Page 7 of The Bone Season

I crawled to his side. Shining my phone on his face, I saw his broken neck, scarred with silver. The poltergeists had killed him and gone. I had to speak the threnody, or he would haunt this carriage. Fumbling in the pockets of his coat, I found his identity card.

‘William Linwood,’ I said, my voice quaking, ‘be gone into the æther. All is settled. All debts are paid. You need not dwell among the living now.’

His spirit was nearby. The æther quietened as both he and his angel faded.

I used a handrail to get to my feet. My clammy palm could hardly grip it. A few feet away, the summoner lay dead.

The other Underguard was on his back. I stepped closer and brushed his dreamscape. When I understood, I made a strangled sound.

I hadn’t pushed his spirit all the way from his body. It was trapped in the outermost ring of his mind – the fifth circle, the darkest, the very brink of death. His silver cord might not have broken, but I had stretched it far enough that all his sanity was gone.

I sank to my knees beside him and found the switch on the side of his helmet, lifting the visor. He looked vacantly at the ceiling, a ribbon of saliva slithering down his chin.

As I stared at him, he focused on my face. With his last flicker of lucidity, he rasped out two faint words:

‘Kill me.’

Tears spilled down my cheeks. I placed my cold hands on his shoulders and steeled myself for a mercy kill.

When the next station came into view, I was farther along the train, waiting. As soon as the doors opened, I stepped out and got straight into the nearest lift. By the time a group of passengers discovered the scene, one man in that carriage was still breathing.

I was gone.

NO SAFER PLACE

7 March 2059

I slipped almost unnoticed into the Barbican. Since it housed so many key employees of Scion, this residential wing had a security guard, who had been mercifully distracted when I arrived. He hadn’t seen my ashen face, the drying blood under my nose.

Somehow, I had managed to leave the Underground before anyone raised the alarm. I must have escaped with seconds to spare. I should have gone straight to ground, but some buried instinct had driven me here, to my father.

He was in the kitchen, watching ScionEye, the flagship broadcast network of the Republic of Scion. I paused to listen to Burnish. Due to an incident on the Underground, one branch was suspended until further notice.

Scarlett Burnish, the Grand Raconteur – the voice of Scion, responsible for public announcements and reading the approved news. She had clear skin, smoothed by cosmetic enamelling, and lips painted to match her red hair, which she wore in an elegant tuck. The high collars she favoured put me in mind of the gallows.

Soon she might be telling the whole citadel my name.

‘In news from elsewhere, the Grand Inquisitor of the Scion Republic of France, BenoîtMénard, will visit Inquisitor Weaver for Novembertide this year,’Burnish said, with her usual fixed smile.‘With eight months to go, the Westminster Archon is already preparing for the arrival of our closest friend on the Continent.’

‘Paige?’

I hung up my jacket. ‘It’s me.’

‘Come and sit down.’

‘I just need a shower.’

I headed for the bathroom, sweating not so much bullets as shotgun shells. As soon as I had locked the door, I vomited my guts into the toilet.

Jaxon had always said I was capable of killing with my spirit, but I had never really believed it. Now I was a murderer, and worse, I had left evidence in the carriage: my data pad, smothered in my prints.

There was blood on my fingers. With a shudder, I shucked my clothes and stumbled into the shower. Hot water pounded on my skin.

The scene replayed, over and over.

I hadn’t meant to kill them. I had only meant to send pressure at them through the æther, a tactic I had used for years. It might have caused them enough pain and panic to let me get away with Linwood.

What I had done was unprecedented. It had been instinctual, beyond my control.

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