication whatsoever of why the sirens had activated. Just words on a screen, and the noise, never-ceasing.

  A hand seized my bad wrist, making me gasp. A speaking medium stood before me, eyes milky, in the grip of a possession.

  “The Devil,” he croaked. “The Devil has deceived you.”

  “What?” I tried to twist my wrist free, but he only held tighter. “What are you talking about?”

  “The third card. Two horns, two wings, two cloven hooves,” he called over the sirens. Tears leaked from his eyes. “Why did you not heed the cards, Paige? Why did you not listen?”

  Before I could speak, the medium crumpled and fell into the snow, like a puppet without strings.

  The sirens soared to a key that sent a fearful thrill along my spine. Now people were starting to run in every direction. Cars skidded to a stop and decanted passengers onto the street. I turned left and kept forging through the snow, my ears aching in protest. Some unseen force was pulling me on. With every step, a piece fell into place, each one sending a hot jolt into my bones.

  And then I remembered something. Something I had known for months, but had never put together.

  You told me once that there was something that proved that you were always on my side. I could almost hear my own voice. Something that would betray you . . . if anyone but me could see.

  I understood now. Far too late, I had solved the riddle Arcturus had given me. His dreamscape. The red drapes in his mind that only a dreamwalker could see . . .

  He felt safest in the place he had first held me in his arms.

  A moment so powerful it had transfigured his dreamscape. A moment that forever shaped him. Because somehow, for some absurd reason, I was the very centre of his world. The realization hit me so hard I almost bent double.

  Arcturus Mesarthim had not betrayed me. By not trusting him, not believing in him, I had betrayed him. I had condemned him. I had left him all alone in his dark room.

  And it was possible—suddenly, terribly possible—that I was not the only voyant who could see into his mind.

  I ran.

  It was a long way. Perhaps they had already moved him somewhere else, to a safer place than here. But sheer, desperate, blinding resolve propelled me through the streets of Paris. Cade was a dreamwalker. I was not the last of my kind. And for whatever reason, he was working for the enemy.

  I chased the river east, toward the Île de la Citadelle. The next time I passed a screen, it switched to a different message.

  scioneye emergency transmission

  military threat detected

  aerial attack imminent

  seek immediate shelter

  menace militaire détectée

  une attaque aérienne est imminente

  trouvez de l’abri immédiatement

  No. It wasn’t possible.

  It had never happened . . .

  It was as if night held its breath. Then an automated voice intoned the words, and the sirens increased in volume, and the streets shattered into a state of chaos. Scattered Vigiles were trying in vain to maintain order, but no one could hear them. No one stopped. I buffeted through panic-stricken people and kept running, scoured of air, my only thought to reach Arcturus. The cold was punishing, but I kept going, hands on fire, feet numb in my boots.

  This had to be their vengeance. Spain or Portugal. Maybe both. One of them must have allies somewhere, and they were coming to destroy us, in retribution for the murder of a king.

  The night was suddenly too still. I slewed to a stop on a bridge, one hand clutched to my chest, and looked toward the clear sky. Stars shone in their multitudes, bleak and cold, like so many scattered bullets. Every sinew and nerve and vein in my body felt drawn to them. I waited.

  Then it came.

  First, a sound like being underwater. My own breath. Then a bone-deep rumble that filled my ribs and resonated along my jaw, which sharpened into a whine that drowned out the sirens. My last clear thought was that it sounded like the whistle that came before a firework.

  I should have run then. Instead, I watched, transfixed, as a shadow shot overhead, barely visible. And something fell.

  It struck the bridge opposite mine. The obliteration that followed must have unfolded in an instant—but I saw and felt each stage as if the whole citadel were suspended in oil.

  The deep pulsation of the impact. An eruption of rubble and water. The earthquake that resounded along the whole riverbed. Red-hot sparks, flung toward the stars. The terrible flare of fire, a searing yellow that ripped the dark apart and blinded me for an instant. Noise roared all around me, thunderous, in the air and across the citadel. My eardrums screamed. All my senses were lost to this fulmination of light and noise, which tore the night in two.

  Somehow I was on the ground. I shielded my face against the heat. My ears rang and my eyes streamed. Gasping, I looked up to see a black thundercloud of smoke, heaping and twisting itself into a column hundreds of feet high. A tower. For a long moment, all I could hear was my own heartbeat—but no, it was too slow, and with each pulse, the ground shunted.

  The streetlamps flickered back on. Across the water, the devastated bridge shed bodies and debris. There were people in the river. I tried to catch a glimpse of what had dropped the missile, but it was too late, and the night was too dark, my eyes smeared by the frigid air.

  Coughs racked my chest. I hooked my fingers into the balustrade and used it to drag myself up.
To my right, another explosion illuminated the surface of the river. Above, the sky was crisscrossed with tiny comets. Comets that were rapidly descending.

