“It’s my fault.” Belle slurred her words. “I killed the phantoms but I couldn’t save them. The agents tell me every night when I close my eyes. They say, what good are you? What good are you? I don’t want to hear them anymore. . . . Please let me die. . . .”
“Let go of me!” I struggled against Natalya until finally my eyes snapped open and the bright white overwhelmed my sight.
• • •
“You okay, kid?” Chae Rin asked from the backseat of our van. I was back in the land of the living, my body jolting to life in the passenger seat. But I could only answer her by rubbing the sweat off my face with both hands.
The old, rusty van Jin had given us was a vintage sixties Volkswagen. It was a classic, but barely maintained. There was rust around the edges. The paint job—white for the top half, red for the bottom—was dull and peeling, and the flannel curtains covering the windows smelled like cat. I guess they couldn’t have given us their best, but they could have spared us one that didn’t give me the jitters with each sudden shake. At least the gas tank was full.
It was going to be a long trip, an almost twenty-hour drive—and we’d just started it. Naomi had wanted us to get to the museum fast before the Sect, but “fast” was a luxury when you were driving across countries in a crappy car. We’d already given ourselves the inoculations so the Sect couldn’t track us. We’d also dropped James off at the first town out of the mountains. It’d actually taken him a while to come to, but after he had, despite still being a bit shaky, he’d scrounged up some money we’d need on the road and promised to let us know if he heard any rumblings from the Sect—or from Naomi. If she was even still alive. For Rhys’s sake, I hoped she was.
“I think inoculating myself made me weaker in there.” I held a hand against my head. “I guess it’s good that I was still able to get there in the first place, but I don’t know if it helped. I know we’re supposed to get into a place in the museum called the Little Room, but I didn’t get a sense of what we’re supposed to do once we get there.”
“It’s okay.” Lake had a whole bench to herself, lying down with her knapsack on the floor of the car beside her. “James told us Naomi already has a guy there waiting for us. He worked for Baldric. He’ll help us get in after hours.”
My phone buzzed with a text: Where are you?
I sucked in a breath. It was from Rhys.
“What is that?” Through my mirror, I could see Chae Rin gripping Lake’s seat to get a look. “Is that your phone?”
Another text: Are you hurt? Are you okay? Mom is in bad shape.
Naomi. I bit my lip as another one came in succession: Tell me where you are and I’ll come help you.
“Turn it off!” Chae Rin threw one of the dirty pillows that came with the van at my head. “We inoculated ourselves to make sure we didn’t get tracked, stupid.”
True. James had even given us a burner phone to use.
“She’s right, Maia,” Belle said. “They can track through Wi-Fi and GPS.”
Belle. She looked rigid in the driver’s seat, her knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel.
My eyes lingered on her wrist until another pillow hurled by Chae Rin had me turning my cell phone off.
“Did he mention something specifically?” Lake asked, her sneakers pushing the old window curtains back and forth. “Baldric, I mean?”
“A lot of what he said didn’t make much sense.” I laid my head back against my seat. “He talked about shadows on the wall. . . .”
“Like in that desert hideout?”
I blinked. Yes. And that church in London. Shadows that looked like phantoms. But Pastor Charles had been adamant that they weren’t really shadows at all.
There’s more to Emilia Farlow’s old teachings than you would expect, Baldric had said. The secrets of the shadows . . . and the secrets of the beings who dwell among the shadows.
“He also said something about the sins of those little girls,” I repeated, sitting up quickly. “Back in the nineteenth century.”
“Wait!” Lake dove into her knapsack and pulled out the cigar box—the one we’d kept in our dorm back at the London facility.
Chae Rin’s eyebrow arched as she peered down at the box from behind Lake’s shoulder. “You had that in there?”
“Yep, brought it with me. I showed the other two in Toronto.” She cracked the lid open. “It’s just something you said, Maia. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s up with this doll.” Lake didn’t want to touch it, so Chae Rin did. Dried mud still painted its face brown. Chae Rin’s fingers pinned down its maid dress, and when she showed it to me I could see, once again, the torn-out eyes.
