IT WAS EARLY IN THE evening when I got a call from Cheryl, Sibyl’s mousy assistant.
“The mission starts in sixteen hours,” she said. “But before your briefing, Director Langley wants you to report to the Research and Development department. Fifth floor.”
She sounded distracted, so I wasn’t surprised to hear shuffling in the background. Probably another mountain of paperwork. She now had to deal with constant requests to set up photo shoots, radio interviews, and other frivolous marketing stuff superfluous to her actual job as an assistant. I guess when she suggested to Sibyl that we get pushed as the pretty and marketable faces of the Sect, she didn’t expect to be the one taking on the brunt of the work.
“Just me?” I wasn’t particularly feeling up to doing much of anything after what had happened this morning.
“Just you.” Cheryl sounded annoyed over the phone, but then these days she was always a little irritated with someone. “You need to get fitted for your new equipment before the mission begins.”
Effigies get equipment? I get equipment? I jumped off my bed. Hopefully, it was something badass. I always thought it kind of sucked that agents got really high-tech weapons and gizmos while we Effigies just relied on our own natural ability to control the forces of nature and summon giant weapons out of nothing—
Actually, no, that was kinda cool too.
But having actual equipment certainly wouldn’t take away from the cool; it could only enhance it. Like how you could equip Aki from the Metal Kolossos series with different armor and accessories. Hey, being an Effigy was dangerous and bloody and usually resulted in tragedy and death, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t have a little fun with it. I definitely could use a little fun right about now.
Chae Rin and Belle were off training again—separately. Not unexpected for the two in our team who were the least gung ho about being in one. My dear roommate, Lake, was still stomach-down on her bed, completely free other than anonymously writing malicious comments on pop forums about her old pop group.
“What?” she said. “I’m nervous about the mission and this helps me relax.”
“Okay.” I dragged her off her bed by the legs. “Let’s get some fresh air.”
It was better to go to R & D with someone else anyway. The long trek across the grounds was twisty and confusing, the directions taking us through the stone halls and the overhead walkways overlooking the grounds.
We reported to a giant, busy laboratory on the fifth floor of the department. While some scientists bustled up and down the long aisle, others were busy at their terminals, studying the metallic-blue specs projected onto translucent LCD screens so thin and wide the figures could have been twisting in the air all by themselves. Natural light sifted in through the army of blinded windows lining the walls. But the electric lighting fixtures on the ceiling would have been more than enough to illuminate the room.
My eyes followed down the aisle all the way to the huge monitor hanging on the wall at the front of the lab. There were other computer screens, much smaller, screwed into the wall, but this one showed a map of the world against a black screen. Some areas lit up with red spheres of different sizes, its color fading as it radiated outward.
“What’s that?” I pointed at the monitor, walking ahead of Lake down the walkway.
“A map. Novel, isn’t it?”
I stopped in my tracks. Behind one of the terminals to my right, just in front of a glass case filled with Sect-grade weaponry and Sect maroon suits, stood Rhys, dressed in a blue-gray baseball jacket and a pair of faded jeans just tight enough to showcase his long legs.
“Uh, I swear I’m not stalking you,” he said, noticing my surprise.
As he started toward me, I thought back to the momentary silence that’d stretched between us in the gym and started shifting on the balls of my feet, my brain sputtering for some kind of excuse to leave.
“Those red circles represent cylithium-rich areas.” He tossed his black hair with his long, delicate fingers. “Helps them anticipate phantom attacks.”
“Right, right. Cylithium.” I took a step back. “What are you doing here?”
I asked because I couldn’t look at him without thinking of Natalya. It was difficult enough to approach the questions with a clear mind even when he wasn’t around. But when he was . . .
“I said, why are you here?” I repeated a little too sharply.
Rhys stopped dead in his tracks. It could have been disappointment softening his eyes—or hurt.
“They made some upgrades to our suits.” He pointed at the glass case. “I came to make sure everything was ready for the mission. That’s all . . . really.”
Maybe it was because of the accusatory sting in my tone that he sounded so insecure.
He started toward me again, but before I could run, he stopped at a terminal to his right by the wall, tapping someone on the shoulders. I couldn’t see what the very short woman was welding at her desk, but I could see the smoke sizzling from the little pen she gripped gingerly in her hands. She jumped a bit at Rhys’s touch, lifting up her safety glasses to glare at him, her sleeves pushed up past her elbows. But with an amused look, he pointed at me instead.
She whipped around, blinking when she caught sight of me. “Oh, you’re finally here?” Grinning wide, she waved me over. “Oh, good, good. Get over here and take off your clothes.”
