But the face inside was not Saul’s.
“Who the hell is this?” Chae Rin loomed behind us for a better look.
The young man was barely out of his teens, blond hair matted against his pale forehead, scars riddling his thick, angled face.
“What’s going on?” I studied his face. “I thought Communications said that they tracked Saul’s frequency here.”
Belle was quiet for too long. All the while the timer was counting down. Seven minutes and forty-five seconds. Seven minutes and forty-four seconds . . .
“Well?” I urged Belle.
“The Sect tracked the cylithium frequency of an Effigy here,” she said finally.
The bunker was silent. That is, until the boy’s lips parted in a cough.
“It’s okay,” I told him, surprising myself. What if he was an enemy? But there was something about his feeble moaning and the way his eyes fluttered helplessly that made me wonder otherwise.
Kneeling by his side, Chae Rin grabbed his shoulder and shook him. “Hey! Who the hell are you?” After a pause of silence, she shook him again. “We don’t have all day.”
“Chae Rin, be careful!” Lake scowled at her. “He looks half-dead already.”
But if Lake was looking for sympathy, she wouldn’t find it. “The APD field’s about to go out,” Chae Rin snapped. “We don’t exactly have all the time in the world.”
“Sir. Who are you?” Belle asked, more quietly.
The young man sputtered. I could just hear the beginnings of words carving themselves out from the sounds he made.
“What?” Belle leaned in as the young man’s lips moved.
“Are you . . . Sect?”
“We’re the Effigies,” I answered quickly, tentatively touching his arm when it started to tremble uncontrollably. He looked relieved with my answer. “Who . . .” I paused, maybe because I didn’t want to know the answer. “What are you?”
“I ran here . . . I ran from them . . . I hid . . . I wanted you to find me.” He coughed, breathing heavily. “They were going to force me to . . . I couldn’t . . . stop myself. . . . I waited until it stopped working . . . and then when I was free, I ran. . . . I needed you to find me. . . .”
It was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. It was almost impossible to stitch his words into a coherent picture.
“I don’t understand.” Belle straightened her back. “Who was forcing you? How? To do what? Tell us who you are.”
It was obvious that just speaking was agony for him. He couldn’t answer right away.
“If you wanted the Sect to find you, why come all the way out here?” I asked him, trying to be as gentle as the urgency of the situation would allow. “They have facilities all over the world.”
“Not the Sect,” he blurted before taking in a sharp breath. “You. You. I . . . knew they’d send you once they could track me . . . looking for him. I have to trust you. My . . . family . . .”
Family? What was he talking about? As I shivered, he opened his left palm, revealing a gray flash drive just long enough to fit in his hand. He’d been holding on to it so tightly that after Belle took it, its indent remained in his palm. As the blood pooled in his veins where it’d been, he let his hand fall.
“What’s on this?” Belle asked.
“I stole it from the lab . . . I ran . . . I wanted you to find me. . . . Others like me are coming for you. I was just . . . the first. . . .”
I gripped his arm tight until it stopped convulsing. He was looking at me. Only me.
“Tell me who you are,” I said again, quietly.
I wasn’t ready for the sight of his green eyes welling up with tears. It wasn’t what I’d thought awaited us at the end of this mission. I swallowed the lump in my throat as he parted his lips one more time.
“It’s too late for me. . . . No one can heal me. . . . Please find Alex. . . . He’s . . . still . . .”
His head rolled to the side, and his body stopped twitching.
3
DEAD. HE WAS DEAD. BELLE checked for a pulse, but it was clear even before she shook her head.
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Lake said it before I could. Turning away from us, she crouched down and buried her head in her knees.
“Belle. You said Effigy.” Chae Rin’s mouth parted as she considered it. “What do you mean? Whose frequency did we track here?”
“He said we were family,” I whispered. “What if he meant—”
“No.” Chae Rin shook her head resolutely. “He was clearly delirious.”
