“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.”