Snooping around the IBI, on the other hand, was definitely a temptation. Who needed Conn? So what if information about me was classified way beyond his rank? I was invisible. I could unclassify anything. I could watch Director Fitzgerald floss her teeth if I wanted. I could pluck those red knots off Ivers’s collar and fling them out the window like confetti at a ticker-tape parade. Point me in the direction of Anne Green. I’d haunt her morgue. Switch tags on the toes of dead bodies. Scribble on her charts. I would manifest when her back was turned, then ghost into shadow, quick as a snuffed candle. I’d spook her and poltergeist her until, when I demanded the truth about my “death,” she’d give it up gladly, if only to make me leave her alone.
But when I thought about the IBI, I remembered the flaming glass box in solitary confinement. I remembered faces tight with hate. And, of course, I had told Conn that humans could see a Shade’s shadow. What if someone in the IBI happened to see mine? Nothing riled the Bureau more than the constant fear that the Society was spying on them. I felt panicky imagining what would happen if I accidentally manifested and got trapped in the IBI. This time, I wouldn’t be innocent. This time, the cuffs would stay on. Even thinking about it was so frightening that my ghost shivered and wobbled back into my heavy body.
I spent more time in the Archives, where Savannah didn’t shun me like I thought she would after my anti-Society outburst. She acted like nothing had happened. I helped restring her glasses chain and convinced her to add some sparkly vintage beads from Section 3Q.
I read Reservation—and reread it. It was delicious. Even better than Pride and Prejudice.
When I set the book aside, I painted my walls. I opened my box of oils and spread a jungle of color around me. Oils are too good to use on walls, too expensive, but I didn’t care. They’re gorgeous. They smell like gasoline, but have enchanting names like Permanent Madder Deep. They can be thick, rich, and cakey, or as sheer as silk.
I painted the sky I missed when I was underground. Rows of boring Lakebrook houses, abstracted to simple rectangles of blue, brown, and yellow. I painted Raphael as Hamlet, and Lily as herself. I dabbed at Jims’s cheek with Cadmium Green, stepped back, and realized that I rarely saw him smile. He was always too busy making other people laugh.
“What’s this?”
I wheeled around. Orion stood under the tree, his posture a little uncertain.
“It’s Whatever I Want,” I said.
“Oh.” He was puzzled, which wasn’t surprising since he knew nothing of my old life. He quickly sought familiar ground. “Meridian wants to see you tomorrow night.”
My pulse jumped. If Meridian led the faction of Shades who wanted action against humans, this could mean something big. Something Conn, whom I was meeting tomorrow morning, would want to know about. “You mean your mother wants to see me.”
“She’s more than my mother. She’s my commander. And she should be yours, too.”
“So you have a mission for me.”
“You’re ready.”
“Hmm.”
“So you’ll do it?”
I hesitated, barely. “I’ll talk to her.”
His mouth twitched with frustration. Clearly talking wasn’t enough, clearly Orion expected me to stand and pledge allegiance to some plan that was possibly crackers and probably deadly. Before he could speak, I asked, “What does Meridian want?”
“I don’t know. She has an idea, but nobody knows the full details except her. Some Shades are playing a part, but none of us knows what the big picture is or what the others are doing, and we are each sworn to secrecy about our roles.”
Great. “So you’re going to go ahead and do something even though you don’t know the consequences.”
“I trust my mother.” Orion added, “She voted for you.”
“I know.”
“So…?”
Carefully un-careful, I asked, “Do Shades ever visit the Alter?”
He gave me a strange look. “What does that have to do with anything? Why do you ask that?”
“I’m trying to figure out what happened to me when I was five. How I got dumped there.” I shrugged. “Maybe there’s a booming tourism industry for Shades visiting other worlds. Maybe my parents were doing some Alter sightseeing and lost me, or forgot me.”
“They wouldn’t have deliberately left you there.”
“Who knows what they would have done? All I know is that I was there and I was alone.”
“Shades go to the Alter sometimes, but”—he shuddered slightly—“not often, and not for amusement. It’s a pilgrimage, to pay respects to our dead. The Alter is a graveyard.”
To destroy an entire people—to rub out even the memory of them—was a cruelty too large to imagine. Comprehending it would be like trying to swallow the sea.
“You live below a graveyard,” I said to Orion.
“A human graveyard.”
I looked at him, and felt—not for the first time—the weight of everything I could never say. I couldn’t tell him to let go of the Great Fire. It was a long time ago, but Shades live a long time, and have a long memory.
“Well,” I said, “if my parents did travel to the Alter, how did they get there?”
“Through a portal, of course. Any man-made structure that survived the fire in the Alter is a link between that world and ours, provided it exists here, too, in its original form. That’s where the interdimensional border is soft, because of what both worlds share. Of course, the IBI has done their best to limit the number of portals so they can control interdimensional traffic. So in this Chicago they’ve razed or altered many of the sites that otherwise would have been held in common.”
