December 3, 2059
The train glided across the snowbound English countryside. Not that we could see any of it—the four of us were hidden in a small baggage compartment—but Alsafi’s contact had given us a satellite tracker, a requirement for safe passage, allowing us to watch the progress of our journey.
We had met the contact outside Euston Arch station, and she had sneaked us on to a non-stop service after pressing the tracker into my hand. Another member of Alsafi’s network would take us to a safe location in Manchester.
I had decided, in the end, to take Eliza with us, too. She and Tom had long since fallen asleep, but Maria and I were alert.
“So,” Maria said, “the plan—such as it stands—is to locate this person Danica thinks can help us—”
“Jonathan Cassidy,” I said.
“—locate the factory where the portable scanners are being made, and infiltrate Senshield’s manufacturing process. Find out how they build the scanners. That’s it? That’s the famous plan?”
“Well, it’s a start. If you want to dismantle something, you should know how it’s put together. There must be a point at which an ordinary piece of machinery is converted to an active Senshield scanner.” I sighed. “Look, we don’t have any other leads. And you never know: we might unearth some information about Senshield’s core, and how it’s powered—and where it is.”
“Hm.” She peered at the tracker. “Let’s hope Danica got her facts straight this time, or we could find ourselves walking into another trap.” The light from the screen tinged her face with blue. “There’s some information in here about ‘enclaves,’ but I don’t understand it.”
I took it from her and tapped a tiny symbol of a house on the screen. ENCLAVE, the tracker read. LOOK FOR BLACK HELLEBORE.
“What’s black hellebore?” Maria said.
“He’s using the language of flowers,” I realized, after a moment. “Black hellebore points to the relief of anxiety. We must be able to find shelter and supplies where it grows.”
Alsafi must have been preparing for an emergency like this for a long time. Interesting that he spoke the language of flowers, the code the syndicate had used in its scrimmages for years. I had never liked him in the colony, but his work was turning out to be vital to our survival.
While Maria dozed, I occupied myself by studying Scion Britain on the tracker. The territory covered the places that had once been called Scotland and Wales, which were no longer recognized as separate countries; England and Britain were used almost interchangeably by Scion. The island was divided into eight regions, each of which had one citadel, which acted as its regional “capital”—though all bowed to the will of London. The surrounding areas were peppered with towns, villages and conurbations, all under the yoke of Scion outposts. We were headed into the North West region, to its citadel—Manchester, center of industry.
It had been ten years since I had last left London. It had kept hold of me for so long.
I nodded off against the side of the compartment for a while, my hand still curled around the tracker. Everything that had happened over the last few days had left me hungry for sleep.
At just past one in the morning, the train came to a halt, jolting me awake. Maria took the tracker from my unresisting hand. When she saw our location, she stiffened.
“Something’s wrong. We’re still forty miles away.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the delay in your journey to Manchester. This is Stoke-on-Trent.” I pressed my ear to the wall, straining to hear the muffled voice. “Under new regulations imposed by the Grand Commander, all Sciorail trains from London are now subject to regular checks by Underguards. Please accommodate their needs as they move through the train.”
My heart pounded. Had Vance snared us again already? She was always one step ahead—always waiting for us, somehow.
Maria shook the others awake. We gathered our belongings and crept toward a sliding door, which would allow us to steal away without the Underguards seeing. I reached for a lever marked EMERGENCY DOOR RELEASE. As it pushed outward and glided aside, letting in an icy gust of wind, I glanced out of the compartment, searching for oncoming trains. Mercifully, there was no one on the other platform.
“Now,” I whispered.
The Underguards were getting close—I sensed them. Eliza carefully turned and swung her legs on to a short ladder, which took her down to the ballast between the tracks.
Footsteps slapped along the platform, and I caught a snatch of voices. “. . . why Vance thinks they’re going to be here . . .”
“Waste of time.”
I went next, followed by Tom. As Maria got out, she grabbed at the door for support, causing it to slide shut.
“As soon as they leave,” I breathed, “we get back on.”
We edged a little farther down the track, shivering in the frigid air. When the Underguards entered the baggage compartment, we all pressed ourselves against the train and grew still, waiting for one of them to look out and see us. Finding nothing of interest, they soon retreated, muttering about paranoid krigs and pointless work. I motioned to Maria, who reached up to grasp the door—only to find that there was no handle. The only thing there was a fingerprint scanner. We were shut out of the train.
As the Underguards left the platform, a whistle sounded in the station.
