It gave way beneath my hand.
Slowly, I brought my weight against the door, opening it. A trap, surely. Vance wouldn’t have left the tower vulnerable while she was at the Jubilee. And yet – whatever lay beyond, it was my one and only chance. I stepped into the darkness and closed the door behind me.
A draught blew at my hair. There were no lights in the tower.
A balustrade was wrapped around a kind of well in the floor; the draught was coming up from there. When I risked a glance, I saw that the well dropped straight down into an entrance hall. A squadron of Vigiles ran through it, shining their torches. As soon as they were gone, I hit the staircase, fighting the weakness in my body, my head spinning from exhaustion and pain. I forced myself to continue, gripping the rails to crane myself up every step. My muscles had wasted during my coma and imprisonment; my knees had almost forgotten how to carry me. When I fell the first time, I thought I wouldn’t get back up. My hands reached for the next step, but it seemed as if I was at the foot of a mountain, staring up at the distant summit.
You have risen from the ashes before.
I grasped the railing again. One step. Two steps.
The only way to survive is to believe you always will.
When I reached the top of the stairs, I fell to my knees and hunched over myself, trembling uncontrollably. There was light nearby. Almost there. I picked myself back up.
My soft footsteps broke the silence. I was at the highest level of the tower, right beneath its rooftop.
Now I could see that a glass pyramid, illuminated from beneath, made up the centre of the ceiling. And there it was, suspended underneath that pyramid: the image I had seen in Warden’s dreamscape, stolen from the mind of Hildred Vance. The core. The entity that powered every scanner, all of Senshield. And now I was this close to it, I could sense what it was.
A spirit.
An immensely powerful spirit, somehow trapped inside a glass sphere. The ?ther around it was in turmoil, alive with vibrations. Our guesswork had been right.
This was it.
‘Paige Mahoney.’
The back of my neck prickled.
I knew that voice.
A woman stepped from the shadows, into the pale light from above. It made her face skeletal.
‘Hildred Vance,’ I said softly.
She must have devised some way to hide her dreamscape from me. They knew so much more about the ?ther than we did.
Vance stood with a rod-straight back and no expression. I had convinced myself that I would be able to face the Grand Commander without fear, but sweat chilled my brow as we regarded each other. The iron hand of the anchor, the human embodiment of Rephaite ambition. The woman who was responsible for the murders of my father and my cousin.
A rigour went through me.
She had hunted me across the country. She had used my aura – my intimate and fragile connection to the ?ther – to enhance her machine. She had shaped my life since I was six years old.
Thirteen years later, she was finally in front of me.
Vance looked from the core to my face. The crow-black eyes regarded me with something I thought at first was contempt, but it wasn’t that. There was no heat in the stare. No passion. If Jaxon was right, and we were devils in the skins of men, then Vance had shed her skin already. I was in the presence of a human being who had spent far too much time among Rephaim. Decades too long.
She didn’t care enough for my life to feel anything towards me. Not even hatred. Her expression, if it could be called that, told me I was nothing to her but an enemy war asset that should have been destroyed.
‘Even before I saw you in my dreamscape, I knew what you were searching for; what you planned to do. You wanted Senshield.’ She glanced at it. ‘I confess, you almost had me fooled. You responded as anticipated to the march on Edinburgh: a replication of the events of the Dublin Incursion, calculated to make you surrender in order to avoid the same bloodshed you witnessed as a child. All went to plan. You appeared broken in mind and body. And yet . . . and yet, I suspected an ulterior motive.’
I watched her.
‘The Trojan horse,’ she said. ‘An ancient stratagem. You presented yourself like a gift to your enemy, and your enemy took you into their house. You realised that, after all your striving, if you were captured, we would take you right to the core – all you had to do was deliver yourself into our custody.’ Her bony hands clasped behind her back. ‘Unavoidable civic duty called me away tonight. You used the opportunity to escape. I assume you had help from an ally in reaching this part of the building.’
‘None,’ I said. As I spoke, her gaze darted to the core again. ‘It’s brave of you to step out from behind the screen, Vance. And I have something to ask you, if you’ll indulge me. Do you remember the names of all the people whose lives you’ve stolen?’
Vance didn’t answer. She must have calculated that there was no strategic advantage to saying anything.
‘You didn’t just kill my father, Cóilín ó Mathúna. Thirteen years ago, you killed my cousin, Finn Mac Cárthaigh, and an unarmed woman named Kayley Ní Dhornáin.’ Saying their names to her face made my voice quake. ‘You have killed thousands of innocent people – yet when I was in your dreamscape, it was my dream-form with blood on its hands. Do you really think I’ve taken more life than you have?’
Her silence continued.
She was waiting. I was trying to work out why, when I saw her gaze move, ever so slightly, back to the core. That was the fourth time.
She was nervous.
There really was a weakness. It could be destroyed.
Time seemed to slow as I looked at the core. I searched it with my eyes, then with my gift.
It took me a few moments to find the ectoplasm. A vial of it, locked inside the sphere, holding the spirit firmly in place and emanating a greenish light. One of Nashira’s boundlings – her fallen angels. I could feel the thousands of delicate connections that branched out around it, reaching towards every Senshield scanner in the citadel, in the country.
I didn’t know its name, so I couldn’t banish it. But surely if I destroyed the casing that imprisoned the spirit, it would disperse its energy into the ?ther and sever those connections.
Surely.
I raised my gun. At the same time, Vance pointed a pistol at my exposed torso.
‘It will kill you,’ she said, ‘and achieve nothing. The spirit will continue to obey the Suzerain. It will continue to power Senshield.’
I stayed very still.
She could be telling the truth. She could be bluffing.
‘You will die in vain,’ Vance said.
Perhaps I would.
But there had to be a reason she was suddenly talking, telling me how Senshield worked. There could be no gain in that. She would only be this free with her information if she was . . .
If she was lying.
And Hildred Vance only lied when it was necessary.