The Bone Season

3 Confined

It lasted a lifetime. I couldn’t remember when it started, and I didn’t see when it would end.

I remembered movement, a throaty roar, being strapped to a hard surface. Then a needle, and the pain took over.

Reality was warped. I was close to a candle, but the flame kept bursting to the size of an inferno. I was trapped in an oven. Sweat dripped from my pores like wax. I was fire. I burned. I blistered and seared—then I was freezing, desperate for heat, feeling as if I would die. There was no middle ground. Just endless, limitless pain.

AUP Fluxion 14 was developed as a collaborative project between the medical and military divisions of Scion. It produced a crippling effect called phantasmagoria, dubbed “brain plague” by embittered voyants: a vivid series of hallucinations, caused by distortions to the human dreamscape. I fought my way through vision after vision, crying out when the pain grew too intense to bear in silence. If there is a definition for hell, this was it. It was hell.

My hair stuck to my tears as I retched, trying in vain to force the poison from my body. All I wanted was for everything to end. Whether it was sleep, unconsciousness, or death, something had to take me from this nightmare.

“There, now, treasure. We don’t want you to die just yet. We’ve already lost three today.” Cold fingers stroked my forehead. I arched my back, pulled away. If they didn’t want me to die, then why do this to me?

Dead flowers skittered past my eyes. The room twisted into a helix, around and around until I had no idea which way was up. I bit a pillow to stop the screams. I tasted blood and knew I’d bitten something else—my lip, my tongue, my cheek, who knew?

Flux didn’t just leave your system. No matter how many times you vomited or passed urine, it kept on circulating, borne by your blood, reproduced by your own cells, until you could force the antidote into your veins. I tried to plead, but I couldn’t get a note out. The pain washed over me in wave after wave after wave, until I was sure I would die.

A new voice registered.

“Enough. We need this one alive. Get the antidote, or I will see to it that you take twice the dosage she did.”

The antidote! I might yet live. I tried to see past the rippled veil of visions, but I couldn’t make out anything but the candle.

It was taking too long. Where was my antidote? It didn’t seem to matter. I wanted sleep, the longest sleep of all.

“Let me go,” I said. “Let me out.”

“She’s speaking. Bring water.”

The cold lip of a glass clashed on my teeth. I took deep, thirsty gulps. I looked up and tried to see the face of my savior.

“Please,” I said.

Two eyes looked back at me. They burst into flame.

And finally, the nightmare stopped. I fell into a deep, black sleep.

When I woke, I lay still.

I could feel enough to get a good mental picture of where I was: spread on my stomach on a rigid mattress. My throat was roasted. It was such a severe pain that I was forced to come to my senses, if only to seek water. I realized with a start that I was naked.

I pivoted onto my side, resting my weight on my elbow and hip. I could taste dry vomit in the corners of my mouth. As soon as I could focus, I reached for the æther. There were other voyants here, somewhere in this prison.

It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. I was in a single bed with cold, damp sheets. On the right was a barred window, with no glass. The floor and walls were made of stone. A bitter draft sent goose bumps racing all over me. My breath came out in tiny clouds. I pulled the sheets around my shoulders. Who the hell had taken my clothes?

A door was ajar in the corner. I could see light. I stood, testing my strength. When I was sure I wasn’t going to fall, I moved toward the light. What I found was a rudimentary bathroom. The light was coming from a single candle. There was an ancient toilet and a rusted tap, the latter of which had been placed high on the wall. The tap was perishing to the touch. When I turned the nearby valve, a deluge of freezing water engulfed me. I tried turning the valve the other way, but the water refused to heat up more than about half a degree. I decided to take turns with my limbs, dipping one after the other under the crude excuse for a shower. There were no towels, so I used the sheets on the bed to dry off, keeping one wrapped around me. When I tried the main door, I found it locked.

My skin prickled. I had no idea where I was, or why I was here, or what these people would do to me. Nobody knew what happened to detainees; none of them had ever come back.

I sat on the bed and took a few deep breaths. I was still weak from hours of phantasmagoria, and I didn’t need a mirror to know I looked even more like a corpse than usual.

My shivers weren’t just from the cold. I was naked and alone in a dark room, with bars at the window and no sign of an escape route. They must have taken me to the Tower. Taken my backpack, too, and the pamphlet. I huddled against the bedpost and tried my best to conserve my body heat, my heart thumping. A thick knot filled my aching throat.

