The Mime Order

  “We’re on the same page, then.” The fire crackled. “Jax will be wondering where we are.”

  “Eliza’s gone back to the den. She’s saying we’ve stayed out late training in I-6.” He took the jar from my hand with a thin smile, but his face was wan. “You get some sleep, sötnos. You’ve seen enough today.”

  He unpacked the suture kit with steady fingers. I left, pulling the door to, but something made me stop. Zeke’s eyes flickered open, and seeing Nick, he smiled and murmured “hey.” Nick leaned down and kissed him, first on the forehead, then on the lips. I smiled. And there it was: a final, clean snip inside me, as if a thread had been cut.

  Then it was gone. Quietly, I closed the door.

  The chandlery had three floors, including the attic. It was a narrow building, packed with tiny rooms. The bathroom was about as wide as I was tall, tiled with cracked ceramic. I lit the stub of candle on the sink. The mirror confirmed that I wouldn’t look out of place among mudlarks. Dark blood plastered my clothes to my body and the skin around my lips was smudged with grey.

  A deep chill held fast to my bones. I would have done anything for a hot bath at that moment. I peeled off the clothes and bundled them into the corner. Water rattled through the pipes when I turned the aging shower’s dial, bursting out in a lukewarm sputter. Once I’d stood under the drizzle for a few minutes and scrubbed away the smell of salted Emite, I leaned close to the mirror to peel off my contacts. One of my pupils was dilated, taking up most of my iris. I blinked and looked at the candle, but my left pupil refused to react.

  There was a spare room on this floor, where Eliza had left a clean nightshirt on one of two identical beds. I buttoned the shirt and breathed in its delicate, floral smell. It was all I could do not to collapse, but I wouldn’t sleep for long in this room. A bed-warmer might shake the chill.

  I brushed out my wet hair and walked back to the landing, trying to ignore the dull ache in my side. As I headed for the stairs, Warden came up them. He stopped when he saw me.

  “Paige.”

  My arms were still covered in gooseflesh. Part of me wanted to go to him, but something warned me away.

  “Warden,” I said, too softly to be heard from downstairs.

  “You tried to possess the Emite.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Did you steal another memory?”

  “This time I am innocent of that.” Warden studied the painting on the wall. It was one of Eliza’s favorite pieces of art, something she’d worked on without spirits over the course of a year. “Your pupils are unequally sized. It is a sign that your silver cord has been shaken. Had the creature succeeded in trapping you, it would have devoured your spirit.”

  “If you’d let me in on that one,” I said, “I probably wouldn’t have tried walking in its dreamscape.”

  “Hindsight has given me wisdom on that matter.” He laid his hands on the banister. “I take it you were on the hill to talk in secret.”

  My voice was hoarse, but I made myself tell the story again. He listened without changing his expression.

  “A ‘gray market,’” he repeated. “I have not heard the term.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Then it seems a great deal hinges on your victory in the scrimmage.” His eyes burned away the gloom. “The man who lured you to the cold spot may have something to do with this operation.”

  I had to wonder how many people were involved. How many people were willing to kill and to die to protect whatever the Abbess and the Rag and Bone Man were plotting. “Will the Emim keep coming through?”

  “Oh, yes.” His hands tightened on the banister. “Now the penal colony has been abandoned, the Emim will no longer be attracted towards the spiritual activity there. No matter what the costs of that colony, it served well as a beacon. Now they will be tempted by the great hive of spirits in London. Cold spots to their realm can be closed, but the art is difficult.”

  “Their realm?”

  “A large part of the Netherworld is overrun with Emim. You may have noticed that that cold spot repelled spirits, rather than attracting them, for even spirits fear their side.”

  This must have been what Ognena Maria had meant all those weeks ago, when she’d said that spirits were disappearing from her section.

  “We can’t let them come here,” I said.

  Neither of us moved for a long time. Words kept stumbling to my lips and retreating again. He watched me now as he had once in a crowded room, always indecipherable. There was nothing that gave away how he felt—if he felt—when he looked at me.

