Page 44 of The Dark Mirror

For Ducos, I had stuck to the points that would be of interest to her, but with Nick, I spared no detail. I started with the day Warden and I had arrived in Calais and went from there.

I was halfway through the story by the time our meals arrived. The sun had gone down while I talked, and more Domino personnel had come in for dinner, creating a background hum that made it difficult to catch individual conversations. A pianist had started to play, and his music drifted across the bar, so eavesdropping was harder still. Even inside its own headquarters, Domino was cautious.

Nick ate his cod as I described the escape from Versailles, including the silver-haired stranger who had saved me from the flood. The man I was convinced had been Jaxon.

‘How could it have been him?’ Nick asked me.

‘A few days after our escape, we found the Rag and Bone Man dying in a sewer. He’d been disembowelled,’ I said. ‘He said himself that Jaxon was the one who did it.’

‘Jax could have escaped another way. If hewasthe man who saved you, he must have had a dissimulator,’ Nick said, ‘and that makes no sense, because Domino asked you to assassinate him. However he got out of Versailles, I worry he has designs on London.’

‘He’ll have designs on London for ever.’

‘True.’ He drank some ersatz. ‘So you left Versailles and then went straight to hunt the Rag and Bone Man?’

I lowered my gaze.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Something else happened first.’

It took all my willpower to recount the next part, when Arcturus had been detained and I had gone rushing to his rescue. His claim that he had won my trust so he could betray me.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nick murmured. ‘It must have been terrible to hear him say those things.’

I hadn’t admitted that Arcturus and I had taken our physical intimacy a step farther, but Nick knew me well. He would be able to read between the lines.

‘You sent a warning to London,’ Nick said. ‘I was there.’

‘How?’

‘My supervisor was someone from my past. He gave me a lot of freedom.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Max.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Wait,theMax?’

‘The very same.’

Max Thorsell had met Nick when he moved to Stockholm. Nick had been a boy from the coast, with a rare aura and none of the knowledge he needed to protect himself. Max had taught him to fight and climb, and initiated him into a voyant gang named the Hökar.

They might have been a perfect match, had Max not thrived on danger to the point that he would go out of his way to create it, often provoking Vigiles. When he was training Nick, he hadonce sabotaged their handholds, just to see how Nick dealt with falling. Nick had broken his ankle. He hadn’t told me a great deal more, except that the relationship had ended when he moved to London.

‘That’s quite a coincidence,’ I said.

‘No, I don’t think so. Max had been resisting Scion since he was thirteen. Domino snapped him up. We didn’t get back together,’ Nick said, anticipating my question. ‘He wanted to, but he was never good for me. I became the medical officer of his sub-network, Docka.’

‘I take it you had an alias.’

‘Isak Törnqvist.’ He sipped his drink again. ‘In late January, we received orders to investigate a new Scion detention facility on Gotland. This site was code named Tuonela III.’

‘That’s the next Reph city. Nashira mentioned it when I was in Oxford.’

‘I suspected as soon as I heard the name. Not that the others believed me. The intelligence pointed to a town called Visby,’ he said, ‘but when we arrived, the population was still in place. I didn’t understand it at the time, but you said Tjäder had allied with Ménard.’

‘She’s refusing to host the Rephs,’ I murmured. ‘I wondered when she would move against them.’

‘I think you’re right. She’s stalling,’ Nick said. ‘Max thought I’d lost my mind, of course. I’d told him the Rephs would be there, but there was nothing. I asked him if I could visit London for a couple of weeks, to clear my head. He agreed.’

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