Page 46 of Siege of Shadows

Phantoms were forces of nature. They followed no will but chaos. So far, only the ring could channel that pandemonium into some instrumental purpose. It was him.

“We’ve been called to Communications.” Rhys was already turning. “Dot’s found something.”

“Is it about that girl who attacked us?” I asked, following him through the door. “Jessie?”

Rhys’s expression darkened as he tilted his head away from me. He rubbed his cast almost absently as he glared at something in the distance. “It’ll come up. Let’s get there first.”

Under the night sky, we crossed the grounds to Communications, following Rhys up the elevator to the third floor. The room in which Sibyl, Dot, and Pete had been waiting for us overlooked the main floor, its front wall made entirely of glass.

I assumed it worked only one way. Though I could see the agents below clicking away at their keyboards, their monitors lighting up as they tracked disturbances around the globe, they surely,hopefully, couldn’t see Sibyl pacing in front of a red-faced woman sputtering her usual anti-Sect rhetoric on the wide-screen television at the side of the wall. Tracy Ryan, Florida senator: the same woman leading the front on having us Effigies officially classified by international law as biological weapons of mass destruction so we could be quarantined accordingly.

“You can see the Sect’s incompetence with your own eyes,” she said as CNN split-screened her slim, pigeon-sharp face with live footage of the phantom attack in Bloemfontein.

My hands went cold as I saw large, spiderlike phantoms crash through streets with their clawlike legs. People screamed as they rushed past makeshift booths to save themselves from beasts almost half the size of buildings.

“I’ve said this before: The Greenwich Accords is nothing more than a locked and loaded gun holding the international community hostage while the Sect parades around, pretending to ‘handle’ these threats. But they’re not doing that. What they’re really doing is shoring up their arsenal and power whilepretendingto protect the rest of the world. They are waiting to strike.”

“Well,” said the host, “there’s no evidence of them shoring up their power for any specific purpose.”

“What more evidence do you need?” The big, blunt red headline beneath her face seemed to agree with her:TERROR IN BLOEMFONTEIN: ANOTHER SECT FAILURE?“If we don’t do something first, they will make their power known. It’s time for the international community to come together to protectourselves. More military spending and fortifying our borders is where we need to start domestically. But we need to unify against this dark threat.”

“Threat,” said the host, his head cocked. “Do you mean the phantoms? The terrorist Saul? Or the Sect?”

“At this point, is there even a difference anymore?”

“Idiot.” Sibyl grabbed the remote from the round table in the center of the room and clicked the television off. “I wouldn’t expect anything less than nonsensical fearmongering from that woman, especially when she’s up for reelection. But this is really—”

She shook her head, staring at the black television screen for a moment, chewing her lip. Then, suddenly, she threw the remote to the floor.

“Uh...” Pete stared at the broken pieces of plastic on the ground before glancing up and seeing us. “Oh, hey!” he said, his voice a little too high. “Lake! And the others! Lake! Come here. Please.” With a nervous grin, he waved us over frantically as he inched away from Sibyl.

Dot was bent over in front of one of two large monitors atop the long bench pressed up against the window. She clicked the screen twice and pictures popped up, each of the same white corpse laid out on a metal table. Lake gagged behind me, but after the guy I’d seen in the tunnels, this maggotless body was actually a nice change of pace as far as the grotesque went.

“No.” Rhys spoke in a quiet whisper, his lips parted as he stared at the screen. Having been with the Sect for so long, he was certainly no stranger to death. Surely he’d seen bodies like this before, but the color drained from his skin the longer he looked at the corpse on the metal table. “It can’t be. I can’t... tell...”

“What is it?” I asked Rhys as he rushed up to Dot’s side. “Who is this?”

“This,” Dot said, pointing her pen at the screen, “this is another question. A question named Philip.”

“Philip.”Rhys sounded each syllable as if it were a foreign language. “Is that him? Maybe it just looks like him?”

“Rhys, you know him?” I looked from him to the screen and back again. “I don’t understand.”

Pete scratched the back of his neck. “You know that dead guy you found in the desert?”

“That’s him?” The mysterious young man we’d found in the Sahara hideout. Silently, I watched Rhys’s face turn white as the body on the screen.

Lake covered her mouth. “Gosh. He’s... really dead.”

“Well, these pictures are frombeforehe got dissected. You should see the ‘after’ pictures—there’s loads more information to get from those!” Pete’s tone was a little too flippant for Lake, as if he’d forgotten that dissections and autopsies were only delightfully interesting to a select group of people with very special interests. A group Lake didn’t belong to. Her expression soured as if she was about to throw up.

“Rhys,” I said carefully. “How do you know this guy?”

“Th-that’s...” He stopped. Rhys was shaking a little, his eyes blinking rapidly, struggling to focus. He steadied his breath. “I think that’s—”

“Philip Anglebart.” When Dot tapped the screen, it went dark and what looked like a graduation photo appeared. There he was, the boy who’d died in Belle’s arms, but with a few key differences. His blond hair was cut close to his skull in a buzz cut, his face not pale but rosy-cheeked. He was younger in this photo, as if he’d just entered his teens. But the downward slope of his close-set eyes was the same. “One of the seven chosen for the final cohort of the Fisk-Hoffman Training Facility in Greenland.” She flipped her pen around between her fingers. “Along with Agent Rhys and Agent Volkov.”

There must have been some kind of dark magic in those simple words Dot had spoken; at the very sound of the name, the life slipped and fell from Rhys’s eyes. His neck muscles twitched as he clenched his teeth and nodded.

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