“Pushed to the edge of society we were forced into crime to prosper. And so we became more hated. We made the stories true.”

Feared and hated for their abilities, voyants are relegated by the Scion authority to the fringes, forced to live in secret and to seek the dubious community and protection of criminal bosses. What Paige Mahoney describes is a psychological truism, a self-fulfilling prophecy, for whenever a group is marginalized and vilified, that group will inevitably exhibit behavior that corresponds to society’s expectations and worst assumptions.

“I had to smile at that thought. It said a lot about the world when Jaxon Hall was the lesser of two evils.”

Shannon’s world is a place of relative vice and virtue. While Paige feels lucky to be in Jaxon’s employ, especially since other mime-lords are worse), she nonetheless admits that he is a “sycophantic, tight-fisted, coldhearted bastard” (28). The only way for Paige to reconcile this contradiction is to understand the world in which she lives, a world in which voyants like herself are forced to choose between a criminal existence and certain death. It’s not much of a choice, but for Paige, Jaxon Hall is the obvious one.

“There is also, I thought, a high risk that this is all in my head.”

Herded into a vast library in the supposedly quarantined city of Oxford, Paige listens in disbelief as Nashira describes a strange new reality, one existing in secret for 200 years. Paige’s reaction is the all-too-human one of denial, for she considers that she may be dreaming or hallucinating or that her senses are impaired rather than accept the bizarre new reality before her.