The Bone Season

  I stared into them. He stepped back and looked at Nashira.

  Silence reigned. Then the hooded Rephaim stood and applauded. I sat on the floor, stunned.

  Nashira knelt beside me and placed a gloved hand on my head. “Beautiful. My little dreamwalker.”

  I tasted blood. She knew.

  Nashira stood and turned toward Seb, who had watched with as much fear as his injuries would allow. Now his barely open eye came to rest on her as she walked to the back of the chair.

  “Thank you for your services. We are grateful.” She placed her hands on either side of his head. “Good-bye.”

  “No, please, don’t—please! I don’t want to die. Paige—!”

  She jerked his head to the side. His eyes widened, and a gurgle came from between his lips.

  She’d just killed him.

  “No!” The word ripped from my throat. I could hardly process it. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “You—you just—”

  “Too late.” Nashira let go of his head. It flopped. “You could have done it, 40. Painlessly. If only you’d done as I asked.”

  It was her smile that did it. She was smiling. I ran at her, raw heat writhing in my blood. Warden and Alsafi grabbed my arms, hauling me back. I kicked and thrashed and struggled until my hair was lank with sweat. “You bitch,” I screamed. “You bitch, you evil bitch! He wasn’t even voyant!”

  “True. He was not.” Nashira walked around behind the chair. “But amaurotic spirits make the best servants. Don’t you think?”

  Alsafi was about to dislocate my shoulder. I clawed at Warden’s arm, the bad one, the one I’d treated. He stiffened. I didn’t care. “I’ll kill you,” I said, and I aimed it at all of them. I could hardly breathe, but I said it. “I’ll kill you. I swear I’ll kill you.”

  “No need to swear, 40. Let us swear for you.”

  Alsafi threw me to the floor. My skull cracked against hard marble. My vision flashed. I tried to move, but something pinned me down. A knee on my back. My fingers dragged on the marble floor. Then a blinding pain in my shoulder, the most agonizing pain I’d ever felt. Hot, too hot. The smell of roasted meat. I couldn’t help but scream.

  “We swear your undying allegiance to the Rephaim.” Nashira never took her eyes off me. “We swear it with the mark of fire. XX-59-40, you are bound forever to the Warden of the Mesarthim. You will renounce your true name, as long as you shall live. Your life is ours.”

  The fire was in my skin. I couldn’t think of anything but the pain. This was it. They’d killed Seb, and now they were killing me. A needle caught the light.

  8

  Of My Name

  There was too much flux in my blood.

  I ran in circles through my dreamscape. Flux had deformed it, made the shapes and the colors rupture. I heard my heart pounding, the air burning up my throat, through my nose.

  They’re killing me. I thought this as I fought against my mind, watching it crumble like wood in a furnace. This was it. Nashira knew what I was. She’d poisoned me and now I was dying. It wouldn’t be long, after all, a dreamscape couldn’t keep its shape in a dead body. Then the thought unraveled and slipped away, and I was left wandering through the dark parts of my head.

  Then I found it. My sunlit zone, where beauty lived. Safety. Warmth. I ran toward it, but it was like running through wet sand. The dark clouds clung to me, hauling me back into cloud and shadow. I struggled against the flux, kicking and twisting myself free of its hold, and tumbled like a seed into the sunlight, into the field of flowers.

  Everyone in the world had a dreamscape, the beautiful mirage inside their mind. In dreams, even amaurotics saw their sunlit zone—just not very clearly. Voyants could see into their own minds, live in there until they starved to death. My sunlit zone was a field of red flowers, a field that rippled and changed depending on my mood. I saw flashes of the world outside my body, felt the roll in the earth as I emptied my stomach of my tiny meal. But in my mind I was calm, watching as flux wreaked havoc around me. I lay down in the flowers and waited for the end.

  I was back in the room at Magdalen. The gramophone was warbling nearby. Another of Jaxon’s blacklisted favorites, “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” I was lying on my stomach on the daybed, naked from the waist up. My hair had been twisted into a knot.