“Excuse me?” Lake exclaimed behind me.
I could barely see the woman’s face before she whipped around again.
“Dot, you’re thinking of someone else.” The blonde at the terminal next to her shook her head. “These are two of the Effigies.” She nodded at me. “You’re Maia, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I’m definitely not taking off my clothes.”
“Oh, right!” The woman named Dot smacked her own forehead. That’s when I finally took stock of her tiny face and nut-brown eyes, wide and bright like jewels against sallow, sickly skin. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Forget that, go away, I don’t need you. Oh, wait, no . . .” A pause. “Sorry, the neck-band, right. I was working on that. Come here, come here.”
Blindingly pink high heels clicked on the tiled floor as she adjusted her seat at the bench, her lab coat swishing behind her.
“Just working on a bit of tech for you. I’d explain, but I’m not quite done yet,” she said, picking up her welding pen. “You’re welcome to wait here while I work. Actually, I would have had this finished earlier, but there was a bit of a mix-up with the equipment storage down the hall. Luckily, Pete and Mellie over there were here to help me out with that.”
At the terminal next to her, two young lab techs reacted to hearing their names, and the young blond woman who’d spoken earlier rolled her eyes.
“Yeah,” Mellie said, peering up from her monitor. “You forgot your own code. Again.”
“Even though you’d just reset it. Again,” Pete said after rubbing the back of his brown neck, but he wasn’t looking at Dot. He was leaning over the desk, fiddling with some wires linking up to one of the monitors. There was something beside him—some kind of box—but his tall frame blocked it from view.
“Yes, well, that’s why you’re my assistants.” Dot rubbed her sunken cheek with a gloved hand, and it was only when I saw her cheekbones jutting out that I noticed how thin she really was. “You assist me.”
“Yeah, we assist you in remembering what day it is,” Mellie grumbled, her short blond bob bouncing as she shook her head.
“This is Dot Nguyen, by the way,” Rhys told me, and I could tell he was suppressing a laugh. “Weapons and Tech expert. We got her from the facility outside Toronto a few weeks ago. She was the one who designed that inoculation device you used against Saul.”
“Really?” Dot Nguyen. Director Chafik had mentioned her before. I certainly remembered that gadget, too. In Buenos Aires, I’d jammed the long tip into Saul’s neck to temporarily disrupt his powers. It was brilliant. It saved my life.
Dot shook her welding pen as if it were out of ink, jumping back when she nearly dropped it on her knee.
“Uh.” Rhys scratched his head. “All that matters is she’s good at the things we pay her to do.”
Dot scratched her scalp through her messy black hair. “Well, don’t just stand there. Grab a seat while you wait. Don’t mind the mess. I know my work space here is a bit . . .”
Chaotic. There were tools, design plans, beakers, and other equipment not exactly organized atop the white counter. Dot was pointing her metallic pen thing at a white chip the size of a cracker. Smoke had already begun to rise from the tips when she lowered her safety glasses.
Lake and I hesitated when Dot waved us over, but curiosity got the better of us. And Dot wasn’t the only one busy. Pete and Mellie looked to be in the middle of some kind of experiment. When Pete finally moved out of the way, I could finally see what his body had been shielding from view: two glass cases no bigger than a box of tissues. The white shard inside one was just barely visible against the clear surface, but it was the long, twisted oddity placed delicately inside the other that caught my attention.
Once the two of us reached their terminal, Lake walked up to Pete. Pete noticed. The goofy grin never left his face as he stood up from his seat.
“What is that thing?” she asked as Pete adjusted one of the wires hooked into the cases.
Pete lifted off the cover. “Half a phantom’s toe.”
“What?” Lake spat as Rhys walked up to the desk next to me. Close.
“For real?” Rhys narrowed his eyes, peering through the glass. “It looks crystallized.”
Indeed. Phantoms had the ability to harden their hides into an impenetrable shield. Saul had called it “petrification” during the battle in France, and using his ring, he’d forced the phantoms to demonstrate. I’d never forget the way their bodies cracked and crystallized in the night.
The toe looked like a curved tree branch with a sharp, hooked tip—a claw maybe.
Rhys leaned over the table for a better look, and I could feel his arm grazing mine as he touched the glass. My body reacted before I could stop it. I pulled myself away with an awkward spasm. It was only when I caught the shocked look in his eyes that I realized how it must have looked. Lake was watching me too. I said nothing as Rhys silently backed away from me.
“What’s the other thing?” Lake asked slowly, though her quizzical eyes were still on me.
