Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(37)
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.”
“Not exactly easy when you’re being attacked by a bunch of phantoms, but whatever floats your boat,” Lake said.
I would have shared Lake’s indignation, but I was too busy contemplating what we’d heard from Director Chafik back at the Marrakesh facility. “You’re the one who came up with the ether theory, right? That Saul represents a fifth element?”