Siege of Shadows Read online

  The hair alone was enough to make the difference. His was dark, not the silver I’d come to associate with Saul.

  “After the interrogation you spoke of, Ms. Finley, we were able to research his history. Nick Hudson, born in 1847 to a wealthy British family that owned a small but lucrative railway company in Argentina before it was bought out and absorbed into a larger British firm.”

  “So Nick was a little rich boy.” Chae Rin scoffed.

  “But then he became an Effigy,” Belle said.

  “Alice is the more vicious personality,” I said, thinking back to that terrible night in New York, the bodies strewn across the lobby of La Charte hotel. Saul had stood atop his serpent-like phantom as if it were his personal steed, lapping up the sight of the corpses like it were the only oasis that could quench his thirst. But it was Nick I’d faced in France, a boy who’d maintained an almost gentlemanly etiquette even as he held me against my will while threatening a train full of innocents with the phantoms at his beck and call. It made no difference. “Even still, they’re both murderers.” My lips pursed as I stared at Nick’s gorgeous face beaming in monochrome.

  “But then who’s Alice?” Lake asked. “Did you find any information on her?”

  Director Chafik shook his head. “We have not found anything so far. With only her first name to work with, we’ve cross-checked the name against all known Hudson associates and acquaintances, but nothing has come up.”

  “But if he’s an Effigy, then she was the last one before him,” said Chae Rin. “The little voice in his head. Only she is the one driving.” And after a short pause, she laughed as the joke dawned on her. “Grand theft body,” she said with a little chuckle. “Whoever Alice is, she sure took the poor guy out for a joyride and . . .”

  The words died on her lips once she turned and looked at me. She must have seen the way my body was hunched over, my head lowered, my eyes downcast as I recalled the feeling of being ripped away from my own flesh and trapped inside my own mind. Another perk of having someone else’s consciousness bubbling just under the surface. One wrong move—

  I held my arms tightly, squeezing the flesh for reassurance before lowering them again. “If Alice is really the last Effigy in his line, then she would have lived and died in the same time period,” I said. “But people aren’t immortal. Even as an Effigy, Nick should have died by now.”

  “What is Saul?” Lake said. “What else can he do beyond teleporting? Oh, wait, he can control phantoms!”

  “Nah, he used the ring to do that,” said Chae Rin, and she would know because her old circus boss had used the one she’d stolen from Natalya’s apartment for a phantom-Effigy performance act. I always wondered whether Chae Rin missed the feeling of riding phantoms for fun and profit. Having recently done it myself, I could safely say it wasn’t an experience I wanted to relive.

  “Accursed,” I whispered, thinking back to that night in France. “He’d called himself accursed. Like us. He said his life span was just one part of his burden. Maybe he can live forever.” A terrible thought. What if we couldn’t kill him? “We have the power of the elements, but for him . . . teleporting and immortality . . . it’s almost as if he can bend space-time.”

  “One of the researchers at your London facility, Dot Nguyen, has a theory,” said Chafik. “For hundreds of years, philosophers have been theorizing the existence of a fifth element: ether. Experiments were conducted in the nineteenth century to examine its properties as a medium for gravitational and electromagnetic forces. Nguyen believes it’s possible that there were originally five Effigies created, not four, and that Saul has the elemental power of ether. But all we have are our theories. What we need is a way to test them.”

  He brought up the satellite image again. “Like you said, Saul can appear and disappear at will. Weeks after Saul’s signal went dead in Greenland, London Communications once again caught hold of an Effigy frequency, this time in the Sahara desert. Of course, they thought it was his, which is why they sent you to capture him. But this time something was different. This time, the signal did not just appear at the location. Rather, it developed gradually tens of meters away from the site before resting at the location.”

  He played the footage sent over from the London facility, and sure enough, I could see the red blinking dot materializing from nothing, fading into existence as it traveled through a phantom-infested Dead Zone. It grew brighter and brighter until it came to a resting point, a bloodred heartbeat.