  My hand went to my face. Skin. Cold, clammy skin. I was alive. In pain, yes—but alive. They hadn’t killed me.

  I was too sore to lie still. I tried to sit up, but the weight of my head kept me from rising more than a few inches. The back of my right shoulder burned with a ferocious heat. A dull throb in my groin told me where I’d been injected—but this time the damage was deeper.

  Flux was one of the only drugs that worked better in an artery than it did in veins. My thigh was hot and swollen. My chest heaved. I was burning up. Whichever Reph had done this had not only been very clumsy, but very cruel. I had a vague memory of Suhail leering at me before the lights went out.

  Maybe they had tried to kill me. Maybe I was dying.

  I turned my head to the side. A fire had been lit in the hearth. And someone was in the room: my keeper.

  He was sitting in his chair, staring at the flames. I gazed across the room, hating him. I could still feel his hands on me, holding me back, stopping me from saving Seb. Did he harbor any guilt for that pointless killing? Did he care about the helpless slaves at Amaurotic House? I wondered if he cared about anything at all. Even his interactions with Nashira seemed mechanical. Did anything make this creature tick?

  He must have sensed my gaze, because he stood. I held still, scared to move. Too many parts of me hurt. Warden knelt beside the daybed. When he raised his hand, I flinched. He laid the backs of his fingers against my scorching cheek. His eyes had returned to neutral apple gold.

  My throat was sore, full of fever. “His spirit,” I forced out. It was agony to speak. “Did it leave?”

  “No.”

  It took all my strength to mask my pain. If no one had said the threnody, Seb would be forced to linger. He was still afraid. He was still alone, and worst of all, still a prisoner.

  “Why didn’t she kill me?” The words chafed my throat. “Why didn’t she just get it over with?”

  Warden ignored the question. After examining my shoulder, he took a chalice from the nightstand. It brimmed with dark liquid. I watched him. He lifted the chalice to my lips, taking the back of my head in one hand. I pulled against him. A soft growl escaped his throat. “It will ease the swelling in your leg,” he said. “Drink.”

  I jerked my head away. Warden took the cup from my lips.

  “Do you not wish to heal?”

  I stared him out.

  It must have been an accident that I’d survived. There was no reason for them not to have killed me.

  “You were branded,” he said. “You must allow me to treat the wound for a few days, or it will become infected.”

  I twisted to look at my shoulder, covering my breasts with the sheets. “Branded with—with what?” My fingers shook as I traced the taut skin. XX-59-40. No, no! “Oh—you bastard, you sick bastard—I’ll kill you. Just wait—when you’re asleep—”

  My throat was too sore. I stopped, heaving. Warden flicked his gaze over my face, like he was trying to read a foreign language.

  He wasn’t stupid. Why was he looking at me like that? They’d branded me like some kind of animal. Lower than an animal. A number.

  The silence was broken only by my gasping breaths. Warden placed a gloved hand over my knee. I pulled my leg from his grip, sending a bolt of pain down to my toes. “Don’t touch me.”

  “The brand will stop hurting, in time,” he said, “but your femoral artery is a different matter.”

  He slid his hand lower, pulling the sheets away from my leg. When I saw my bare thigh, I thought I would chuck up again. Swollen past its normal size, it was stained with bruises that had spread almost to my knee. The area around my groin was black and bloodshot. Warden appl
ied just the slightest bit of pressure to my leg, barely enough to spring a hair trigger. I choked.

  “This injury will not repair itself. No wound caused by flux can heal without a second, stronger antidote.”

  I thought I would die if he pressed any harder.

  “Go to hell,” I gasped out.

  “There is no hell. There is only æther.”

  I clenched my teeth, shaking with the effort of not sobbing. Warden removed his hand from my leg and turned away.

  I couldn’t tell how long I lay there, weak and delirious. All I could think was how much he must love this, seeing our natural roles restored. It was he with power over me this time, power to watch me suffer and sweat. And this time it was he with the remedy.