“Everything else he said was coherent enough,” I argued. “It has to mean something. What if it meant—”
“That he’s an Effigy?” Chae Rin looked like she was having trouble accepting it. Furrowing her eyebrows and scrunching her lips made her beautiful face shrivel like a dried prune. “He said ‘my family.’ Those exact words. He could have meant anything. I mean, he was dying. His cognitive abilities were probably on the fritz. That’s it, isn’t it? Right?”
If Chae Rin was having a mini-freak-out, I couldn’t blame her. I’d learned in school what we all had learned growing up: that there were four Effigies, each with the power of different elements—fire, earth, water, air. And when one died, another took her place in an endless cycle. Despite all the resources the Sect and various government agencies put into researching where we came from, where the phantoms came from, no one knew for sure.
Four girls and a world full of phantoms. That was the only truth we could cling to. Until Saul appeared as the fifth.
The rules had changed.
But if there were more . . . where did it stop? Were there dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? We already knew so little about the world. Now we couldn’t even trust what we did know.
“Belle, what were you thinking before?” The several seconds Chae Rin waited for Belle to respond was clearly too long. She grabbed Belle’s arm. “Hey! Did you hear me? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Belle snapped, pulling her arm out of Chae Rin’s grasp. “Just stay calm.”
But the look of dread on her face betrayed her.
My eyes drifted back to the young man in her arms. Dead. And I was close to the body. With a sudden surge of panic, I stumbled back, almost slipping on the sheet of ice covering part of the floor. The whites of his eyes popped against the dark dreariness of the bunker as they rolled to the back of his head. Belle must have seen the expression on my face because after a quick glance my way, she closed his eyelids.
“Well, good job, Barbie. Dude’s dead. You killed him.” With her arms folded over her chest, Chae Rin scoffed in disbelief. “At least we could have pumped him for information that actually made sense. Like who he is. And what that is.”
Belle turned over the sleek drive in her hand. “My attack wasn’t . . . It wasn’t forceful enough to kill.”
“But you attacked him anyway when he was clearly no danger to anyone. You basically admitted that yourself,” Chae Rin pressed. “Look at this place.” She motioned around the hideout. “It’s a freaking winter wonderland. You panicked. Just admit it.”
Belle’s attack did scream overkill. It wasn’t like her to jump the gun.
Wasn’t like her.
A phrase I’d been thinking a lot these past few weeks. Since France.
Since the consciousness of her dead mentor had found life again through my body, even if just for a moment.
And then I remembered the dull fear that had seized me that day as she’d turned her curious gaze from Saul’s ring to me. As she’d mulled a dangerous thought over and over in her head. The flicker of decisiveness that shattered almost as quickly as it’d appeared, dissipating into tears.
Weeks later, she was still struggling against something. I could tell by the way Belle wavered despite keeping a brave face, swallowing and tightening her jaw.
Belle didn’t have an answer for Chae Rin. Instead, sucking in a deep, silent breath, she looked at the young man lif
eless in her arms. “This man . . . He said no one could heal him. . . .”
“He also asked us to find Alex.” I remembered the soft glow in his eyes, soon to be dimmed forever. “Alex . . . Is that what he meant by family?”
Frowning, Belle leaned over sideways, her sharp eyes trained on the young man’s neck.
“What are you looking at?” I asked, afraid to step closer.
Gingerly, Belle shifted the body onto its right side so that she could inspect the white flesh more carefully. “What is this mark?”
Guess I didn’t have a choice. Steeling myself, I inched close enough to lean over Belle’s shoulders. The body had many scars, but the one I found at the back of his neck looked almost deliberate. A deep red, circular bruise, the size of a penny, right at the base. The jagged slashes across it told me he’d scratched at it more than once. Secrets etched bloodred into his flesh.
Short staccato warning signals came from each of our goggles. I pulled mine down over my eyes. “Five minutes,” I said, then pulled them back up. “We don’t have much time here.”
“This place must be phantom-proof. Maybe EMA.” Chae Rin looked around until she nodded and pointed at the corner of the room. “There it is.”
