Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(48)

“Jessie . . . ,” I whispered, and could sense Rhys reacting to the name. Jessie, in this picture, was very chubby with a hooked nose and a square jaw that turned her face into a box. Her brown hair fell around her face and her green eyes sparkled as she smiled cheerfully for the cameras. Innocent. Hard to believe it was the same girl who’d almost killed us in the tunnels.

“Wait. Alex?” I stared at the burly boy in the photo before turning to Belle by the round table behind me. “You remember, right?” I asked before shifting to Chae Rin, who was sitting on top of the table, swinging her legs. “Before he died, Philip told us to find Alex. Remember?”

Pete shuffled uncomfortably on his feet. “Yeah, I think we did. Well, you did. In the tunnels.” When he saw that I wasn’t following, he let out a weary sigh. “Um . . . we were able to identify the dead body that attacked you.”

Oh. Oh. As my stomach lurched, Rhys whipped around. “You’re kidding. You’re . . .”

He turned to each of us as if hoping we would tell him this had all been some kind of cruel joke. Scrunching up his face from the torture of it, he took a few hurried steps toward the door and bent over. For a minute I thought he’d throw up, but he kept himself together. I couldn’t blame him. That this young boy could have turned into the mass of dead flesh that murdered our comrades . . . It was too much for anyone to take.

“Care to explain what’s happening?” Sibyl folded her arms. “These kids disappear from an old facility and reemerge as monsters?”

“Well, they’re monsters, certainly. But of what sort? That’s the question.” Dot tapped the screen again, switching to a black-and-white diagnostic image of Philip’s body. “The Marrakesh facility found cylithium-like particles all through his body.”

“So he is an Effigy.” With a grim frown, Belle folded her arms by the round table.

My heart sank. I wanted to believe it was Saul we’d tracked to that hideout before disappearing and leaving the other boy there to fend for himself. But Chafik was right. There was no reason why he’d have risked traveling through a Dead Zone of phantoms when he could simply appear and disappear at will. It was Philip all along. An Effigy.

“Effigy? Not quite,” Dot answered, and at her urging, Pete brought up a diagram with a touch of his finger. “This chemical compound is certainly cylithium, but his body isn’t producing it naturally.”

“His body isn’t producing it?” Chae Rin crossed her legs atop the table. “What do you mean? Was that guy an Effigy or was he not?”

“I can’t tell yet.” Dot straightened up, flipping back her sloppily braided ponytail. “Like I said, questions, questions, and more questions. But what I can tell you is that they found a network of electromechanical devices all down his spinal cord. We’ve just begun to study Alex’s body in the lab, but we’ve noticed similar compounds. I would bet money that all the children have it—well, save for Vasily and Rhys, according to their recent physical exams.”

“Nanomachine, we think. But this is really . . . advanced. Way advanced, even for us,” Pete said, and as he touched the screen, a path down the back of the body lit up the dark diagnostic image. “There’s a network down his spine. We think this may have been delivering the cylithium into his system. And then there’s another one at the base of his neck, but it’s too degraded to study.”

The base of his neck. I remembered the red bruise on his skin.

“In fact, his whole body was dying long before you found him,” Pete added, pointing at parts of the diagrams. “Cellular degradation, muscular atrophy. The cells couldn’t maintain their integrity. It’s as if his body couldn’t handle the magic. Basically, he was burning out.”

Maybe that was how Belle’s attack had killed him so quickly. He’d already been dying.

“Mellie’s still in the lab trying to figure out some of the structure,” Pete said. “But Dot did say she recognized part of the chemical signature.”

“What do you mean?” Sibyl’s high heels clicked sharply as she stepped forward. “Do you know who might be behind this technology?”

Dot ran a hand through her unwashed black hair. Her dark eyes dimmed with fatigue. Someone else who probably hadn’t gotten any sleep. “I’m not sure,” she answered. “This kind of nanotechnology is still in its infancy. But this . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know for sure, but this reminds me of a lot of work that began in the sixties, after the Seattle Siege. A decade ago, they were making advancements in nanotechnology over at a university in Scandinavia before it was shut down. I read about this years before in a thesis that linked nanotechnology to synthetic telepathy.”

I blinked. “Synthetic what?”

“Synthetic telepathy,” Dot repeated. “It’s when you inject nanotechnology inside someone’s head. . . . The chip acts like a receiver that can channel someone’s coded voice signal directly into the human brain.”

“Brainwashing,” added Pete.

Dot shrugged. “Yeah, that’s what this work was on. But cylithium delivery has nothing to do with that. Meanwhile, this is more complex than I’ve seen. I’m not sure—”

“Find them,” Sibyl said. “Find the other kids.”