“Maybe instead of trying to kill me, save your energy for the next mission,” I said.
“Another one.” Lake slid slices of plantain into the pan. The thick, sickly sweet smell sizzled into the air. “Will I ever get a reprieve from all this blood and death?”
Chae Rin smirked. “Life was a lot easier back when you were still dodging the Sect’s calls, huh, Victoria?”
I was so used to the stage name that I usually wasn’t prepared to hear anyone use Lake’s real name. Chae Rin only did it to piss her off.
Lake shot her a dirty look, grabbing the handle of the frying pan menacingly. “You’re really asking for half a pint of hot oil in your face, aren’t you?”
“In any case,” I said loudly before this got ugly—as it often did, “now that we’re all here, there’s something I need to tell you. It’s about what happened in Morocco.”
Chae Rin sat at the table and crossed her legs. “So are you finally going to tell us what you saw in that dream of yours?”
My fingers gripped the sofa.
“You saw her, didn’t you?” Lake said over the sizzle of her pan.
“Yeah. I saw Natalya. And she . . . she wasn’t . . . right.”
Chae Rin and Lake stared at me. But it was the shuffling upstairs that caught my attention. I swiveled around and looked up to see Belle peering down at us from the iron railing on the second floor, her hair loose over her shoulders. She’d shut the door to her room so quietly I hadn’t even noticed she’d left it.
“What do you mean, she wasn’t right?” Belle asked, looking down at me.
“Wow, it’s like Bloody Mary,” Chae Rin said in a low voice. “Say Natalya’s name three times and Belle suddenly appears.”
Belle usually ignored her snide comments, but this one earned Chae Rin a look so cold even she looked a bit shaken. Quietly, Chae Rin took another sip of soda while Belle started down the stairs.
“Maia, what do you mean?” Belle repeated, her eyes on me.
I always had to choose my words carefully when it came to Natalya. “What I mean is that she wasn’t right. She was violent. Scary.” I shuddered, thinking about the sword in Rhys’s chest, but I didn’t dare utter that detail. I couldn’t. “She entered into my dreams.”
“But that has happened to you before, has it not?” Belle stopped by the couch. “The only way to see former Effigies is to scry. Peeling back the layers of your own mind to access their memories. You would have to be in a trance—or else, you would have to be dreaming. You have seen her memories in your dreams before.”
“But this time was different. Before, I’d just fall asleep and see her memories. This time, I was having a dream of my own and she appeared. In my dream, she ran around Marrakesh, telling me to catch her. That’s when she led me into a new memory.”
“Led you? Is she like your spirit guide now or something?” Chae Rin asked. “Telling you stuff, leading you places?”
“Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, in the past, whenever I’d glimpse her memories, it’d be an involuntary thing. She’d only tried to directly communicate with me twice. Once when I took my oath at Ely Cathedral. And then in France, the first time I scried properly.”
And then she’d tried to take my body.
I went rigid, my blood pumping faster as I thought of it. “I used to just dream my own dreams. And then suddenly one night, I began to dream Natalya’s memories. But since France, I’d been hearing her more often in my head. And then this happened. I thought maybe it was because of the experiment messing around in there. But what if the true problem was that the barrier between my mind and hers was already deteriorating even before then?”
Then Natalya would have more freedom to play around in my head. It’d make taking my body all the easier. My throat tightened as I thought of the possibility. I rubbed the sweat beading off my flushed forehead.
“Well, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Maybe it was something she could do all along and she’s just decided to be more proactive,” Lake said from the stove, her spatula dripping oil onto the counter. “If that’s the case, then isn’t it a good thing? We know the Sect lied about Natalya’s death being a suicide. We know Vasily tried to kill you.” She listed them off with her fingers. “We know he and some agents from Research and Development helped free Saul from Sect custody. I still think she wants us to know the whole story regardless of anything. She led us to the box in Belle’s old foster home, but since then it’s been radio silence. We’ve been waiting for her to beam another message to Maia.”
