The Mime Order

by Samantha Shannon

  6

  Seven Dials

  As I crossed the threshold of the den, my knees almost gave way. A strong pair of hands got me up the first flight of stairs and into a wing chair. My nose was streaming, my ears ached and a vicious burn clawed at my cheeks. It was only when sensation returned to my lips that I looked up to see who had rescued me.

  “You’re blue,” Danica said.

  I managed a laugh, though it sounded more like a cough.

  “It’s really not funny. You’re probably hypothermic.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t know why you’re apologizing. You’re the one who’s probably hypothermic.”

  “Right.” I unbuckled my boots with clumsy fingers. “Thanks for letting me in.”

  Save a single lamp on a filing cabinet, the den was completely dark—every curtain drawn, every light put out—but it was wonderfully warm. Someone must have fixed the boiler at last. “Where are the others?” I said. I was getting déjà vu.

  “Out searching for you. Nadine saw the broadcast when she was walking back from the Juditheon.”

  “Jaxon went, too?”

  “Yup.”

  Maybe he cared more than I thought he did. Jaxon rarely did search work (“I’m a mime-lord, O my lovely, not a mime-peasant”), but suddenly he was leaping to my rescue. Danica took a seat on the footstool and pulled a familiar machine toward the wing chair.

  “Here.” She unhooked the oxygen mask from the tank. “Take a few breaths. Your aura’s all over the place.”

  I lifted the mask to my face and inhaled. Fear is your real trigger, Warden had told me. Warden, who had known more than anyone about dreamwalking.

  “How’s your head?” I said.

  “Concussed.” As she turned her head to the light, I could make out the long cut above her eye, held together with a series of thin stitches.

  “Are you all right now?”

  “As ‘all right’ as you can be with mild traumatic brain injury. Nick stitched it up.”

  “Have you been back to work since we got back?”

  “Oh, yeah. They would have been suspicious if I didn’t go. I did a job the next day.”

  “While concussed?”

  “Didn’t say I did a good job.”

  I took another breath from the oxygen mask. A botched job by Danica Panić was probably still a lot better than what most engineers could manage on top form.

  “Going to turn off the light downstairs. Jax said we had to be in lockdown mode.” She got up. “Don’t turn anything on.”

  As soon as she was gone, the æther flickered at eye level, disturbing my vision. Pieter Claesz, Eliza’s favorite art muse, was beaming deep reproach at me.

  “Hi, Pieter,” I said.

  He floated into the corner to sulk. If there was one thing Pieter hated, it was people leaving for months at a time without a word of explanation.

  Danica puffed her way back up to the landing. “I’ll be in the garret,” she said. “You can finish my coffee.”

  Warmth was finally reaching my core. I took in the familiar surroundings as I sipped the tepid coffee. In the mirror, I caught sight of a greyish stain around my lips. My fingertips had the same discoloration.

  The smell of the den fell like dust around me: tobacco, paint, lignin, rosin, cutting oil. I’d spent most of my first year working at one of these tables, doing research into the history and spirits of London, studying On the Merits of Unnaturalness, sorting out old newspaper clippings from the black market, making and updating lists of the voyants registered in I-4.

  My heart caught at the sound of keys in the lock. Boots thundered on the stairs, and the door was flung open. Nadine Arnett stopped dead when she saw me. Since I’d last seen her, she’d cropped her dead-straight hair so it just covered her ears.

  “Wow,” she said. “I just ran all over I-4 looking for you, and here you are, drinking coffee.” She dumped her coat on the back of an armchair. “Where have you been, Mahoney?”

  “I was on Grub Street.”

  “Well, you could have sent us a memo. Why haven’t you been here since we got back?”

  I was saved from answering when the door slammed again, and Zeke came charging up the stairs.

  “There’s no sign of her,” he said, out of breath. “If you call Eliza we can head over to—”

  “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “What?”

  She pointed. When he saw me, Zeke came straight to my side and wrapped me in a tight hug. The gesture took me by surprise, but I returned it. He and I had never been close. “Paige, we were so worried. Did you come here by yourself? Where have you been?”

