He poured some more tea. ‘I came to Britain when I was seventeen. I was due to transfer to London the next year, to start my job officially with Scion; I thought I’d get to know the place first. When I first arrived, I had a vision of Jaxon. It was like the æther was telling me to find him, but I didn’t know where to start looking … then one day, I was walking through Trafalgar Square, and there he was. Just like that. He stopped dead when he saw me. It was almost funny, how quickly he stopped – like he’d walked into a brick wall.’

I smiled with him. I couldn’t imagine Jaxon losing his composure like that.

‘We went to a coffeehouse. He told me he had never seen a clairvoyant with a red aura, not once. I felt I could confide in him about my vision. It was clear that we were meant to meet.’ His voice softened a little. ‘It turned out that Jaxon had a vision of his own. He wanted six talented voyants to join him to make up the Seven Seals. Preferably rare ones, like me. Like you. I agreed to be his mollisher, to live a double life. The rest is history.’

‘It’s a good friendship-origin story,’ I admitted, ‘but not quite as good as ours.’

‘No, true.’ He winked. ‘I hope Jax finds another mollisher soon. It’s too much, on top of my job. As you saw with Maria, I’m his voice in the syndicate. He doesn’t get his hands dirty.’

‘Can’t Eliza do it?’

‘He wants someone rarer as his protégée.’ He scraped up the last of his meal. ‘He likes you, you know.’

‘He has a strange way of showing it. And I think I’m in his bad books after I refused to make the tea this morning.’

‘Oh, I think that was exactly why he let you come out today. You showed your claws. Jax doesn’t like outright disobedience,’ he said, ‘but he does like spark. He would have been disappointed if you’d kept on doing the drudgework.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘You think he was waiting for me to speak up?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I know him. He wanted you to take control of your place in the gang. Show him you’re a fighter. Let him see that you’re ambitious, and you’ll go far.’

The reassurance took root in my chest and blossomed into pride. I should have known that Jaxon was waiting for me to crack – after all, he hadn’t wanted an automaton to order around. He had wanted a criminal, a rebel. Now I felt like a fool for biting my tongue all these months.

A squadron of armed night Vigiles strode past the teahouse, clad in their black-and-red uniforms and helmets. We both tensed, but they didn’t look in our direction.