Page 26 of The Mask Falling

More uproarious laughter. “And who are you to make such demands?” A hoarse chuckle to my left. “Another lowlife mendiante who thinks she can drag herself up from the Cour—”

“I am Paige Mahoney,” I said. “Black Moth. Underqueen of the Scion Citadel of London.”

My voice was a guillotine blade, ending all sound. The one with the knife gripped my hair a little tighter.

“Paige Mahoney is dead. Slain in Edinburgh,” a medium said coldly. “You insult her memory.”

“Wait.”

The polyglot grasped my chin and raised it, so the lamplight reached my face. Pale eyes assessed me from inside his skull mask.

“Her face is familiar,” he conceded. “A red aura, yet it does not belong to an oracle. They say the Underqueen was another kind of jumper. And that she walked with the gods of the æther.”

“Lies to shift penny dreadfuls,” came a sharp reply from the medium, even as a few of the masks turned toward Arcturus. “If there are gods in the æther, they abandoned us a long time ago.”

“No. He is one ofthem,” someone else muttered. “Look at his eyes. Did you not read the pamphlet?”

The Rephaite Revelation. I had organized its publication to warn the syndicate about the Rephaim, and the Spiritus Club had distributed it all over London. It seemed it had made its way here, too.

“Whispers from over the sea mean nothing,” the medium insisted. “And this could be a trap.”

“That is for Le Latronpuche to decide,” the polyglot said. I jerked my chin free. “Come, then, my new friends. Walk with us. And do try to keep up, or we will not be friends for very long.”

****

They escorted us farther into the labyrinth, past free-standing towers of bone that looked like altars to some nameless divinity of death. Though I tried to remember the turns we took, I soon lost track. Arcturus would remember the way.

Water trickled beneath our boots. It set me on edge, but I could stand it so long as it was away from my face.

At some point, rubble and shards of ceramic overtook the bones. One passage was so cramped that we humans had to duckwalk through the knee-deep water, while Arcturus was almost on all fours. I clenched my stomach to keep myself from heaving. When we emerged in a small chamber, I stopped. One of the voyants was up to his waist in a milky pool.

He took a deep breath and went under. One by one, the others followed. Mélusine stepped in last, hair drifting like seaweed on the surface.

“Thank you,” she said. “For covering for me.” She tucked the slack tresses back into her ponytail. “This is the final test. Le Couloir des Noyés. I trust you can hold your breath for a while.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the water as it closed over her head. The light from her headlamp dwindled to nothing.

“Paige.”

There was soaking cloth over my face, rancid water in my mouth. Worming down my throat, swelling my abdomen, rusting my lungs. I was alone and suffocating. A living corpse.

“I can do it,” I said, more to myself than to Arcturus. I took off my coat and knotted the sleeves around my waist.

Cold swashed up my body as I lowered myself into the flooded basin. I shuddered at the feel of the water, the dank smell of it. It had almost reached my chin before my heels scraped the bottom. With an uncontrollable shudder, I turned back and gripped the edge of the pool. Chalk smoked around me.

Arcturus sank into a crouch. “Look at me,” he said. I did. “This is not the waterboard. You are not trapped. I will be with you all the way.”

“It’s all over m-me.”

“You are not going to drown, Paige Mahoney. You are a dreamwalker,” he told me, “and you know how to go without breath.” I clung to the side like a limpet. “Would you like me to go first?”

“No. Don’t leave.” I closed my eyes. “I n-need you to come straight after me. Promise.”

“You have my word.”

He joined me in the water and held my elbows, keeping my shoulders above the surface. The stretto of my breathing filled the tunnel.

If I waited any longer, our guides would think we had lost our nerve. It was now or never.

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