  Instinct jolted me to life. I stumbled off the bridge and onto the south bank, joined by a mass of screaming Parisians. I was no longer a mollisher or a rebel or a terrorist or a queen. Just one person running for her life.

  They would not see unnaturals or amaurotics. All of us looked the same from the air.

  The bridge had been the herald. Now the bombardment commenced. Missiles rained down on Paris, hitting buildings and cars and crowds of terror-stricken people. As I broke into a sprint along the south bank, I looked up as often as I could, eyes and ears strained for any sort of warning, but it was so dark, and there was already too much smoke. In the turmoil, I shut out the æther. My mind rejected death. Every other sense engulfed the sixth. They sheared me down to nerve and blood, and desperate, primal, animal instinct.

  Cold and disorientation slowed me. I collided with a man—he could have been amaurotic or voyant—and we both crashed headlong into the snow. People stampeded past me, stepping on my fingers and the toes of my boots. I curled into a ball. Somewhere close by, a child was crying.

  Another missile clipped a rooftop and showered the pavement with broken tiles. Someone went down beneath them. The next explosion took out a line of vehicles. Alarms went off on both sides of the river. Everywhere, people were abandoning their cars to flee on foot.

  In the distance, thunder. A far deeper explosion, felt in the very roots of Paris. A moment later, every light plunged out. Every building went dark. Every streetlamp was extinguished. Another surge of screams spiked the air as the citadel was plunged into near-total darkness.

  The fires. The fires could light my way. I rolled onto my knees and got back up, choked by smoke and snow and dust. Ash between my fingers, in my mouth. I tasted blood. Not mine.

  I was nineteen, trapped in a screaming crowd in Edinburgh. I was six and underneath a statue, watching as soldiers washed Dublin in blood.

  Except Scion had never bombarded Dublin from the air. Not then. Nashira had paved the way to war.

  And here it came.

  Everywhere I turned was pandemonium. Screaming. Terror. Insanity of fear. I fought to orient myself, using the ruined bridge as the centre of my compass. The earth trembled as another bomber whined overhead. I had to stay calm. I had to find Arcturus.

  To my right, a car burst into flame. The blast hurled me off my feet and into a gutter full of slush. It was in my hair, on my bare palms, soaking into my jacket. I was so cold. So heavy.

  For six months, I had courted war, taunted it. This was not what I wanted. Not this bloodshed, this wild terror. I covered my head as another plane dived toward the quay, lit by its own path of destruction.

  This is not what I wanted this is not what I wanted this is not what I wanted this is not what I wanted this is not what I wanted—

  Blood soaked the snow nearby. I looked up to see corpses strewn across the street. Jaw blown off. Chunks of flesh. Like the carrières, but with warm, soft bodies. My mind locked it all out. Yet everywhere I turned, there were more horrors to rip open each stitch I used to seal it all away. I was six. I was stumbling over bodies and through lakes of blood. I was twenty and in hell and there was no escape. My past and present selves were side by side.

  One hand in the snow. Trembling in my elbow, pressure in my wrist. Get up. I planted my boot on the ground. Get up.

  Somehow, I kept going. I ran and ran until I retched on the scorched air. I skirted craters, stepped on bodies, veered away from cracked and teetering buildings. I imagined the deep wounds in the citadel, missiles shattering the delicate walls of the carrières. Paris could swallow itself whole.

  I stumbled past Rue Gît-le-Cœur. And then I was almost there. I was closing in on that hall of stained-glass windows, where I had left part of myself. Left him to his fate. Yes, I could see its spire, not yet fallen. The golden cord trembled. I felt it. A gasping laugh escaped me. He was there. We would find each other. We could get out of here together.

  I want you with me. That is all I know.

  Faster. Over the bridge, onto the Île de la Citadelle. The Grande Salle was on fire. A woman was on her knees in front of it, fists buried in the snow. Her scream went on and on. I kept running, half blinded by dust.

  Paige?

  Arcturus—

  From the east, where the sun would rise, a windstorm. A whistle. The telltale vibration in my bones. I looked up, past the flaming buildings and the smoke, to the spire. I heard him—either in my head or through the cord—call my name. I heard it like he was beside me. And with the last of my sense, one clear thought: stop, you have to stop. I was too close.

  And then the purest, brightest, most beautiful gold, as if the sun had opened its eye and looked straight into me. And I knew it was the last light, and the æther had come to take me back into its arms.

  ****

  I woke to snow on the backs of my fingers. My cheek was numb against wet stone.

  Not just snow. Ash. Gray, flaking ash.