  Dawn broke. The clock ticked. Warden just sat in his chair, stoking the fire. I had no idea what he was waiting for. If he wanted me to change my mind about the remedy, he was going to be there a long, long time. Maybe he had just been told to watch me, to make sure I didn’t top myself. I can’t say I wouldn’t have tried. The pain was excruciating. My leg was rigid, and it only moved in spasms. The swollen skin strained and glistened, like a blister on the edge of bursting.

  As the hours crept past, Warden moved from place to place: the window, the armchair, the bathroom, the desk, back to the armchair. Like I wasn’t there. Once he left the room and came back with some warm bread, but I pushed it away. I wanted to make him think I was on hunger strike. I wanted my power back. I wanted to make him feel as small as I felt.

  The pain in my thigh refused to ease; if anything it got worse. I pressed the blackened skin. I kept on pressing, harder and harder, until stars burst in my eyes. I had hoped it would make me lose consciousness, just so I could have a few hours of relief, but all it made me do was throw up yet again. Warden watched as I choked acidic bile into a basin. His gaze was empty. He was waiting for me to give in, to beg.

  I looked at the basin through blurred eyes. I was starting to bring up blood, thick clots of it. My head rolled against the cushions.

  I must have fallen unconscious. It was getting dark again when I woke. Julian must be wondering where I was, assuming he’d been able to leave his residence. Probably not. My brain could only focus on these things because all my pain, inexplicably, had gone.

  So had the sensation in my leg.

  Fear chilled my spine. I tried to move my toes, to rotate my ankle, but nothing happened.

  Warden was at my side.

  “I should mention,” he said, “that if the infection is not treated, you are very likely to lose your leg. Or your life.”

  I would have spat at him, but the vomiting had dehydrated me. I shook my head. My vision was fading.

  “Don’t be a fool.” He grasped my head, made me look at him. “You need your legs.”

  He had me in a bind. He was right: I couldn’t lose my leg. I needed to run. This time, when he took the back of my head in his hand, I opened my mouth and drank from the goblet. It tasted rank, like earth and metal. Warden nodded. “Good.”

  I mustered a look of loathing, but the effect was dampened by relief as my leg tingled. I drank the foul liquid to the dregs, and wiped my lips with a steady hand.

  Warden lifted the sheets again. My thigh was already returning to its normal dimensions.

  “We’re even now,” I whispered. My throat scorched. “No more. I healed you, you healed me.”

  “You have never healed me.”

  I faltered. “What?”

  “I have never been injured.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “It never happened.”

  I didn’t believe for a moment that I’d imagined the whole encounter. He was still wearing sleeves, so I could hardly point it out to him, but it had happened. His denial wouldn’t make a shade of difference.

  “Then I must have made a mistake,” I said.

  Warden never took his eyes off me. He was looking at me with interest. A cold, dispassionate interest.

  “Yes,” he said. “You did make a mistake.”

  And that was my warning.

  The bell chimed in the tower. Warden glanced out of the window.

  “You may go. You are in no fit state to begin training tonight, but you should find something to eat.” He indicated the urn on the mantelpiece. “There are more numa in there. Take as many as you need.”

  “I don’t have any clothes.”

  “That is because you were due a new uniform.” He held up a pink tunic. “Congratulations, Paige. You have been promoted.”

  That was the first time he used my name.

  9

  Variety

  I had to get out of this place. That was my first thought when I stepped into the bitter cold. Sheol I looked just the same as it did before, just as if Seb had never walked its streets—but I looked different. Instead of white, I wore a pale pink tunic. On my new gilet, the anchor was the same sickly pink. I was stained.

  I couldn’t take another test. I couldn’t. If they’d killed a child in the first, what would they do to me in the second? How much blood would be spilled before I was a red-jacket? I had to leave. There had to be some way out, even if I had to dance around land mines. Anything was better than this nightmare.

  As I found a path through the Rookery, my right leg weak and heavy, an unfamiliar cold spread through my gut. Each time a performer looked at me, their expression changed. Their features went blank. Their heads went down. My tunic was a warning: turncoat, traitor. Stay away. I am a killer.