  “We know from the time that Langley had Saul in custody that his ability to mask his spectrographic signature only appears when Alice’s personality is in control,” Chafik said. “It would have been Nick that we tracked after your battle in France. Like Sibyl suggested, the fight may have destabilized him. However . . .”

  He trailed off, pursing his lips tight, his exhale seeping out from his throat in another deep grumble.

  “However?” I prodded him.

  “He can still appear and disappear at will,” Chafik said. “Indeed, it would make little sense for Saul to risk traveling through a nest of phantoms to reach that location, especially since he was injured from your fight.”

  “So the signal you tracked to the desert may not have been Saul’s, but that dead guy’s,” I said, my mind filling in the blanks. “I mean, if the guy can’t vanish and materialize at will, then he’d have to go through the Dead Zone. Vanishing is Saul’s power, after all, and Effigies . . .” I raked my tongue over my dry lips. Effigies each had their own unique ability. “There really are more Effigies out there. . . .” I shook my head. No matter how many times I thought about it, I couldn’t accept it.

  “Perhaps. However, an Effigy’s signal does not fade or grow stronger, nor is it ever unstable,” Chafik continued. He tapped the screen again, and three silver dots appeared just a few miles away from the desert hideout. In Marrakesh. The blinking lights were us. “This is why the Sect can track you once you have come into your powers. Wherever you go,” Chafik added, unhelpfully. I don’t think he realized how creepy it sounded.

  “So, number one: That signal we chased out into the desert probably wasn’t even Saul’s.” Chae Rin counted it off with her fingers. “And number two: Even if it did belong to that soldier we found, he may not be an actual, legitimate Effigy? He may be something else?” She pressed a hand against her forehead, fingers sliding against the sweaty black hair matted to her skin. “Then what the hell was he?”

  “We need answers.” Chafik stared at the monitor. “How was this soldier able to travel through the Dead Zone on his own? And what are the circumstances behind these unstable frequencies—Saul’s signal in Greenland and the one that appeared in the desert hideout? Is masking a frequency one of Saul’s abilities? Or is it a special property that appears only upon the reappropriation of the current Effigy’s body by the previous Effigy in the line?”

  Still too many riddles. Effigies, like the phantoms, were discovered in the nineteenth century. Even after all the studies, all the research, there was so much we didn’t know about them. But I was more concerned over where this conversation was heading. Especially once Chafik’s eyes were on me.

  “The truth is, Sibyl Langley spoke to us while you were waiting in the Sect van. We both think it may be time to use our own assets in order to seek out the answers to these questions. For that, we need you.”

  My breath hitched. Some of the agents from the bench in front of us were listening even as they worked at their terminals. I caught the shift in their heads as they waited to see how I’d respond.

  “What . . . exactly do you need me to do?” I asked, my hands feeling strangely numb.

  “It’s our understanding that you have scried before.” Chafik scratched his black beard as he considered what he must have been told by Sibyl. “In New York. Intimate contact with Saul forced you to prematurely open up the connection between your mind and the scattered psyches of the fire Effigies inside you. It is perhaps because of the connection between
Nick or Alice and an Effigy in your line. The contact might have awoken that girl, if even just for a moment.”

  “Marian,” I whispered. The girl both Alice and Nick were desperate to find for the answers she carried with her.

  “Whatever that ‘connection’ was,” Lake said, “had to have been pretty intimate if a kiss woke her up.”

  Intimate. Romantic? It seemed so by the way Nick had talked about her the last time we faced each other in France. That faraway look as he said her name . . .

  “In either case, Maia’s ability to cross through the psychic barriers into another Effigy’s consciousness can give us a way to study this issue with the frequencies. Are both Saul and the now-deceased soldier you found Effigies? Is it the unstable crossing of two personalities—in Saul’s case, Nick and Alice—that makes the difference in the ability to mask one’s signature? Langley has proposed that we use you, Maia, to look into the matter. And I agree.”