She pointed at the small gray metal half circle drilled just below the ceiling like a CCTV camera, except without the camera inside. From behind the glass, I could see the wires and machinery sparking a light blue charge.
“Traffickers usually use some crude technology out here in Dead Zones,” Chae Rin continued. “This might be a base that a group of them once used. That guy said he ran here. . . . Maybe he knew about it too. Was Saul ever even here?”
“Traffickers usually take their tech with them, don’t they?” I’d learned a little about it during my training.
“They obviously meant to come back. Otherwise they wouldn’t have left that there.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I peered around the room. “They’re nomadic. They’d have to take certain technology with them to travel in, out, and around Dead Zones.”
“She’s right,” Belle said quietly. “They take their equipment with them wherever they go.”
I nodded. “But this guy said he ran here, probably by himself.”
“So?” prodded Chae Rin.
“So, how did he get here on his own? Do you see any antiphantom tech on him?”
No. Nothing but his uniform and helmet.
“He had to have had help getting here.” I paused. “Right?”
“No idea, kid.” Sighing, Chae Rin traced her hands along the brick wall. “Wait.” She inched closer to the wall. “What is this?” She was peering at something tucked in the corner of the room by the hatch.
“What do you mean?” I went over to take a look.
It was hard to see since the dim lights above didn’t seem to reach the dark corner, but I could still make out the pattern: a swirling circle, spiraling into itself. It had been carved into the brick with something sharp but inexact, like a rock. The edges around the circle were harsh and jagged, but even still, as my eyes traced the line curving up into a point, the image forming in my mind took shape, growing stronger the longer I stared at it.
“A flame?” I whispered. “It looks like a flame.”
Without thinking, I turned to the painted shadows on the wall. “What . . . what is this?”
“Take a picture of it.” Belle began pulling up the dead body. “Take a picture of everything. Use the function in the visors. And Lake—Lake, get up.”
With a whimper, Lake wiped her face and turned around with red eyes.
“Search the room. We’ll do a quick sweep before leaving.” She stood, hoisting the corpse over her shoulder as if it were half its weight. The young man’s helmet dangled from the fingers of her free hand. “We don’t have much time. Work quickly.”
With a crisp, derisive chuckle, Chae Rin pulled her goggles down over her eyes. “Okeydoke,” she said, giving a humorless smirk. “Let’s make this quick.”
• • •
Maia . . .
Maia . . .
Are you listening . . . ?
Not for the first time, I heard her voice, softly, dangerously whispering in the recesses of my head. It’d been happening like this for weeks. It was how I knew I’d fallen asleep. It was how I knew I had to wake up.
The slow, deliberate notes of a secret melody drifted out from the dark. Humming. I couldn’t see her—I couldn’t see anything—but if I calmed my breath, I could hear her calling.
Maia . . . ?
Then I saw it emerge from the dark—the image of an arm going limp over a couch, of a glass cup slipping from the grasp of Natalya’s long fingers.
No, not again. I tried to tear my gaze away, but it was as if I’d been petrified. That’s when I saw him slipping out of the shadows, his hands shaking as the woman tumbled out of her living room chair, his head lowered as he stared at the body on the floor.
“I’m so sorry.” Tears stung Rhys’s eyes as he whispered it.
Maia. Don’t be afraid, Natalya told me. Come to me. . . .
“No!”
My eyes snapped open as a stream of short, violent breath escaped from my lips, erratic, uneven. Bending over in my car seat, I placed my head in my hands.
Don’t think about him. Don’t think about him. Don’t think about any of it. I repeated it until the image of his sweet face, his strong jaw, and his soft lips disappeared completely from my mind’s eye. Once it did, I could breathe again.
“Hey! You okay?” said Lake from the seat next to me, shaking me by the shoulder. “Breathe, girl, breathe.”
