I stared at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
But Lake was already checking out the nominations list on the awards show’s home page. There we were, under Favorite Badass Role Models, next to an eclectic list comprised of a teen physicist, a social media star, an Olympic athlete, and a pop star fresh out of rehab. The weird thing about being an Effigy was you could fit in perfectly among any of them.
Ah, the strangest beast of all: celebrity.
Well, Effigies were known all over the world. Even as we fought monsters in a kill-or-be-killed lifestyle that usually ended in our bloody, gruesome deaths, the media still reported on us as if we were no different from your typical reality star or starlet stumbling drunkenly out of a limo into the latest LA party. When I was a kid, I worshipped the Effigies. I bought the posters and the trading cards the Sect put out just like every other obsessed fangirl. But it was the hero part that thrilled me. The fame part I could do without.
“You’re not actually still planning on making us go to that,” I said wearily. “Are you?”
“In fact, I’ve already picked out your dresses!”
“Oh god.” My head rolled to the side and came to a rest against my seat belt. Unlike me, Lake relished the spotlight and thrived in it. Going from auditioning for some cheesy televised British talent show to debuting in a pop group to becoming an Effigy, staying famous wasn’t something she had to worry much about. Still, it’d been months since her solo pop single was supposed to drop, but her record label was delaying the release, and her fans were beginning to think it was a myth.
“Did you check out Doll Soldiers? Wait, let me go there.” On her phone, Lake signed in to the online forum of Effigy enthusiasts, the site I’d spent an unhealthy amount of time on before I’d, somewhat ironically, become an Effigy myself. I leaned over for a better look. Ah, the Belle Kill Count thread was still racking up the views, as expected.
Lake pointed at what was creatively called the Official TVCA Thread and grinned widely. “Our fans are organizing mass voting parties. Isn’t it awesome?”
She clicked the link. She really shouldn’t have.
“Oh . . .” Lake grimaced as she read the screen.
[+299, - 173] LOL @ Icicles acting like they’re too good to vote for a damn Teen Viewers’ Choice Award. Like don’t you think if Belle were “above it all” she wouldn’t be going? Think again, they’ve all been confirmed by their publicist. What now, bitches?
[+230, - 101] People honestly think Swans are pushing for this shit just because of Lake and her personal career. Well, the reality is we’re not, and if you think that, it just makes your bitterness toward her that much more obvious. Doing this kind of stuff helps the girls. Do you know how much pressure they’re under? Every Effragist that supports OT4 should take this shit seriously, so Icicles need to get over their damn selves and vote.
“What’s OT4?” Lake asked me because she correctly assumed I’d wasted enough time on the internet to know the lingo.
“One True Four,” I said. “All four of us. The whole crazy Effigy gang.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!” Lake nodded excitedly as I read another comment.
[+220, - 180] Okay, but Belle fans don’t actually call themselves Icicles and never did. We’d like you to stop this immediately.
“Yeah, when the hell did that start?” I narrowed my eyes because it only got messier and messier down thread.
[+218, - 194] I love the girls, but Swans are so desperate, pathetic, and transparent. Like fave, like fan!
[+218, - 150] I’m voting for Aaron. He just got out of rehab and hasn’t shown any dick pics or peed in a public establishment in like a month—that takes real courage.
[+210, - 130] I’m screaming—these girls are supposed to be warriors; there is literally no reason for them to be attending parties designed for the detritus of the entertainment industry! Wake up!
They had a point with that last one. Unfortunately, after Saul’s escape from the London facility and the PR disaster that followed, embracing our Effigy fame was the best option we had to distract the masses while the Sect pulled its shit together.
“When did they come up with ‘Icicles’?” Lake cocked her head to the side. “A bit on the nose, isn’t it? And why in God’s name are they all fighting each other instead of voting?” She scrunched up her face as she whined, like a child throwing a tantrum. “Ugh, be unified, you wankers. I want this win.”
