Free The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon

Binder,” I said.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    Three minutes passed before Jaxon’s voice came down the line: “Is that you again, Didion? Look, you wretched jackanapes, I have neither the time nor the money to waste on capturing yet another one of your escaped—”
    “It’s me.”
    There was a long, unbroken silence. My voice usually sent him into fits of prolixity.
    “Look, Hector just cornered me. He says he’s coming to talk to you. He’s got the Underbodies with him.”
    “What do they want?” he said curtly.
    “I summoned a meeting of the Unnatural Assembly,” I said, just as curtly. “They didn’t like it.”
    “You wretched
fool
, Dreamer. You should have known better than to think Hector would convene a meeting. He hasn’t called a single one in all the years he’s been Underlord.” I heard him moving around. “You say they’re coming here? To Seven Dials?”
    “I think so.”
    “Then I suppose I will have to deal with them.” Pause. “Are you hurt?”
    I wiped blood from my lips. “They knocked me about a bit.”
    “Where are you? Shall I send a cab?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “I would like you back at Seven Dials. I’ve already been forced to inform the nearest sections that you’ve considered leaving my service.”
    “I’m aware of that.”
    “Then come back, darling. We’ll talk this over.”
    “ No, Binder.” The words came out before I’d even thought about them. “I’m not ready. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.”
    This time the silence was much, much longer.
    “I see,” he said. “Well, I await your
readiness
. In the meantime, perhaps I shall begin my search for a replacement mol lisher. Bell’s commitment is encouraging. After all, not all of us have time to lounge in lavish doss-houses while our mime-lords dust away our problems.”
    The dialing tone pierced my ear. I yanked the module from the phone and dropped it down a drain.
    So Jaxon was considering Nadine, the Silent Bell, as his new mollisher. I shoved the empty phone into my pocket and headed for the end of the mews, my cheek throbbing. Nick was staying on Grub Street, where pamphlets were produced. I should go to him. Talk to him. It was better than spending another night alone, waiting for the red-jackets to drag me from my bed. I hailed a rickshaw and asked for I-5.
    ****
    There would be no meeting of the Unnatural Assembly. It had been optimistic to hope that Hector would listen, but a tiny part of me had thought he might at least be curious enough to hear me out.
    I’d have to get word out some other way. I couldn’t go shouting about the Rephaim on the street. People would think I’d lost my mind. And I couldn’t fight them alone, not when they had the military might of Scion behind them. The sheer size of the enemy was frightening. If I didn’t have the syndicate, I had nothing.
    Rain was pouring by the time the rickshaw dropped me off at the entrance to the street. I promised the driver I’d come back with coin, wrapped my cravat over my face and walked beneath the archway.
    Since the 1980s, Grub Street had been home to the
haute bohème
of the voyant underworld. It was more of a district than a single street, a seam of sedition in the heart of I-5. Its architecture was an eccentric mix of eighteenth-century Georgian, mock-Tudor, and modern, all crooked foundations, cobblestones, and leaning walls, interspersed with neon and steel and a single, modest transmission screen. Shops sold all the supplies a wordsmith could desire: thick paper, moonbows of inkwells, old collectors’ tomes—the kind that opened, like doors to other worlds—and bejeweled fountain pens.
    There were at least five or six coffeehouses and a solitary cook-shop, already open for business. The smell of coffee drifted from most windows. You could tell it was home to most of the biblio-mancers and psychographers in the citadel, who dwelled in mildewed garrets with only their muses, coffee, and books for company. Victorian