“Yeah.” My mouth was dried-up and tasted bitter. I swallowed whatever saliva was there and gave her a reassuring nod. “Just a nightmare.” One I’d been having far too often lately. One I wanted to never have again. “It’s okay. I’m good.”
“Had me scared for a second there.” Lake tilted her head before leaning in to inspect my face. “Um, you’ve got a little . . .”
After she pointed to the corners of my mouth, I wiped the drool off and sighed.
The clay walls of the Sect facility shimmered orange and red under the sun. The gentle breeze in Marrakesh, Morocco, was a nice change from the desert torrents we’d faced hours ago, but the heat was just as relentless. Our Sect van was parked outside the premises, the dulled black automatic gates locked behind us. But the air-conditioning was broken, which meant that to keep ourselves from cooking, we had to keep the car doors open. A couple of flies buzzed in with the heat, one flitting annoyingly close to my ear. Waving it away, I lay back against my seat, wincing from the sun’s onslaught.
Her voice lingered somewhere deep in me. Maia . . . Maia . . . steady like a drumbeat, each strike an assault on my nerves. My fingers twitched as I brought them up to my forehead and shut my eyes, trying to block her out.
Effigies fought and died, and each death opened up the door for another girl to inherit the power of the last. No, not just the power—the legacy, the memories, and the consciousness, even if just in pieces. Natalya Filipova was the last in my line. That meant parts of her lived on inside me. The Russian-born legendary fire Effigy who had lived as a hero.
But she hadn’t died as one.
And she would never let me forget it.
It took me a moment to realize my hand was shaking against my forehead. Quickly, I brought it down and stared at it. The soft, sandy skin tone was mine. The dark lines stretching across the red of my palm. The white nails, cut short. This was my hand. Mine.
Even though I could remember how it felt to have Natalya move it through her will alone.
Mine. I clamped my hand shut as if the sharp pain of my nails digging into my skin sealed my desperate thoughts as truth.
Shivering, I checked the time on my phone. I hadn’t been asleep for thirty minutes, but that heavy, languid feeling lingered stubbornly in my bones. It still took my body time to recover from these missions. I’d traveled here and there,
back and forth so many damn times, all the cities were starting to blend together—as was, apparently, my vision, right now. I rubbed my eyes. The weight of the stress of battle came down hard on my bones. Belle always said that the more you train, the more you get used to it, but apparently nobody told my muscles.
Well, at least I wasn’t the only one who’d conked out. Having taken the whole back bench for herself, as she usually did, Chae Rin curled up on her side with her headphones plugging her ears and slept peacefully, her bare legs sticking to the leather through the natural adhesive of heat and sweat. She was out of her Sect fatigues and back into her civilian clothes. We all were. It was hot enough in Morocco without torturing ourselves needlessly.
In the seat next to me, Lake fiddled with her phone with one hand and kept her minifan trained on her with the other. “They’re still out there?” she asked, peering out my door. “Should it be taking this long? Didn’t they already take the . . .” She paused and bit her lip. “The . . .”
Body. The body of the mysterious young man we’d found in the desert hideout. Sibyl ordered that he be processed at the African Division headquarters several miles away. This meant that even after surviving a dangerous, body-breaking mission, we still had to stick with the body, stowed safely away in its sterilized white bag, as it was transported to Morocco to ensure its successful arrival. The moment we passed through the tall black gates, a medical team was already waiting for us. We should have been able to leave by now, but after half an hour had passed, Belle was still outside talking to the director of the facility.
“While the untalented and undeserving are releasing rubbish singles that get rewarded with money and praise, I am going on secret missions, fighting for my life, and hauling away dead bodies.” Sighing, Lake closed her eyes against the fan-generated wind lapping against her face. “My one consolation in this whole dreadful scenario is Sibyl okayed us going to the TVCAs. Attending an awards show because you’re nominated for something and not because your agent wrangled an invite from some poor underpaid intern. How novel!” With her eyes still closed, she grinned. “It’s gonna be so great. I’m back in the game!”
Siege of Shadows Page 3