Page 8 of The Song Rising

“Thank you all for coming at such short notice,” I said. “I’ll get straight to the point. Eliza just tried to use a cash machine, and an alarm went off. It seems a Senshield scanner was . . . built into it.” I paused, letting them take it in. “We barely escaped.”

Breaths were drawn. Glym lowered his face into the palm of one hand.

“The implications for the Mime Order could be catastrophic,” I said. “If we can’t see the scanners, we can’t avoid them.”

“In a cash machine.” Maria scraped a hand through her hair. “Such an ordinary thing . . .”

“This might explain the mysterious phone box,” Nick murmured. “And the voyant who disappeared from the pharmacy.”

I had been too quick to brush off those reports. “This is the greatest threat to voyant-kind we’ve ever faced,” I said. “Depending on how many hidden scanners have been installed, the first three orders—the only ones that can currently be detected—may have to go into hiding temporarily until our numbers are great enough to overcome the Vigiles. It could be too dangerous on the streets.”

“No.” Eliza stared at me. “Paige, we can’t justhide.”

“As a fellow medium,” Glym said, lifting his face, “I agree. Despite the danger, it would be impractical to freeze most of our foot-soldiers.”

“It would also be impractical to allow Scion to capture them,” I said. “We have voyants from the other orders to do the footwork.”

“Not many.”

“Enough,” I said, but I could tell that they weren’t having this. Maria shook her head. “Fine. Then we’d better get damned good at avoiding the scanners. And it’s time we actually tackled the threat head-on. Hector buried his head in the sand about Senshield, but we have to face the facts about how serious this is. This is a god in a machine. An all-seeing eye.”

“And you’re going to find it hard to blind it,” Danica said.

She was sitting uncomfortably at the other end of the table with her arms folded. Her hair was a thatch of auburn frizzles, her eyes bloodshot from overtime. With her job in Scion’s engineering department, she was our best source of information on Senshield.

“Dani,” I said, “did you have any idea this was coming?”

“I knew they planned to install the large scanners across the citadel, which is why I tried and failed to build a device to block our auras—we all knew that. We also knew that they would eventually target essential services. I didnotknow, however, that they had created a version that could be concealed.”

“Let’s cut to the chase, then. Do you have any idea how we can get rid of them?”

“Well, you can’t destroy or remove the large ones by hand. Aside from the fact that they’re clearly being watched, each scanner is welded in place.”

“Do you know how they work?” Glym asked Danica, tersely. “Do you know anything about them at all?”

“Obviously.”

“And?”

She shot him a dark look. If there was one thing Danica Panic hated, it was being rushed.

“According to the engineers’ grapevine, the scanners are powered by a central source of energy, which they call thecore,” she said, with deliberate slowness. “I don’t know what it is, but I do know that every single scanner is connected to it.”

“So if we get rid of the core, we disable the whole thing,” I said.

“Hypothetically. It would be like removing the battery.”

Tom stroked his beard. “And where do we find it?”

“The Archon, surely,” I said.

“Not necessarily,” Danica said. “Senshield is a ScionIDE project, so it’s most likely in a military facility.”

ScionIDE. Scion: International Defense Executive. Scion’s army. I had encountered them once before, thirteen years ago, when they had broken into Ireland through Dublin.

“ScionIDE,” Maria repeated.

I looked at her. Wearing an odd expression, she took a leather cigarette case from her jacket.

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