Too late. The train was moving. We didn’t have long before we were exposed on both sides. I beckoned frantically to the others; Tom pulled Maria away from the door. We sprinted back the same way the train had come, into billows of snow, while our ride left Stoke-on-Trent without us.
We kept running, our boots crunching through ballast. Only when we were a fair distance from the station did we slow down to catch our breath. We helped each other over the fence, on to the street, and clustered beneath a bus shelter, heads bent to see the tracker. I brought up a map of our location, which offered up morsels of data about Stoke-on-Trent. Status: conurbation. Region: Midlands. Nearest citadel: Scion Citadel of Birmingham.
“We can’t stay here for long,” I said. “Outlying communities are too dangerous. They’re much more observant than people in the citadels.”
Maria nodded. “We’ll have to walk.”
Eliza was already shivering. “In this snow?”
“I walked across countries to get to Britain, sweet. We can make it. And let’s face it: it wouldn’t be the most insane thing we’ve done this week.” Maria peered over my shoulder at the tracker. “Looks like twelve hours on foot to the center of Manchester. Probably a little longer, in this weather.”
I clenched my jaw. Every hour left the Mime Order in more danger. “There’s an enclave farther north.” I tapped the tracker. “We’ll walk from now until sunrise, stop there, and press on when it gets dark again. The contact we’re due to meet will guess that something went wrong.”
Maria patted Tom on the back. “Can you make it that far?”
Tom had a slight limp from an old injury to his knee. “There’s no other choice,” he said, “unless we mean to stay here and wait for the Gillies to find us in the morning.”
I adjusted my winter hood so only my eyes were uncovered. “Then let’s stretch our legs.”
Although Stoke-on-Trent was quiet in the small hours, it put me on edge. Even a notorious outlaw could be anonymous in the capital of all Scion, but not in settlements like these. It reminded me of Arthyen, the village where I had first met Nick. Its residents had been on a permanent quest to see unnaturalness in their neighbors.
We stole through the streets, passing darkened shops, small transmission screens, and houses with the occasional lit window. Maria went ahead to scout for cameras and guide us out of their way. I only managed to relax a little when the streetlamps were far behind us and we were out in the countryside. It wasn’t long before we crossed the regional boundary, which was marked by a billboard reading WELCOME TO THE NORTH WEST.
For a while, we risked the road, which had been recently cleared of snow. Ruined churches dotted our way. Tom found a sturdy branch to use as a staff. To distract myself from the blistering wind, I started counting stars. The sky was clearer here, and the stars burned far brighter than they did in London, where the blue haze of the streetlamps watered down their light. As I picked apart the broken necklaces of diamond, trying to find the constellations, I wondered why the Rephaim had taken the stars’ names as their own. I wondered why he had chosen Arcturus.
After a truck gunned past us and blared its horn, we ducked under a barbed-wire fence into the fields, where snowdrifts were piled like whipped cream. More of it was falling, catching in my lashes. We had the tracker, but it was so disorienting, with the black sky above us and white as far as the eye could see below, that we finally risked switching on our flashlights. The world around us was drained of color, flickering with snowflakes.
“I can’t wait to advertise the Mime Order to the n-northerners. ‘Join Paige Mahoney for unexpected rambles through snow and shit,’” Maria bit out through chattering teeth.
I chased white powder from the tracker again. “Nobody s-said the revolution would be glamorous.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I like to think that in the great uprisings of history, they had beautiful d-dresses and decadence to go with the misery.”
Tom managed a chuckle.
“If my Scion History class on the French had it right,” I said, through numb lips, “the dresses and decadence were p-part of what caused those uprisings.”
“Stop spoiling my fun.”
We passed a row of pylons, steel goliaths in the frozen sea. The power lines above us were so laden with ice that some of them almost touched the ground. I reached into my jacket, where I had stashed some of the precious heat packs Nick had given me, and handed them out to the others. When I cracked one, warmth bled into my torso.
The conditions had one advantage: they stopped me thinking about anything but keeping warm. They stopped me thinking about Warden, about whether I had made the right choice in telling him that it was over. Thoughts like those would lead me down a darker path than the one I walked on now. Instead, I envisioned a glorious bonfire and promised it would be waiting for me at the end of every field we crossed, over every wall and fence we encountered. By the time the sun climbed over the horizon, turning the sky a moody red, my muscles were on fire, I could no longer feel my toes, and I was so caked in snow that the black of my coat and trousers had been engulfed by white.
