The Mime Order (The Bone Season, #2)

by Samantha Shannon

“I may have agreed to fund your revolution, and I may have saved your hide in the colony. But do not cease to remember your station, Paige Mahoney, or I will see you fall as a crop falls to the scythe.”

She let go of my arm. I marched toward the door, more shaken than I dared to show. Fuck her training. Fuck the lot of them.

Outside, it was starting to rain. The Punisher hadn’t returned. He was fortunate; at that moment, I p...

I’d always known what Rephaim thought of humans, but I never imagined that Warden would care what others thought about him. I

“Let’s see how rattled you are when I start talking about what cruel, tyrannical bastards you Rephaim can be.”

And you need to decide how many of Terebell’s orders you’ll follow if we go ahead with this alliance.”

“What I do is my prerogative, Paige Mahoney. Thanks to you, I am my own master.”

“You told me once that freedom was my right.” I held his gaze. “Maybe you shoul...

“I have studied many books on human history, and if there is one thing I have learned from them, it is that it is not always possible to find reason in tradition. It is the same for Rephaim.”

In the colony, our relationship had been about fear. My fear of his control. His fear of my betrayal. Now, I realized, it was about trying to understand each other.

I didn’t know if I understood him yet, but I wanted to. That in itself was a shock.

I would rather that you made the gift yours. You belong to yourself, not to the fear.”

“Your body is your anchor to the earth. The more your mind is forced to concentrate on it, the more difficult it will be to lift yourself free of it. Hence the trouble you encounter when you try to dreamwalk when you have been injured.” He lifted my chin. “Raise yourself.”

I caught a glimpse of the inside of his dreamscape. Where there had once been an expanse of ash, a glimmer of bright color shone at the very center. The sight called to me: the engine of his body, tempting me to take control, to puppeteer him.

“You call a past lover an ‘old flame.’” His apple-gold eyes were more chilling than beautiful, his face carved out of nothing earthly. “For Rephaim, it takes a long time for a flame to catch. But once it burns, it cannot go out.”

“But I am not.” His gaze burned into mine. “Your respect for the status quo continues to surprise me.”

Know that the road walked at my side is not an easy one,” he said, quiet as ever, “and that if we are discovered, you will not only lose the support you need from the Ranthen, but quite possibly your life as well. I want you to acknowledge this, Paige.”

Love didn’t come into this, and we both knew it. Arcturus Mesarthim was of the veil, not the world, and I was a daughter of the streets. If the Ranthen discovered anything between us, the fragile alliance we’d forged would be broken. But I could feel his warm, solid presence from here—the beating of his spirit, the tantalizing dark arc of his dreamscape, a flame wrapped up in smoke—and I realized that none of those things would change my mind. I still wanted him with me, just as I had before climbing aboard that train to my freedom.

“Paige.” His voice was a gray shadow of itself. “It is not that I do not want you. Only that I might want you too much. And for too long.”

But Warden cared if I laughed. He cared if I lived or died. He had seen me as I was, not as the world saw me. And that meant something.

The osteomancers burned or handled bones. There were blood-loving haematomancers; drymimancers who scried with human tears; oculomancers obsessed with eyes, whether they were in the head or not. Jaxon had scared Eliza half to death when he told us about the Deflowerer, the legendary anthropomancer who prowled the sewers of this place, waiting for young women to skin and dismember before he used their entrails to predict the next one’s death.

“Dreamer, they—they killed Hector. T-tell Ivy I didn’t—I’m sorry they took her. Trusted him. She was—everything. She has to—to make it right—”

“About Rags . . . about them

“The tattoo. Saw it once. Her arm . . .”

Their public enmity must be a complete falsehood, a smokescreen to conceal their alliance.

“Honestly, Pale Dreamer, I don’t think anyone would care. Some mollishers are far more skilled than their superiors,”

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

Liminal

He was a creature of the limen; any false impression of humanity was gone.

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.

“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.

“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.”

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.

“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?”

They are projections of one’s regrets or anxieties.

His vision of me, in direct contact with his vision of himself.

For all the darkness and the cold in him, there was warmth that made me feel alive and strong.

This was belonging of a different sort, as things that are alike belong with one another.

“I am no soothsayer, nor oracle,” Warden said to me, his voice a low rumble, “but I have every confidence in you.” “You’re mad,” I said into his neck. “Madness is a matter of perspective, little dreamer.”

I didn’t know where I’d be the day after tomorrow. Certainly not here, in my little room at Seven Dials. I could be on the streets, a pariah and a traitor. I could be Underqueen, ruling the syndicate. I could be in the æther.

The hollowness reminded me of a Buzzer, but he couldn’t be one of those, either.

I killed her for Vern and Wynn, for Cutmouth, and for Ivy.

Jaxon grabbed my hand and lifted it with a laugh, intoxicated by his first, sweet taste of victory.

He was the King of Wands, the one Liss had predicted.

“I’m Black Moth.” With a heavy heart, I stepped away from him. “And I challenge you, White Binder.”

And oh, it was glorious, watching Jaxon Hall put two and two together. Watching him understand, inch by agonizing inch, that he could no longer blackmail me into submission.