  “I was with Nick.” I looked first at him, then at Nadine. “Thank you, both of you. For coming to get me.”

  “Didn’t have much of a choice.” Nadine unzipped her boots. One of her shoulders was hooded by a thick scab, encircled by livid skin. “Jax hasn’t stopped going on about you since we got back from Oxford. ‘Where’s my mollisher? Why can’t someone find her? Nadine, you do it. You find her. Do it now.’ You’re damn lucky he pays me, or I might be irritated.”

  “Stop it,” Zeke murmured. “You were just as worried as the rest of us.”

  She kicked off her boots without comment. I glanced at the doorway behind them. “Did you split up to search?”

  “Yeah,” Zeke said. “Did Jaxon say to lock up, Dee?”

  “Yes, but don’t. We’re not leaving them outside.” Nadine looked between the curtains. “You two get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “You look like you’re about to keel over. Just take forty.”

  I didn’t move from the chair. The warmth of the den had made me drowsy, but I had to stay alert. I might still have to run tonight.

  Zeke opened the doors of his box-bed (so Jaxon called it, though it looked remarkably like a cupboard) and sat on the quilt to pull off his shoes. “Is Nick at work?”

  “He might be back at Grub Street by now,” I said.

  “I tried calling him earlier.” He paused. “Do you think they suspect him?”

  “Not unless he’s said something to make them suspicious.”

  There was silence after that. He lay on the quilt and closed one of the doors, gazing at the photographs and posters he’d glued to the top of the box. They were mostly of free-world musicians, with a single shot of him and Nadine in a nondescript bar, wearing bright clothes and smiles. None of the rest of his family, or any friends from back home. Nadine stood at the window, her pistol tucked against her side.

  I turned on the small TV in the corner. Jaxon hated us watching it, but even he liked to keep an eye on what Scion was saying. The screen was split down the middle, with Burnish on one side, in the studio, and a little raconteur on the other. This one was standing outside the front gate of the Tower, her red coat whipped and battered by the wind.

  “. . . Guard Extraordinary say the prisoners were able to escape by using Felix Coombs’s unnatural influence on their newest guard member, who had no idea what to expect from the detainees.”

  “Of course,” Burnish said. “What a horrifying experience that must have been. We’re going to leave you now and talk about the most notorious of these individuals: Paige Eva Mahoney, an Irish immigrant from the southern farming province, situated within the Inquisitorial region of the Pale.” The area was highlighted on a map. “Mahoney is charged with murder, high treason, sedition, and evasion of arrest. First, we’ll speak to renowned Scion parapsychologist Dr. Muriel Roy, who specializes in the study of unnaturalness in the brain. Dr. Roy, do you suspect that it was Paige Mahoney that coordinated this escape? She lived with her father, Dr. Mahoney, for nearly two decades without him having any idea of her condition. That’s some real deception, isn’t it?”

  “It is, Scarlett—and as Dr. Mahoney’s long-time supervisor, I can only emphasize that Paige’s unnaturalness was just as much of an awful shock to him as it was
to us . . .”

  They showed a short video of my father leaving the Golden Lane complex, shielding his face with his data pad. My fingers dug into the arm of the chair. When she talked about him, Burnish used his birth name, making puzzled faces as she sounded out the syllables: Cóilín Ó Mathúna. He’d had his name anglicized to Colin Mahoney on our arrival in England, as well as changing my middle name from Aoife to Eva, but apparently Burnish didn’t care for petty legalities. By exposing that name, she labeled my father as alien, as Other. Heat stroked my eyes.

  All my life my father had been distant. The night I’d gone missing had been the first time in months that he’d shown me affection, when he’d offered to make me breakfast and called me by my childhood nickname. He’d been shaking in the coffeehouse, grasping the hands of the woman who’d been sitting with him. But to avoid the accusation of harboring an unnatural—a crime that could lead him to the block—he would have to publicly disown me. To deny that he’d ever seen the part of me that had defined my existence since I was a child.

  Did he hate me for what I was, or Scion for bringing us here?

