The Shadow Society (13 page)

I had a lot of them at this point, but this wasn’t just any bruise. The one that caught my eye was a small purple smudge on my wrist.

“Hello, you,” I whispered. The memory of Conn’s touch welled up within me.

And Darcy Jones, the tough girl with the snide remarks, the one who had been broken and remade every year, in every new home, in every new school, and every new life, crumpled. Tears slid into my mouth and then fell onto my hands until I covered my face.

I didn’t want to be a Shade. I didn’t want to disappear. I hugged my arms to my chest. Stay, stay, I told my skin.

If I vanished, I might never find myself again.

*   *   *

O
VER THE NEXT FEW DAYS,
Shades came and went. They examined my injuries, asked me questions. By the time I started receiving visitors, I had sucked back my tears and scraped myself together, though I nearly lost it again when I found a hairpin lying on the slick shower tiles. The little stowaway. I must have missed it when I’d pulled apart my lopsided effort at elegant hair on that Saturday morning that felt like forever ago.

I flicked the pin into the corner of the bathroom.

When the Shades came, I told my story over and over again. That I didn’t remember how I’d gotten to the Alter as a child, that I hadn’t known what I was, that I’d been minding my own supposedly human business when an IBI agent hauled me into this world. I’d broken my firecuffs and ghosted out of IBI headquarters.

“But you say you don’t know how to ghost and manifest,” said one Shade with a short black beard.

“Manifest?”

“Appear.”

“It just kind of happens. Or doesn’t.” I knew that sounded lame. I didn’t need this guy’s skeptical look to remind me. He gave me one anyway.

“Perhaps it’s pure instinct.” This came from a middle-aged woman with ropy arms and burns wrinkling half her face. “Think of her as a child, Veldt,” she told the man. “One that has been raised by wolves.”

It probably wasn’t a great idea to scowl at one of the few people who seemed to be on my side. But when I did, she chuckled.

“There is no humor in this situation,” Veldt snapped. “We have no proof that anything she says is true.”

“Then what do you propose?” she countered. “Imprison her forever? Perhaps we should experiment on her. Cut her open to discover why she can’t control her shadow.”

That sounded like one of those fake, extreme things people say in order to sound snarky. But Veldt hadn’t rolled his eyes. He hadn’t told her she was being ridiculous. Fear zigzagged through me—not quite panic, not yet. But getting there.

“Is that what you think we should do?” the woman continued. “No. A thousand times no. She is one of us.”

Veldt made a frustrated noise. “Now, more than ever, we need to be careful.”

“We need to embrace the risks of who we are!”

They continued to bicker in a deadlocked way, and my fear ebbed when it seemed that there were no immediate plans for eviscerating me.

I hadn’t missed the significance of what Veldt had suggested: something was afoot inside the Society.
Now, more than ever.
I wanted to ask him what he’d meant by that, but I figured that if the IBI was right and the Society was planning an attack, asking questions that came too close to that truth wouldn’t help my Little Lost Lamb image.

One question seemed innocent enough. “Can you tell me what day it is?” I interrupted. “I’m losing track of time. No window, no clock. Trapped hundreds of miles below the earth’s surface, you know?”

“Wednesday,” said the woman.

Wednesday. My meeting with Conn was supposed to be yesterday. I wondered what he’d felt, waiting, and how long he’d stayed, and what his final thought had been before giving up and heading home. I imagined him pacing. Anxious, even if only for himself and the trouble he’d get into when he told Fitzgerald that the Shade had slipped through his fingers. I saw his face taut with worry.

It almost cheered me up.

*   *   *

I
SLEPT.
Drank tons of water. You might not think water has a taste, but it does—a kind of non-taste taste—and I got sick of it. Time stretched and bent and tied itself into knots and finally ceased to exist. I began to wonder if I was losing my mind, or if one of the several fires I’d been tormented with had damaged my eyes, because sometimes I saw dark blurs in the corner of my vision, flickering against the walls.

“Really?” Orion said when I told him during one of his visits. “That’s wonderful!”

