Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(54)

Rhys’s laughter echoed off the wall. “Oh, shut up.”

He hopped down to my level and grabbed Brendan’s sleeve with his good hand.

“Hey!” I waved my hands wildly as Rhys yanked his brother close to him. “Wait, don’t fight! Peace! Peace!” I hadn’t expected things would get this messy quite this quickly.

But Rhys only flicked him in the head.

“Ow!” Brendan whined. His hands flew to his forehead, but with a smile, Rhys blocked them and flicked him again.

“I’m the civil, responsible one,” Rhys repeated in a mocking tone as he continued to keep the older boy from guarding against his flicks. “Aw, Bren, so all this is just because you wanted a little love from your baby bro, right? Riiight?” He gave the last word a childish swoon as if his older brother were a puppy he’d decided to tease.

“St-stop it!” Brendan struggled against Rhys as the younger boy tried to force a hug on him. “This is t-totally inappropriate!”

But Rhys succeeded, enveloping him in a bear hug with his good arm, so tight that Brendan’s glasses skewed off his face.

“Look at you. You can’t even fight me off, can you? Dude, I’m in a cast.” After waving his broken wrist, Rhys caught Brendan’s neck by the crook of his elbow and didn’t let go, even as his brother squirmed wildly against the steel cage that was his grip. “Looks like you could have spent a week or two in Greenland, eh? But Daddy gave me the recommendation, not you. I can see where the jealousy comes from. Guess you just weren’t good enough to be the Chosen One.”

“Jealous?” Brendan sputtered, indignant. “I was never— Who said I was—”

“Please. And since we’re sharing, maybe I should tell Maia about how you wet your bed until you were twelve? Or how you locked yourself in your room writing crappy poetry for days after your girlfriend dumped you?”

“Enough!”

“Then performed it at a poetry slam competition and totally tanked. Director Prince.”

I’d been expecting a real brawl when Rhys jumped down the stairs and grabbed him. Or a war of words. Not a litany of embarrassing anecdotes. But seeing Brendan’s face redden and his eyes dart to me every few seconds made me realize that this may have been worse. The earlier tension had dissolved into something more playful. Rhys was laughing, after all, but there was a cold sting to his glee he couldn’t quite hide from me.

“Okay, okay, break it up, guys.” They stopped struggling with each other only after I began prying them apart. “Before someone’s neck gets broken in all the fun and games.”

The two straightened their clothes, breathing a little harder than before.

“You’ve got nothing to be jealous of, Brendan,” Rhys said as resentment crept back into his features. “You didn’t have to go to the facility. Trust me, if you had, your life would have turned out very differently.”

Maybe he was referring to the other kids—Philip, Jessie, and the rest. That would make sense. But something told me there was more to his hostility that he didn’t dare speak out loud. That hostility, even if it was just a flicker, had turned him into a very different Rhys—the one who made me think of that boyish smile of his and question everything.





14



FINALLY, WE CAME TO THE end of the staircase, a seven-foot door of steel and bolts just ahead of us. Brendan’s keycard brought us through the threshold and into a long path wedged between two rows of widely spaced holding cells. Each cell was sealed by solid red iron doors.

“It’s like a refrigerator in here.” Even beneath my long-sleeve shirt, I could feel the hairs on my arms stand on end. “It’s dead quiet, too.”

“By design.” Brendan’s glasses were once again neatly positioned on the bridge of his nose, his air of superiority back in full force. “The walls and the doors are all soundproof. The temperature is down in the cells too.”

“To make the prisoners especially compliant,” Rhys said. His grim expression had returned too. “Which cell is his?”

The only way I could differentiate between the identical cells were the tiny numbers carved out of black metal and nailed to the doors.

Without answering, Brendan set off down the hallway. Rhys and I followed after him silently until we reached the thirteenth cell on the right wall.

My chilled breaths disappeared into the air. “Why am I down here, anyway?”

Brendan looked at me. “He said he would speak only to you.”

A swipe from his keycard across the security pad and the door opened. The cell was deeper than it looked from the outside. Blinding white. Several feet away, Vasily’s blond hair, matted with sweat and blood, spilled over the table he’d been strapped onto. The brown leather latches pinned his emaciated body down so tightly I could see his ribs poking out through his white T-shirt. His eyes were closed, shut perhaps from the blood dripping over them.

“What is this?” I covered my mouth and stepped back as Vasily’s hands began twitching over the table. A man stood over him, hunched, though maybe it was just the natural hump of his back. I couldn’t tell if the white garment he wore was a technician’s coat or a straitjacket.

This time when Rhys grabbed his brother’s collar, anger flickered in his eyes. “You brought the Surgeon? You brought him here?”