The Mime Order (The Bone Season, #2)

by Samantha Shannon

Some revolutions change the world in a day. Others take decades or centuries or more, and others still never come to fruition. Mine began with a moment and a choice. Mine began with the blooming of a flower in a secret city on the border between worlds.

The surviving voyants, all huddled together. I’d hoped Julian might have boarded when I wasn’t looking, but there was no sign of my co-conspirator. My heart clenched with grief. Even if he and his unit of performers survived the rest of the night, Nashira would have them all trimmed at the neck by sunrise.

More than anything I wanted to offer her somewhere to stay, but Jaxon wouldn’t put up with strangers invading his den, especially as I wasn’t intending to go back there with him. None of these voyants would last long on the street.

One voyant shook her head. “How did he get so far on his own?” Someone let out a quiet sob. He’d so nearly made it home, this harlie who’d escaped his prison.

Michael vaulted over the wall to the riverbank. I screamed his name over the sirens, but he was gone.

Until we sorted things with Jaxon, I’d have to keep moving between rented rooms, one every week or so. It was already costing a fortune—I was managing, so far, with money Nick had given me—but it was the only way to know for sure that Scion couldn’t track me.

Liss had predicted my future in six stages: Five of Cups, King of Wands inverted, the Devil, the Lovers, Death inverted, Eight of Swords. But she’d never reached the end of the reading.

Michael was out there somewhere, probably huddled under a bridge or in a doorway. If he scraped together some money he could sleep in a penny hangover,

“Aloys Mynatt was at the Bicentenary—Inquisitor Ménard’s assistant. If he’s dead, I doubt Ménard will be in a party mood.” “They wouldn’t cancel it.” “Trust me—if Nashira says ‘cancel it,’ they’ll cancel it.”

The Unnatural Assembly, made up of the thirty-six mime-lords and mime-queens of the citadel, each of whom was supposed to oversee all syndicate activity in their assigned section.

To Jaxon, losing his prized dreamwalker would have been infuriating, even humiliating—but I still wouldn’t have expected him to risk everything to retrieve me from Scion’s clutches. That was the kind of sacrifice you made for people, not property.

Eliza had always thought the world of Jaxon Hall— after all, he’d given us a world—but I’d seen too much from him that said otherwise. He was capable of kindness, but he wasn’t kind. He could act like he cared, but it would always be an act. It had taken me years to wake up and see it.

“I don’t think that security is to do with Novembertide. They need to wipe out everyone who knows.” “And then what?” Eliza said. “Another Bone Season. To replace all the humans they just lost.”

“He’s off the cot.” “He didn’t know who you were when he did that.” “He knew he was beating the stuffing out of a dreamwalker. I’m the only dreamwalker we know.”

“She’s afraid, Paige.” Nick heaved a sigh. “Eliza’s never known anything but the syndicate. She was dumped on the street and raised in some miserable cellar in Soho. She’d be nightwalking if Jaxon hadn’t given her a chance.”

We have hundreds of voyants in the syndicate. It’s organized. It’s powerful. If we could use it against the Rephaim, instead of playing tarocchi and killing each other, we might be able to get rid of them. I have to talk to the Unnatural Assembly.”

When I finally broke through, wilting poppies brushed my cheeks. I opened my dream-eyes. I was standing at the edge of my sunlit zone, my feet pillowed by petals, and the sky beat red and hot above me. An arid wind whipped at my hair. Great patches of the field had been uprooted. That was the fabric of my mind, torn and scarred, as if it had been ploughed by some infernal engine.

At the touch of my hand, each one grew a tiny stalk and flowered— but they weren’t quite poppies now. A deeper red. A smaller bloom. The smell of fire. Blood of Adonis. The only thing that could do harm to the Rephaim. They broke across my dreamscape like a red wave. A hundred thousand poppy anemones.

The room was safe. I shouldn’t leave it. But the streets were my life. I’d fought tooth and nail to get back to this, shed blood for it. With clammy hands, I turned and took hold of the ladder, taking each step as though it were my last.

the voyants here often colored their hair or nails to match their auras, though you’d only get the link if you were sighted.

If he’d been a Rag Doll, he wouldn’t have let me push him around. They were the dominant gang here, one of the few to have invented their own distinctive “uniform”: pinstriped blazers and bracelets made of rat bones, as well as the colored hair. Their mime-lord’s name was whispered throughout II-4, but only a handful of people had ever laid lamps on the elusive Rag and Bone Man.

“But he helped Liss,” Jos said, frowning. “I saw it. He got her out of spirit shock.” “Give him a medal, then,” Nell said, “but I’m not working with him, either. They can all rot in hell.”

“Imagine how the average denizen would react if they found out Scion was controlled by voyants. The Rephs are more clairvoyant than we are, and they’ve had us wrapped around their finger for two centuries. But we need to focus on voyants first, not rotties or Rephaim.”

“What did you tell her, then?” “That we broke out of the Tower.” Ivy kept shaking her head. “I just . . . couldn’t face explaining it. I want to forget it all.”

“Don’t act like a king, Hector.” I didn’t move. “You know what London does to kings.”