  ****

  The bed was divided from the rest of the room with a translucent curtain. On the left of the pillow was a large window with wooden shutters, which looked down on the beautiful courtyard behind the den. Beyond the curtain, a Lanterna Magica, a white noise machine, and a portable, leather-bound record player stood in a large cabinet: all atmospheric tools, designed to put me in a fit state for dream-walking. Opposite the door was a bookshelf, cluttered with stolen bits of memorabilia and cases of dreamwalker fuel: painkillers, Nightcaps, adrenaline.

  I stirred from sleep with my sixth sense trembling. My old room, with its crimson walls and the ceiling painted with a thousand stars. Jaxon Hall was sitting on the armchair, watching me through the veil.

  “Well, well.” His face was half in shadow. “The sun rises red, and a dreamer returns.”

  He wore his silk brocade lounging robe. When I didn’t reply, a smile pulled at one corner of his mouth.

  “I always rather liked this room,” he said. “Quiet. Close. A fit place for my mollisher. I understand Alfred brought you back.”

  “Some of the way.”

  “Sagacious man. He knows where you belong.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  We studied each other. In four years of knowing him, I’d never really sat down and looked at Jaxon. White Binder. King of Wands. The man who had made me his sole heir, giving me unparalleled respect from people three or four times my age. The man who had taken me into his home and sheltered me from the eye of Scion.

  “We are overdue a little tête-à-tête.” Jaxon crossed one leg over the other. “We have our differences, I know, my Paige. I sometimes forget that you are nearly twenty years of age, drunk on the sweet ambrosia of independence. When I was twenty, my only friend in this world was Alfred. I had no mime-lord, no mentors, no friends of whom to speak. An unusual situation, given that I started life under the watchful gaze of a kidsman.”

  I pulled the curtain from between us. “You were an urchin?”

  “Oh, yes. Surprising, isn’t it? My parents were hanged when I was only four. Probably blockheads, or they wouldn’t have let themselves get captured. They left me alone in the citadel, penniless. I couldn’t always afford fine clothes and famous spirits, my mollisher.

  “My kidsman made me steal from amaurotics. She worked with two others, and together they controlled a flock of eighteen sorry gutterlings. Any money I earned was taken from me, and in return, I was tossed the occasional scrap of food. I had always dreamed of going to the University, of being a man of letters—some great, scholarly clairvoyant—but all the trio did was laugh. They told me, dear Paige, that I had never been to school, and while I could pry watches and data pads from amaurotics, I never would. School would cost money, and besides, I was unnatural. I was worthless. But when I turned twelve, I felt an itch. An itch beneath my skin, impossible to reach.”

  His fingers strayed to his arm, as if he could still feel it. There was a reason he’d always worn long sleeves. I’d seen the scars before, long white marks that ran from the creases of his elbows to his wrists.

  “I scratched the itch until my arms bled and my fingernails broke. I would scratch my own face, my legs, my chest. My kidsman threw me out to beg—she thought my wounds would attract public sympathy, you see—and indeed, I never made as much coin as I did when I was itching.”

  “That’s sick,” I said.

  “That’s London, darling.” His fingers tapped his knee. “By the time I was a young man of fourteen, nothing had changed, except that I carried out more dangerous crimes for mouthfuls of bread and sips of water. I grew ill with fever; I burned for independence, for vengeance—and for the æther. Though I was sighted and had an aura, the true nature of my gift had never revealed itself to me. At least if I understood my clairvoyance, I would think, I could make my own money and keep it. I could read people’s palms or show them cards, like the buskers in Covent Garden. Even they laughed at me.”

  He told the tale with a smile; I wasn’t laughing.

  “One day, it all became too much. Like a doll dropped to the ground, I broke. It was winter, and I was so very, very cold. I found myself sobbing on the ground in I-6, half-mad and ripping at my arms. Not a single soul helped me: no amaurotics, no voyants.” He said all this in a sing-song tone, as if he were telling a bedtime story. “I was close to shouting out my clairvoyance to the world, to begging the SVD to take me to the Tower, or Bedleem, or some other hell on earth—until a woman knelt beside me and whispered in my ear, ‘Carve a name, sweet child, a long-dead name.’ And with those words, she disappeared.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Someone to whom I owe a great debt, O my lovely.” His pale eyes were in the past. “I knew no long-dead names—only the names of those I wanted dead, which were plentiful—but I had nothing else to do but die. In light of that, I walked four miles to Nunhead Cemetery. I couldn’t read the names on the graves, but I could copy the shapes of the letters.