The first we saw of the enclave was a lodging-house with a thatched roof, so covered in snow that it looked like an ornament for a cake. I could just see the clusters of white flowers on its windowsills.
“There,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken in hours. “Black hellebore.”
Maria squinted. “Where?”
Eliza pulled down her scarf. “You know black hellebore is white, don’t you?”
“Of course. N-nothing makes sense.” Maria stomped ahead. “These people had better have hot chocolate.”
We walked faster through the last stretch of field, coaxing our legs into carrying us just a little farther. It must have been too early for anyone to have cleared the snow from the village: the few parked cars were buried, and there was no evidence of roads or paths beneath it.
Something pricked at my sixth sense, stopping me in my tracks as Eliza circled around to the front of the lodging-house. I had the sudden notion that I had been somewhere like this before, though I was certain I had never set foot in the North West. There were no spirits. Not one. A warning beat in the pit of my stomach: stay away, stay away.
That was when Eliza let out a blood-stewing scream. It jolted adrenaline through my veins, giving me the strength to pull my knife from my boot and run over with Maria. We found Eliza beside a fence, one hand clamped over her mouth. The snow before her was marbled with crimson.
A bird croaked at us and fluttered off the wreckage of a human being. The ribcage was torn open, bone laid bare beneath drapes of flesh, and most of the left arm was missing, but the face, the face of a woman—untouched. Dark hair was strewn across the snow.
Shock made my ears ring. Human remains littered the village. The victims had been decapitated, dismembered, thrown, and mauled in the rage of an eternal hunger. A shroud of snow glistened over the bodies. A head had been tossed into another garden of hellebore, bruising the white blooms with blood. The weather had kept flies at bay, but they must have been lying here for a day, at least.
“What did this?” Maria muttered.
“Emim.” I turned my back on the slaughter.
“Let’s bury them.” Tom swallowed. “Poor bastards.”
“We don’t have time to bury them, Tom,” Eliza said, her voice cracking. “It could come back.”
Tom traded a look with Maria, whose pistol was in her hands. It wouldn’t help her. They might have learned a little about the Emim from The Rephaite Revelation, and now they knew what they did to flesh, but they had no idea what it was like to be in their presence.
My boots sank to the ankle as I followed my instinct to the edge of another field. When I found the source of my unrest, it took all my nerve not to run at once. I dug through the snow with gloved fingers, revealing a perfect circle of ice—too perfect to be naturally occurring.
This was where the monster had come through. The Ranthen knew how to close the doorways to the other side, but it was an art they had never shared with their human associates.
“We have to leave,” I said. “Now.”
Even as I said it, an eldritch scream echoed over the snowdrifts. A sound exactly like the cries that must have risen from this village when the creature came, a sound that grated along my spine and raised every hair on my nape. Eliza grabbed my arm.
“Is it close?”
“I can’t sense it.” All that meant was that it was slightly more than a mile away. “It will come back here, though, to its cold spot. Come on. Come on,” I barked at Maria, who seemed rooted in place.
So we pressed on through the fields, away from the village of the dead.
Nashira had told us that Sheol I had been there for a reason: to draw the Emim away from the rest of the population. They were attracted to ethereal activity like sharks to blood. “No matter what the costs of that colony, it served well as a beacon,” Warden had told me. “Now they will be tempted by the great hive of spirits in London.” London and elsewhere, it seemed. The voyants gathered in the enclave must have tempted the Emite from its lair.
I had never wanted to believe that Nashira was right: that by rendering the colony useless, I had put lives at risk. That Warden and I might be responsible for the deaths of everyone in that village.
An hour later, we were crossing yet another field, our heads bowed against the roar of the wind, leaden with exhaustion. It felt as if splinters of glass were slashing me across the eyes. It was only fear of the Emite that kept us moving, but it stayed off my radar. It hadn’t caught wind of us.
We heard the car coming from a long way off. The engine sounded like a death rattle of a rusty tractor, so it was unlikely to be a Scion vehicle, but we couldn’t take any chances. Wordlessly, we made for the hedgerow that ran alongside the main road and hunkered down behind it. Minutes later, our faces were dappled by the glow of headlights.
The car pulled over close by. Too close. It was a small, urban runaround, coated in soot. I told myself it was just turning—until the door opened, and a silhouetted figure emerged.
“Paige Mahoney!”
We stared at each other.
“Hello?” A muttered curse. The newcomer tramped across the road and peered over the hedgerow. “Look, if you don’t come with me now, you’ll be on your own out here.”
