The Song Rising

  ‘Something’s wrong. We’re still forty miles away.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we apologise 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 towards 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 centre 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 neighbours.

  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 lorry 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 torches. The world around us was drained of colour, 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 adrenalin 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 torch 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 modelling.’

  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. S
enshield 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.