Even I knew that expecting unification in Effigy fandom was like asking time to move backward. And in fact, you’d have a better chance of achieving the latter. The angrier people were, the longer and more frequent their online vitriolic rants. Hell, I was the former poster child of messy Effigy fans, so I had no room to judge.
Leaning back in her seat, Lake kept on scrolling through comments. With nothing else to do, I laid my head against the car window, readying myself for another nap, when the door opened with a yank. I would have fallen straight out of the car if I hadn’t grabbed the seat.
It was Belle. “You three, come with me. Chae Rin,” she added sharply and, being the gentle girl that she was, picked up a pebble off the sandy floor and threw it hard at Chae Rin’s forehead. The Effigy awoke with a start, swearing the typical profanities I’d gotten all too used to during the past few weeks. She looked as subtly murderous as she always did whenever I had to venture into her dark jungle of a room in the morning and force her awake to start our training.
“Director Chafik has some information to show us in Communications,” Belle said.
“Is it about the dead guy?” I asked, admittedly with little tact or respect for the dearly departed. “Or the flash drive?”
Belle quickly looked over her shoulder to where Chafik was waiting by the front entrance of the building. “I haven’t given it to him. Not yet. Just a feeling.”
“But—”
“Don’t mention it to him either until I decide what to do.” She straightened up. “Come, let’s go.”
None of us much liked being bossed around, but we stumbled hot and groggy out of the car anyway.
“Not feeling the new arrangement,” Chae Rin, never one to let her displeasure go unnoticed, grumbled as she shut the door behind her. Lake shrugged and obediently went ahead of us. I was about to follow when Chae Rin grabbed the short sleeve of my T-shirt. “Look, I know back in that hospital after France, I was the one who said we should stick together, and we all agreed. And that’s fine, but are we really just going to let Belle call the shots?”
“Isn’t that what she’s been doing?” My nonchalant shrug couldn’t mask the weary sliver of dread in my voice.
“Hey, guys!” Lake called to us just as she, Belle, and Director Chafik were about to enter the facility. “You coming?”
“Yeah, we’re coming!” I called back with a little wave. “Give us a sec!”
“You know as well as I do, kid.” Chae Rin peered over at Belle and Lake as they disappeared through the entrance. “Something hasn’t been right with Belle since—”
“Since she almost wished for Natalya to take over my body for good.”
Chae Rin straightened up and sighed. “Since she found out Natalya’s death wasn’t a suicide like the Sect had told everyone it was.”
And that the Sect could be involved. I was the one who’d seen her death scene myself in my dreams. The perks of having other Effigies’ memories live on inside you.
Perhaps that was why Belle wasn’t keen on handing over the flash drive.
“We have to cut her some slack,” I said quietly. “This isn’t easy for Belle. She’s going through stuff.”
“Like none of us are?” Chae Rin shook her head, exasperated. “I’d ask why you’re so willing to overlook her bullshit, but then you are her number one ass-kisser, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“That’s not it!”
“It’s not? Then what is it?”
I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her why my
fingers were curling with guilt. Why my heart beat a bit heavier with dread every time I saw Belle.
I hadn’t told Belle yet about the memory Natalya had shown me in France. I hadn’t told anyone.
Chae Rin flicked me right in the middle of my furrowed eyebrows—a soft flick, thankfully. With her strength, she could have caved my skull in. “Come on, you can’t tell me you’re one hundred percent comfortable with this. You saw what she did in that hideout.”
I did. But it was all the same. After our penultimate run-in with Saul two months ago, we’d decided that we had to work as a team from now on if we were going to be able to face the challenges up ahead. Well, every team needed a leader. That was Belle. I guess. It wasn’t a verbal agreement. We didn’t shake hands or anything. It was just . . . understood. Belle had the most experience out of all four of us. Unlike Lake and Chae Rin, who had only become Effigies in the past two or three years, nineteen-year-old Belle had somehow managed to survive fighting phantoms for six years. For an Effigy, that was pretty damn massive.