Chae Rin shook her head. “Freaky as hell,” she said, tugging gently at its disheveled hair made of black yarn.
“Exactly.” Lake shivered. “Gives you creepy little-girl vibes, doesn’t it? Alice and Nick. Weren’t they around back then?”
“Wait.” I stuck out my hand. “Show me the letter.”
Lake gave it to me, and I scanned it. I’d read it enough times this past month, but there was something nagging at me. I was missing something obvious. . . .
“There it is!” I tapped the paper. “Emilia!”
Chae Rin blinked. “Who?”
“ ‘Two years, my dear friend, my sister,’ ” I read, “ ‘since you passed away, and I find my thoughts are still attached to you, to Patricia, to Emilia, and yes, even to Abigail. Perhaps it is guilt.’ ”
“Emilia?” Lake repeated.
“In Natalya’s memories, Baldric mentioned Emilia Farlow.”
Belle quickly glanced down at the letter in my hands before directing her attention back to the road. “Emilia Farlow. The original creator of the Deoscali cult.”
“The cult that worships phantoms. But her teachings were different.” I remembered the serenity in Pastor Charles’s eyes as he’d explained it. “That the phantoms aren’t really phantoms at all—or that they’re not bad? Or maybe they’re bad under certain circumstances? I don’t know.” I pressed a hand against my forehead. “He said they control life and death. And fate.”
“Well, it can’t be a coincidence,” Chae Rin said.
“I agree.” Belle’s eyes were stern as she gazed into the horizon. “The secret volume has to tell us more. We should hurry.”
She pressed on the gas. Belle didn’t say much as he drove down the highway, the antiphantom nets, much like those in Britain, lining the roads as we traveled. It was only in the seventh hour, when the other two had fallen asleep, when my own eyelids were starting to feel heavy, that I felt comfortable saying anything to her.
“Belle . . . when I was scrying, I saw another of Natalya’s memories. Not just the one with Baldric.”
Belle seemed to understand what I was insinuating, probably from the guilt written all over my face—the guilt of prying into someone else’s darkest moments.
“You weren’t concentrating hard enough, then. Remember that scrying is dangerous, Maia. You should be careful.”
“Is that what you really want?” I mumbled under my breath before I caught myself. But strangely, knowing how horrid it felt to have another person claw at your mind to drag you into the dark with them, I didn’t feel too guilty over that one.
Belle let an almost imperceptible sigh pass through her lips. “I had thought, originally, that Natalya went to Prague in order to leave me a message . . . because she knew I’d be there. Really, I had only wanted to go in the first place because a few weeks earlier, Natalya had begun talking about the museum so suddenly. How could I have known the real reason she was there?”
“I thought you guys would have shared everything.”
Belle laughed sadly. “Natalya shared only what she wished to share. She always kept me at arm’s length. Maybe because she knew she could not live up to the esteem I held her in.”
“Well, I certainly don’t know what that feels like.” I gave her a playful smile and sank deeper into my seat. If I sq
uinted, I might have been able to see the beginnings of a smile playing on Belle’s lips, but it was gone in the next second.
“Perhaps. I know you’ve had a difficult life as well, Maia. And I identify with that. I understand your pain—I truly do.”
I couldn’t respond right away. It was rare to hear her refer to us as sharing something—something other than a destiny and the weight of Natalya’s life and death. The pain of severed connections. It was a pain that cut through the magic and mystery of our Effigy bond and tapped into something frail and human in us. A twisted connection. And though I wasn’t quite the same girl who’d waited for her that day outside Lincoln Center in New York, it was still a connection I strangely craved.
“Still,” Belle continued, “Natalya was the only family I had. And if it weren’t for her, I would have died long ago.”
I lowered my head but stayed silent.