  What had happened in the clearing, along with everything else, had left an ache behind my ribs. I’d learned too much in one day. With the smallest of movements, I shifted myself closer to him, resting my head against his arm. Warmth radiated from inside him, as if his chest was stacked with hot coals. His hands grasped the banister on either side of me, not quite touching my hips. The low sound he made sent a chain of tremors along my abdomen.

  When I lifted my chin, his nose listed against mine. My fingers traced the hard line of his jaw and the shell of his ear as I listened to his breathing and his heartbeat. They were just rhythms to him—not countdowns, like they were for me. That burning started in my dreamscape again, as it had once in the Guildhall.

  I had no name for what he made me feel. I had no real sense of what it was; only that it was blood-deep, like some long-forgotten instinct. Only that I wanted it to let it take me over.

  “I have thought about what you said,” he said. “In the music hall.”

  I waited. His finger followed the line that arced from the side of my palm, above my thumb, down to just above my wrist.

  “You are right. It is how they silence us. I will not be silenced, Paige, but nor will I lie to you. Our lifelines will meet only when the æther sees fit. That may not be often. It can never be always.”

  I linked his fingers through mine.

  “I know,” was all I said.

  23

  Liminal

  As soon as I closed the door to the attic, Warden took my face between his callused palms. All I could hear was my own breathing, my own heartbeat. My fingers found the key and turned it, locking myself into the darkness with a Rephaite. He was a creature of the limen; any false impression of humanity was gone. I smoothed my hands over his shoulders, up the slope of his neck, and at last, when my heart was pounding, his mouth took hold of mine.

  In the darkness, I was nothing but feeling. Fingers pushing through my hair, climbing up the column of my spine. I pulled him closer, draping one arm around his neck, winding my fingers into rough-spun hair. He tasted of red wine and something else, something earthen and rich and just faintly amaroidal.

  A callused palm came to rest against my bare stomach, where my breaths came quick and shallow. Until now, I hadn’t understood how much I’d wanted him to hold me, to touch me. Intimacy had no place in either of our worlds.

  Warden lifted me, swinging the floor from under my feet. His hand cupped my cheek, and we broke the silence with our breathing. He held me so our foreheads touched, as if he were reassuring me that this was all right. As if that wasn’t a lie. I pressed my mouth against his jaw, savoring the warmth of his skin and the low-pitched notes of Gloss that trembled in his throat.

  His dreamscape sent a tongue of fire across my flowers. There was still that voice in my head as I kissed him, as I whispered his name into his mouth. Stop, Paige, stop. An innate warning. The Ranthen could walk in and discover us, like Nashira had. But with this nocturne playing, the voice of reason was easy to ignore. He was right: this wouldn’t last forever. He would never be a steady presence in my life. But how much could a moment matter?

  We sank on to what felt like a buttoned couch, with my legs on either side of him and his arm wrapped around my hips. My fingers strayed to the welts that criss-crossed his back, the scars left for his treachery. Scars he’d received when a human traitor had fed information to Nashira.

&nbs
p; Warden grew still. I caught his gaze before I followed the branching scar tissue from his back, over his ribs, round to his abdomen. Their texture was almost waxen. Cold to the touch, like the ones on my hand.

  These were the prints of a poltergeist. Warden watched my face as I drew away, tracing a vicious mark along his ribcage.

  “Whose spirit was it?”

  “One of her fallen angels. The poltergeist.” His finger followed my jaw. “Naturally, its name is a closely guarded secret. Perhaps time has forgotten it.”

  I could envision no better way to control him than to ration out drops of amaranth for the pain. Nashira Sargas had more imagination than I’d given her credit for.

  We stayed there in the dark of the attic, sprawled in slats of moonlight. Adrenaline pulsed through my veins. The others wouldn’t pick up on our dreamscapes from the lower floor, but they might if they came upstairs.

  “I’ll still go out.”