But all I’d gotten from Natalya were taunts and hazy dreams of her death played on instant loop like a broken nightmare channel.
“Each time you’ve been in contact with Natalya’s consciousness, you’ve learned something about her death,” Belle said. “Her investigations of Saul, moving under the Sect’s radar. It was because of all her efforts to find out the truth that she was . . .” The next words caught in Belle’s throat, but she covered herself quickly, sweeping back her long hair. “If she’s leading you somewhere, it’s for a good reason.”
Or she was messing with me. That was the problem. It’s like Natalya herself couldn’t decide if she wanted me to know the whole story behind her death and the mystery that she’d died for—or if she simply wanted to use her memories to lure me into a trap to take my body.
As if purposefully planning the cruel irony of her timing, Belle added, with utmost certainty, “It’s Natalya. We can trust her.”
I took the fan letter out of my pocket and turned it over. “The last time I trusted Natalya, she tried to take over my body,” I reminded her quietly.
Belle stood frozen to the spot for a moment. “Yes, well,” she said quickly. “I told you once before, scrying has its risks. Normally, you need to be calm. You need complete control of yourself. But at that time, you were in the middle of facing Saul. Such a high-stress situation would obviously compromise the barrier between your consciousness and hers. Given that, it makes sense that her mind would cross over involuntarily.”
The letter crinkled in my hand. “Except it wasn’t involuntarily.” The words fell from my mouth, heavy like the stone sinking in the pit of my stomach. “She very, very purposefully chained me up in my own mind.”
And I remembered every painful second. It was like being buried alive several feet underground. My mind was probably weaker for it now, which made it easier for her to scratch at the surface of my subconscious.
But did Belle understand that? From the awkward purse of her lips to her subtle attempts at avoiding my knife glare, her reluctance to accept the truth was obvious.
“We were both in danger.” Belle raised her head almost in defiance. “I’d been captured by Saul. Chae Rin, Lake, and all the train passengers were the hostages of phantoms. You weren’t enough to save us. She would have seen everything through your eyes.” She met my gaze as if to challenge me. “She would have wanted to fight.”
“Seemed to me like she just wanted to live.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Belle’s words evaporated into the silence that stretched out between us, unbroken but for the sizzling of Lake’s frying pan.
There it was. That insidious, nagging suspicion that had bloomed the moment we’d spoken for the first time at La Charte hotel: that I was nothing more than a replacement borrowing Natalya. I lowered my head. That night in France, as she’d held Saul’s ring in her hands, I really believed for a second that she’d do it: wish me away and Natalya back into my body. It would have been an easy wish to grant. Saul had said so himself. I wanted to believe in Belle. I wanted to believe in the tears she’d shed as she dropped the ring and collapsed to the ground. And though there were times it felt as if she were finally warming to the idea of us as a team and of me as the fire Effigy, other times I couldn’t be sure.
Maybe she wanted Natalya back. Even if it meant I was gone forever.
“Wait.” Chae Rin placed down her soda can and stood from the t
able. “You’re excusing what Natalya did now?” She looked at her in disbelief. “Are you a body-snatcher apologist?”
But it was clear that Belle had realized her mistake. She was already shaking her head as each of us watched her. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Wow.” Chae Rin let out an incredulous laugh. “That’s kind of a new low.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Her voice rang out over the room. Regret was clear in the pale blue of her eyes as she faced me again. “That’s not what I meant.”
Panic. Even if it was just a shadow, I wasn’t used to seeing it sweep across her features. Suddenly, she looked sheepish, ashamed of herself. “That’s not what I meant, Maia,” she said, shaking her head. “Please don’t take it that way. I would never.” The regret in her eyes as she pleaded with me told me she remembered that moment in France as well as I did. “I wouldn’t.”
I played it off with a shrug. “I guess I’ll just have to believe you, right?” I wanted to. I had to.