It was the Seven-Year Rule. Belle had told me once before. A little saying among the Sect. If you could survive more than seven years fighting monsters, you had either spent your life hiding or honed your skills enough to become a godlike fighting machine. Natalya held the world record, having spent fourteen years battling as an Effigy. Only fourteen.
Effigies didn’t live long. The truth of it still terrified me.
“Regardless, she’s the best equipped out of all of us for the job. Besides, it’s not like it’s a dictatorship. If she gets out of line, we can do something about it,” I told her, but I wasn’t too confident about that.
“Yeah.” Chae Rin’s expression darkened as she cracked her knuckles. “I’ll do something about it. Better believe it.”
Great. I sighed as Chae Rin went on ahead. As if I didn’t have enough to deal with. An Effigy brawl was the last thing anyone needed. But these days, despite our “arrangement,” you could never really know when one bad day would get us there. We were a team. We were supposed to be. I kind of wanted us to be.
Maybe “team” was too strong a word.
4
AT WELL OVER SIX FEET, director Chafik with his stocky build towered over all of us, except maybe for Lake, who was model tall in her own right. After a short greeting, we followed him into the facility.
There must have been one standard design for all Sect facilities. So far I’d been in two headquarters—one in Argentina and one in London—and the twisting, sterile corridors looked just the same. Communications, too. Once Chafik typed the security code into a keypad by a set of wide silver doors, and once the small screen scanned and verified his face with a gentle blue light, the door slid open and there it was, two stories of busy agents in suits hurrying past one another as they carried information to different stations. Most of the agents sat at rows of computers, typing away at a furious pace, speaking into headsets to whom I could only guess were agents in different parts of the facility, or maybe even agents at other facilities.
Since the Sect was an international nongovernment organization, they had facilities all over the world, some specifically for training agents while most were for base operations. Others, like the headquarters in London, were equipped for training Effigies. Not this one. This one was more research-based than anything else. Judging by what Chafik told us, their Research and Development building was even bigger than the one in London. That’s where they’d taken the mysterious young soldier.
“We are holding the body there,” said Chafik in an accent that made it sound as if he were slurring his words a bit. “First we will perform the autopsy and then continue on with other examinations. It will be a few days before we can send over any information from our findings.”
Director Chafik’s thick black beard stretched to his ears. The wrinkles across his face may have come from age, but I was sure the permanent frown lines cutting across his sandy brown forehead could only be attributed to having an intense stare as his resting face. As he and Belle kept pace with each other through Communications, I could see that they both matched in the severity of their expressions. It was like each was trying to outserious the other.
“Thanks, we appreciate it,” I said, my footsteps heavy against the tiled floor.
I looked over at Belle, who probably had the flash drive still on her somewhere, maybe in the pocket of her checkered flannel shirt. It was a delicate dance, trusting the Sect without trusting too much. Natalya’s own parents had warned us against them, and as it turned out, they’d had a point. The Sect was involved in Natalya’s death. But we were still part of the organization, still party to their rules. And if we were going to recapture Saul and get to the bottom of the mysteries that surrounded him, we had no choice but to work with them. Even though there was no telling how many agents had played a part in Natalya’s demise.
Agents. My mouth dried again, and my chest felt tight just like it always did whenever my thoughts drifted to him. I squeezed my eyes shut. Don’t think about him.
Shaking the half-formed thought away, I crossed my arms over my chest, about to speak again when I caught the eyes of some agent who swiveled back around in his chair in an instant.
Sigh. Now that we were here, some of the agents couldn’t help but peek up from their computers to take a gander at us. No matter how many weeks it’d been, I still couldn’t get used to the curious, unsubtle glances of those who didn’t, couldn’t, see Maia Finley the Girl because to them, I was only, always, Maia Finley the fire Effigy. They gave us that quick, self-conscious look, the kind people give when they know they shouldn’t stare but can’t help it. Lake stood a little taller when she noticed their eyes on her, while Chae Rin sighed with obnoxious volume. Belle never seemed to care. I, on the other hand, shifted on my feet, uncomfortable in my skin. It was like walking into every room perpetually smelling like a litter box.
