“How do you take this off?” Placing his body on the ground, Belle began struggling with the helmet covering his face. “Help me.”
Lake and I looked for a lever, a groove, a latch, anything.
“Wait. There’s a switch here,” I said.
It was more like a tiny button tucked away by his ear. One click and the helmet shuddered and shifted open, steaming at the sides.
But the face inside was not Saul’s.
“Who the hell is this?” Chae Rin loomed behind us for a better look.
The young man was barely out of his teens, blond hair matted against his pale forehead, scars riddling his thick, angled face.
“What’s going on?” I studied his face. “I thought Communications said that they tracked Saul’s frequency here.”
Belle was quiet for too long. All the while the timer was counting down. Seven minutes and forty-five seconds. Seven minutes and forty-four seconds . . .
“Well?” I urged Belle.
“The Sect tracked the cylithium frequency of an Effigy here,” she said finally.
The bunker was silent. That is, until the boy’s lips parted in a cough.
“It’s okay,” I told him, surprising myself. What if he was an enemy? But there was something about his feeble moaning and the way his eyes fluttered helplessly that made me wonder otherwise.
Kneeling by his side, Chae Rin grabbed his shoulder and shook him. “Hey! Who the hell are you?” After a pause of silence, she shook him again. “We don’t have all day.”
“Chae Rin, be careful!” Lake scowled at her. “He looks half-dead already.”
But if Lake was looking for sympathy, she wouldn’t find it. “The APD field’s about to go out,” Chae Rin snapped. “We don’t exactly have all the time in the world.”
“Sir. Who are you?” Belle asked, more quietly.
The young man sputtered. I could just hear the beginnings of words carving themselves out from the sounds he made.
“What?” Belle leaned in as the young man’s lips moved.
“Are you . . . Sect?”
“We’re the Effigies,” I answered quickly, tentatively touching his arm when it started to tremble uncontrollably. He looked relieved with my answer. “Who . . .” I paused, maybe because I didn’t want to know the answer. “What are you?”
“I ran here . . . I ran from them . . . I hid . . . I wanted you to find me.” He coughed, breathing heavily. “They were going to force me to . . . I couldn’t . . . stop myself. . . . I waited until it stopped working . . . and then when I was free, I ran. . . . I needed you to find me. . . .”
It was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. It was almost impossible to stitch his words into a coherent picture.
“I don’t understand.” Belle straightened her back. “Who was forcing you? How? To do what? Tell us who you are.”
It was obvious that just speaking was agony for him. He couldn’t answer right away.
“If you wanted the Sect to find you, why come all the way out here?” I asked him, trying to be as gentle as the urgency of the situation would allow. “They have facilities all over the world.”
“Not the Sect,” he blurted before taking in a sharp breath. “You. You. I . . . knew they’d send you once they could track me . . . looking for him. I have to trust you. My . . . family . . .”
Family? What was he talking about? As I shivered, he opened his left palm, revealing a gray flash drive just long enough to fit in his hand. He’d been holding on to it so tightly that after Belle took it, its indent remained in his palm. As the blood pooled in his veins where it’d been, he let his hand fall.
“What’s on this?” Belle asked.
“I stole it from the lab . . . I ran . . . I wanted you to find me. . . . Others like me are coming for you. I was just . . . the first. . . .”
I gripped his arm tight until it stopped convulsing. He was looking at me. Only me.
“Tell me who you are,” I said again, quietly.
I wasn’t ready for the sight of his green eyes welling up with tears. It wasn’t what I’d thought awaited us at the end of this mission. I swallowed the lump in my throat as he parted his lips one more time.
“It’s too late for me. . . . No one can heal me. . . . Please find Alex. . . . He’s . . . still . . .”
His head rolled to the side, and his body stopped twitching.
3
DEAD. HE WAS DEAD. BELLE checked for a pulse, but it was clear even before she shook her head.
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Lake said it before I could. Turning away from us, she crouched down and buried her head in her knees.
“Belle. You said Effigy.” Chae Rin’s mouth parted as she considered it. “What do you mean? Whose frequency did we track here?”
“He said we were family,” I whispered. “What if he meant—”
“No.” Chae Rin shook her head resolutely. “He was clearly delirious.”
“Everything else he said was coherent enough,” I argued. “It has to mean something. What if it meant—”
“That he’s an Effigy?” Chae Rin looked like she was having trouble accepting it. Furrowing her eyebrows and scrunching her lips made her beautiful face shrivel like a dried prune. “He said ‘my family.’ Those exact words. He could have meant anything. I mean, he was dying. His cognitive abilities were probably on the fritz. That’s it, isn’t it? Right?”
If Chae Rin was having a mini-freak-out, I couldn’t blame her. I’d learned in school what we all had learned growing up: that there were four Effigies, each with the power of different elements—fire, earth, water, air. And when one died, another took her place in an endless cycle. Despite all the resources the Sect and various government agencies put into researching where we came from, where the phantoms came from, no one knew for sure.
Four girls and a world full of phantoms. That was the only truth we could cling to. Until Saul appeared as the fifth.
The rules had changed.
But if there were more . . . where did it stop? Were there dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? We already knew so little about the world. Now we couldn’t even trust what we did know.
“Belle, what were you thinking before?” The several seconds Chae Rin waited for Belle to respond was clearly too long. She grabbed Belle’s arm. “Hey! Did you hear me? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Belle snapped, pulling her arm out of Chae Rin’s grasp. “Just stay calm.”
But the look of dread on her face betrayed her.
My eyes drifted back to the young man in her arms. Dead. And I was close to the body. With a sudden surge of panic, I stumbled back, almost slipping on the sheet of ice covering part of the floor. The whites of his eyes popped against the dark dreariness of the bunker as they rolled to the back of his head. Belle must have seen the expression on my face because after a quick glance my way, she closed his eyelids.
“Well, good job, Barbie. Dude’s dead. You killed him.” With her arms folded over her chest, Chae Rin scoffed in disbelief. “At least we could have pumped him for information that actually made sense. Like who he is. And what that is.”