“A sample.” Pete’s silly grin came back. I figured it was probably related to the way he devoured the sight of Lake standing next to him. “Of the ring. We shaved off some of the stone. We’ve been doing different things to figure out the relationship between the stone and the phantoms, putting both through different stimuli. Particularly, we’ve been trying to figure out if both materials share certain chemical properties.”
“See,” Dot explained as Mellie stared at dark blue diagrams of the shard and toe on her monitor, “we’ve tried everything we could to figure out just what the heck the stone is. Where it came from, how it worked. If Saul were around, I’d ask him a few questions, but unfortunately for us, he’s still in the wind. So we did experiments. Many, many experiments, which, by the way, took more time than necessary, considering a handful of our agents got arrested two months ago after that whole letting-Saul-go fiasco. Days and hours and seconds and charts and graphs and computers and looking at monitors—”
“They get it,” Mellie said next to Pete.
“The stone isn’t from this world.” Dot whipped around so suddenly Rhys jumped back a bit, probably out of self-preservation. The woman jittered as if she survived on oxygen and espresso alone. “That’s the conclusion we came to. It simply doesn’t exist in the natural world—or we haven’t discovered it yet.” She ran her gloved hand through her messy black hair, yanking it out again when it got stuck in the knots. “It’s either an alien ring or there’s much more to this world we don’t understand yet.”
A world of shadows. Secrets veiled in darkness . . .
“We know that Saul used the ring to control phantoms and focus their attacks on targets of his choosing,” Pete said as Mellie continued examining all the numbers and bars littered across the touch screen of her monitor. “But there could be more to it. Bystanders reported that Saul’s phantoms petrified around that train when he attacked in France two months ago, and then unpetrified to attack you.”
“He did it purposefully to hold the passengers hostage,” I said.
“Willing it to happen by using the ring, I’m sure,” Pete continued. “So not only can you use the stone to control phantoms, but you can also use it to force phantoms to transition between natural and petrified states. Whatever the ring is made of, it can control the phantom’s biology down to a molecular level. The stone and the phantoms. There’s definitely a deeper connection between them we don’t know about.”
Dot sighed. “What I wouldn’t give to pick Saul’s brain. You guys have no idea how much you screwed up by letting him go.”
Lake scoffed. “We screwed up? The traitors that let him escape the facility in the first place were in your department.”
Dot cocked her head to the side. “Oh, right,” she said with a shrug. “Still, it would have been nice if you could have brought him back.”
“Not exactly easy when you’re being attacked by a bunch of phantoms, but whatever floats your boat,” Lake said.
I would have shared Lake’s indignation, but I was too busy contemplating what we’d heard from Director Chafik back at the Marrakesh facility. “You’re the one who came up with the ether theory, right? That Saul represents a fifth element?”
Dot perked up. “Oh, so you’ve been reading up on me?”
“We heard about it in Morocco. Saul’s powers—living forever, disappearing and appearing at will? It’s like he can bend space-time.”
“Well, it’s just a theory I had. The four of you girls can manipulate different elements. For a time we thought that there were only four of you. But then Saul appeared—a fifth Effigy.”
A fifth. And that dead soldier could be a sixth.
“For centuries,” Dot continued, “scientists have theorized ether as a medium necessary for the very propagation of gravitational and electromagnetic force. The raw essence of all space . . . the mysterious foundation of the universe. Is this Saul’s element? And is the ring tapping into the same force?”
Dot was lost in thought for a moment before heaving her shoulders with a sigh. “We need to learn more about him.” The smoke drifted past Dot’s safety glasses as she continued to solder. “What’s more, we need to find the connection. Among the stone, the phantoms, and the Effigies. Those three very mysterious variables. If we had more information, we could find out where all three came from. Maia, I know you were debriefed after your mission in France, but sometimes we think of things after everything’s settled. Are you sure Saul didn’t tell you anything else about the ring when you faced him last?”
I placed my hands behind my back like a child who’d just been caught with her hand in a cookie jar. I wanted to help. And I could have. The ring controls the phantoms. The ring uses the deaths they cause to magnify its power. That was why Saul had been using the stone and its ability to control phantoms to go on a killing spree. Somehow, when he used the stone to force phantoms to kill, it added to the stone’s ability.
All these facts would surely be of use to Dot and the R & D department. And if the Sect hadn’t been involved in Natalya’s death or Saul’s escape, I would have told them happily.
Dot sighed when I shook my head. “Well, that’s fine, I suppose. But anyway, that’s not really why I called you here. Wait a second.”
She opened one of the drawers at her bench and pulled out a small briefcase. As she unlocked it and lifted the lid, the glint of a silver steel band caught my eye. Using a screwdriver, she pried open a small section on the inside and began fitting in the chip she’d been soldering.
