Too late. The train was moving. We didn’t have long before we were exposed on both sides. I beckoned frantically to the others; Tom pulled Maria away from the door. We sprinted back the same way the train had come, into billows of snow, while our ride left Stoke-on-Trent without us.
We kept running, our boots crunching through ballast. Only when we were a fair distance from the station did we slow down to catch our breath. We helped each other over the fence, on to the street, and clustered beneath a bus shelter, heads bent to see the tracker. I brought up a map of our location, which offered up morsels of data about Stoke-on-Trent. Status: conurbation. Region: Midlands. Nearest citadel: Scion Citadel of Birmingham.
‘We can’t stay here for long,’ I said. ‘Outlying communities are too dangerous. They’re much more observant than people in the citadels.’
Maria nodded. ‘We’ll have to walk.’
Eliza was already shivering. ‘In this snow?’
‘I walked across countries to get to Britain, sweet. We can make it. And let’s face it: it wouldn’t be the most insane thing we’ve done this week.’ Maria peered over my shoulder at the tracker. ‘Looks like twelve hours on foot to the centre of Manchester. Probably a little longer, in this weather.’
I clenched my jaw. Every hour left the Mime Order in more danger. ‘There’s an enclave farther north.’ I tapped the tracker. ‘We’ll walk from now until sunrise, stop there, and press on when it gets dark again. The contact we’re due to meet will guess that something went wrong.’
Maria patted Tom on the back. ‘Can you make it that far?’
Tom had a slight limp from an old injury to his knee. ‘There’s no other choice,’ he said, ‘unless we mean to stay here and wait for the Gillies to find us in the morning.’
I adjusted my winter hood so only my eyes were uncovered. ‘Then let’s stretch our legs.’
Although Stoke-on-Trent was quiet in the small hours, it put me on edge. Even a notorious outlaw could be anonymous in the capital of all Scion, but not in settlements like these. It reminded me of Arthyen, the village where I had first met Nick. Its residents had been on a permanent quest to see unnaturalness in their neighbours.
We stole through the streets, passing darkened shops, small transmission screens, and houses with the occasional lit window. Maria went ahead to scout for cameras and guide us out of their way. I only managed to relax a little when the streetlamps were far behind us and we were out in the countryside. It wasn’t long before we crossed the regional boundary, which was marked by a billboard reading WELCOME TO THE NORTH WEST.
For a while, we risked the road, which had been recently cleared of snow. Ruined churches dotted our way. Tom found a sturdy branch to use as a staff. To distract myself from the blistering wind, I started counting stars. The sky was clearer here, and the stars burned far brighter than they did in London, where the blue haze of the streetlamps watered down their light. As I picked apart the broken necklaces of diamond, trying to find the constellations, I wondered why the Rephaim had taken the stars’ names as their own. I wondered why he had chosen Arcturus.
After a lorry gunned past us and blared its horn, we ducked under a barbed-wire fence into the fields, where snowdrifts were piled like whipped cream. More of it was falling, catching in my lashes. We had the tracker, but it was so disorienting, with the black sky above us and white as far as the eye could see below, that we finally risked switching on our torches. The world around us was drained of colour, flickering with snowflakes.
‘I can’t wait to advertise the Mime Order to the n-northerners. “Join Paige Mahoney for unexpected rambles through snow and shit,”’ Maria bit out through chattering teeth.
I chased white powder from the tracker again. ‘Nobody s-said the revolution would be glamorous.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I like to think that in the great uprisings of history, they had beautiful d-dresses and decadence to go with the misery.’
Tom managed a chuckle.
‘If my Scion History class on the French had it right,’ I said, through numb lips, ‘the dresses and decadence were p-part of what caused those uprisings.’
‘Stop spoiling my fun.’
We passed a row of pylons, steel goliaths in the frozen sea. The power lines above us were so laden with ice that some of them almost touched the ground. I reached into my jacket, where I had stashed some of the precious heat packs Nick had given me, and handed them out to the others. When I cracked one, warmth bled into my torso.
The conditions had one advantage: they stopped me thinking about anything but keeping warm. They stopped me thinking about Warden, about whether I had made the right choice in telling him that it was over. Thoughts like those would lead me down a darker path than the one I walked on now. Instead, I envisioned a glorious bonfire and promised it would be waiting for me at the end of every field we crossed, over every wall and fence we encountered. By the time the sun climbed over the horizon, turning the sky a moody red, my muscles were on fire, I could no longer feel my toes, and I was so caked in snow that the black of my coat and trousers had been engulfed by white.
The first we saw of the enclave was a lodging-house with a thatched roof, so covered in snow that it looked like an ornament for a cake. I could just see the clusters of white flowers on its windowsills.
‘There,’ I said. It was the first time I had spoken in hours. ‘Black hellebore.’
Maria squinted. ‘Where?’
Eliza pulled down her scarf. ‘You know black hellebore is white, don’t you?’
‘Of course. N-nothing makes sense.’ Maria stomped ahead. ‘These people had better have hot chocolate.’
We walked faster through the last stretch of field, coaxing our legs into carrying us just a little farther. It must have been too early for anyone to have cleared the snow from the village: the few parked cars were buried, and there was no evidence of roads or paths beneath it.
Something pricked at my sixth sense, stopping me in my tracks as Eliza circled around to the front of the lodging-house. I had the sudden notion that I had been somewhere like this before, though I was certain I had never set foot in the North West. There were no spirits. Not one. A warning beat in the pit of my stomach: stay away, stay away.
That was when Eliza let out a blood-stewing scream. It jolted adrenalin through my veins, giving me the strength to pull my knife from my boot and run over with Maria. We found Eliza beside a fence, one hand clamped over her mouth. The snow before her was marbled with crimson.
A bird croaked at us and fluttered off the wreckage of a human being. The ribcage was torn open, bone laid bare beneath drapes of flesh, and most of the left arm was missing, but the face, the face of a woman – untouched. Dark hair was strewn across the snow.