  “I was too frightened to carve. Instead, I chose a grave, cut my finger and wrote the name in blood along my arm. As soon as the last letter was finished, I felt the spirit stir at my side. I spent a long, delirious night in that cemetery, sprawled among the headstones, and all night long I felt the spirits dancing from their graves. And when I woke, the itch was gone.”

  A muddled image drifted through my thoughts: a little girl in a poppy field, her hand outstretched, and the blinding pain of the poltergeist’s touch. I’d been younger than Jaxon when my gift had first emerged, but until I’d met him, I’d had no idea what I was.

  “I cut the spirit’s name into my skin, and he taught me how to read and write. When he had served that purpose, I released him and sold him for a modest sum, enough to get me a month’s worth of hot meals,” Jaxon recalled. “I returned to the kidsmen for a short while—long enough to practice my art—and then, at last, I left.”

  “Didn’t they come after you?”

  “Later,” he said, “I went after them.”

  I could only imagine the sorts of deaths he must have given those three kidsmen. Fiercely imaginative, Alfred had called him.

  “After that, I began my research on clairvoyance. And I found out what I was,” he said. “A binder.”

  Abruptly, Jaxon got to his feet and walked to the forbidden Waterhouse painting that hung on the wall. It depicted two half-brothers, Sleep and Death, lying on a bed together with their eyes closed.

  “I told you this because I want you to know that I understand. I understand what it is to be fearful of your own body’s power. To be a vessel of the æther,” he said. “To never trust yourself. And I empathize with that burning desire for independence. But I am not a kidsman. I am a mime-lord, and I consider myself a generous one. You are allowed a little coin for your own uses. You are given a bed. All I ask is that you obey my orders, as any mime-lord a
sks of his or her employees.”

  I knew it could be worse—that I was lucky. Eliza had told me as much. Jaxon turned to look at me again.

  “I lost my temper in Oxford. I suppose you did, too. That you don’t really wish to leave Seven Dials.”

  “I wanted to help other voyants. Surely you can understand that—you of all people, Jax?”

  “Of course you wanted to help them, sweet, selfless soul that you are. And I, perhaps, was too concerned about protecting you to think of those other voyants. It was beastly of me to threaten you, and I fully deserve your displeasure.” He touched the backs of his fingers to my cheek. “You know I would never surrender you to those awful barbarians in Jacob’s Island. No splanchomancer will ever lay a finger on my dreamwalker, I promise you.”

  “Did you try to find me?” I said. “When I went missing.”

  He looked wounded. “Of course I did. Do you think me so heartless, darling? When you didn’t arrive on that Monday I had every trusted clairvoyant in I-4 out looking for you. I even involved Maria’s and Didion’s nitwits in the search. I had to keep the information out of Hector’s oily clutches, of course, so the operation was conducted sub rosa. But I did not give up, I assure you. I would sooner return to the streets in rags than let Scion take my dreamwalker.” With a sniff, he turned to the two reservoir glasses on my nightstand. “Here. The green fairy heals all.”

  “You never take this out.”

  “Only on extraordinary occasions.”

  Absinthe. His long fingers dealt lithely with the accoutrements: the slotted spoon, the sugar cubes, and water. The liquid turned opalescent. Few Scion denizens had the constitution for alcohol, but my injuries were deep enough for me to risk the headache. I took the glass.

  “You were meeting with Antoinette Carter,” I said. “That day in London, when Nick shot me. Why?”

  “I came across some old recordings of her performances while I was at the Garden that month. I was interested in studying her gift and managed to contact her via Grub Street, who publish her writing here.” He took a delicate sip from his glass. “Alas, thanks to the Rephaim’s interference, she slipped between my fingers.”