Page 90 of The Song Rising

I stroked the back of his hand with my thumb. Perhaps I would have stayed quiet, too, if I’d thought I might see Ireland.

“I worked as a mule scavenger in Glasgow in my younger days, before I went south. I saw what Scion would do for their metal.” His chest rose and fell unevenly. “I just . . . couldna bear to see it still happening, all these decades later. It had to end. It all has to end.”

Maria tipped the water to his lips. Tom took a little and leaned back into the pillows.

“Paige, I dinna want you to watch me snuff it, but I have a last favor to ask of you,” he said. His face creased into something like a smile. “Just a small one. Bring Scion down.”

“I will,” I said quietly. “I won’t stop. One day, they’ll call this country by its name again.”

He managed to lift a big hand to my cheek. “That’s brave talk, but I can see in your eyes that you’re doubting yourself. There’s a reason we accepted you as Underqueen, and there’s a reason the anchor’s been trying so hard to find you. They know they canna control someone with a flame like yours. Don’t ever let them put it out.”

I pressed his hand.

“Never,” I said.

With Tom’s death, I lost one of my most faithful commanders. One of the few truly honest people in the syndicate.

We had no time to mourn for him. No hours left to absorb his passing. I stood with Maria outside the safe house while she lit her first roll of aster in days. A ten-minute smoke was the only grace period I could allow her before we had to get back to the streets, to our task.

“He was a good man. A gentle soul.” Rain seeped down her face. “So it begins again. I lost so many friends during the Balkan Risings. At least Tom knew what we were really fighting. The Rephaim.”

I still knew so little of that invasion. Maria tilted her head into the rain.

“In 2039,” she said, “they marched through Greece. Then, in 2040, they came for us.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen. Along with my friend Hristo, I left my home town of Buhovo and joined the youth army in Sofia. That was where I met Rozaliya Yudina, the woman in the memory. She was . . . charismatic, free-thinking, single-minded in her search for justice—rather like you. Roza convinced us that we had to fight, even if we weren’t unnatural. She was adamant that any organization that labelled one group of people as evil would eventually do the same to others. That to treat any one person as less than human was to cheapen the very substance of humanity.” Sorrow tensed her features. “Training was rigorous, and we knew our chances were small, but for the first time in my life, I was free of my father, free to be who I truly was. Yoana Hazurova—not Stoyan Hazurov, the son he had never loved.

“When ScionIDE approached, we made our own cannon. We stole the guns of dead police. We defended Sofia.” She inhaled deeply. “We lasted ten days before our country issued a surrender. Hristo fled to the Turkish border . . . I highly doubt he got there.”

“You picked up a gun in your memory.” A drop of water iced my nose. “You weren’t going to use it on the soldiers.”

“Ah, you noticed. Unfortunately, it jammed. The soldiers beat me almost to death, then threw me into prison.” Her face twisted with bitterness. “Several years later, the new Grand Inquisitor of Bulgaria forced prisoners into heavy labor. I fled on a boat to Sevastopol and spent months traveling west, determined to find a large community of voyants. London’s underworld embraced me.” Lilac smoke plumed from her roll. “We didn’t last long, I know. But with every friend lost and home burned, we fought harder.”

“What kept you going?”

“Rage. Rage is the fuel. And people need to see suffering, the blood of innocents shed. But they also need to see people standing, Paige.”

“Who chooses who suffers and who stands?”

“You have to stand. Wemustget rid of Senshield now, no matter what. If you return to the capital with a dead commander and no evidence that you’ve damaged the core—”

“I know.”

Nothing would protect me then, Underqueen or not. Loyalty would sour to hatred. Even my allies among the Unnatural Assembly would abandon me. ScionIDE would steamroll us all.

Time was of the essence, now more than ever.

“Did he—before he—did Tom say where the voyants were based?” I asked.

“Yes. The Edinburgh Vaults.”

“Where are they?”

“Off a street called the Cowgate, which lies beneath South Bridge,” she said, “but the entrance is hidden, and he wasn’t sure where.”

“I’ll go now. You . . . finish your aster.”

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