Page 168 of The Mask Falling

With my heart north of its rightful place, I waited. They were moving out of sight of our vantage point. I identified their drivers in the æther and waited for them to keep moving up the quay.

Then I felt the convoy stop. And I felt where it stopped.

On the corner of Rue Gît-le-Cœur.

“No.” The word left me as a rasp. “No. They can’t—”

Léandre had risen. “Your bodyguard.”

Like a shock of iced water, fear drenched me. Without a strategy, without a single thought for caution, I turned on my heel and ran for the roof. The golden cord quaked as I screamed his name through it.

arcturus, run!

Léandre intercepted me. He pinioned my waist with both arms—stopping me, like he had stopped me in the tunnels. “Paige, wait,” he snarled in my ear. “You can’t help him now—”

“I can.” Labored breaths sawed through me, hard as sobs. “I can. Let me go, let me go to him—”

“You are not going down there to get shot or arrested,” he snapped. “You think you’re going to fight off all those squadrons on your own, Underqueen? What are you, a fucking tank?”

My knees could barely hold me. With a last flare of strength, I shoved Léandre off and threw myself back to the edge of the gallery, grabbing onto a column to keep myself from falling. Without the sirens to warn him, and with little strength to run or fight, Arcturus would not escape.

arcturus, go, now!

A vibration rang in answer. I sensed him move—my heart soared—before the Vigiles stormed in, and his dreamscape was in a moil of them, and it was too late, he was lost.

What followed was a torture I had never thought possible. Unable to see the arrest, I lived every moment of it in the æther. The blow that brought him down. (I buckled, as if they had struck me as well.) His stillness. (I slid down the column, onto stone.) The slow drag to the vehicle.

I let out a low sound of denial, my head vised in my hands. Léandre was beside me, and I could hear him speaking, but all I could do was cling to the feel of that ironclad dreamscape, as if by holding onto it I could keep Arcturus from what was to come.

He was going back to his dark room. The one he had never truly escaped. Nashira had no more use for him now. She knew from experience that he was too strong to give way under torture, that all she could do was dispose of him.

The vehicles drove off. A few Vigiles remained behind, presumably to lie in wait for me. With a last flicker, Arcturus disappeared from my perception. I pressed my brow to the column.

“Paige.” Léandre broke the terrible silence. “Did they take him?”

It was a moment before I could speak. “Yes.”

By unspoken agreement, we stayed in the gallery. Safer up here. Only when a dreamscape came to my attention did I stir from my detached state.

Ducos was on her way back to the safe house. I needed to intercept her before she ran straight into the Vigiles.

“I have to get down there.” I sounded distant even to my own ears. “Léandre, you should go.”

“Paige, wait.” Léandre grasped my shoulder. “If not for you, I would have lost the two most important people in my life—my sister and Le Vieux Orphelin.” His face was set. “I will help you get Warden back. To repay that debt. The other perdues will help you, too, once the Man in the Iron Mask is dead.”

“I’m going after Arcturus first.”

The last time Nashira had seen him, I had been in his arms. She was the only other person who knew the truth about us, because she had seen it with her own eyes. Her cruelty might be my only hope. She would want to punish him for that betrayal before she took his head.

I had time to save his life.

“If you’re serious about helping me,” I said to Léandre, “get yourself safely back to Passy. I’ll find you there.”

Lips pursing in the fuzz of his beard, Léandre squinted across the citadel, his low-set eyebrows knitted.

“I will expect you soon. Be careful, marcherêve,” he said gruffly. “They will be looking for you, too.”

I clambered back to the roof and started to edge along it. Arcturus had taken bullets to shield me, dived into an ice-cold river to drag me from its grip. Now it was my turn.

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