“Please tell me that the Society doesn’t think that going blind is a holy rite of passage.”

“Of course not,” he said when he had stopped laughing. “You’re just coming into your own. Shades don’t disappear completely. We leave a trace. A shadow. Most humans, however, never see it. The fact that you do means that you’re starting to remember what it means to be a Shade.”

This strange thought—that I was learning how to not be human—crinkled my brain, completely distracting me from an important significance of what he’d just said. Then I got it. “Are you saying that Shades have been in my room?
Spying on me?
”

He brushed aside my anger. “You’re under observation, Darcy. What did you expect?”

“There are laws against that in my world!”

“
Your
world?” His black eyes narrowed, all laughter gone. “And in
your
world, is it unheard of for prisoners to be monitored by, say, video cameras?”

“But I had no idea! I never even thought…” I felt like I’d been dipped in slime, and it occurred to me that this was what people in this world had to deal with on a daily basis. The possibility of being surveilled. Never trusting that any moment was truly private. “No wonder humans hate you.”

“Unbelievable.” There was a dangerous curl to his mouth. “It’s unbelievable how ignorant you are. Do you even know what caused the break between
your
reality and
ours
?”

“Yes.” I drew myself up to my full height. “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. It was the Great Chicago Fire.”

“And who caused it?”

“Mrs. O’Leary.”

He choked.

“I mean, her cow. Like in the song.” I sang the rhyme every Chicagoland kid is taught in school:

“Late one night when we were all in bed,

Mrs. O’Leary lit a lantern in the shed.

The cow kicked it over, and Mrs. O’Leary said,

‘It’s going to be a hot time in the old town tonight.

Fire! Fire! Fire!’”

“That,” said Orion, “is absurd. It was a witch hunt. A witch hunt burned down the city. Surely you must have been curious about the fact that there are no Shades in the Alter.”

“Not really. It’s hard to notice the absence of people you don’t know exist.”

“There are no Shades in the Alter because they were murdered. Every man, woman, and child. It was a genocide.”

Words have different weights. This one would break any scale. It lay there, heavy and hard, between us.

“There were never very many of us,” Orion said. “We don’t know how we came to exist, though legend tells that the first Shades were born on the shores of Lake Michigan in a meteor shower, and that this is why fire can kill us. We came from fire, and so fire will return us to the darkness.

“Humans hated us, and we were afraid of our own shadows. Afraid to embrace who we were. Afraid of what humans might do. They did it anyway. They burned us from our homes. They set women on fire with torches made from the hair of their children. The fire swept out of control and raged through the city for three days. When the ash settled, the Society was gone and humans in the Alter insisted that nothing, not even a memory, should remain of it. It was forbidden to speak about Shades, and all evidence that they had ever existed was burned.

“Humans here revere the Great Fire. There are monuments to it in the center of town. Not a day goes by that the Society doesn’t dread that this world will try to reenact what
yours
did.” His eyes pinned mine. “The humans struck first. Anything else that we did later, we did in self-defense. Consider that. Consider it while you wait for the judgment of the Council. Given your current attitude, there will be time for you to think about it.”

He vanished.

I hated Orion. Who was he to expect me to embrace the ways of people I didn’t know? I hated the entire spying Society, for watching me while I wept. I hated Fitzgerald, for making me lie. Didn’t she know how hard it was to fake it, to create a new me, every time I met a Shade? It was exhausting. It was horrible. So was she.

I even hated my friends, for not being there.

I hated Conn. For everything.

And I hated J. Alfred Prufrock.

Because he waits and wanders and dithers and can never make up his mind. Because he tells himself there’s time to think and think and think. But there’s not enough time. There never is. Not for anybody in this whole universe. We always want more. Why waste it doing nothing?

It was time to take matters into my own hands.

A brilliant thought crashed and shook in my mind like a gong. I raced into the bathroom, fell to my hands and knees, and snatched the hairpin from its dusty corner.

Know why jailbreakers and burglars in movies always use a bobby pin to unlock doors?

Because it works.

22

What they don’t show you in movies, and what the Ingleside Home girls had showed me long ago, is that you also need a tension wrench.