  I wasn’t a killer. Nashira had killed Seb, not me—but the performers didn’t know that. They must despise anyone who wasn’t a white-jacket. I should have just stayed at Magdalen for the night. But then I would have had to be with Warden, and I couldn’t bear to spend another moment in his company. I limped through the claustrophobic passages. I had to find Liss. She could help me out of this nightmare. There had to be a way.

  “Paige?”

  I stopped, my leg shaking. The effort of walking was exhausting. Liss was looking out of her room. She took one glance at my pink tunic and stiffened. “Liss,” I started.

  “You passed.” Her face was dark.

  “Yes,” I said, “but—”

  “Who did you get arrested?”

  “No one.” When she looked disbelieving, I realized I had to tell her. “They tried to make me kill—Seb. The amaurotic.” I looked down. “And now he’s dead.”

  She flinched.

  “Right,” she said. “See you later, then.”

  “Liss,” I said. “Please listen. You don’t—”

  She yanked the curtain across her door, cutting me off. I slid down the wall, drained. I wasn’t one of them.

  Seb. I said his name in my head, trying to coax his spirit from wherever they’d hidden it, but there was nothing from the æther. Not even a twinge. Even with his surname, there was nothing; I had to be missing a name. The boy that had been so dependent on me, so certain that I would save him, was still a stranger to me in death.

  The curtain seemed to glare at me. Liss must think I was pure scum. I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the dull ache in my thigh. Maybe I could find another pink-jacket to exchange information with—but I didn’t want to do that. I couldn’t trust them. Most of them were murderers. Most of them had turned somebody in. If I wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t a turncoat, I had to prove to Liss that she could trust me. With an effort that left me coated in sweat, I pulled myself up and headed for the food shack. I might find Julian there. Not that he’d want to talk to me, either, but he might give me a chance.

  A light caught my eye. A stove. A group of performers were smoking in a tiny lean-to, slumped on their sides, snatching at the air. Aster again. Tilda was among them, her head propped on a cushion, her white tunic filthy and crumpled, like a used tissue. I groped in my gilet for the green capsule I’d taken. I had the pill with me. Minding my leg, I knelt beside her.

  “Tilda?”

  Her eyes cracked op
en. “What s’matter?”

  “I brought the pill.”

  “Hold on. Still reigning. Give me a minute, doll. Maybe two. Or five.” She rolled onto her stomach, racked with silent laughter. “Dreamscape’s gone all purple. Are you real?”

  I waited for the aster to wear off. Tilda spent a solid minute laughing, flushed to the roots of her hair. I could sense the wildness in her aura, the way it jerked and shifted with the drug. The other voyants showed no sign of wanting to wake up. With shaking hands, Tilda rubbed her face and nodded.

  “Okay, I’m dethroned. Where’s the pill?”

  I handed it to her. She looked at it from every angle. Ran her finger over it, testing the texture. Split it in half. Crushed one half between her fingers. Smelled the residue, tasted it.

  “Your keeper’s out again,” I said.

  “She’s out a lot.” She handed me the remnants of the pill. “It’s herbal. Couldn’t tell you which herb.”

  “Do you know anyone who could tell me?”

  “There’s a jerryshop in here. The guy that sold me the aster might be able to tell you. Password’s specchio.”

  “I’ll see him.” I stood. “I’ll leave you to your aster.”

  “Thanks. S’later.”

  She collapsed back onto the cushion. I wondered what Suhail would do if he found them.

  It took me a while to find the jerryshop. The Rookery had many rooms, most of which were occupied by groups of two or three. They spent their days in cramped shacks, huddled around a paraffin stove, and slept on sheets that reeked of damp and urine. They ate what they could find. If they found nothing, they starved. They stayed together for two reasons: because there was no room for them to do otherwise, and because of the bitter cold in the city. There were no hygiene facilities and no medical supplies, except for what they obtained through theft. This was where you came to die.

  The jerryshop was hidden behind a series of thick curtains. You had to know where to look; I only found it after interrogating a harlie for its whereabouts. She seemed reluctant to tell me, warning me of blackmail and high prices, but pointed me in the right direction.