Would they hurt my father? He was valuable, yes—a commodity—but would he be forgiven for harboring a voyant? That was misprision. But he was important. They had to spare him.

For a while I lost track of time. I fell into a fitful doze. Finally the door crashed open, and I snapped awake.

“Get up.”

A paraffin lamp swung into the room. Holding it was a woman. She had polished nut-brown skin and an elegant bone structure, and she was taller than me by several inches. Her loosely curled hair was long and black, as was her high-waisted dress, the sleeves of which fell to the tips of her gloved fingers. It was impossible to guess her age: she could have been twenty-five or forty. I clutched the sheet around my body, watching her.

I noticed three odd things about the woman. First, her eyes were yellow. Not the kind of amber you might call yellow in certain lights. These were real yellow, almost chartreuse, and they glowed.

The second thing was her aura. She was voyant, but I’d never encountered this type before. I couldn’t pinpoint why exactly it was strange, but it didn’t sit well with my senses.

And the third—the one that chilled me—was her dreamscape. Exactly like the one I’d felt in I-4, the one we hadn’t been able to identify. The stranger. My instinct was to attack her, but I already knew I wouldn’t be able to breach that kind of dreamscape, certainly not in my current state.

“Is this the Tower?” My voice was hoarse.

The woman ignored my question. She moved her lamp close to my face, scrutinizing my eyes. I started to wonder if this was still brain plague.

“Take these,” she said.

I looked at the two pills in her hand.

“Take them.”

“No,” I said.

She hit me. I tasted blood. I wanted to hit back, to fight, but I was so weak I could barely lift my hand. With difficulty, given my freshly burst lip, I took the pills. “Cover yourself,” my captor said. “If you disobey me again, I will ensure you never leave this room. Not with flesh on your bones.”

She threw a bundle of clothes at me.

“Pick them up.”

I didn’t want to be hit again. I’d fall this time. With my jaw set tight, I picked them up.

“Put them on.”

I looked down at the clothes, dripping blood from my lip. A spot grew on the white tunic in my hands. It had long sleeves and a square neckline. With it was a black sash, matched with trousers, socks, and boots, a set of plain underwear and a black gilet stitched with a small white anchor. Scion’s symbol. I dressed in rigid strokes, forcing my cold limbs to move. When I was finished, she turned to the door. “Follow me. Do not speak to anyone.”

It was deathly cold outside the room, and the threadbare carpet did little to improve the temperature. It must have been red once, but now it was faded and stained with vomit. My guide led me through a labyrinth of stone corridors, past small barred windows and burning torches. They seemed too bright, too raw, after the cool blue streetlights of London.

Could this be a castle? I didn’t know anywhere within a thousand miles of London that had a castle—we hadn’t had a monarch since Victoria. Maybe it was one of the old Category D prisons. Unless it was the Tower.

I risked a glance outside. It was night, but I could see a courtyard by the light of several lanterns. I wondered how long I’d been under the influence of flux. Had this woman watched me as I struggled? Did she take orders from the NVD, or did they take orders from her? Maybe she worked for the Archon, but they wouldn’t employ a voyant. And whatever else she might be, she was most definitely voyant.

The woman stopped outside a door. A boy was shoved out from inside. He was a skinny, rat-faced creature, with a mop of sandy hair, and all the symptoms of flux poisoning: glazed eyes, bone-white face, blue lips. The woman looked him up and down.

“Name?”

“Carl,” he rasped.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Carl.” You could tell he was in agony.

“Well, congratulations on surviving Fluxion 14, Carl.” She sounded anything but congratulatory. “That may have been the last sleep you have for a while.”

Carl and I exchanged a glance. I knew I must look as awful as he did.

As we traipsed through the corridors, we collected several more captive voyants. Their auras were strong and distinctive; I could hazard a guess at what they all were. A seer. A chiromancer—palmist—with a pixie cut dyed electric blue. A tasseographer. An oracle with a shaved head. A slim and thin-lipped brunette, probably a whisperer, who seemed to have a broken arm. None of them looked much older than twenty, or much younger than fifteen. All of them were pale and sick from flux. In the end there were ten of us. The woman turned to face her little flock of freaks.

“I am Pleione Sualocin,” she said. “I will be your guide for your first day in Sheol I. Tonight you will attend the welcome oration. There are a number of simple rules you are expected to observe. You will not look any Rephaite in the eye. You will keep your gazes on the floor, where they belong, unless you are invited to look at something else.”

The palmist raised a hand, she kept her eyes on her feet. “Rephaite?”

