Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(46)
Rhys and I shielded our eyes from the dust. And once it settled, Jessie was gone, her monstrous puppet falling to the ground with a dull thud.
A dead pile of flesh and bones on the pavement.
12
FAILURE. BETRAYAL. TWENTY-TWO HOURS passed in disarray as Sibyl conducted an internal review of the London facility’s entire roster, though many agents had no idea what had even happened in the underground tunnels.
But that wasn’t enough for the Council. Apparently, after an emergency meeting, they’d called someone in from another facility to “aid in operations.” Whether that meant helping Sibyl or interrogating her, I didn’t know. Still, after what had happened, nobody could blame them for taking action. Only two agents had helped those mysterious soldiers attack us, but it was two too many. Lake’s and Chae Rin’s unit had successfully delivered their ring to its new fortified hiding spot. But Jessie had managed to make off with the one we were supposed to deliver. If backup hadn’t come when it did, she might have made off with me, too.
Sibyl had told us to stay in our dorms, out of the way, while she conducted the investigation, but that didn’t last long.
“Open up! Open up, it’s an emergency!” Rhys was pounding on the door.
Chae Rin glanced up from her laptop. Lake and Belle burst out of their rooms on the second floor. Jumping up from the table, I ran to let him in.
“What is it?” I asked, taking in the sight of a blue cast on the arm Jessie had snapped. Dark circles caved in the skin around his eyes, his full lips cracked from dehydration. He looked like he’d been grilled all night.
“Bloemfontein’s APD was hacked. Parts of the city have just been attacked by phantoms.”
I sucked in a deep breath, my shoulders lifting with my chest as I let the dread sink in. Saul was back in business.
“Have agents been dispatched to the area?” Belle kept her eyes on Rhys as she walked down the stairs, her body mostly healed from her wounds thanks to her Effigy abilities.
“Yeah. It didn’t look like it was a full-scale attack. The phantoms rampaged a farmers’ market for a while before disappearing again.”
“How do we know it was him?” asked Lake from behind the second-floor railing.
“It’s his pattern,” I said quietly, remembering New York. “Plus, phantoms wouldn’t just target a specific area, then disappear.”
Phantoms were forces of nature. They followed no will but chaos. So far, only the ring could channel that pandemonium into some instrumental purpose. It was him.
“We’ve been called to Communications.” Rhys was already turning. “Dot’s found something.”
“Is it about that girl who attacked us?” I asked, following him through the door. “Jessie?”
Rhys’s expression darkened as he tilted his head away from me. He rubbed his cast almost absently as he glared at something in the distance. “It’ll come up. Let’s get there first.”
Under the night sky, we crossed the grounds to Communications, following Rhys up the elevator to the third floor. The room in which Sibyl, Dot, and Pete had been waiting for us overlooked the main floor, its front wall made entirely of glass.
I assumed it worked only one way. Though I could see the agents below clicking away at their keyboards, their monitors lighting up as they tracked disturbances around the globe, they surely, hopefully, couldn’t see Sibyl pacing in front of a red-faced woman sputtering her usual anti-Sect rhetoric on the wide-screen television at the side of the wall. Tracy Ryan, Florida senator: the same woman leading the front on having us Effigies officially classified by international law as biological weapons of mass destruction so we could be quarantined accordingly.
“You can see the Sect’s incompetence with your own eyes,” she said as CNN split-screened her slim, pigeon-sharp face with live footage of the phantom attack in Bloemfontein.
My hands went cold as I saw large, spiderlike phantoms crash through streets with their clawlike legs. People screamed as they rushed past makeshift booths to save themselves from beasts almost half the size of buildings.
“I’ve said this before: The Greenwich Accords is nothing more than a locked and loaded gun holding the international community hostage while the Sect parades around, pretending to ‘handle’ these threats. But they’re not doing that. What they’re really doing is shoring up their arsenal and power while pretending to protect the rest of the world. They are waiting to strike.”
“Well,” said the host, “there’s no evidence of them shoring up their power for any specific purpose.”
“What more evidence do you need?” The big, blunt red headline beneath her face seemed to agree with her: TERROR IN BLOEMFONTEIN: ANOTHER SECT FAILURE? “If we don’t do something first, they will make their power known. It’s time for the international community to come together to protect ourselves. More military spending and fortifying our borders is where we need to start domestically. But we need to unify against this dark threat.”
“Threat,” said the host, his head cocked. “Do you mean the phantoms? The terrorist Saul? Or the Sect?”
“At this point, is there even a difference anymore?”
“Idiot.” Sibyl grabbed the remote from the round table in the center of the room and clicked the television off. “I wouldn’t expect anything less than nonsensical fearmongering from that woman, especially when she’s up for reelection. But this is really—”