Despite the urgency, his voice was somehow mellow, with a rolling accent I had occasionally heard at the black market. At first, I stayed put. Vance was laying traps for me, and I had no intention of running into her net again. But there was only one dreamscape in the car—no Vigiles lying in wait, no paratroopers above.
I rose, ignoring Maria’s hiss for me to get down. A flashlight glared in my direction.
“Ah, good. Found you,” the voice said. “Get in, quick. We don’t want to run into a night patrol.”
The words night patrol got the others moving. I squeezed into the back of the car with Tom and Eliza while Maria swung herself into the front. The man behind the wheel was probably in his mid-twenties, tangle-haired and bespectacled. His dark skin was smattered with freckles and small moles, and a good few days of stubble coated his jaw.
“Underqueen?” When I raised a hand, he glanced at me in the rear-view mirror. “I’m Hari Maxwell. Welcome to the North West.”
“Paige,” I said. “These are my commanders, Tom and Maria, and Muse, one of my mollishers.”
“Your what?”
I searched for a suitable alternative. “Second-in-command. Deputy.”
“Ah, right. I can call you Paige, can I? You don’t expect ‘Your Majesty?’”
He said this without a trace of sarcasm. “Just Paige,” I said.
A fine layer of coal dust surrounded his eyes. He had the aura of a cottabomancer, a rare type of seer that dealt with wine. “Sorry, what was your name, again?” he asked Eliza.
It took her a moment to notice who he was talking to. “Me?” She tilted her head. “Muse.”
“Doesn’t sound like a real name.”
“I only tell my friends my real name.”
Hari grinned and turned the car, yanking the gearstick. The engine retorted with a coughing fit.
“I waited for you at the station, then thought I’d head out to find you,” he said, once we were on our way. “Anyway, sorry to leave you stranded for so long. What happened?”
“There was a spot check at Stoke-on-Trent,” I said. “Underguards.”
“How did you get here, then?”
“We walked,” Maria said, “hence the ‘dejected snowman’ look we’re all modeling.”
Hari let out a breath. “I’m dead impressed you walked all this way. ’Specially in this weather.”
“Not much choice.” I peeled off my gloves. “What have you been told?”
“Just to assist you however I can.”
It was a forty-minute journey into the heart of Manchester. Hari put on some music. It was good, which meant it had to be blacklisted.
The Underguards had set us back by a day. Another day that the others were stranded in the crisis facility. Another day of ScionIDE hunting those who hadn’t made it into the Beneath. Sooner or later, Vance would begin to wonder why the scanners weren’t detecting as many voyants as she had anticipated, and she would make it her mission to root them out.
“Hari,” I said, “does ‘SciPLO’ mean anything to you?”
It was a while before he answered. “Yeah,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Means something to everyone here. They’re factories. Stands for Scion: Processing Line for Ordnance.”
“Ordnance,” Maria repeated. “Weaponry?”
“Right. Anything that can kill you, SciPLO makes it. Guns, ammo, grenades, military vehicles—anything that isn’t nuclear. Don’t know where they handle that.”
Maria raised an eyebrow at me.
This was promising. It fitted with what Danica had said. Senshield was a military project, after all.
“What about a Jonathan Cassidy, an ex-employee of SciPLO, wanted for theft?”
“Sorry,” Hari said. “Doesn’t mean anything to me, but I can do some digging for you. Anything else you want to know?”
“Are you aware of a link between SciPLO and Senshield?”
“No, but I’ve never worked for SciPLO, so I might not be the best person to ask.”
“Do you know anyone who does?”
“Not personally. Funny you should come here asking about it now, though: they’ve just introduced quotas in the SciPLO factories. The workers used to be able to sneak out the odd weapon, but the whole black market’s dried up in the space of two weeks . . . I never wanted a gun myself, but a lot of the Scuttlers carry them in case they run into Gillies.”
The handle of a knife protruded from his boot. Maria put her feet up on the dashboard. “Scuttlers?”
“The local voyants.”
“Who leads them?” I asked.
“We don’t have a big syndicate like yours. We just have the Scuttlers, and the Scuttling Queen.” He glanced at me with full-sighted eyes, taking in my red aura. “By the way, was it you who sent those images?”
So they had reached Manchester.
“Not me,” I said. “Tom.”
Hari shook his head in awe, smiling. “You must be the best oracle in Britain, mate.”
Tom chuckled. “I had some help.”