“You must know as well as I do: When you have no family, when you have nothing, the longing you feel is more painful than whatever you could think of,” she said. “You search for anything, anyone to fill the loneliness. Natalya may not have been perfect, but because of her, I wasn’t alone anymore. She helped me. Guided me. Made me something. Someone. I owe her everything.”
“That’s all I wanted too,” I whispered. Sleep was coming fast, but there was still so much to say. “I have my uncle, but it’s not the same. Losing my dad and mom was awful enough. But losing my sister, June . . .”
I didn’t even know how I survived those first few days with Uncle Nathan. Or how he survived my shutting myself off, deadening myself to the world.
“But then this whole thing happened and you guys came along.” I turned, my gaze passing over Chae Rin’s and Lake’s sleeping forms. “That’s why . . .”
That was why, even though holding this secret in my heart was the biggest of betrayals, I knew I couldn’t give it voice. And it wasn’t just about my feelings for Rhys. It wasn’t just that Naomi had begged me not to give up her son. What would happen when Belle turned her sword on Rhys? When she crossed a line she couldn’t come back from? Everything would fall to pieces. We would fall to pieces. All four of us Effigies.
Holding that secret was for Belle. It was for all of us.
Maybe it was for me.
I pressed my head against the window. Finally giving in to the heaviness of my eyes, I let them flutter shut. “I don’t want us to change. I don’t want to lose anyone either. Belle, you won’t hate me, will you?”
I didn’t hear Belle’s answer before I fell asleep.
26
PRAGUE’S ANTIPHANTOM TECHNOLOGY RAN through pipelines underground that stretched beyond the limits of the city. An expensive network, to be sure, so Belle told us; its construction began after the split of Czechoslovakia, replacing older models as part of a national campaign, its might signaling the beginning of a new republic.
Keeping the systems underground may have had its strategic, scientific purposes. But aesthetically, they kept the scape unmarred by the very technology that every day served as a reminder of humanity’s captivity. Prague was untouched—the romantic labyrinth of narrow streets, the cobblestone painstakingly paved over centuries. The Gothic spires and domes howling ancient secrets into the skies, the curved cupolas of Baroque churches. The traditional red roofs of the tall houses in the old square and the modern apartments we passed by as we drove up the streets in the afternoon. There was no trace of the electric field protecting the beauty of the city and the people inside of it. No trace of the gilded bars protecting us from our own destruction.
Our first order of business was to scope out the National Museum, the grand Neo-Renaissance icon of the city. Rows of windows stretched across the building; there must have been dozens of them, maybe more, arched and straight-edged, decorating the brown stone. The deceptive simplicity of the museum’s rectangular layout belied the detail etched into the surface, the careful brickwork, and the imposing design of the four quadrilateral tours stretching upward, the spear tips on each of their domes piercing the skies. The winged stone statues along the main tower rising above the frontage guarded the central dome and lantern, though they’d no doubt look even more majestic under the night sky.
I was sure our vintage van would stand out as we parked near the upper end of the square, but the patrons were none the wiser, walking around the planted flowers and trees, passing by the stone statue of a man mounted on a horse—the Wenceslas from the carol, Belle told us.
There couldn’t be a secret section buried deep in a prominent museum without someone among the staff knowing about it. The museum’s director had long worked with the Haas family to keep their secrets safe; even if he didn’t and couldn’t know them himself. According to James, he was willing to help out of loyalty to the Haas family. Naomi had already told him to expect our arrival, but we couldn’t just walk inside the museum in the middle of the day right as it was beginning to open; there were too many people around, people who knew our names and faces. We’d have to wait until nightfall, when the museum was closed, but even then, to avoid the people milling about the square, the front door wasn’t exactly an option. But we’d thought of that, too.
“Climb?” Lake exclaimed.
Belle nodded. “The museum’s director will help disable the security to make things easier.”
“Climbing.” Lake collapsed against her seat. “Never gets any easier, does it? I should have just stayed in the bloody dorms.”