  My jaw clenched. “You want to experiment on me?” I took a short step back. “You want to, what, keep me locked up here like a lab rat?”

  “We only want to measure your brain waves and spectrographic signature as you scry. It should not take more than a few hours.”

  “But the whole point of this is to see what happens when one personality takes over the other. Like Alice did with Nick.” The implications of everything tore through me like a scream. I felt numb from the neck down. “You want the same thing to happen to me.”

  “Natalya,” Belle said with an odd, wistful quirk in her voice. It sent a violent shudder through me.

  “No. No, no, no.” My head was shaking side to side with each “no.” “She took me over the last time. Do you understand what that means? There’s no way—”

  “We will be monitoring you precisely to make sure that doesn’t happen.” Chafik looked sincere enough, the seriousness in his small, dark eyes easing a little as if it’d make the blow any softer. “We want you because of the instability of your scrying. We see you as a closer estimate to Saul’s own psychic battles than, say, Belle, who’s studied and practiced the skill over a period of years.”

  My mind was a better measure to figure out what was happening in Saul. We were alike. Nick and I. Unlike Belle, we’d both experienced the horrors of having someone move your bones and stretch your limbs without your say-so. But this was still too dangerous. I didn’t . . . I couldn’t.

  I looked at the other girls for help, and thankfully, Lake and Chae Rin looked just as skeptical as I did. Belle, on the other hand, had a pensive tilt to her head that told me she was mulling it over.

  “It may be of help to us,” Belle said. “We need to figure out the nature of Saul . . . and the soldier. This could be a crucial first step. And perhaps understanding the pattern behind Saul’s frequency can give us a way to track and capture him.”

  “She . . . has a point, kid.” Chae Rin gripped my shoulder. “I’m not totally sold on this, but there are questions that need answers.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Shrugging off her hand, I wrapped my arms around my chest. “You and Lake have never even had to scry before, so how would you know? And none of you know how horrible it feels to . . . to . . .” To have your body taken over. I shuddered.

  “No, we don’t,” Chae Rin replied coolly. “But what other options do we have?”

  “This is kind of an urgent situation,” Lake chimed in.

  I knew it too. But I didn’t have to like it. With a heavy sigh, I looked up at Chafik with my teeth gritted. “You’re one hundred percent sure you won’t lose me in there? Ten hundred percent sure?”

  Chafik nodded. “Don’t worry. Our technicians will do everything in their power to make sure you are safe and secure. We already have a lab prepared in the Research and Development wing. Like I said, we will be monitoring you carefully to make sure there are no accidents. We only want Natalya’s consciousness to graze the surface. We want to see what happens when your minds interact. We won’t let it get beyond that.”

  “Don’t worry . . . um . . . we’re all here,” Lake said reassuringly, though she didn’t seem too sure if it was worth anything. “It’ll be fine.”

  “You say that now. Just watch. In a few hours you’ll have Natalya as a roommate instead of me.”

  Lake thought about it. “Well, then, hopefully she won’t snore as badly as you do.”

  She waited for me to catch on to her smile, but I couldn’t say I appreciated that joke. Once Lake realized her misstep, her shoulders slumped sheepishly.

  Chae Rin scratched her head. “Look, kid, I get that we’re not exactly best friends or anything, but none of us want you gone. Right?”

  “That’s a no-brainer,” Lake answered. “You said it yourself: We’re a team, yeah?”

  But Belle took a little longer to respond than I would have liked. Her languid eyes stared off in the distance. She looked tired suddenly, as if all the energy had been sucked out of her in a moment. Perhaps fatigue had finally settled into her bones. But you never knew with Belle.

  She nodded absently. “Let’s go,” she said in an almost whisper.

