The Dawn Chorus Read online

  ‘Did you hear anything at all?’ I asked Michael hoarsely. ‘Anything about us, about a rebellion?’

  Michael shook his head and signed again, faster.

  ‘It seems that Benoît Ménard, the Grand Inquisitor of France, will not be attending the Bicentenary, apparently due to a long-term illness.’ Warden paused. ‘His physician has advised him against all travel until his symptoms subside.’

  ‘That seems … odd. I’d have thought only death would keep him from answering a summons from Nashira.’

  ‘Yes. His absence will rattle her. This was to be the first time they met. The Great Territorial Act, which is to be ratified on that night, promises a new colony in France.’

  ‘Sheol II.’

  ‘Yes.’

  David, the mysterious oracle, had told me as much. That Nashira planned to open another prison city. To take more voyants from their homes and force them into a nightmare.

  ‘You never mentioned this,’ I said to Warden.

  ‘Consider it mentioned now. It is another reason why we must disrupt the Bicentenary,’ Warden said. ‘If we can demonstrate that there is rebellion against the Rephaim, and if all of you can escape from the colony that night, Ménard will have grounds to delay signing the Great Territorial Act. For fear that the Bone Seasons will be exposed.’ He topped up my goblet of water. ‘His representatives must see you at your strongest.’

  ‘They must.’ I propped myself up on one elbow. ‘Back to three pills a day, then.’

  No reply. I was taking the iron and the contraceptive out of choice – the last thing I needed right now was a period – but he had never presented me with a green pill again.

  ‘There should be no more excursions to the House,’ he said. ‘Paige, I ask that you tell your allies not to enter it. Clearly security has been tightened.’

  ‘The House is chock-full of provisions,’ I said. ‘Julian knows a pair of white-jackets, both decent climbers. They could try.’

  ‘If they fail, I would not send anyone else.’

  After a moment, I nodded.

  ‘You said those would cure most of the harlies,’ I said. ‘Was there not enough for everyone, Michael?’ Michael looked away, downcast. ‘It’s all right. You’ve saved a lot of lives.’

  Warden brought me the goblet of water and a pill. I sluiced the medicine down.

  ‘It should be you who chooses, Paige,’ he said in an undertone. ‘You know the Rookery.’

  When I realised what he meant, my fingertips blanched on the goblet.

  ‘You want me to decide which of them to cure,’ I said. ‘And … which of them to leave.’

  ‘They may not all die. Some of them may weather the sickness,’ Warden said, ‘but others will need the medicine. And I suspect you would sooner the choice fell to a human than a Rephaite.’

  Michael glanced at me, looking worried. I set the goblet aside.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would.’

  For a time, there was stillness between the three of us – a dreamwalker, an unreadable, and a Rephaite. We ought to have been bitter enemies, yet the rebellion now turned on our alliance. Michael rubbed his pink-knuckled hands together while I tried not to think about the responsibility he had passed me with those boxes.

  There would be no easy choices on this road.

  ‘Thank you.’ Warden looked at us. ‘Both of you. For all you are risking. I hope the sacrifice is not in vain.’

  ‘It won’t be,’ I said. ‘Not this time.’

  Chapter 2

  The Hunger

  SCION CITADEL OF PARIS

  4 JANUARY 2060

  Sweat plastered my nightshirt to my skin. I lay on my bed in the safe house, in too much pain to move. Not just from my wounds. This was withdrawal. They had injected me with more than one drug in the Archon.

  A dry cough shook my frame. The clock now read 15:28. It might have been a day or a week since I had last woken like this, feverish and clattering.

  Agony filled my skull. It clanged in my jaw and my eye sockets and the hollows of my cheeks. An iron band was locked around my brow and, with every breath, it constricted. I wept into the pillow, trying not to make a sound. Warden had already seen too much.

  A memory. The wallpaper in my childhood bedroom. Mamó spoon-feeding me medicine while I burned and itched with chickenpox.

