Bone Season 01: The Bone Season: A Novel (6 page)

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 (“
shi
t
sayers, 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.