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, I was 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 to just graze 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 to murder me? 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 . . .
“Raise the transducer frequency to twenty megahertz. Beginning . . .”
“. . . cognitive penetration successful . . .”
“. . . and eliminate the artifacts from the cylithium return signal . . .”
The voices weaved in and out, lyrics to an eerily pleasant song. Peaceful.
“Raise the frequency higher,” someone said. Director Chafik, maybe. His voice was much deeper than the doctor’s, a milky murmur that matched the steady rhythm of my calm breaths. “We have to allow Natalya to get to the brink. She’ll survive.”
Survive. I rolled the syllables along my tongue without ever parting my lips. Sur . . . vive . . .
Survive . . . survive . . .
Live . . . I want to live . . .
I want to live, Maia.
It was dark. In my T-shirt and jean shorts, I lay on a ground I couldn’t see because the darkness had cloaked everything.
This wasn’t what scrying looked like. There was a right way and a wrong way to scry, typically. Belle had explained it before. There was a difference between using the front door and being dragged in through the back window. When Saul had first kissed me in New York, that sudden, shocking contact weakened the already penetrable barrier between my consciousness and Natalya’s, the last fire Effigy to die before me. Even now if I wasn’t careful, I’d see her memories in my dreams, but this left me vulnerable. True scrying required meditation and concentration. It was different from just slipping into her memories. It was a controlled experience.
This was neither. I didn’t know what this was, couldn’t fathom why the darkness had drained away until I was back outside the Marrakesh facility. Our Sect van was still parked outside. The sun was still blazing hot. Wiping the sweat off my forehead, I shifted my gaze to the sparse row of palm trees by the guard towers, their long, stiff leaves stretching into the sky.
“Maia.”
My body warmed at the sound of his voice, soft, deep, and darkly sweet. He stepped out of the driver’s seat and shut the door behind him, the wind tousling his black hair, which had grown a little since the last time I’d seen him.
“Rhys.” My arms were useless at my sides, the blood thumping in my body as I drank in the sight of his lean body dressed in the black suit typical for Sect agents to wear when not on the battlefield. A strange look for him; in the short time I’d known him, he’d worn mostly faded, worn-out jeans, baseball jackets, and, the first time we’d met, a bow tie.
“Oh good, you’re here.” He smiled as he straightened his pin-striped tie and walked up to me. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to do for ages.”
Wait. I’d had this dream before.