  “That was an observation,” he said. “A selfish one. It has no bearing on my choices.”

  “It isn’t just that. It’s every reason under the sun.”

  “True enough.” He traced a sliver of moonlight across my waist. “A good thing, then, that we are not under the sun.”

  I smiled into his shoulder. Downstairs, someone was playing a piano. Not a whisperer. No spirits stirred to the rhythm. I looked up at Warden.

  “Cécile Chaminade. An elegy.”

  “Do you keep a jukebox in your head?”

  “Hm.” He pushed a curl from my eyes. “That would make a fine addition to my dreamscape.”

  There was a nervous tremor in my core, the same feeling I got when I discovered some rare ornament or instrument on the black market. The sense that my fingers would slip on its surface. That it would break before it saw the light of day. I laid a hand on his abdomen, so I felt it rise with each steady breath.

  “If you want this,” he said, very softly, “even if it does not last, it must be kept from the Ranthen.”

  Or they would destroy me. And him, and the alliance, all so we could touch and kiss and hold each other if we wanted. It was pure, reckless feeling, the sort Jaxon would scoff at.

  Warden’s gaze roved over my face. I was about to answer with a lie—it doesn’t matter—but it caught in my throat. He knew it mattered, and it hadn’t been a question. I turned over, so my back was against his chest, and looked up at the window.

  “I’ve been so blind,” I said. “ About the syndicate . . .”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “I’ve always known it was corrupt, but not like this. The Abbess and the Rag and Bone Man are doing something terrible, something to do with the Rephaim. And I can’t work out what it is, but I feel like the answer’s staring me in the face.” I traced the scars along his knuckles. “The traitor from the first rebellion. Did you ever see their face?”

  “If I did, I may never know. I was never told which human had betrayed us.”

  It must have eaten away at him for years, not knowing who had done this to him. His muscles tensed as he spoke.

  I took my hand from his stomach. “I’m going to have to enter Jaxon’s dreamscape at the scrimmage. I haven’t been in anyone else’s mind for a while.”

  He studied me for a while. “Do you intend to kill Jaxon?”

  The question gnawed at me. “I don’t want to,” I said. “If I can control him for long enough to make him surrender, I might still be able to win.”

  “An honourable choice,” he remarked. “More honorable than any the White Binder himself will make, I imagine.”

  “He risked everything to get me out of Sheol. He wouldn’t kill me.”

  “Let us assume, for safety’s sake, that he will try.”

  “Wasn’t it you who said ‘never assume’?”

  “I make some exceptions.” Warden sat back against the cushions. “It will be easy for you to enter my dreamscape now. By the time you face Jaxon, you will be exhausted and injured. You will need the last of your strength to make the jump.”

  “Let me try, then. Without the mask.”

  It was no small thing to let me in again, yet he didn’t raise a word of objection. I reached up to his nape and held him there, taking deep, slow breaths. I was already beginning to feel drowsy; slipping out of my body was easy.

  When I stepped into his dreamscape, I found myself in his hadal zone, where the silence pressed against me like a wall. Red velvet drapes swirled down from high above and vanished into bonfire smoke. My footsteps echoed as if I were walking through a cathedral, but this dreamscape remained a floating island in the æther, taking no clear form. It just was. Maybe the Netherworld was like this, a desolate realm with no life left in it. I pushed past the swathes of velvet, through each ring of his consciousness until I reached the very heart of Arcturus Mesarthim’s mind. His dream-form stood with its hands behind its back. A hollow, washed-out thing.

  “Welcome back, Paige.”

  The drapes surrounded us. “You’ve gone for a minimalist look, I see.”

  “I was never one for mental clutter.”

  But something had changed in this part of his mind. A flower had grown from the dust, with petals of a warm and unnameable color, sealed under the bell jar like a preserved specimen. “The amaranth.” I crouched down and touched the glass surface. “What’s it doing here?”

  “I do not claim to know how dreamscapes choose their shape,” he said, walking around it, “but it seems I am no longer an ‘empty shell,’ as you put it.”