“What is that?” Lake asked.
“Maia, you’ve been having issues with scrying, haven’t you?”
Rhys looked at me.
“Dr. Rachadi at the Marrakesh facility sent over the results of your earlier exam. Because of your encounter with Saul in New York leading to your premature summoning of your weapon,” she said as she tinkered with the chip, “your mind is vulnerable to the consciousness of the other Effigies in your line. More than it should be. Case in point.” Dot set down the bracelet. “You’ve seen Natalya a lot lately, haven’t you?”
The intensity in her gaze froze me to the spot. I nodded before I could stop myself.
Rhys’s back straightened a little. “You’ve seen her?” he asked.
“Well, I told you a long time ago I’d been dreaming of her,” I said. “It’s getting more frequent.”
“Has she said anything?” A short silence followed after Rhys spoke. “Or done anything?”
“Why?”
The nonchalant shrug of his shoulders calmed me for the few seconds I believed it before the doubt began crawling back up my insides. Rhys wasn’t stupid. If he’d really killed Natalya, he would have known that I would find out eventually through Natalya’s memories. Was he really innocent? Or was he just quietly waiting for the other shoe to drop?
Maybe we were both just trying to deny reality.
“I’m just worried about you.” Looking suitably concerned, he folded his arms across his chest. “It’s dangerous enough having past Effigies milling about in your head. You know that, Maia.”
Why not turn him in?
Why not?
If he killed Natalya, he deserved to be punished.
My lips trembled as I thought of him rotting away in a Sect prison for the rest of his life. Or executed. Is that . . . is that what I wanted?
He looked convincing, natural. And why wouldn’t he ask more about my scrying? It was the obvious question to ask considering everything that had happened to me. Right?
What do I do? I thought desperately, turning from him.
“Yes, it is dangerous,” said Dot, picking up on Rhys’s warning. “Hence the necklace.”
Dot was finally finished. Standing, she carried the device in front of her as she approached. “Remember, Sibyl still wants you to scry to find this ‘Marian.’ That’s who Saul is really after, right? But we don’t want to hurt you in the process. This will help regulate your brain chemicals while using your powers to scry so you won’t get any more surprise visits from previous Effigies. Let’s see if this fits: Sweep back your hair for a bit?”
I did. “Ah!” My breath caught in my throat from the stinging cold of the steel. The effect was nearly imperceptible, slight enough for me to ignore it, but if I closed my eyes and concentrated, I could feel the cold vibrating softly through muscle.
“We can also inject her with a primer to help stabilize her cylithium levels,” Mellie said.
“Oh, right, good idea,” Dot answered. “You can handle that, Mellie.”
“Won’t that make it harder for her to scry?” Lake looked a bit worried. She knew how important my communication with Natalya was. But Dot was right. It was a dangerous game. I didn’t want to lose myself playing it.
“Well, you won’t be able to communicate as readily. It’s like setting up a makeshift wall in your brain. The windows are still there—you’ll just have to pull a bit harder to open them, but hey, it’s better than the storm blowing in, you know?”
The neck-band was a bit clunky, but I could pass it off as a fashion statement if I needed to. It was better than being body-snatched by Natalya.
“I still don’t understand how Natalya’s mind is in me in the first place.” I shook my head once Dot took the neck-band off again. “All this stuff about frequency and vibrations and chemicals and whatever, but at the end of the day, someone’s mind is in my mind. I don’t understand it.”
“Welcome to our world.” Dot gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Controlling the elements. Effigies passing on their consciousness, but only after they die. Magic. What you do is magic. Magic that shouldn’t exist, but does. And the only thing we mere mortals can do is try to understand magic through science.” With her bony hands, she propped herself against her assistants’ table. “Because really, what else can we do? How can the ability to perform magic be created from inside the human body? Why can we also find it in phantoms?”
There was a wildness to her curiosity, smoldering as she pulled up her safety glasses and faced me. “How is the mind connected to the body? How is the mind connected to magic?” She tapped my forehead twice with her index finger. “How did Natalya’s mind and magic travel into your physical body after she died? Mind, magic, body. One hundred years and we have more questions than answers. But we are trying our best. There’s just so much we don’t know yet.”
“That’s understandable, but it doesn’t really help me,” I said.
Dot rubbed the muscles in her neck as she moved back to her station. “It’s like we’re looking at the wall of a cave seeing only what we can see through our limited scope. Trying to grasp the universe into our hands using nothing but our flimsy, woefully insufficient technology.” She picked up a screwdriver from her table. “But the real truth . . . the real truth, Maia, is always just out of sight.”