“Stop whining. That’s nothing,” Chae Rin said. “The scaffolding at the back of the building’ll make it easy. Just a couple of stories.”
“A couple of stories!” Lake whipped around as the sleek, black burner phone began to ring from the backseat. After flicking Lake’s forehead with her finger, Chae Rin picked it up.
“James? Yeah, what’s up?” Then, covering the receiver, she whispered to us: “It’s an update on Naomi.”
An update, finally. It had been around a day and a half since the attack, with no news. Each of us watched her expression carefully as she nodded and listened. I almost wished I hadn’t. My chest ached as I saw her face fall. “Still in critical condition,” she said.
“Damn,” Lake whispered, drawing up a knee to rest her foot upon the bench.
“Wait, what?” Chae Rin’s back popped into a straight line, her eyes wide as she listened. “What did you say?”
“What’s going on?” I asked quickly, but she wouldn’t tell us until she finally clicked the phone off.
“The Sect is investigating the hit on Naomi. But someone saw us escaping from her apartment. Someone saw you, Maia.”
My body responded with a deep shiver, my fingers cold. “They saw me?”
“It’s all over the news.” Chae Rin shook her head. “The Sect is looking for us. Director Prince is on the warpath.”
But I’d covered my face so well. How could they have spotted me? I swallowed, clasping my hands together. “So we have to get into the museum fast. Grab the volume. Find out the truth.”
“And then what?” Chae Rin said. “We can’t avoid the Sect forever.”
“But we can’t work with them either,” I pressed. “You heard what my uncle said.”
“This whole thing is turning into a damn mess.” She flung the phone down onto the bench in frustration. “I mean, what is this? Are we fugitives now? Effigies wanted in connection for attempted murder of a Sect director’s wife?”
“Oh my god, we’re criminals,” Lake cried. “My name is ruined. My fans will leave me! What will my parents think?”
“Calm down,” Belle said quietly.
“You calm down, Ice Queen. This whole thing is going to hell!” Chae Rin snapped.
“What if they capture us?” Lake was breathing heavily. “I can’t release a single from prison; I don’t have the connections!”
“I said calm down.” Belle didn’t turn, but surely Chae Rin could see her features turn to stone through the rearview mirror. “We also have to co
nsider that the Sect may have been responsible for the attack in the first place. Someone tried to kill a director’s wife and an Effigy just happened to be at the scene?” Belle tapped her fingernails against the wheel as she thought. “Under normal circumstances, the Sect would have done everything they could to control the narrative. They would have gotten to that witness first and made sure she never spoke to the press. Allowing this to reach the airwaves could just be an attempt to make us panic and draw us out. We have to stay calm.”
Ironically, Belle would have been the one to kill a director’s wife if it weren’t for us holding her back. Nevertheless, she was right. Keeping our heads on straight was a tall order, but we did our best as Belle drove us somewhere we could park until nightfall. It was a place Natalya had always told her about: less than a half hour away from the square on the northwest side of the city was a natural reserve they called Wild Šárka, named so after a legend Natalya had once cherished. We parked off the curb of Evropská Street. I stared at the thick of trees, holding the old window curtains open a sliver with a gentle brush of my finger.
Šárka was a fierce warrior maiden who met her tragic end off the cliffs of these very reserves, according to the myth. I could see why Natalya would hold a certain fascination for the tale, but I couldn’t drum up the same kind of enthusiasm. There was nothing beautiful about tragedy. Not for someone like me, who’d already lost everything once, who was about to have everything taken away again. I’d tried to stay calm like Belle had said, but she wasn’t the one whose name was being mentioned in connection to the possible murder of a prominent official.
Rhys’s mother. I could only imagine what he’d be thinking watching the news. Or Uncle Nathan. Or my classmates and teachers back in New York. Chae Rin was right. Everything was going to hell. We were betting everything on some book whose contents were a mystery to everyone except a jittery old man who’d long fallen off the grid. And in the meantime, Saul’s clock ticked ever still.
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