“My, what a well-adjusted, functional bunch we are.” Chae Rin rolled her eyes. “Okay, look, we all know Natalya was your mentor and you and her were tight while she was still breathing or whatever, but we need to be realistic about our situation.”
Nudging Lake out of the way, Chae Rin went over to the kitchen cabinet. When she reached under the pile of magazines in the bottom drawer, I knew what she was looking for. We had to put it in an unsuspecting spot after all.
She pulled it out: the cigar box Natalya had buried underneath Belle’s old floorboards. A couple of weekends ago, Belle had cleaned off the moss and dirt that had clung to the dark wood, polishing the stunning handcrafted carvings in appreciation for their design. But it was what was inside that mattered. Lifting the lid, Chae Rin pulled out a small shard of white stone—the same mysterious stone that comprised Saul’s rings.
“You said Saul wants the rest of this, right?” She squeezed the tip of the shard delicately between two fingers. “A death-powered stone that grants wishes. One of the dead fire Effigies in Maia’s head knows how to find it. That’s why he kept coming for Maia. Natalya led us to this thing. She clearly wants us to figure this whole mystery out, but given what happened to Maia, that doesn’t mean we can trust her completely. It’s possible that she wants two things at once.”
She wanted us to solve the mystery she couldn’t. But she also wanted to live again. No one knew which she wanted more. Maybe not even Natalya herself.
Placing the shard back in the box and shutting the lid, Chae Rin turned to me. “Kid, Natalya isn’t going to stop talking to you. And that’s fine. We need her. Listen to what she has to say, but keep two eyes open, you know? Not everything she says may be on the level.”
No. No, it may not be, least of all Natalya’s last living memory: Aidan Rhys, standing over her as she struggled to breathe from the poison he’d given her.
But was it really true?
And for the thousandth time I tried to justify my doubts, though it’s not like they weren’t already justified. If I, from the depths of my mind, could see her using my body to decimate Saul’s phantoms in France, then Natalya could see everything I saw. She would have seen me with Rhys. She would have felt the way my chest tensed whenever he was close to me, the way my body flared to life when he smiled. She would have known—
I thought back to the way his head moved to follow me, almost involuntarily, as I passed him on the way out of the briefing room.
She would have known.
And Natalya hadn’t wasted a single moment snatching my body the moment my mind crumbled at the thought that he might have killed her.
I knew how much it had meant to her, feeling the air rushing through her lungs again, feeling her muscles burning with adrenaline. More than needing me to find out why she died, she needed me to regain the life she’d lost. It was everything to her. But those memories had felt real. Too real to be lies. And—
And I didn’t know what to think anymore.
“Maia.” Belle’s voice snapped me out of my desperate thoughts.
“Y-yes?”
A pause. “Has she shown you?”
There was a strange twinge in her voice as she spoke.
“Shown me what?”
“Who killed her?” Belle didn’t even look at me as she asked it.
It took only a second for my whole body to flush, for my head to swirl in frenzy as I scrambled for the words I was now used to saying. “No, no. Not yet. Everything I see is choppy, you know? Hazy. Unfinished. You were right when you said scrying can be kinda unreliable when you’re not super trained.”
“Then we’ll keep training.” Belle turned for the stairs. “If we are going to take on Natalya’s final mission, we need to know the whole story.”
“Sure, for the mission,” Chae Rin said under her breath. “Not like she wants to carve up whoever killed her.”
Carve up whoever killed her. The thought of it chilled me to the bone.
Belle shut the door of her room behind her, leaving us in an awkward silence.
“Well, these are done!” Lake said suddenly, turning off the heat on the stove, her cheerful voice breaking the quiet dread that had settled over us. The hot, oily slices of fried plantain were already drying on a paper towel–covered plate. “Maia, you want some?”