  “Do you have defenses?”

  “Only those which my nature has gifted me. Jaxon will not have walls as strong as mine, but he may have manifestations of memory.”

  “Specters,” I recalled. I’d read about them in an early draft of On the Machinations of the Itinerant Dead, and seen them for myself when I’d glimpsed the insides of other dreamscapes. Silent, spidery figures that crawled in the hadal zone. Most people had at least one. Some people, like Nadine, had a dreamscape overrun with them. “Those are memories?”

  “In a manner of speaking. They are projections of one’s regrets or anxieties. When something ‘plays on your mind,’ as you say, it is the specters at work.”

  I stood. “Do you have any?”

  His head turned toward the drapes. Twelve specters had gathered at the edges of his twilight zone, held back by the light in the center of his dreamscape. They had no discernible faces, though their shape was loosely human. They were somewhere between solid and gas, with skin that seemed to slip and slide around smoke.

  “They cannot hurt your dream-form,” he said, “but they may attempt to block your path. You must not tarry, nor let them hold you.”

  I studied his collection. “Do you know which memory is which?” “Yes.” Warden watched them. “I know.”

  His profile was much harsher in his dreamscape, all the softness leached out of his features.

  I’d never touched another person’s dream-form. Entering a dreamscape was already an invasion of privacy, and it had always struck me as too cruel to contemplate, handling the image they held of their own nature. Leaving fingerprints on that image could do irrevocable damage: burst or bolster an inflated ego, shatter a last inch of hope. But my wanderlust had turned to lust and wonder. A thirst for knowledge, no matter how dangerous. So when Warden’s ember-eyes looked down at me, I reached up and laid my hand against his cheek.

  Cold against my fingers. Vibrations through my dream-form. His vision of me, in direct contact with his vision of himself. I had to remember that they weren’t my fingers, though they looked exactly like the ones I knew. These were my hands only as Warden perceived them. I let them rest against his face for a long while, tracing the firm lips and carved jaw.

  “Take heed, dreamwalker.” He lifted a hand to cover mine. “Self-portraits are as fragile as mirrors.”

  His resonant voice shook me to the core, snapping me out of it. When I returned to my body, I swung my legs over the edge of
the couch, my chest heaving. Doing this without the mask was still diffi- cult, teaching my body how to hold out without its most basic functions. Warden watched me from a distance until I got a handle on it.

  “You—” I caught my breath, one hand against my chest. “Why do you see yourself like that?”

  “I cannot see my own dream-form. I confess myself intrigued.”

  “It’s like a statue, but scarred, like someone’s taken a chisel to it. To you.” A frown creased my brow. “Is that how you see yourself?”

  “In a sense. Years as a blood-consort to Nashira Sargas certainly eroded my sanity, if nothing else.” He touched his thumb to my cheekbone. “You will not need to break from your body entirely during the scrimmage. Remember what I taught you. Leave enough of yourself behind to keep your life functions working.”

  I didn’t miss his avoidance, but I’d already invaded his privacy. “I don’t understand how.” I rested my head against his shoulder. “I can’t split my spirit between two bodies.”

  “You did it in the music hall. Do not think of it as splitting yourself,” he said, “but leaving a shadow behind.”

  In the moonlight, we watched one another for a while. One of us should have gone, but neither of us did. His fingers grazed a line from my temple to my neck, stroking downward to where the collar of my shirt fell open above my breasts. Emotion pulsed through the cord, too complex to pull apart.

  “You look exhausted.” The words rumbled through his chest.

  “It’s been a long day.” I held his gaze. “Warden, I need you to promise me something.”

  He only looked at me. I’d asked him for a favor once before, facing death at the hands of his fiancée.

  If she kills me, you have to let the others know. You have to lead them.

  I will not need to lead them.

  “If I lose the scrimmage,” I said, “make sure the gray market ends. Whatever it is.”

  It was a while before he answered. “I will do what I can, Paige. I will always do what I can.”