Page 49 of The Bone Season

Alsafi approached me. I was in so much pain that all I could do was let him drag me up, my legs shaking. Warden came to my other side.

Nashira now turned her attention to Seb. His terrified stare snapped towards her.

‘Thank you for your service to our cause.’ She stopped beside the chair and touched his ashen face, almost tenderly. ‘We are grateful.’

Before he could say a word, she twisted his head, the movement so quick I almost missed it. His neck crunched in her grasp.

‘No!’

The denial ripped out of me. I tried to run at Nashira, heat writhing in my blood, only for Warden and Alsafi to grab my arms, holding me back.

‘Youmonster,’ I snarled at Nashira. ‘Who the fuck gave you the right?’

‘You did.’ Nashira turned to face me. ‘You could have killed him yourself, 40. Had you not taken him food, he would not be here.’

I cursed blindly at her, kicking and thrashing with all my strength, my hair lank with sweat.

‘I ought to give you a yellow tunic for your cowardice. But I will assume you were telling the truth – you did not know how to project your spirit,’ Nashira said. ‘Not without the right persuasion.’

Alsafi was about to dislocate my shoulder. Warden had a lighter hold on me, but his grip was still unbreakable. I dug my fingers viciously into his upper arm – the one I had bandaged, the one that must still hurt. He tensed at once, and I dug harder, loathing him.

‘I will destroy you,’ I gritted out. ‘You see now what I can do. I swear I’ll bring every one of you down. You and your anchor—’

‘Suhail,’ Nashira said. The Reph in question emerged from the side door. ‘40 has passed her first test. Let us congratulate her.’

‘With pleasure,’ Suhail said.

Alsafi threw me to the floor. I tried my utmost to get up, to reach Seb – he was just about clinging to life, I could sense it – but now I was being held down on the floor, and Suhail was there, and I finally saw it, the hot glow of it, as merciless as the light in his eyes.

‘XX-59-40,’ Nashira said, ‘you are bound in life to the Warden of the Mesarthim, and in death to the Suzerain. Henceforth, you will renounce your name, and serve only the Rephaim.’

With those words, pain seared into the back of my shoulder. I couldn’t help but scream. Seb slumped in the chair just as I passed out, and his spirit gave one last flutter, untethering.

DENIAL

There was a storm in my dreamscape. I ran in circles, driven from its heart. Caught in the dark, my spirit was stumbling, lashed by windblown red petals.

Outside, in just as thick a gloom, my body was in agony. Nashira had got her proof of my gift; now she could only be killing me for it.

This must be a flux overdose. I wondered what it would be like, to witness my own death from the inside – to be trapped in my mind when it vanished from the æther, leaving me disembodied for good. No dreamscape could hold its shape in a corpse.

Paige, can you hear me?

The voice came from outside. It faded, and I was running again, trapped in the circles of the mind where no other spirit could tread. I glimpsed my sunlit zone in the distance – the only place I would be safe – but each time I tried to run to it, I was forced back into the shadows. That place should have been the eye of the storm. Now it was in turmoil.

All living things had a dreamscape. Of the many concepts Jaxon had taught me in the early days, it had probably been the hardest to grasp. Where the brain controlled the body, the dreamscape housed and nurtured the spirit. It was a haven, the strongbox of memory. Mine took the form of a field of red poppies.

Even amaurotics could glimpse their dreamscapes, though only in their sleep, in shades of grey. As for voyants, we could enter ours consciously – wander our minds, bask in their colours. Most could stray no farther than the sunlit zone, the centre.

I could go anywhere.

Now I could see flashes of the world outside my body. In my mind, I grew calm, watching as the storm receded. I lay down in my flowers and waited for the end.

In the Founders Tower, the gramophone was warbling ‘Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?’ – one of my blacklisted favourites. From what I could feel, I was back on the daybed. Someone had put me in a pair of shorts, propped me on my side with cushions, and tucked a sheet around me, leaving my shoulders bare.

My eyes cracked open. The fire was out, and only candles lit the parlour.

As I gazed at the ceiling, my heart started to pound. I had a vague memory of a violent struggle, and two excruciating pains, one after the other. Now the back of my right shoulder burned with a ferocious heat, and my left thigh felt swollen and strained.

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