For the rest of the journey, I questioned Hari relentlessly about SciPLO. Fortunately, he was happy enough to talk. He told us that the arms industry had been based in Manchester for decades, and that SciPLO manufactured weapons for both the Vigiles and ScionIDE. It had always been a secretive division of the government, but particularly so in the last year, when production had increased exponentially. The workhands were now forced to do eighteen-hour shifts or risk losing their jobs, and they could face execution without trial for attempted theft or “industrial espionage,” which included talking to your own family about your work. Hari knew very little about what went on inside, but reassured me that somebody might be willing to share the information I needed.
The crystalline fields soon gave way to the austere buildings of the Scion Citadel of Manchester. High-rise apartment blocks were dotted far apart, like blunted gray digits, stern and monolithic, each a hundred stories high. The lower rungs of the citadel were suffocating under smog—you could hardly see the dingy blue of the streetlamps through it. Jerry-built houses cowered in the shadow of gargantuan factories, which vomited black smoke.
An industrial chimney had fallen on to a dwelling in a slum, crushing it. Every surface I could see was wallpapered with layer upon layer of soot. Most denizens wore a mask or respirator, as did the Vigiles, who had them built into their visors. That would work to our advantage.
“Do you have Senshield scanners in this citadel?”
“Not yet,” Hari said. “You have the prototypes in the capital, don’t you? Are they as bad as they sound?”
“Worse,” I said. “And they’re not prototypes now.” I glanced at him. “You don’t seem worried.”
“Ah, I doubt they’ll bring them north for a while. It’s people in the capital who matter. Scion wants them to feel safe.”
A humorless smile touched my lips. “People don’t feel safe up here?”
“Well, let’s see how you feel. If you end up believing there’s “no safer place’ than Manchester.”
He stopped the car on a street of red-brick buildings, most of which housed shabby establishments selling food: hot-water-crust pies, bone broth and fresh bread, pickled tripe. The snow had been swept on to the pavement and trampled into slush. I could just make out a rusted sign reading ESSEX STREET. When I opened the car door, a thick miasma scratched the back of my throat and spread a foul taste over my tongue. With my sleeve over my mouth, I followed Hari into a cookshop on the corner, the Red Rose, which promised traditional food from Lancashire. He led us through a warm interior, up a flight of stairs in the back, and through an unmarked door to the apartment above.
We gathered in a dimly lit hallway. “Welcome to the safe house.” Hari drew several chains across the door. “Don’t go back outside without a respirator. I’ve got a few spare.”
He showed us all to our rooms. While the others were placed on the second floor, with Maria and Eliza sharing the larger room, I was led up a flight of cramped stairs to the attic.
“And here’s yours,” he said. The floor creaked under our feet. “It’s not much, but it’s cozy. Bathroom’s down the hall if you want a wash. I’ll contact the Scuttling Queen for you.”
“No need for that.” I dropped my backpack onto the floor. “We might want local help at some point, but we should start searching for—”
“You can’t do anything here without being introduced to her.”
“What if I do?”
Hari blinked. “You can’t.” When I raised my eyebrows, he shook his head, looking uneasy. “You just can’t. She needs to know what’s going on in her citadel. If she finds out a voyant leader from London is on her turf without her permission, there’ll be trouble.”
I supposed I would expect the same, were our situations reversed. “How quickly will she get back to you?”
“When she chooses to.”
“I can’t wait long, Hari.”
“You can’t rush her.” He grimaced at my barely concealed frustration. “I’ll get her to see you soon, don’t worry.”
He closed the door. The attic was small, furnished with nothing but a bed, a clock, and a lamp. I left my snow-encrusted outerwear to dry over the radiator and sat beside it, warming my fingers. Every joint in my body felt stiff and rusted.
We needed to be out searching for Jonathan Cassidy, or sizing up the factories, trying to locate the one that made scanners. Anything might be happening in London while I waited for this Scuttling Queen to contemplate her schedule. This felt like trying to get an audience with Haymarket Hector again. I had grown too accustomed to the Underqueen’s power, to being able to walk where I chose without announcing myself. Here in Manchester, I had no such privilege.
Something made me focus on the golden cord. For the first time in months, I couldn’t feel Warden at all—not even his silence. Usually, I was aware of him in the same way I was aware of my own breathing, not noticing it unless something was wrong. Now he was gone.
Eliza appeared in a loose-fitting sweater with two mugs of tea, steering my thoughts away from him.
“Mind if I join you?”
I patted the floor in invitation. In our more carefree days in Seven Dials, I had always liked to sit and talk with Eliza in the evening.