  Something was tightening my insides. Not just the wounds, not just grief. Deeper than the hunger in my stomach, it whispered in my blood and sinews. It wrung my muscles and scraped my bones. My skeleton was ravenous, every joint a panting mouth. I was starving. For the drug. For the oblivion promised by a needle. In oblivion, I was not an orphan. I was not hunted or trapped or broken from torture. I was fog, impossible to chain.

  Grey light sifted through the cracks between the shutters, enough for me to glimpse the pouch of saline above my head. A tube snaked down to meet the cannula in my hand.

  In the Archon, I had been sedated to keep me from using my gift. Now my body craved the stupor that had kept me weak and powerless for weeks. I was a razor blade, all edge and gleam, and I needed to be dulled. I needed to fade. Not to die, not to disappear altogether – just to soften, so the world stopped catching on my sharp corners. So I didn’t feel it when it scraped me. I ached for the comfort of absence. I longed to exist less severely.

  My eyes closed. I didn’t want him to see me in this state again.

  I had no one else.

  ‘Warden.’

  Only a breath came out. My eyelashes were sticky, my hair dishevelled from being crushed into a pillow for days. I kicked with boneless legs at the duvet. The chains. The duvet.

  ‘Warden,’ I slurred again, but I had no more strength to speak, or to tug the golden cord.

  For a while, I drifted between the room and my dreamscape, where a spectre had appeared. A smoking, Rephaite-shaped reminder of my ordeal, staring out from the darkest circle of my mind.

  I must have fallen back to sleep. Next I woke, I was desperate for breath and soaked to the skin, and it was dark. Dread viced my limbs. Was I on the board again? No. I was the board.

  Water. My skin was creating it, pints of it. It prickled on my scalp and nape. Even the backs of my knees were slippery. Whimpering, I rolled on to my side and scrubbed at my arms, desperate to dry off. Liquid trickled down my back and dripped from the ends of my hair. I was slimy with it. Each movement stretched the skin of my hand.

  Perhaps the Underqueen would care for a drink …

  The tube.

  Water was shooting into my bloodstream. Flowing out of the bag, into my arm. I was so full of it that it burst out from my eyes, my pores, my nose. I was drowning from within. Wet sponge. Soaked cloth. Like the rag that had masked my face in that basement, congealed the air before it reached me, kept me blind and screaming. I was blind now, too, with terror. Desperate, I groped for the tube and ripped it out.

  Heat knifed through my hand and drew a sharp cry from me. Blood dribbled from my vein, saline from the tube. I sat there, staring at the break in my skin, too shocked to do anything but stare.

  That was how Warden found me, bloody and petrified, hair wild around my face.

  ‘Paige.’

  Dizzy, I looked up at him.

  ‘I had to get it out.’ Tears seeped to my neck. ‘I was drowning.’

  Warden seemed to assess the situation. He looked at the wormlike tube on the bed, and at my hand, gloved in blood.

  When he left, I watched the door, shivering. Moments later, he was back with a gauze and a roll of bandages.

  ‘Don’t touch me.’ I cringed against the headboard. ‘Please d-don’t try to touch me.’

  This time, I saw a flicker in his expression. Disquiet, perhaps. He must be wondering what he had done to unnerve me to this extreme. I wished I could explain that if he touched me, he would know what a filthy, broken creature I was. He would slice himself on my razor edges.

  I doubt even his standards are this low.

  ‘I will not touch
you,’ Warden said quietly. ‘You have my word.’

  I swallowed. Making no sudden movements, he placed the supplies within my reach.

  ‘You must staunch the bleeding yourself,’ he told me. All I could do was shake. ‘Paige—’

  ‘I can’t do this yet, Warden. I n-need the drug.’ Blood laced my arm. ‘Please just find it for me. They must sell it somewhere, the sedative. I’ll just have a little bit.’

  ‘That is not a sound idea.’

  ‘It is. I’ll be stronger in a few days.’ I blotted my face on my sleeve. ‘Warden, humans aren’t supposed to just come off drugs. You’re meant to take a s-substitute. Or something.’

  ‘All I can offer is scimorphine.’

  ‘Scimorphine isn’t strong enough. Look again. Please.’ When he did nothing, anger nearly throttled me. ‘Why are you just standing there? Do you think I’d be pleading with you if I didn’t really fucking need this?’