I glanced around the room, searching for shadows that didn’t belong there. I didn’t see any, but they could appear any second. I grabbed my backpack and stuffed it with water bottles.

Now for the tension wrench.

After some thought, I attacked the bed. It was squeaky and old and—thank God—held together with screws. I twisted off a few and pulled away a metal bed slat. It would do.

I stared at the lock on the door. It looked simple enough. The Ingleside girls would laugh at this so-called security. But I figured that the Shades weren’t super worried about me breaking out because A) they could probably tackle me in the halls, and B) I didn’t know how to get out of the Sanctuary. I had a plan for Problem A. As for B … well, I’d worry about B later.

I bent the bobby pin into a right angle. Now I could use it as a pick. All I had to do was wriggle it into the lock and free the cylinder that blocked the whole mechanism. Little pins kept that cylinder in place.

I stuck my pick in the lock and raked it along the pins. My hand shook. But I set the pins, pushing them back on their springs. The cylinder slid in its chamber, the lock shuddered open. I was free.

And the Shade stationed outside my door noticed.

I snatched a water bottle from my backpack and threw it at his head. He vanished, and the bottle smashed against the wall behind him. I ran, gripping the bed slat in one hand.

Shadows swarmed behind me as I tried to retrace the steps Orion and I had taken to my prison. Sometimes a Shade would manifest at my side, and I’d lash out with the bed slat. Several of them tried to block my path. I fired bottles at them. I pounded into the Great Hall and had spotted the tunnel leading to the earth’s surface when countless Shades erupted into being, surrounding me with their dizzying similarity. Their gleaming eyes and skin and fierce faces. I slung bottle after bottle at them until I had none left. Then I struck out with the slat. The Shades flickered away. Flickered back. Finally I hit one, cracking the slat down on his arm. He cried out, fell back, then lunged forward with a kick to my side. I hit the ground, and Shades poured on top of me.

They wrenched at my hands. The slat was snatched out of my fingers. They squeezed down on my chest, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything.

But at least I’d tried.

*   *   *

T
HEY DRAGGED ME
into a courtroom that looked nothing like a courtroom. Waterfalls chattered and shushed in the corners. Ferns and orchids twined across the limestone walls.

So how did I know it was a courtroom and not an underground botanical garden sprouted by someone with serious heat lamps? My biggest clue was the curved, monolithic table and the five angry Shades sitting at it. My second clue was the doom that hung in the air. And the third?

That was when a young woman—
the
woman who had shoved me on my first day in the Sanctuary, who was sitting at the center of the table like she was the one in charge—said, “Who will speak for Darcy Jones before she meets the Council’s judgment?”

“I will,” I said. I took a deep breath to calm my hammering heart.

“You can’t,” said one of the five seated Shades, an elderly woman whose hair was still jet black. “It’s not allowed. You must remain silent.”

“She doesn’t even know our laws,” I heard someone mutter in the crowd of Shades behind me.

“Well?” The young woman smirked, templing her small hands. “Will anyone speak for her?”

No one answered.

Not at first. Then I heard the whisper of feet shifting behind me. Light feet. Graceful ones.

“I will,” said Orion.

His voice did little to dull my fear. Sure, he’d promised to speak in my defense, but that was before the “Your World/My World” argument.

“Orion.” The scarred woman who had interviewed me leaned forward, placing her hands on the table where she sat. “You can’t be serious. Not after what she’s done.”

“And what has she done?” said Orion. “She fought for her freedom. Don’t tell me, Meridian, that you wouldn’t have done the same.”

Meridian’s face tightened, but into a pleased kind of frown.

“No.” The young woman slapped the table. “Meridian would never have acted like that. Never. No cage can bind a Shade. But that’s because a Shade will
ghost her way free
. She won’t crash and blunder through our Sanctuary in a shameful display of
humanity
.”

“She fights well,” said a stocky man to her left. “She’s fast, too fast for me to ghost out of her way. I have the marks to prove it.” He raised a bare arm, which bore a welter from my bed slat.