Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(81)

There was no hesitation as she stared back at me, as she held me in place with little more than a confession.

“Though I didn’t order her death, Natalya’s blood is on my hands.” Her words hung in the silent air. I hadn’t realized my mouth was open until I heard my own breath shuddering out of me. “Knowing that, if you still want to stop Saul, come and find me in Madrid.”

I opened my door the moment the driver arrived. And I watched quietly as Naomi’s car took her from the estate into the dead of night.





PART TWO


All around the house is the jet-black night; It stares through the window-pane;

It crawls in the corners, hiding from the light, And it moves with the moving flame.

Now my little heart goes a-beating like a drum, With the breath of the Bogie in my hair; And all around the candle and the crooked shadows come, And go marching along up the stair.

The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp, The shadow of the child that goes to bed— All the wicked shadows coming tramp, tramp, tramp, With the black night overhead.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Shadow March”





19



VASILY HAD ESCAPED. WITH THE looming threat of his father’s disappointment hanging over his head, Brendan dispatched several units to find him, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. He’d escaped through the tiniest cracks in the Sect’s defense structure with the help of several agents who were now missing. Of course, no one was more displeased than the Surgeon, who’d lost one of his favorite toys. It was everything Cheryl could do to keep this mess a secret from the press.

Meanwhile, I had other worries.

“Okay, Maia, we’re all done.” The technician spoke through an intercom from the other side of the glass. With an angry mechanical whir, my flat white bed slid back out of the hole in the CT scanner.

“Did you find anything?” I asked as one tech came into the room and started removing the straps from my neck.

“Well,” she said, helping me up, “you know, we need to go over it further—”

“Please.” It was cold in the room and the hospital gown was too big, so I felt the chill brush up my bare legs. I reached out with the arm they’d punctured with an IV line and tugged at his shirt. “Can’t you tell me anything? I need to know what they did to me.”

He turned to the other technicians waiting behind the glass.

“Well, in vivo CT molecular imaging can only give us so much,” one said through the intercom, “but from what we can see so far, our targeted probes did detect the presence of a similar molecular structure to the one in the dead soldier you found in the desert.”

The dead soldier. Philip. Thinking back, he’d said someone was forcing him to do something . . . before he broke free and ran to the hideout. He wanted us to find him. To help Alex, maybe the others too . . .

“Pete and Dot told us it was a nano . . . thing,” I said. “Nanomachine?”

Jessie had it at the base of her neck. She said it hid her frequency for as long as it didn’t degrade. That guy we’d found in the desert. Once his degraded, the Sect could track him.

But maybe that was what he wanted. A defector.

I rubbed the back of my neck. “So it wasn’t the neck-band Dot and Pete gave me. . . . Wait!” My head snapped up. “Mellie. Mellie injected me with something before I put it on. We should question them!”

“They’re questioning Mellie Beasley as we speak, as well as other personnel. Though Beasley is cooperating.”

“What about Dot and Pete?”

“Those two fled not long after Vasily escaped.”

My stomach gave a painful little lurch. You didn’t run unless you were guilty. The band was a front—even if it’d done its job in dulling Natalya’s consciousness, it still gave them a convenient excuse to plant something in me. Not to mention Mellie was the one who’d done the deed, so even if she was cooperating with the Sect, I wasn’t ready to believe she was innocent. Dot, Pete, and Mellie . . . They’d seemed nice too. . . .

“The good news is that it’s mostly degraded—so degraded it’s lost its functionality,” said the tech. “That’s why we couldn’t quite tell what it was at first.”

Jessie had called it an earlier, weaker model; she knew its sway over me wouldn’t hold for long. That’s why she was so desperate. She only had the one shot, all or nothing, but they couldn’t get me. The combined strength of Natalya and me had shorted out the machine’s effects before it was too late. I guess the two of us made a pretty powerful team. That is, when she wasn’t trying to hijack my body. I’d buried her deep now, very deep. She was too weak after her last stint to try anything again. But how long would that last?

“Jessie used a phone that sent out a signal,” I said. “It sounded like radio interference.”

“That could have been the trigger. We have to let R & D figure that out, except they’re under investigation now too.” The tech sighed. “This whole thing is a mess.”

“That seems to be the common theme these days,” I said, getting off the table.

At least my neck was free and a little less sore. But I couldn’t relax.

Mind control. The very thought made me shake my head, incredulous. Well, they’d tried and failed, but I knew that wasn’t the end of it. I could only imagine what they’d come up with next, especially after regrouping with Vasily. I was supposed to meet Naomi in a few days. But in the meantime, I had to be prepared.