  ‘Even if I wanted to do as you ask, I could not. I can guess which sedative they used, and it will not be available from a pharmacy. Only from SciSORS.’ He was perfectly still. ‘This will end soon. You were sedated for less than a month, and the drug is not known to cause long-term withdrawal.’

  ‘Less than a month?’ I said thickly. ‘What – what are you saying, Warden? That I’m weak to be this desperate after such a short imprisonment?’

  ‘That is not what I meant.’

  ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ I barked, loathing him to his core, half as intensely as I loathed myself. ‘Do you really hate me that much, Warden? Because I gave myself up to Scion, to Nashira? Is this your sick way of telling me that I made my own bed? Do you enjoy hearing me beg?’

  ‘I will not dignify those questions with an answer.’

  A rusty laugh escaped me. ‘No.’ My ribs fought to contain the beast that writhed behind them. ‘I imagine you think this is all very undignified behaviour on my part.’

  ‘You imagine wrong.’

  ‘Oh, go back to hell. After everything I’ve done for you—’

  It occurred to me that someone in the nearest buildings might hear me shouting myself hoarse at him. I needed to stop. If he would just get me the drug, if he would just for once relent, I could get better. I could heal. He could see me whole and strong, not broken.

  ‘Paige,’ was all Warden said, ‘you must see to your wound. You are losing blood.’

  Enraged, I made a clumsy grab for a pillow – my fingers throbbed with the strain of lifting it, my sprained wrist seared like hellfire – and, with every bit of strength I had left, I tried to throw it at him. He watched it thump into the foot of the bed as I folded at the waist. That pitiful swing of my arm felt as if it had peeled the bones of my spine apart.

  I had been so strong before.

  ‘Fuck the blood,’ I hissed. ‘You didn’t mind when I used it to heal you in Magdalen. Or spilled it in the scrimmage so I could be Underqueen.’ All the anger that had simmered in me came boiling to the surface. I spoke between my teeth: ‘Get me that sedative, Warden, you miserable fucking ingrate, and I might consider those debts paid.’

  His chin lifted a little, his eyes dark.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  My face crumpled. Even in this state, I knew when he had dug his heels in. Arms trembling, hair limp with sweat, I collapsed back on the bed and curled myself around a pillow.

  ‘None of you came for me,’ I said weakly. ‘Why did none of you come?’

  ‘Paige—’

  ‘I would have done anything to get you back. Why didn’t any of you try to get me?’

  ‘Paige,’ Warden cut in, ‘I know you are distressed, but please, little dreamer, bind your wound.’

  Please. That word reached between the gnashing jaws of the withdrawal and gripped what little of my sanity remained. He had said it right before I surrendered to Scion. Paige. Please.

  The realisation cooled the burning corridors of my mind. Suddenly I understood why he had sounded afraid that night, and how he must feel to see me in this state. He had tried to stop me because he had known exactly what awaited me if I gave myself to the enemy.

  He had once been at her mercy, too.

  She will chain you in the darkness, and she will drain the life and hope from you. Your screams will be her music.

  It could have been worse. Nashira could have had my bones shattered, my tongue ripped out – anything she liked. She could have mutilated me until I was unrecognisable. I had been spared only so that the torture didn’t kill me before she could. Warden must have imagined me chained somewhere, in agony.

  Silence leaked like crude oil between us. Under his gaze, I pressed the gauze over the wound and tried to strap it in place. My fingers were stiff, ill-suited to such delicate work. The bandages spilled between them.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  My eyes overflowed again. Scion had even taken my ability to tend to my own wounds.

  Warden sat down beside me. He was slow, and kept his distance.

  ‘May I?’

  I looked at his proffered hand as if it were a red-hot iron. Straight after my rescue, I had realised how much I craved his touch. Now, like water, it was something to fear.

  ‘Paige,’ Warden said, ‘will you let me bind the wound if I wear gloves?’

  The question cut right to my core.

  I saw now what Suhail had done. Nashira must have ordered him to keep invoking Warden, to chisel away my ability to take solace in him – so that even if I did escape her, it would always hurt to be in his presence.