“You will find out soon enough.” Pleione paused. “An additional rule: you will not speak unless a Rephaite addresses you. Is there any confusion on these matters?”

“Yeah, there is.” It was the tasser that spoke. He was not looking at the floor. “Where are we?”

“You are about to find out.”

“What the hell gives you the right to nib us? I weren’t even busking. I ain’t no lawbreaker. Prove I’ve got an aura! I’ll go straight back to the city and you ain’t going to—”

He stopped. Two dark beads of blood seeped from his eyes. He made a soft sound before he collapsed.

The palmist screamed.

Pleione assessed the tasser’s form. When she looked up at us, her eyes were gas-flame blue. I swerved my gaze away from them.

“Any other questions?”

The palmist clapped a hand over her mouth.

We were herded into a small room. Wet walls and floor, dark as a crypt. Pleione locked us in and left.

For a minute, nobody dared speak. The palmist heaved out sobs, close to hysteria. Most of the others were still too weak to talk. I sat down in a corner, out of the way. Beneath my sleeves, my skin was stippled with gooseflesh.

“Is this still the Tower?” said an augur. “It looks like the Tower.”

“Shut up,” someone said. “Just shut up.”

Someone started praying to the zeitgeist, of all things. Like that would help. I rested my chin on my knees. I didn’t want to know what they would do to us. I didn’t know how strong I’d be if they put me on the waterboard. I’d heard my father talk about it, how they only let you breathe for a few seconds at a time. He said it wasn’t torture. It was therapy.

A seer sat down beside me. He was bald and broad-shouldered. I couldn’t see much of him in the gloom, but I could see his large, intensely dark eyes. He extended a hand.

“Julian.”

He didn’t seem afraid. Just quiet. “Paige,” I said. Best not to use full names. I cleared my dry throat. “What’s your cohort?”

“IV-6.”

“I-4.”

“That’s the White Binder’s territory.” I nodded. “Which part?”

“Soho,” I said. If I said I was in Dials, he’d know I must be one of Jaxon’s nearest and dearest.

“I envy you. I’d love to have lived central.”

“Why?”

“Syndicate’s strong there. My section doesn’t see much action.” He kept his voice low. “Did you give them a reason to arrest you?”

“Killed an Underguard.” My throat ached. “You?”

“Minor disagreement with a Vigile. Long story short, the Vigile is no longer with us.”

“But you’re a seer.” Most voyants regarded seers—a class of soothsayer—with disdain. Like all soothsayers, they communed with spirits through objects; in a seer’s case, anything reflective. Jax hated soothsayers with a passion (“shitsayers, dolly, call them shitsayers”). And augurs, come to think of it.

Julian seemed to read these thoughts. “You don’t think seers capable of murder.”

“Not with spirits. You couldn’t control a big enough spool.”

“You do know your voyants.” He rubbed his arms. “You’re right. I shot him. Didn’t stop them arresting me.”

I didn’t reply. Icy water dripped from the ceiling, onto my hair, and ran down my nose. Most of the other prisoners were silent. One boy was rocking back and forth on his heels.

“You have a strange aura.” Julian looked at me. “I can’t work out what you are. I’d say oracle, but—”

“But?”

“I haven’t heard of a woman being an oracle in a long time. And I don’t think you’re a sibyl.”

“I’m an acultomancer.”

“What’d you do, stab someone with a needle?”

“Something like that.”

There was a crash from outside, and an awful scream. Everyone stopped talking.

“That’s a berserker.” The voice was male, afraid. “They’re not going to put a berserker in here, are they?”

“There’s no such thing as a berserker,” I said.

“Have you not read On the Merits?”

“Yes. It’s a hypothetical type.”

He didn’t look relieved. The thought of the pamphlet made me colder than ever. It could be anywhere, in anyone’s hands—a first edition of the most seditious pamphlet in the citadel, covered in fresh notes and contact details. I could never have got such a thing without knowing the writer.

“They’re going to torture us again.” The whisperer was cradling her broken arm. “They want something. They wouldn’t have just let us out.”

“Out of where?” I said.

“The Tower, idiot. Where we’ve all been for the last two years.”

“Two?” There was a half-hysterical laugh from the corner. “Try nine. Nine years.” Another laugh, a giggle.

Nine years. Why nine? From what we knew, detainees were given two choices: join the NVD or be executed. There was no need to store people. “Why nine?” I said.

There was no answer from the corner. After a minute, Julian spoke up.

“Anyone else wondering why we’re not dead?”