We huddled up to the radiator, sipping the tea. “Paige,” she said, “the village—the Emim . . . is that going to keep happening now?”
“Unless the Ranthen know a way to stop it. Or unless Scion builds another colony.” I blew lightly on the tea. “We’re caught between being torn apart by monsters, or being ruled by them.”
“The Ranthen will have a solution. They know more about the æther than we do.” She pressed her sock-clad feet to the radiator. “I was thinking about the séance the whole way here. You never told me you saw ScionIDE, too.”
“When I was six, in Dublin. I don’t remember much of it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’d have shown you, in the séance,” I said, “but you heard Warden. I was too young for the memory to be useful.”
“I guess he knows what he’s talking about. Jax never wrote that much about oneiromancy.”
It occurred to me for the first time that Jaxon might have learned about oneiromancy from Warden, by observing him. It wasn’t mentioned in the original edition of On the Merits of Unnaturalness—but it had appeared in later ones. He must have done plenty of research on the new kinds of clairvoyance he encountered in the colony. Never a man to waste an opportunity.
“Warden’s . . . interesting, isn’t he?”
“That’s one word for him,” I said.
“You must have ended up getting quite close to him. Living with him for six months.”
I shrugged. “He’s a Rephaite. There’s only so close you can get.”
She was watching my face intently. When I didn’t elaborate, she said, “Paige, why did you choose Glym to be interim Underlord?”
“I thought he was the right person for it.”
“Okay, but shouldn’t it have been Nick? He’s mollisher supreme. Or . . . me, if not him.”
I had broken with another syndicate tradition, and I hadn’t even thought about it. Of course, the mollisher supreme always took over from the leader. Now I understood why Glym had been surprised. It must have seemed as if I didn’t trust the competence of my own mollishers.
“I didn’t mean to snub you,” I said. “Glym will be fair, but hard. It’s what they’ll need in the Beneath.”
“You don’t know what my approach would have been. I started off in the pits of the syndicate; I know how hard it can be, how tough you have to be. Don’t underestimate me, Paige—and don’t underestimate my loyalty to you.” I looked away. “You don’t know what it took me to leave Jaxon at the scrimmage. You and Nick were always together, from the moment you arrived. Jax was all I had.
“I still left him. You made me see that he was just like the dealers who used me as their runner. I saw that you wanted justice for everyone with an aura, not just those you considered superior. So I chose you.” Her eyes were full. “Don’t you dare take that for granted.”
She must have had to muster a lot of courage to say this. I tried to think of something, anything to say.
“Eliza,” I said, “I am sorry. I’ve just—”
“It’s okay. Look, I know how much you have on your shoulders. I just want you to know that you can trust me. With anything.”
I could see from her face that she needed me to understand this, to acknowledge it, but I did trust her; I always had—I had just never thought of telling her so. Maybe I had spent too much time around Rephaim, forgotten how to show what I was feeling. Before I could say anything in answer, Hari appeared in the doorway.
“The Scuttling Queen will see you tonight,” he said. “Seems like she might just move at your pace, Underqueen.”
I needed to look presentable. Not polished, but presentable. I brushed past an automatiste as I made my way to the shower, but he didn’t seem to be interested in small talk, which suited me just fine.
The bathroom was an icebox. I washed in a hurry, stepping in dirty water, then dressed in gray trousers, a rib-knitted black jersey with a roll neck, and a body-warmer. My hair was a lost cause, a knotted brier after hours in the wind, and I knew from experience that brushing it would cause mayhem. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, Hari elbowed his way through the door with a paper bag in hand.
“Ah, good.” He shut the door with his heel. “Here’s something to eat. You must be starving after that walk.”
I followed him into the kitchen, which was small and dim, like all the rooms.
“Sorry it’s so cramped. I’ve got one guy staying—you probably saw him—he’s wanted for painting a caricature of Weaver on the Guildhall.” Hari snorted with laughter as he set down several cartons. “Rag pudding.” He slid one across the table. “It’s not pretty, but it’s good.”
Inside was a gravy-soaked meat parcel, a spoonful of mushy peas, and thick-cut chips, cooked in beef dripping. It was only when I smelled it that I realized I was famished. As we ate, I noticed a pamphlet under his elbow.
“The Rephaite Revelation.” I brought it across the table, tracing the illustration on the front. The pamphlet I had written to warn the syndicate about the Rephaim and Emim, which the Rag and Bone Man had edited to work to the Sargas’s advantage. “I didn’t know it had made it up here.”