“Yes, but how do you go through the portals? The IBI must guard them all.”
He blinked at me. “Go through them?”
I inwardly winced. Now Orion was going to see the obvious: that I wanted to go through a portal.
What I didn’t realize was that my question was silly. That’s what had startled him.
“You simply go,” he said. “You walk right through it. Even a human could do that, if she knew where it was and no guards stopped her. And you are better than human. Darcy, now that you can ghost, what would stop you? IBI agents? They would never see you. Gates? You can slip through them like a knife through butter.” He frowned. “It worries me, how you don’t fully understand what nature has given you. I know allowances must be made. You’re not used to thinking as a Shade. But you are what you are, and must embrace it. Darcy?” His expression changed to concern. “What’s wrong?”
The blood drained icily from my cheeks. If possible, I had gone paler than I already was.
I realized that when I’d cut the deal with Fitzgerald, the IBI had had nothing to offer me. Nothing I couldn’t learn to do myself. And Conn knew this. He must have known it was only a matter of time before I figured out how to go home.
“I haven’t kept this information from you,” Orion said hurriedly. “If you had wanted to go back to the Alter, we would have found a way to send you, even if you couldn’t ghost. And now you can. Perhaps we’ve never talked about the portals before, but only because you didn’t ask, and I assumed you knew. I assumed you wanted to stay here. You do, don’t you?”
I couldn’t answer. All I could do was stare at the boxes of art supplies stacked along the wall and wonder what color anger was, and what color betrayal. Which hue was hurt, washed by my own foolishness? If I knew, I could paint the story of how Conn had tricked me yet again.
30
I biked along the lakefront to the lone figure standing by an old pier.
Lake Michigan is huge, so big that it seems like an ocean, with choppy waves and miles of sandy beaches. On a cold, clear morning in the suburbs, you can look toward Chicago and see cloudbanks around the city because the lake is a little warmer than everything else, and it’s so large it can change the weather. As my bike tires sped over the wet sand, I thought for sure dark clouds of hurt and fury were rolling off my sk
in. Conn should have been able to see them from far away.
He turned to me, pulling his gloveless hands from his pockets. I braked and let the bicycle fall to the beach.
“You lied to me.” The words were thick and low in my throat.
He knew. He knew what I meant. I could see it in the sudden unhappiness that flashed across his face. Conn opened his mouth to speak, but the wind raked me with icy fingers and slipped below my hood to tug out black ribbons of hair.
Conn’s expression changed. “Darcy, your wig. Pull your hair back.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
“Darcy—”
“How long did you and Fitzgerald think you had before I figured out that interdimensional travel didn’t involve some IBI-only gizmo I’d have to hope and pray you let me use?”
His gaze cut to the lake. “We never said that.”
“Never said I never needed you. Never said that once I learned how to control my shadow, I could be gone, out of this jacked-up world with its stupid war.”
Conn kept his eyes trained on the churning waves. I seethed at his crooked profile, wishing his nose wasn’t broken. Then I could break it for him. “Of course,” he said finally. “You’ve learned how to ghost.”
I hesitated, but only for a second. “No.”
He looked at me. “Really?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? Do you think I would have stuck around just for the pleasure of seeing you again?”
He thrust his hands back into his pockets. “Fitzgerald wanted to buy time and as much information as she could before you figured it out,” he said. “And I didn’t think that anything less than the promise to send you home would convince you to work for us. But I never banked on our promises. I never thought that that—or even researching your history—would keep you here, helping the IBI.”
I crossed my arms. “Then what were you banking on?”
“You’re a good person,” he said simply. “You care. You meet with me because you don’t want to see the Society destroy more lives. Maybe that’s not the only reason. But it’s one of them.”
I blinked, because I suddenly realized I didn’t know the answer to my own sarcastic question. Why was I still here, in this Chicago? And why was I here, on the beach in the dead of winter with Conn? I looked at him, and some part of me, the artist part, thought that if I were to paint him with oils, his eyes were the color of King’s Blue Light.
At least, they were today.
But I would never paint him.
As my anger cooled, my mind began to tick. Something didn’t make sense. Conn had asked me to learn how to ghost. He had demanded it. I’d thought he wanted me to become the IBI’s Top-Notch Invisible Spy, and maybe that was the case, but it still didn’t seem like a smart move if Conn had wanted to keep me from portaling home.
Conn glanced down the beach, and I saw it, too: a man jogging toward us, a golden Lab at his side. “Darcy, please pull your hair back.”
I tucked it into the hood. I sighed, admitting to myself that Conn had to have known that by controlling my shadow, I’d gain independence from the IBI. Yet he had still asked me to do it. And what he’d said was true: I didn’t want the Society to attack again, though I wasn’t so sure that made me a good person. If you do things because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself, isn’t that selfishness?
“Meridian wants to meet with me,” I said. “She’s the leader of the Shades who call themselves ‘warriors.’”
“About what?”
