Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(47)

She shook her head, staring at the black television screen for a moment, chewing her lip. Then, suddenly, she threw the remote to the floor.

“Uh . . .” Pete stared at the broken pieces of plastic on the ground before glancing up and seeing us. “Oh, hey!” he said, his voice a little too high. “Lake! And the others! Lake! Come here. Please.” With a nervous grin, he waved us over frantically as he inched away from Sibyl.

Dot was bent over in front of one of two large monitors atop the long bench pressed up against the window. She clicked the screen twice and pictures popped up, each of the same white corpse laid out on a metal table. Lake gagged behind me, but after the guy I’d seen in the tunnels, this maggotless body was actually a nice change of pace as far as the grotesque went.

“No.” Rhys spoke in a quiet whisper, his lips parted as he stared at the screen. Having been with the Sect for so long, he was certainly no stranger to death. Surely he’d seen bodies like this before, but the color drained from his skin the longer he looked at the corpse on the metal table. “It can’t be. I can’t . . . tell . . .”

“What is it?” I asked Rhys as he rushed up to Dot’s side. “Who is this?”

“This,” Dot said, pointing her pen at the screen, “this is another question. A question named Philip.”

“Philip.” Rhys sounded each syllable as if it were a foreign language. “Is that him? Maybe it just looks like him?”

“Rhys, you know him?” I looked from him to the screen and back again. “I don’t understand.”

Pete scratched the back of his neck. “You know that dead guy you found in the desert?”

“That’s him?” The mysterious young man we’d found in the Sahara hideout. Silently, I watched Rhys’s face turn white as the body on the screen.

Lake covered her mouth. “Gosh. He’s . . . really dead.”

“Well, these pictures are from before he got dissected. You should see the ‘after’ pictures—there’s loads more information to get from those!” Pete’s tone was a little too flippant for Lake, as if he’d forgotten that dissections and autopsies were only delightfully interesting to a select group of people with very special interests. A group Lake didn’t belong to. Her expression soured as if she was about to throw up.

“Rhys,” I said carefully. “How do you know this guy?”

“Th-that’s . . .” He stopped. Rhys was shaking a little, his eyes blinking rapidly, struggling to focus. He steadied his breath. “I think that’s—”

“Philip Anglebart.” When Dot tapped the screen, it went dark and what looked like a graduation photo appeared. There he was, the boy who’d died in Belle’s arms, but with a few key differences. His blond hair was cut close to his skull in a buzz cut, his face not pale but rosy-cheeked. He was younger in this photo, as if he’d just entered his teens. But the downward slope of his close-set eyes was the same. “One of the seven chosen for the final cohort of the Fisk-Hoffman Training Facility in Greenland.” She flipped her pen around between her fingers. “Along with Agent Rhys and Agent Volkov.”

There must have been some kind of dark magic in those simple words Dot had spoken; at the very sound of the name, the life slipped and fell from Rhys’s eyes. His neck muscles twitched as he clenched his teeth and nodded.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s him. I know him. We . . .” His eyes darted in my direction before he cleared his throat. “We trained together.” He wouldn’t look at me.

Rhys had told me before that he’d trained for a time in Greenland. Some training facilities are a little tougher than others. That’s what he’d told me, though he’d never elaborated.

Rhys shook his head. “But he’s dead. They’re all supposed to be dead. Only Vasily and I survived the . . . the fire.”

“What fire?” Walking up to him, I gripped his broad shoulder tightly, tilting my head low to catch his eyes. It slackened beneath my touch. “What are you talking about, Rhys?”

“The facility shut down four years ago,” Sibyl answered instead, her piercing expression hardening as she stared at the picture of the young man. “Because of a wide-scale fire caused by an electrical fault.”

My body stiffened involuntarily. A fire. Electrical fault. It sounded too familiar. But I couldn’t let myself slip back into painful memories.

“It never reopened. Too many of the staff died, including all the doctors. And the students. Only Rhys and Agent Volkov survived and were relocated.”

“I didn’t know . . .” I trailed off as Rhys turned on his heel, pivoting out of my touch.

“Wait, so he’s alive after all?” Lake asked, and thought about it. “Well, I mean, now he’s dead. But before, you know, before, how could he have been alive to die if he’d already died?” She sighed impatiently. “Ugh, you get what I mean, right?”

“The other five students were only presumed dead,” Sibyl explained. “Their bodies were never recovered after the fire.”

“Wait, let me draw up their profiles.” A few series of clicks from Dot’s fingers and the seven were on the screen.

Philip Anglebart. Talia Nassar. Gabriel Moore. Alexander Drywater. Jessie Stone. Aidan Rhys. Vasily Volkov. Each was young in their photo, barely into their teens, wearing the same blazer as if taking a school photo. Talia’s long dark hair was split at the edges as it draped down her chest. Gabriel was very slight and handsome, his small eyes peering out from coal-dark skin. Alexander was the biggest of all of them by far, the size of a football player, his red hair as closely shaven to his skull as Philip’s.