  5

  “CONSIDER IT A PHYSICAL,” I told myself as I entered the lab alone from the observatory room, but then, most of the physicals I’d had in the past were the normal kind with doctors and stethoscopes. There was indeed a doctor in the room, from what I could tell by both his long white lab coat and the way he just kind of stood around looking important. But instead of nurses, he surrounded himself with technicians tinkering with monitors and wires and all sorts of medical equipment I couldn’t name if I tried.

  “Ah, she’s here,” said the doctor when I shut the door behind me. “Maia Finley? My name is Dr. Rachadi.” He was young, slender, dark, and handsome, but having a pretty face to look at made me feel only marginally better. “Have a seat over there. This shouldn’t take long.”

  Before I even had the chance to follow his instructions, a couple of technicians started dragging me toward a long examination table. I couldn’t see any of the other girls or Director Chafik, but I knew they were behind the large black screen on the left side of the room, watching me as I lay down on the table, as the technicians hooked me up to a set of monitors and wrapped black straps around my arms.

  “Fix the tripod,” Dr. Rachadi ordered a technician, who ran to reorient the camera stuck in the corner.

  “What are you looking for?” I shivered, longing for the warmth of a bed. The room was unusually cold. “What is all this stuff?” Long tubes coiled around the floor and over the tables like metal vines.

  Dr. Rachadi grabbed the long neck of a thin, clear monitor and rotated it so I could see the screen. “This entire apparatus,” he said, patting the mass of complicated equipment, “will simply help us measure your spectrographic frequency and brain waves concurrently. We will monitor your cylithium levels, which should spike as you attempt to make contact with Natalya.”

  Make contact. They made it seem like they were leaving me stranded on an alien planet. They might as well have been.

  “Cylithium. Right. Where all the magic comes from.”

  “Through studies in the past, we’ve come to conceive of cylithium as a kind of conduit or medium that not only enables your ability to control the elements but also allows for the connections between the psyches of the Effigies. Through previous studies on Effigies, we’ve found that the cognitive experience of scrying correlates to cylithium production, which goes into overdrive during the process. Now, you won’t be scrying by yourself. For your safety, we’ll be inducing your meditative state, adjusting cylithium levels to a premeasured amount. And we’ll be using the instruments at the far panel behind me to ensure that the levels never get out of control.”

  When I lifted my head, I could see the technicians at the front wall turning various metal knobs of different sizes.

  “That way you maintain the delicate psychic balance between the two minds,” he said.

  “Just don’
t kill me.”

  He swept his fingers along the screen and with a few taps an image of my body appeared, all outlined in metallic blue, bordered by stats and figures in writing too tiny for me to read from my table. “Maia Finley, age sixteen, blood type AB, weight—”

  “That we don’t need to say out loud,” I said, and I would have sat up if I weren’t hooked into so much weird stuff. I wanted to rub my arms. The hairs were standing on end, and I couldn’t tell if it was because of my own fear or because of the subzero temperature of the lab. Everyone else was wearing layers. They could have warned me.

  A voice rang out from the intercom. “Finley, please calm down.” It was Director Chafik. Calm down. Easy for him to say. As if he had any idea how nerve-racking this was.

  “Yeah, don’t worry, kid. We’re all here.” Chae Rin.

  Lake chimed in too. “We won’t leave until it’s all over, ’kay?”

  Belle said nothing.

  I wondered what the other girls were doing behind the black screen. Maybe they were laughing at me. Well, Chae Rin would under normal circumstances, but I had to believe that she’d be a bit more sensitive even though we weren’t, as she’d said, best buds.

  It’s not like we disliked each other either. None of us exactly saw eye to eye when we all first met. But battling side by side had brought us closer together. I liked Chae Rin’s straightforward personality, envied her mercilessness when it came to being as blunt as humanly possible. I’d come to expect it. Enjoy it, even—well, most of the time. Lake and I got along a lot better for whatever reason, maybe because we had the least harsh personalities out of the four. And Lake was just accommodating to everyone. I was sure she was as nervous for me as I was for myself.