Hari gulped down his mouthful. “The voyant publishers in Withy Grove got hold of a copy and printed their own. People loved it. Then they reviewed it in the Querent, and since then—”
“The what?”
He swept aside some unopened mail and presented me with a saddle-stitched booklet with a coffee ring on the cover. “It’s a voyant newsletter. Scion is trying to stop it spreading, but it keeps coming back.”
The headline was printed in the old black-letter script. SECOND VIGILE REVOLT ON THE HORIZON AFTER SHOCKING ORACULAR IMAGES FROM THE MIME ORDER, it blared. In smaller print: THE QUERENT SAYS NO TO KRIGS IN MANCHESTER! NO TO SENSHIELD IN OUR CITADEL!
“Second Vigile revolt,” I read out. My pulse sharpened. “There was a first one?”
“It was only small, to be honest. A handful of our night Vigiles turned on the factory overseers a few days ago. Didn’t last long—they were easily brought down. But there are rumblings that there will be more.”
“Why?”
“They heard about the Senshield expansion in London and thought they were going to lose their jobs. They won’t be needed if Senshield spreads. And if they aren’t needed . . .”
He drew a line across his neck. I handed back the newsletter. Warden had been right; the Vigiles were ripe for revolution. Regardless of how long such a tense alliance would last, we might be able to call upon them while we were here without fear of betrayal—especially if we told them that Senshield was about to become portable. That would be the true death knell for their employment. And for them.
Tom came into the kitchen with Maria, who drew up a chair. Her hair was back in its usual pompadour style, and she had painted a ribbon of aquamarine across each eyelid.
“Interesting.” She gave the rag pudding a poke. “Hari, do tell us. Who is this mysterious Scuttling Queen?”
“Aye. Last I heard, it was a Scuttling King.” Tom cracked open a pudding box. In the gray light of morning, he looked his age, his face gaunt and speckled with liver spots. “Attard, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah—Nerio Attard. It’s an old family,” Hari said. “They’ve ruled the voyant community here for four generations. They tried to set up a Council of the North about thirty years ago, to bring more of us voyants together, but it didn’t last. Nerio got beheaded by Scion a couple of years back, but he had two daughters. Roberta is the one their father chose to take over in the event of his death—she gives me a bit of money to keep this place up and running. She’s the Scuttling Queen. Then there’s Catrin, the younger one, who’s sort of her muscle. She was detained a few days ago.”
“She helped the Vigiles stage their uprising.”
That meant that if she wasn’t already dead, she would be soon. “If I needed Roberta’s help,” I said, “do you think she would be open to co-operating with me, even if it’s just by sharing information?”
Hari rubbed the back of his neck. “Really depends how you present yourself when you see her. She’s not keen on competition, but as long as you don’t show signs of wanting to take over as leader of the Scuttlers or anything, it’s a possibility.” He eyed his watch before shoveling in a few more mouthfuls of food. “We’ll go to the Old Meadow now. Better to be early than late.”
I looked to Maria. “Where’s Eliza?”
She pulled a face. “I think something possessed her. I heard noises. No answer when I called her, and the door’s locked.”
Eliza wouldn’t want to miss this meeting, but she would be confined to bed for a good few hours after a trance. “Let me check on her,” I said. “Do you have any cola, Hari? And the key to her door?”
“Ah, yeah.”
He passed me a glass bottle from the fridge. I took it up to the first floor and unlocked the room. Eliza was lying unconscious where the rogue spirit had dropped her, her lips tinged with the blue of spiritual contact. Finding no ink or paints to hand, the muse had made her scratch the beginning of a face into the wall with her nails, leaving them ragged and her fingertips bloody. I lifted her chin and checked her airways, as Nick had taught me to do if she experienced an unsolicited possession, before I cleaned up her hand and covered her with blankets. She murmured incoherently.
The æther takes as often as it gives, people said in the syndicate. It was true. My nosebleeds and bouts of fatigue; Nick’s migraines; Eliza’s loss of control over her body. We all paid a price for our connection to the spirit world.
“She all right?” Hari said when I returned.
“She’s fine. Your wall, not so much.”
He frowned slightly before handing me a full-face respirator.
I saw the world through glass eyeholes. The mask was uncomfortable, but it would keep me anonymous. I laced my feet into snow boots and zipped myself into a hooded puffer jacket with a thick fleece lining.
We followed Hari from the cookshop at a distance. Not one star could be seen through the smog. When we reached a main road, we squeezed into an elevator labeled MONORAIL OF SCION MANCHESTER, which winched us up to a station platform.
