Page 1 of The Dawn Chorus

Chapter 1

Here Lies the Heart

There is a narrow street in Paris named Rue Gît-le-Cœur. In early 2060, it was home to a tiny bookshop, a flophouse even the rats avoided, and not a great deal else. No one had much reason to linger on that street.

Except, of course, for two fugitives from Inquisitorial justice – Warden and me. It was on Rue Gît-le-Cœur that I was to fight a different sort of war to the one we had been waging against Scion: a war against my own body and mind after twenty-three days of imprisonment.

Twenty-three days. Just over three weeks. I thought that was right – that I had worked it out. There had been no tally marks on those blind walls, no grooves from desperate fingernails. Only the dates I held in my mind. The dates and the darkness between them.

I had escaped at the eleventh hour. I was getting fairly good at that. Scarlett Burnish – the most unlikely saviour in Scion – had smuggled me out of the Westminster Archon to Dover, and I had boarded a cargo ship with Warden and sailed away from England.

Now I had to prove my life had been worth the risk. I had to mend, and quickly, so I could get back to the war beyond the window. The war he and I had rekindled together.

SCION CITADEL OF PARIS

2JANUARY2060

My first thought, in the pitch-dark room, was that my execution must be close – though, to Scion, I was already a corpse. They were keeping me in cold storage, as if I would begin to rot at the merest breath of warmth.

My second thought was that I was awake, and that meant pain was coming. My muscles tightened, braced for hands to drag me to the waterboard, for boots and fists to try again to force my secrets out.

I assumed it was day when the Vigiles came, when the Rephaite guards were resting and the humans could reign as they pleased in the basement. Hard to be sure without natural light. In the black silence of my cell, there were few means of reckoning time. Still, they would come, and when they did, they would no longer pretend these private sessions were interrogations. I was their amusement in this place.

Let them go too far and kill me this time. Let me escape into the æther before the executioner got to me. Let Nashira hear that she would never dreamwalk. My escape – the spy, the tunnel, the ship – had been one more drug-induced delusion. A story I had told myself.

Except I was sure I was seeing a clock. Red digits told me it was 01:06. And I could hear something, beyond my own heartbeat – a wide and shapeless roar. The unmistakable rumble of a citadel.

It came back to me then, as I made out the snarl of a moto in the distance and felt the duvet over my body. I remembered how I had reached this bed. Speckled with goosebumps, I lay still, savouring the not-silence of freedom. I had never thought I would hear a citadel sing to me again.

It was real. I was in Paris.

I soon realised that sleep had been a mercy. Every inch of me was in distress, right down to my knuckles, my fingertips. Every breath stabbed deep into my chest. Through a dense headache, I tried to understand why it should hurt so much to breathe. My breastbone might be bruised. Cracked ribs. There had been so many beatings in those final days. Then there was the chill in my left hand, where the poltergeist had cut me, which had climbed right the way to my shoulder, leaving the whole arm stiff and numb.

My bladder was full. That was what had woken me. The pressure raised my heartbeat.

Even swine have the dignity to soil themselves outside. Wetness on my brow.If only the concubine could see you now. I doubt even his standards are this low.Suhail Chertan had said many things to me while I was lashed to the waterboard, but that remark clung to the front of my mind.I doubt even his standards are this low.

It must have been over a week before he had banished me to a cell. The only cleaning the board had received, in that time, was when he pulled the lever. They had let me wash once in the twenty-three days I had been imprisoned, just before my audience with Jaxon. No doubt he had wanted me presentable, lest he be put off his breakfast. By the time of my rescue, I had been a bloody, reeking, broken shell.

Warden knew what it was to be tortured and humiliated. He must understand that I had been in that state because I had been mistreated, not through any fault of my own.

No. He saw you for what you are, Suhail sneered.Saw the damp rot of mortality.

He might have been standing at my bedside. There he was, in the shadows, waiting to fill my stomach with foul water. I had to switch on the lamp, to exorcise him, but when I tried, my shoulder objected. My arms had been strained over my head for days.

Leave a human for too long, and you will see its true nature.The blood-sovereign taught me this.The scrape of a baton along the wall. You leak fluids like corpses even before you die. You paint and wash and scent yourselves to keep the rot at bay, yet still it stalks you.

I hated that it had been Suhail, who seemed to wield no power or respect among the Rephaim. He was a low-ranking brute. Instead of questioning me herself, affording me that thin façade of respect, Nashira had passed me off to an underling. Made me fear a nobody.

Cheeks damp, I blew out a shaking breath. I was no closer to reaching the bathroom.

In the Westminster Archon, I had divided my imprisonment into steps.Survive the torture. Resist the drugs. Withstand the beatings.Could I do the same with my healing? I wasn’t sure I knew where to start.Endure the pain. Crush the fear …

First I had to get back to sleep. I listened to the silence in the room. I controlled my breathing as best I could. I pressed my cheek into the softness of the pillow, reminding myself that I was no longer in a cell – but my throat burned with thirst and I was sore all over and the pressure wasn’t going anywhere.

I would have to drag myself to the bathroom.

Sweat beaded on my brow. When I tilted my hips, pain shot up my spine. My swollen wrist refused to brace me. My back ached. Until now, I had never appreciated how many complicated little movements were involved in things I had once done without a second thought, like getting out of bed and walking. I had taken my strength for granted.