“They killed everyone else.” A new voice. “I was there for months. The other voyants in my wing all got the noose.” Pause. “We’ve been picked for something else.”

“SciSORS,” somebody whispered. “We’re gonna be lab rats, aren’t we? The doctors want to cut us up.”

“This isn’t SciSORS,” I said.

There was a long silence, broken only by the bitter tears of the palmist. She couldn’t seem to stop. Finally, Carl addressed the whisperer. “You said they must want something, hisser. What could they want?”

“Anything. Our sight.”

“They can’t take our sight,” I said.

“Please. You’re not even sighted. They won’t want disabled voyants.”

I resisted the urge to break her other arm.

“What did she do to the taser?” The palmist was shaking. “His eyes—she didn’t even move!”

“Well, I thought we’d be killed for sure,” Carl said, as if he couldn’t imagine why the rest of us were so worried. His voice was less hoarse. “I’d take anything over the noose, wouldn’t you?”

“We might still get the noose,” I said.

He fell silent.

Another boy, so pale it looked as if the flux had burned the blood out of his veins, was beginning to hyperventilate. Freckles dusted his nose. I hadn’t noticed him before; he had no trace of an aura. “What is this place?” He could hardly get the words out. “Who—who are you people?”

Julian glanced at him. “You’re amaurotic,” he said. “Why have they taken you?”

“Amaurotic?”

“Probably a mistake.” The oracle seemed bored. “They’ll kill him all the same. Tough luck, kid.”

The boy looked as though he might faint. He leaped to his feet and yanked at the bars.

“I’m not meant to be here. I want to go home! I’m not unnatural, I’m not!” He was almost in tears. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry about the stone!”

I clapped a hand over his mouth. “Stop it.” A few of the others swore at him. “You want her to reef you, too?”

He was trembling. I guessed he was about fifteen, but a weak fifteen. I was forcefully reminded of a different time—a time when I was frightened and alone.

“What’s your name?” I tried to sound gentle.

“Seb. S-Seb Pearce.” He crossed his arms, trying to make himself smaller. “Are you—are you all—unnaturals?”

“Yeah, and we’ll do unnatural things to your internal organs if you don’t shut your rotten trap,” a voice sneered. Seb cringed.

“No, we won’t,” I said. “I’m Paige. This is Julian.”

Julian just nodded. It looked like it was my job to make small talk with the amaurotic. “Where are you from, Seb?” I said.

“III Cohort.”

“The ring,” Julian said. “Nice.”

Seb looked away. His lips shook with cold. No doubt he thought we’d chop him up and bathe in his blood in an occult frenzy.

The ring was where I’d gone to secondary school, a street name for III Cohort. “Tell us what happened,” I said.

He glanced at the others. I couldn’t find it in myself to blame him for his fear. He’d been told from the second he could talk that clairvoyants were the source of all the world’s evils, and here he was in a prison with them. “One of the sixth-formers planted contraband in my satchel,” he said. Probably a show stone, the most common numen on the black market. “The Schoolmaster saw me trying to give it back to them in class. He thought I’d got it from one of those beggar types. They called the school Vigiles to check me.”

Definitely a Scion kid. If his school had its own Gillies, he must be from an astronomically rich family.

“It took hours to convince them I’d been framed. I took a shortcut home.” Seb swallowed. “There were two men in red on the corner. I tried to walk past them, but they heard me. They wore masks. I don’t know why, but I ran. I was scared. Then I heard a gunshot, and—and then I think I must have fainted. And then I was sick.”

I wondered about the effects of flux on amaurotics. It made sense that the physical symptoms would appear—vomiting, thirst, inexplicable terror—but not phantasmagoria. “That’s awful,” I said. “I’m sure this is all a terrible mistake.” And I was sure. There was no way a well-bred amaurotic kid like Seb should be here.

Seb looked encouraged. “Then they’ll let me go home?”

“No,” Julian said.

My ears pricked. Footsteps. Pleione was back. She pulled open the door, grabbed the nearest prisoner, and hauled him to his feet with one hand. “Follow me. Remember the rules.”

We left the building through a set of double doors, the palmist guided by the whisperer. The frigid air hit every inch of exposed skin. I started when we came to the gallows—maybe this was the Tower—but Pleione walked past it. I had no idea what she’d done to the tasser, or what the scream had been, but I wasn’t about to ask. Head down, eyes open. That would be my rule here, too.