It took less than a minute for a train to arrive. It must have been sleek once, but now it was worn and soiled, and it rattled on the track. I stepped over the gap and took a seat in the deserted carriage. Maria sat beside me and picked up a copy of the Daily Descendant.
The others removed their respirators. Taking advantage of the invisibility afforded by mine, I took a good look at the people around us. Despite the late hour, none wore everyday clothing. One man was clad in the crisp red of those who worked in essential services, but he stood out—most were in slate-gray or black boiler suits. Black was for skilled personnel, but I didn’t know what gray signified. Only two of the passengers wore the white shirts and red ties that filled the Underground every morning in London. Hari nudged me and tapped the window.
“There.”
It took me a moment to see it in the darkness. Its walls were as black as the sky.
A factory.
It dwarfed the monorail track. Even in the train, the clangor from inside made my teeth vibrate. SCIPLO was painted in towering vertical letters down one side of the building, with a white anchor beside it. Its employees, whose gray uniforms almost blended with the smog, filed in and out through titanic gates. Each pressed their finger to a scanner before entering or leaving. There were at least ten armed Vigiles at the gates, another six patrolling the street outside, and I had no doubt there would be more within those walls.
“Terrible life they have in there.” Hari shook his head. “The work kills you. They handle dangerous materials for long hours and not much money—plus, they get fined for the slightest thing. Most have to shave off their hair so it won’t get caught in the machinery.”
Tom’s brow was deeply furrowed. I remembered the factory in his dreamscape, the gloom and the dust.
“They’ve started beatings since the quotas were introduced. If you don’t meet your target, you’ll know about it in the morning.” Hari nodded to where a squadron of Vigiles was escorting several gray-clad workers. “Even the kids don’t escape it.”
I tensed. “They have children working in there?”
“Kids are cheaper. And small enough to clean under the machines.”
Child labor. It wouldn’t be tolerated in London, though enough unwanted children washed up on the streets there and ended up working for kidsmen for no money.
“Since you want to find out more about SciPLO, you could try and get one of the workhands to talk—if the Scuttling Queen gives you permission to do your investigating, that is—but it won’t be easy.” Hari pushed his glasses up his nose. “Might be an idea to visit Ancoats. A lot of factory workhands live in that district. Mostly Irish settlers.”
I watched the factory until it was out of sight.
We crossed a bridge over the River Irwell. Below us, dead fish rolled like balloons on the water.
After a while, the factories and foundries gave way to warehouses. Soon enough, we were stepping off the train and down a stairway to the street below. As my boot hit a manhole, I thought again of the Mime Order, and the people who were relying on me. I needed to persuade Roberta Attard that we presented no threat to her; that she should let us conduct our investigations in peace; that she should help us, even. Didion Waite had once described me as an “ill-mannered, jumped-up little tongue-pad” when I tried to sweet-talk him, which didn’t seem to bode well for our meeting, but Attard and I were both leaders of our respective communities. That had to count for something.
In the shadow of the track, letters on an archway declared this district to be the Old Meadow. The “meadow” in question was little more than a scuff of grass, encircled by a wrought-iron fence. In the feeble glow of a streetlamp, a group of children kicked a ball to one another, watched by a greyhound. One of them whistled as we came closer.
Hari pocketed his hands. “Tell her I’m here, will you?”
She threw the ball and took off across the grass. “Give us a fiver, Hari,” one of the boys wheedled. He was missing his front teeth and a chunk of fire-red hair. “Just for some grub.”
Hari opened his wallet with a long-suffering sigh. “You ought to be at the factory, you. You’ll starve.”
“Ah, sod the factory. I’ve done enough scavenging.” The boy held out a hand. Half of his index finger was missing. “Do us a favor, mate. I don’t want to be crawling under those machines again.” When Hari threw a coin, he caught it with a laugh. “You’re a good bloke, Hari.”
“Get that dog some grub, too. Where’d you even find him?”
“The McKays’ house, where the chimney fell. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
As the boy knelt to pet the greyhound, Tom shook his head. “Poor weans,” he muttered. “Just look at them.”
“Yeah,” Hari said sourly. “Just look at how much of my hard-earned money I give them.”
“Are they all orphans?”
“Yep.”
I watched the scene through my respirator. In London, I had never seen a child with missing fingers. Dockland workers and syndies, but never children.
Soon enough, the girl was back. “Come on, then,” she said to us. “The lady will see you now.”