She always tried hard, Lake. Whenever she noticed the mood taking a turn for the worse, she’d put in her best effort to lift it again. But with my heart squeezing against my rib cage, I could only manage a smile. “Thanks, but I’m not hungry. I’m going to bed.”
After a few labored steps up the staircase, I disappeared into my room.
8
OUR TRAINING SESSION WAS OVER, but something restless in me still stirred. There were a couple of hours left in the morning, so Belle went for a run. The other two returned to the dorm to wash up. But I stayed behind in the gym staring down the black punching bag mounted to the wall in the corner. With my unruly hair tied at the base of my neck, I raised my arms, my hands nestled carefully inside a pair of boxing gloves, wrapped up with bandages in the way Chae Rin had shown me. And while I was not the pro she was, I’d taken to this particular method of training over the weeks; the sound of my glove-cushioned punches battering the leather-bound sand was steady in its rhythm, the powerful impact offering me the kind of release I craved as it shuttered up my bones. Saul on the loose. Natalya plotting inside me. Secrets, lies, deception.
Yeah, the stress was there.
The creaking from the double-door entrance to the gym ricocheted off the high, arched ceiling as someone slowly pushed the doors open. I figured it was one of the girls come back for something. Maybe Chae Rin—she’d forgotten her water bottle by the bench and it’d only cause another blowup if she used Lake’s without permission again. It was almost funny how comfortable we’d gotten around each other while still being so painfully dysfunctional in other ways.
My fists flew. I heard the footsteps behind me but didn’t think to look back, not until I heard his voice.
“You’ve gotten better.”
A sudden jolt in my chest made me miss the timing. The punching bag swung fast and hit me in the head just as I’d turned it. Stumbling, I fell back onto the floor at Rhys’s feet.
“Or not.”
Rhys knelt and gripped my arm softly, just above the elbow, while his other arm found my waist. I twitched at his touch but didn’t pull back. His dark eyes caught the light that slipped in through the high windows.
“It’s okay,” he said softly. “It’s just me.”
Just me. The gentleness in his voice had returned, breaking down my defenses like it always did. Making me want to trust him.
“Sorry I startled you,” he added as he helped me to my feet.
“No. It’s okay.”
He must have realized then that he was still holding on to me. Quickly, he withdrew his hands. I shifted awkwardly, looking down at my sneakers, my bare legs, before steadying my chest enough to loo
k up at his sculpted face.
“Um, it’s been a while,” I said.
“Yeah.” It was times like this I remembered that before he was a trained soldier of the Sect, he was also just a kid like me, a boy of eighteen. He looked as nervous as I did, his eyes focused on the punching bag instead of on me. “I hope you didn’t think I was too short with you back there in the briefing room,” he said. “It’s just that we haven’t talked in a while.”
The side effect of dodging his calls for weeks. That was how I’d treated him. Even after he’d nearly died protecting me. Even when I wanted to know why he ever would.
“You didn’t visit, either. At the hospital, I mean,” he said, giving me a wry smile as he tilted his head sideways. I turned the moment I noticed my throat begin to tighten. “I thought maybe you forgot I existed. It’s all right, I forgive you,” he added jokingly.
I didn’t tell him that I had visited him three times, but each time he was sleeping, and I begged the nurses not to let him know I’d been there. During every visit, I studied his face and watched the rise and fall of his chest, wondering to myself whether he was really a killer—and whether I’d really be able to turn him in if it was true. And to whom? The Sect? Or Belle.
Belle. My body froze up from the very thought of her murderous anger. If he had killed Natalya, and if she found out . . . if I said a word about it . . . Belle would kill him. There was no doubt about it. She would murder him in front of me.
Maybe it was better if I never knew.
I walked away from him back to the swinging punching bag. “Why are you here?” I steadied it with my gloved hands. “I thought you, Sibyl, and your dad were planning the next mission.”
He paused. Maybe he wasn’t used to me referring to his father. Well, he’d never even mentioned him in first place.
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