  When I coughed, crushing pain followed. A sludge of memories, too thick to parse. I was lying on my side, half buried under shards of wood and glass, and the sky above was scarred with black. The sirens had waned, replaced by a dead silence I had thought impossible in a citadel. No blue tone. No unbroken breath of traffic.

  Silence.

  A heavy bar of iron lay across my leg. With a tiny groan, I pulled free, shifted onto my front, and sucked in a burning lungful of smoke. I crawled along pitifully on my stomach. My clothes and hair were thick with ash, bleached pale as bone. I tried to push myself onto my elbows, but my arms trembled too much. I kept going until I almost collapsed onto soft warmth.

  A woman. Eyes dull beneath heavy lids, blood drying in her hair, a shroud of ashes. Slowly, with a leaden head, I looked up to see more corpses, as gray as me, littered all the way down the street. One man was missing most of his right arm; he lay in red snow near the ruins of the Forteresse de Justice. I looked at it. At the first place a missile had hit.

  At the smoking remains of the chapel with stained-glass windows, the last place I had seen Arcturus. That glass now glinted from the snow and ash, fractured into millions of pieces. Splinters of a rainbow in the gray.

  “No.” I reached for the golden cord, but it seemed to slip between my fingers. “No—”

  In the ruins, nothing stirred. Surely even Rephaite bone would have yielded to that weight.

  My sob of denial set off a coughing fit. Smoke cooked the back of my throat. I stared with hot eyes at the place that had been his prison, the dark hall that had shone with colors. Elsewhere in the citadel, I realized, the sirens were still calling. I mustered all the breath I had left and screamed along with them, until I folded on myself and my voice burned to nothing.

  I have resented my gift, for it does not let me forget. I could not forget the room where I was scarred. Our fingers twined. Yet neither can I forget this room.

  “Paige!”

  My hands curled into fists. Someone was beside me, someone I knew. A pair of buckled shoes, black against the slush. Hair less gray than mine.

  “You’re alive.” Cordier blew out fog. “The only one here, by the looks of it. A stroke of luck for both of us.” Small hands took me by the shoulders. “Paige, get up. Stand up. We have to go.”

  But my chest was heaving. I was awake in the ruins of everything, and suddenly I was racked by sobs, so hard and wrenching that I made no sound at all. Heat bathed my cheeks. Every memory was a knife in my core. Keeping one hand pressed to my back, Cordier swore under her breath and reached into her coat. In the bloody light of sunrise, her shadow fell across me.

  “I’m sorry, Paige. I have to do this,” she said, her voice almost tender. And no longer French. “It’s for your own good. I promise. Everything that happens next is for good.”

  Before I could stop her, she clamped a cloth over my nose a
nd mouth. It smelled of white flowers. It smelled of oblivion. I tried to resist, to push her away, to stop myself inhaling—I tried, I did—but I was back on the waterboard, icy cold and wet and smothered, all my fight was gone.

  War was coming. The Devil was twofold. It was standing over me, holding my chains, and I could not remember why I had ever thought I could escape it. I closed my eyes.

  And I breathed in.

  A Note on Language

  Since the seventeenth century, a mixed group has always been masculine in French. Even if there is one man among fifty women, the rule is the same: le masculin l’emporte sur le féminin.

  Since the Republic of Scion is not a patriarchy, and since I disagree with Nicolas Beauzée’s assertion that the masculine should prevail over the feminine (in any context, linguistic or otherwise), I decided that feminine and masculine group nouns would be interchangeable in Scion French, leaning towards a rule of majority – for example, ‘les perdues’ is feminine throughout the book because more than half of Le Vieux Orphelin’s loyalists are women, while ‘les grands ducs’ is masculine because the group is made up of two men and one woman. A person’s own gender identity may influence their choice of noun, especially when the makeup of a group is unknown or fluid – for example, Paige defaults to ‘les anormales’ (feminine), while Le Latronpuche uses ‘les anormaux’ (masculine).

  There is one exception to this rule in the book: ‘les patrones’, which combines the feminine ‘patronnes’ and masculine ‘patrons’. In this case, I took what seemed a golden opportunity to blend two words into a gender-neutral noun.

  Although there are no examples in The Mask Falling, Scion French also uses the rule of proximity. Where an adjective applies to multiple nouns, its gender matches that of the closest noun, rather than defaulting to masculine.

  Given their deep-rooted associations with a woman’s age and marital status in the real world, I decided against including ‘Mademoiselle’ or ‘Madame’ in the Republic of Scion France, either for official or colloquial use. Instead, I use a portmanteau, ‘Madelle’ (plural ‘Mesdelles’), an honorific that appears to have first been proposed for use in Québec. Perhaps due to its lack of etymological logic, or simply the power of tradition, ‘Madelle’ has never seen widespread use in any French-speaking territory. However, it does have historical precedent, appearing in the correspondence of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc as early as the seventeenth century.