“Alfred and Jaxon go back a very long way.” Nick unlocked the door. “He’s remarkable—probably the most talented bibliomancer in the citadel. Fifty-seven years old and works eighteen hours a day. He claims he can read anything and just sense if it’s going to sell.”

“He’s threatening to make Nadine his mollisher, though.” “He’s been grooming her for it, sötnos.” When I frowned, he sighed. “Nadine was pushing to be mollisher as soon as you went missing. They’ve been having private meetings, and he’s let her do a lot of your work—collecting

Both the mime-lord and the mollisher supreme need to be gone before a scrimmage can be called. If Hector died, Cutmouth would become Underqueen,” he said, “and she’s no better.

“I’ve had visions since I was six years old, and I still don’t really understand them. Even if the waterboard isn’t meant for me, they’ll find out what I am sooner or later.

“Wherever I go, they’ll follow.” “Scion?” “No. The Rephaim.” Nashira wouldn’t give me up that easily. “Only five people definitely survived the escape. I’m the only one of those five people who has sway enough to make a difference.” “So we stay.” “Yes. We stay and change the world.”

You could kill a busker or a fellow gang member, but you couldn’t go against your own mime-lord, or your Underlord. It was an unwritten rule. The syndicate’s high treason.

At least, Didion liked to think he was anonymous. We all knew who’d written the dreary collection of epics as he named every muse after his late wife. Jaxon was waiting on tenterhooks for the day he tried to write erotica.

My father sat at a table by the window. I hid behind the screen, watching him through a swirling pattern of glass panes in the wood. Now I could see the other side of him, I noticed a purple welt on his neck, so small you’d think it was a shaving cut. My hand strayed to the matching flux scar on my lower back, gained on the night I’d been arrested.

“Fairly seditious pieces of paper, I hear.” He chuckled at that. “Yes, sedition is my field of expertise.

Literature is our most powerful tool, one Scion has never fully mastered. All they’ve been able to do is sterilize what they put out,”

The slideshow of the fugitives was silent, except for a mechanical voice stating each name and the crimes committed. The first face was Felix Samuel Coombs. The second, Eleanor Nahid. The third, Michael Wren. The fourth, “Ivy”—no surname—with her old haircut, dyed brilliantly blue. That photo was against a grey background rather than the white of Scion’s official database of denizens. And the fifth—the most wanted, the face of public enemy number one—was mine.

“Where are the others?” I said. I was getting déjà vu. “Out searching for you. Nadine saw the broadcast when she was walking back from the Juditheon.” “Jaxon went, too?” “Yup.”

When she talked about him, Burnish used his birth name, making puzzled faces as she sounded out the syllables: Cóilín Ó Mathúna. He’d had his name anglicized to Colin Mahoney on our arrival in England, as well as changing my middle name from Aoife to Eva, but apparently Burnish didn’t care for petty legalities. By exposing that name, she labeled my father as alien, as Other. Heat stroked my eyes.

When I was twenty, my only friend in this world was Alfred. I had no mime-lord, no mentors, no friends of whom to speak. An unusual situation, given that I started life under the watchful gaze of a kidsman.” I pulled the curtain from between us. “You were an urchin?” “Oh, yes. Surprising, isn’t it?

His fingers strayed to his arm, as if he could still feel it. There was a reason he’d always worn long sleeves. I’d seen the scars before, long white marks that ran from the creases of his elbows to his wrists.

“One day, it all became too much. Like a doll dropped to the ground, I broke. It was winter, and I was so very, very cold. I found myself sobbing on the ground in I-6, half-mad and ripping at my arms.

until a woman knelt beside me and whispered in my ear, ‘Carve a name, sweet child, a long-dead name.’ And with those words, she disappeared.” “Who was she?” “Someone to whom I owe a great debt, O my lovely.”

I felt the spirit stir at my side. I spent a long, delirious night in that cemetery, sprawled among the headstones, and all night long I felt the spirits dancing from their graves. And when I woke, the itch was gone.”

“After that, I began my research on clairvoyance. And I found out what I was,” he said. “A binder.”

“I wanted to help other voyants. Surely you can understand that—you of all people, Jax?” “Of course you wanted to help them, sweet, selfless soul that you are. And I, perhaps, was too concerned about protecting you to think of those other voyants. It was beastly of me to threaten you, and I fully deserve your displeasure.”

“Paige, Paige. Your enthusiasm is to be commended, but let me remind you that we are not freedom fighters. We are the Seven Seals. Our duty is to I-4 and to London.

“Everything we know will be meaningless if the Rephs come here. We’re living in their lie.” “A lie that sustains the syndicate. That gave birth to it. You cannot, and will not, change its character.”

“Do you know how old I am, Paige?” The question took me by surprise. “Thirty-five?” “Forty-eight,” he said. I couldn’t help but stare. “As a member of the fifth order of clairvoyance, my life expectancy is rather low.

I tried to imagine it: the Pale Dreamer, mime-queen of I-4. Owning this building. Knowing that every voyant in the section would follow me. Having a voice far louder than a mollisher’s.

I had no intention of being silent, but for now, I’d have to play along. I took his hand, and he shook it. “You’ve made the right decision.” “I hope so,” I said. His grip grew tight. “Two years. Until then, you remain my mollisher.”