“You said you had some info for us?” I said once he’d reached a terminal at the center space of the room. Unlike the rows of benches in front and behind us, this small, circular area just had the one terminal with two flat-screens sutured together on the surface. I guess this was specially made for the director of the facility. “What kind of information?”
Chafik gave me with a curt nod as he tapped the computer screen awake. “Yes. Rousseau has told me the circumstances by which you came to find the body. You tracked an Effigy frequency to the desert.”
“Yeah, we figured it was Saul’s,” Chae Rin said before adding under her breath, “But after finding that other guy instead, we’re not so sure anymore.”
Every once in a while, when Chafik was deep in thought, he’d breathe out a deep, baritone grumble like the one I heard now. It sounded a little like the earth should have been trembling beneath my feet. “Yes. This is a strange situation. Stranger than usual. Our facility has been checking for Saul’s spectrographic signature.”
I perked up. “And?”
He only needed to tap the computer screens with his fingers to bring up the satellite map of the world. A dull red circle blinked over the Sahara hideout like a pulsating heart. The thick green words hovering over it spelled out LAST WHEREABOUTS.
“This is the only signal we’ve been able to pick up in weeks,” Chafik said.
“The only signal in weeks,” I repeated. “And it may not have even been his.” I sucked in a breath to calm myself down. The Sect’s scanners may have actually been picking up Dead Guy’s frequency all along. It was a possibility. But none of us knew what to do with its implications. The discovery of Saul, a man with Effigy-like abilities in a world that only had room for four of us, was shocking enough. The mere idea of countless others grew more disturbing each time I considered it.
“We did have reason to believe it might have been Saul’s,” Chafik continued, thankfully sparking a little glimmer of hope. “According to our scanners, an Effigy signal did appear just after your battle in France. First it popped up suddenly outside of L
ondon.” As Chafik spoke, he tapped the screen so that the blinking lights representing his frequency appeared over their location. “Then, shortly after, it reappeared in Greenland before vanishing. We searched the area, of course, but didn’t find him. He was off the grid.”
“Saul fled shortly after Maia cut off his hand,” Belle said, and when she turned her head, her blond ponytail swished gently to the side. “He must have gone back to London. Why? To see someone? And why would he then go to Greenland? Why would his signal end there?”
“Usually, an Effigy’s signal will show up on the monitor, pulsing at a particular rate. However, while we were monitoring his signal, it was erratic, arrhythmic, even as he jumped from area to area.”
“Sibyl said Saul’s spectrographic signature had been unstable for several days after we faced him in France,” I told him. “Then nothing until now.”
I thought back to that day I’d watched Sibyl interrogate him in lockup when we had him captured at the London facility. I could still picture him clearly: caged in that cold, metallic chamber, drugged and rambling. But the tired fear in his eyes as he sputtered out incoherent phrases eventually dissolved into an expression wholly different—and sinister. The fear and desperation had flickered out, leaving only that glimmer of malice I was too familiar with . . . and that vile smile. The same he’d worn as he and the phantoms under his control had torn through bodies in New York.
“Well, I mean, Saul’s nothing if not unstable. The last time Saul was in Sect custody, they measured his spectrographic signature and his brain waves,” I said. “That’s how we learned that Saul actually has two personalities: Alice and—”
“Nick Hudson.” Chafik tapped away the satellite map and, in a few seconds, there he was. Saul—no, Nick.
He was handsome, almost beautiful. It was a fact I couldn’t escape even after all the evil he’d done. Then again, Nick wasn’t Saul. The black-and-white image Chafik showed us was of a young man in a nineteenth-century frock coat and trousers smiling boyishly without a care in the world outside a stone building. He was just one of a group of boys packed into the stairwell leading up to the grand entrance, but he stood out through his beauty alone: the same full lips, petite nose, and sculpted face, which was maybe a little chubbier in this picture. He was still slender, though with the slight muscular build of a casual athlete. If the photo were in color, I might have seen the ghostly sea blue of his eyes.
Siege of Shadows Page 4