Page 17 of Siege of Shadows

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.

Belle, on the other hand... I couldn’t say I knew one way or the other. And that scared me.

Belle used to be my hero. Her strength, her skill, her focus. I still envied them as much as I used to worship them. Back then, I’d just wanted to be strong too. And I’d wanted her to acknowledge that strength as if that would somehow make it real. But right from the time we first met, the more I interacted with her, the more I realized how little about her I really knew or understood. And these days, after all we’d learned about Natalya, after Belle had come so close to seeing her again—through me—in France, it felt like things had only gotten worse. She was more distant and aloof. And then there were the missions where she was all too ready to strike the first blow. Dead Soldier was proof of that.

I thought back to her tired and unfocused gaze in Communications. In the past few weeks, in those quiet, unexpected moments, I’d seen her dulled eyes staring off into the distance. Something wasn’t right. But then, nothing’s been quite right since Natalya’s death, not for either of us. Anyone could see that.

We both had the same ghost weighing our souls.

Only difference was,Iwas the one about to face her.

Dr. Rachadi tapped his monitor. A washed-out yellow light waved through my body diagram from head to toe. The two red bars on the right side of the screen began to fluctuate.

I shivered. “Why is it so cold in here? I can’t scry properly under these conditions.”

“Exactly. The psychic boundaries between your mind and the next in your line have already weakened from previous contact.” He said it as if it weren’t supposed to terrify me. “You know that to enter another Effigy’s subconscious safely, your mind needs to be perfectly calm.”

I lifted my head as much as I could. “Yes, or else I get taken over. But then again, that’s what you want.”

“Creating conditions of discomfort will ensure a scrying experience that will allow Natalya’s mind tojustgraze the surface. Don’t worry.Like I said, we’ll be monitoring you carefully.”

Natalya’s mind. A sudden burst of fear gripped me. This was real. They were really going to do this. No, they said they’d monitor me. They’d take care of me. This wasn’t a trap. We had to do everything we could to figure Saul out. And the girls were on the other side of that glass. If these people tried anything, they’d be here to stop them.

But who would stop Natalya?

She’d moved my body in France so well, fighting against Saul and his phantoms. She’d moved it much better than I ever could. I’d watched her from the deep recesses of my own mind, suffocated by darkness as if I’d been buried alive. That feeling of hopelessness started to crawl back into me as I imagined her face. Natalya Filipova, a girl I’d once considered my hero.

“I changed my mind.” My words came out in short rasps. “I don’t think I can do th—”

A hard prick in my arm gave my heart a jolt. One of the technicians had practically attacked me with a needle filled with a pale blue liquid, completely oblivious to the panic on my face. How the hell could I be sure these people weren’t just trying tomurderme? What had I gotten myself into? A warm liquid oozed into my bloodstream. I shut my eyes with a shudder, but I suddenly couldn’t move my jaw. I felt nearly weightless, my body just barely anchored to the table upon which my limbs lay lifelessly.

I wished my uncle were here. Uncle Nathan. I hadn’t seen him or talked to him since I’d left New York months ago. If he were here, I’d know for sure I was safe. I’d be... at peace...

---