He walked to the armoire. My eyes were hot with anger. I could almost hear Jax scolding me. You really are a silly thing. Look at you, with dewdrops in your shiners. Raise your head, O my lovely! What do you want—sympathy? Pity? You won’t find that from him, just like you didn’t find it from me. The world is an abattoir, my mollisher. Raise those barking irons, now. Let me see you give him hell.

Warden presented me with a long black tunic. “I hope this fits.” He handed it to me. “It seems a little too large, but it should keep you warm.”

I nodded. Warden turned his back. I pulled the tunic over my head. He was right: it came to my knees. “Done,” I said.

“Will you sit down?”

“Like I have a choice.”

“I am giving you the choice.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Ideally, I would like you to tell me who has been so cruel to you in the past as to make you think that you can trust nobody.” Warden returned to his seat. “But I know you will not tell me that. You want to protect these friends of yours.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course not.”

I cracked. “Fine, yes, I have voyant friends. Doesn’t every voyant have voyant friends?”

“No. The London syndicate has grown stronger over the years. The ones we capture are mostly outsiders—those that live alone, or on the streets, because they are unable to control their powers. Or their families have evicted them. That is why so many of them are happy to serve us: they have been mistreated by their own kind. And while the Rephaim treat them as second-class citizens, they still give them the chance to indulge in the æther. We put them in groups, make them belong to a social structure again.” He motioned to the door. “Michael was a polyglot—I think your people call them ‘julkers.’ His parents were so frightened of his locution that they tried to exorcise him. His dreamscape collapsed. After that he could hardly speak.”

My voice was gone. I had heard of dreamscapes collapsing; it was what had happened to one of the boys in the gang, Zeke. That was how you became unreadable. The dreamscape would grow back with layer upon layer of armor, preventing all spiritual attack.

“The red-jackets picked him up two years ago. He was living rough on the streets of Southwark—an unreadable with no money or food. They put him in the Tower as a suspected unnatural, but I had him brought here prematurely. Though he is treated as an amaurotic, he still has an aura. I taught him how to speak again. I hope that he will find the æther one day, and that he can sing in the way he once did. With the voices of the dead.”