Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(110)
“You weren’t concentrating hard enough, then. Remember that scrying is dangerous, Maia. You should be careful.”
“Is that what you really want?” I mumbled under my breath before I caught myself. But strangely, knowing how horrid it felt to have another person claw at your mind to drag you into the dark with them, I didn’t feel too guilty over that one.
Belle let an almost imperceptible sigh pass through her lips. “I had thought, originally, that Natalya went to Prague in order to leave me a message . . . because she knew I’d be there. Really, I had only wanted to go in the first place because a few weeks earlier, Natalya had begun talking about the museum so suddenly. How could I have known the real reason she was there?”
“I thought you guys would have shared everything.”
Belle laughed sadly. “Natalya shared only what she wished to share. She always kept me at arm’s length. Maybe because she knew she could not live up to the esteem I held her in.”
“Well, I certainly don’t know what that feels like.” I gave her a playful smile and sank deeper into my seat. If I squinted, I might have been able to see the beginnings of a smile playing on Belle’s lips, but it was gone in the next second.
“Perhaps. I know you’ve had a difficult life as well, Maia. And I identify with that. I understand your pain—I truly do.”
I couldn’t respond right away. It was rare to hear her refer to us as sharing something—something other than a destiny and the weight of Natalya’s life and death. The pain of severed connections. It was a pain that cut through the magic and mystery of our Effigy bond and tapped into something frail and human in us. A twisted connection. And though I wasn’t quite the same girl who’d waited for her that day outside Lincoln Center in New York, it was still a connection I strangely craved.
“Still,” Belle continued, “Natalya was the only family I had. And if it weren’t for her, I would have died long ago.”
I lowered my head but stayed silent.
“You must know as well as I do: When you have no family, when you have nothing, the longing you feel is more painful than whatever you could think of,” she said. “You search for anything, anyone to fill the loneliness. Natalya may not have been perfect, but because of her, I wasn’t alone anymore. She helped me. Guided me. Made me something. Someone. I owe her everything.”
“That’s all I wanted too,” I whispered. Sleep was coming fast, but there was still so much to say. “I have my uncle, but it’s not the same. Losing my dad and mom was awful enough. But losing my sister, June . . .”
I didn’t even know how I survived those first few days with Uncle Nathan. Or how he survived my shutting myself off, deadening myself to the world.
“But then this whole thing happened and you guys came along.” I turned, my gaze passing over Chae Rin’s and Lake’s sleeping forms. “That’s why . . .”
That was why, even though holding this secret in my heart was the biggest of betrayals, I knew I couldn’t give it voice. And it wasn’t just about my feelings for Rhys. It wasn’t just that Naomi had begged me not to give up her son. What would happen when Belle turned her sword on Rhys? When she crossed a line she couldn’t come back from? Everything would fall to pieces. We would fall to pieces. All four of us Effigies.
Holding that secret was for Belle. It was for all of us.
Maybe it was for me.
I pressed my head against the window. Finally giving in to the heaviness of my eyes, I let them flutter shut. “I don’t want us to change. I don’t want to lose anyone either. Belle, you won’t hate me, will you?”
I didn’t hear Belle’s answer before I fell asleep.
26
PRAGUE’S ANTIPHANTOM TECHNOLOGY RAN through pipelines underground that stretched beyond the limits of the city. An expensive network, to be sure, so Belle told us; its construction began after the split of Czechoslovakia, replacing older models as part of a national campaign, its might signaling the beginning of a new republic.
Keeping the systems underground may have had its strategic, scientific purposes. But aesthetically, they kept the scape unmarred by the very technology that every day served as a reminder of humanity’s captivity. Prague was untouched—the romantic labyrinth of narrow streets, the cobblestone painstakingly paved over centuries. The Gothic spires and domes howling ancient secrets into the skies, the curved cupolas of Baroque churches. The traditional red roofs of the tall houses in the old square and the modern apartments we passed by as we drove up the streets in the afternoon. There was no trace of the electric field protecting the beauty of the city and the people inside of it. No trace of the gilded bars protecting us from our own destruction.
Our first order of business was to scope out the National Museum, the grand Neo-Renaissance icon of the city. Rows of windows stretched across the building; there must have been dozens of them, maybe more, arched and straight-edged, decorating the brown stone. The deceptive simplicity of the museum’s rectangular layout belied the detail etched into the surface, the careful brickwork, and the imposing design of the four quadrilateral tours stretching upward, the spear tips on each of their domes piercing the skies. The winged stone statues along the main tower rising above the frontage guarded the central dome and lantern, though they’d no doubt look even more majestic under the night sky.