  I could see the trap. Still I couldn’t bear for him to touch me now. Not like this. Not with gloves, either.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Warden, you know I’d never want that.’

  ‘Then will you trust that I am not going to touch you?’

  His words sank in slowly. At last, I yielded the bandages. My heart drummed as he unravelled them.

  ‘Spread the fingers of your injured hand.’

  I did. Blood drooled from my open vein. Warden set the gauze on top of it, then hooked one end of the bandage between my middle and forefingers.

  ‘Hold that in place.’

  It took concentration to press my fingers together – enough to distract me from the pain. I could do this one small thing. I could hold the bandage. Warden began to wrap the rest of it around my hand, as he had once in the colony.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ he asked.

  Even my jaw was trembling. ‘My head.’

  ‘Do you wish for scimorphine?’

  After a moment, I gave as much of a nod as my headache allowed. Warden gently looped the bandage under my thumb. All the while, he somehow kept his word. At no point did he touch my bare skin.

  I’m sorry. The words had almost reached my lips. I’m so sorry.

  I almost got it out. Almost found the courage to clasp my fingers around his, the way I might have done in the past. Before I could try, he guided my neatly dressed hand to the covers.

  ‘You should eat something, Paige,’ he said. ‘You might feel stronger.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ My eyes drifted shut. ‘I just want to not … hurt. Just for a little while.’

  Even though the hunger was still in me, its bite was softer now. I hadn’t exerted myself as much in days as I just had trying to throw that pillow. I wanted to say more, to explain, but the bed was beginning to swallow me.

  The small weight of his hand left mine. And even though I feared his touch, I wanted it back now.

  ‘Warden,’ I started, but sleep chose that moment to snatch me away.

  PENAL COLONY OF SHEOL I

  8 AUGUST 2059

  Light leaked into the Rookery where time had strained its walls apart. Liss kept her shack draped with swathes of cloth she had bargained for and scavenged, but sometimes she would uncover the hole in the roof to let the sun inside. It was snug enough that you could almost forget it sat at the heart of a prison.

  I stirred from a drowse, rosy sunlight glowing in my hair.
Dust twinkled above me, and I let myself believe, for a heartbeat, that I was waking up in my own room, in London.

  A gentle snore broke the illusion. Julian was asleep beside me, head on a limp cushion. The vomiting and hallucinations had worn him out.

  I rubbed the grain from my eyes. My hair was in desperate need of a wash. So was my tunic. In Magdalen, there was a bath with stove-heated water, which I used as often as I dared – if I looked too clean, the other Rephaim would suspect Warden of lenience and detain him. All the harlies had was rain, or murky water from a stream near the House. That was all they had to drink, to clean their clothes and skin and homes. Liss kept a barrel outside her shack and boiled every cup she used. Perhaps that was how she had avoided getting ill.

  The rats, at least, had taken their leave. Or the harlies had snapped and killed them all. I had elected not to ask.

  Liss sat barefoot by the stove, studying a few of her cards. Shadows feathered over her face. One of the other harlies had filched her curling irons, so her black hair fell straight to the small of her back. Since her strength had returned, she had been practising night and day on the silks.

  A blanket was draped over me. I wrapped myself in it as I sat up, covering the yellow tunic that marked me as a coward. Nashira had decreed that I should wear it after my escape attempt.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  Liss stiffened and hid the cards. Seeing me, she relaxed again and offered a weary smile.

  ‘Evening, sleepyhead.’

  ‘Sorry.’ My broken wrist throbbed. ‘Must have been more exhausted than I thought.’

  ‘Not to worry. It’s only sunset,’ she said. ‘The night-bell won’t ring for a while yet.’

  She returned the cards to the box and drew her shawl a little closer. I joined her by the stove, and we warmed our hands for a while. Her feet and ankles were mottled with bruises.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked her. ‘You’re training harder than usual.’

  ‘Beltrame expects my best performance for the emissaries.’ Liss kept her gaze on the stove. ‘Have you heard if Gomeisa will be at the Bicentenary?’