She led us through deserted streets, illuminated by gaslight and wet after a night of heavy rain. Julian fell into step beside me. As we walked, the buildings grew larger—but they weren’t skyscrapers. They were nowhere near that scale. No metal framework, no electric light. These buildings were old and unfamiliar, built when aesthetic tastes were different. Stone walls, wooden doors, leaded windows glazed with deep red and amethyst. When we rounded the last corner, we were greeted by a sight I would never forget.

The street that stretched in front of us was oddly wide. There wasn’t a car in sight: just a long line of ramshackle dwellings, winding drunkenly from one end to the other. Plywood walls propped up slats of corrugated metal. On either side of this little town were larger buildings. They had heavy wooden doors, high windows, and crenellation, like the castles of Victoria’s days. They reminded me so much of the Tower that I had to look away.

Several feet from the nearest hut, a group of svelte figures stood on an open-air stage. Candles had been placed all around them, illuminating their masked faces. A violin sang below the boards. Voyant music, the sort only a whisperer could perform. Looking up at them was a large audience. Every member of that audience wore a red tunic and a black gilet.

As if they’d been awaiting our arrival, the figures began to dance. They were all clairvoyant; in fact, everyone here was clairvoyant—the dancers, the spectators, everyone. Never in my life had I seen so many voyants in one place, standing peacefully together. There must have been a hundred observers clustered around the stage.

This was no secret meeting in an underground tunnel. This wasn’t Hector’s brutal syndicate. This was different. When Seb reached for my hand, I didn’t shake him off.

The show went on for a few minutes. Not all of the spectators were paying attention. Some were talking among themselves, others jeering at the stage. I was sure I heard someone say “cowards.” After the dance, a girl in a black leotard stepped out onto a higher platform. Her dark hair was slicked back into a bun, and her mask was gold and winged. She stood there for a moment, still as glass—then she jumped from the platform and seized two long red drapes that had been dropped from the rigging. Weaving her legs and arms around them, she climbed up twenty feet before unraveling into a pose. She earned a smattering of applause from the audience.

My brain was still drug-addled. Was this some kind of voyant cult? I’d heard of stranger things. I forced myself to study the street. One thing was certain: this wasn’t SciLo. There was no sign of Scion’s presence at all. Big old buildings, public performances, gas lamps, and a cobbled street—it was like we’d rewound time.

I knew exactly where I was.

Everyone had heard about the lost city of Oxford. It was part of the Scion school curriculum. Fires had destroyed the university in the autumn of 1859. What remained was classified as a Type A Restricted Sector. No one was allowed to set foot there for fear of some indefinable contamination. Scion had just wiped it from the maps. I’d read in Jaxon’s records that an intrepid journalist from the Roaring Boy had tried to drive there in 2036, threatening to write an exposé, but his car was driven off the road by snipers, never to be seen again. The Roaring Boy, a penny paper, disappeared just as quickly. It had tried far too often to uncover Scion’s secrets.

Pleione turned to look at us. The darkness made it hard to see her face, but her eyes still burned.

“It is unseemly to stare,” she said. “You do not want to be late for the oration.”

Yet we couldn’t help but stare at the dance. We followed her, but she couldn’t stop us looking.

We trooped after Pleione until we reached a pair of enormous wroughtiron gates. They were unlocked by two men, both of whom resembled our guide: same eyes, same satin skin, same auras. Pleione sailed right past them. Seb was starting to go green. I kept hold of his hand as we walked through the grounds of the building. This amaurotic should have meant nothing to me, but he seemed too vulnerable to be left alone. The palmist was in tears. Only the oracle, picking at his knuckles, seemed fearless. As we walked, we were joined by several other groups of white-clad newcomers. Most of them looked frightened, but a few seemed exhilarated. My group drew closer together as we joined the ranks.

We were being herded.

We spilled into a long and lofty room. Olive-green shelves stretched from the floor to the ceiling, packed with beautiful old books. Eleven stained glass windows lined one wall. The decor was classical, with a dressed stone floor inlaid in a diagonal pattern. The captives jostled into lines. I stood between Julian and Seb, my senses on red alert. Julian was tense, too. His eyes moved from one white-clad captive to another, sizing them up. It was a real melting pot: a cross section of voyants, from augurs and soothsayers to mediums and sensors.

Pleione had left us. Now she stood on a plinth with what I guessed were eight of her fellow Rephaite creatures. My sixth sense quaked.

Once we were assembled, a deathly hush swept over the room. A single woman stepped forward. And then she began to speak.