I was too young to understand what the village was really like. Voyants might have been in danger in the citadel, but they couldn’t escape to these idylls in the countryside. Far from the Archon, small-town amaurotics grew nervous. Suspicions about unnaturalness pervaded those close-knit communities. They made a habit of watching one another, eyes peeled for a crystal ball or show stone, waiting to call the nearest Scion outpost—or take justice into their own hands. A real clairvoyant wouldn’t last a day. Even if they did, there was no work. The land needed tending, but not by many hands. They had machines to farm the fields. It was only in the citadel that voyants could make decent money.

I didn’t like to go far from the house, not without my father. The people talked too much, looked too much, and Giselle talked and looked straight back at them. She was a stern woman, thin and hard-faced, with a ring on every finger and long, string-like veins that bulged from her arms and neck. I didn’t like her. But one day, from the rooftop, I spotted a haven: a poppy field, a pool of red beneath the iron sky.

Every day, when my father thought I was playing upstairs, I would walk to that field and read on my new data pad for hours, watching the poppies nod their heads around me. It was in that field that I had my first true encounter with the spirit world. The æther. At the time I had no idea I was clairvoyant. Unnaturalness was still a story to a child of nine, a bogeyman with no clear features. I had yet to understand this place. I only knew what Finn had told me: that the bad people over the sea didn’t like little girls like me. I was no longer safe.

That day, I found out what he’d meant. When I walked onto the field, I sensed the angry presence of the woman. I didn’t see her. I felt her. I felt her in the poppies, in the wind. I felt her in the earth and in the air. I stretched my hand out, hoping somehow to work out what it was.

And then I was on the ground. And bleeding. It was my first encounter with a poltergeist, an angry spirit that could breach the corporeal world.

My savior soon came. A young man, tall and sturdy, with ice-blond hair and a face that seemed kind. He asked my name. I stammered it. When he saw my tattered arm, he wrapped me in his overcoat and took me to his car. SCIONAID was stitched on his shirt. My little body flooded with terror when he took out a needle. “My name’s Nick,” he said. “You’re safe, Paige.”

The needle went into my skin. It stung, but I didn’t cry. The world gradually turned too dark to see.