“That’s the thing. There is a plan, Conn, and since it’s Meridian’s, it’s probably a scary one.” I told him what I knew, which wasn’t much.
Conn became … intense. He didn’t speak or pace or even budge. He went electric. “So you’re meeting her tonight?”
“Midnight.”
“Agree to whatever she asks.”
“What?”
“Agree.”
“You’re crazy, Conn. Totally non compos mentis. What if she wants me to blow up your lousy subway? Which, if I may say so, is a pretty good idea as long as nobody’s in it.”
He was humorless. “Obviously I don’t want you to blow anything up. Just agree, and see what you learn.”
“They’d never blow anything up anyway. They don’t like fire.”
“No,” said Conn. “They attack with gas.”
“Then why were there IBI flamethrowers in the practice room?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head.
“Orion probably knows.”
“And he’s part of Meridian’s plan.” Conn’s lip curled into a sneer. “I thought he was supposed to be so very nice.”
“He doesn’t even know what the plan is. Come on, Conn. Maybe we’re being apocalyptic. Maybe the Society is planning a parade and Orion’s in the color guard. Meridian’s his mother, you know. It’s hard to tell your mom no. At least, that’s what I hear.”
“You’re defending him.” Conn was incredulous.
“I’m saying we don’t know the whole story. We’re assuming the worst.”
“Because Shades have done the worst.”
We fell silent as the jogger and his dog passed us, kicking up sand. Masochistic jogger. It was December. It was freezing. The wind cut through my clothes, and I thought that now would be a good time to get out of the cold. Now would be a good time to ghost. If, that is, I felt like giving Conn one of my few, precious secrets.
I stayed solid.
“Have you found out more about my arrest in 1997?” I asked.
“Not yet. I’m sorry.”
“What, your pretty little secretary had nothing to say?”
“My pretty…?” He looked at me quizzically. “What are you talking about?”
“You said you were having dinner with a secretary who might know something.”
“Yes, but she’s not my secretary.”
“Conn, you better not be withholding information from me.”
“But I’m not. And she’s not—” A strange expression flitted across Conn’s face. His eyes rested on me, considering, seeming to order the world into different patterns and possibilities. Then something shut down. “I have nothing to tell you because there’s nothing to tell. I’ve hit a dead end with your case. No one knows anything, or they don’t want to talk.” He checked his watch. “I have to meet Fitzgerald. I hope I’ll have something for you next time, Darcy. I really do.”
“Next time.”
“Yes … I thought we could go to the Art Institute.”
My heart flared. I couldn’t speak.
“That’s not what we call it here, of course,” he said. “But it’s a good museum. Great collection. A different collection from the one you know.”
I stood, breathless. Tantalized. “When?”
“As soon as we can after your meeting with Meridian. The weekend begins tomorrow, and the museum’s too busy then for you to walk around unnoticed. So Monday morning, 9:00 a.m. Just walk through the front entrance.”
“The Art Institute’s closed on Mondays. In my world.”
“It is here, too. To the public. We’d have the museum to ourselves.” His smile was so small it looked almost like a wince. “What do you say?”
I almost snatched at his offer with both greedy hands, but only because my brain was so flooded with eagerness that I had forgotten to think. Then I remembered that I was a Girl with Options. If I wanted to see the Art Institute’s alter ego, I could ghost through the doors during the busiest time of day, no problem. No fee. I could break in under the full moon. I could probably even steal a van Gogh. I didn’t need Conn and his blatant bribe.
And yet … the bribe—the perfection of it—touched some tender spot in me, one that hadn’t realized he knew me so well. If I squinted my eyes and looked at his offer, it seemed to be a gift, one as smooth and shining as the silver planet he had once tipped into the palm of my hand.
But my eyes were open now. This was a bribe, and if he knew me well that w
as all the more reason to be afraid. Suspicion knotted in my chest.
“Darcy?” Conn’s smile, small as it was, had vanished.
How badly did I need to find out about my past? I’d been okay without it before. And forget seeing a bunch of paintings. I could see Lily, Raphael, and Jims tonight. All I had to do was find the Water Tower.
Sure, humans here had problems, and I’d protect them if I could. But how much could I really do? How much were Conn’s problems my problems?
“I don’t know,” I told him.
Conn seemed to expect this. He nodded. He looked back out at the lake again, pulled up his coat collar to block the wind, and said, “I’ll be there.” Then he turned and began to walk up the beach, shoulders hunched against the cold.
What I did next was unethical.
It was also inevitable.
31
I followed him.
After he’d dwindled to a faraway dot on the long stretch of sand and I was reasonably sure that if he hadn’t looked back yet, he wouldn’t look back at all, I stashed my bike behind a clump of pine trees and ghosted.
I flew after him.
He kept to the edge of the surf for some time, as if he liked this beach, enjoyed it despite the bad weather—or maybe because of it. Then he abruptly turned away from the lake. Conn quickened his pace, taking a path through a park. He stepped out onto a busy street and walked toward a subway plate. I rushed forward, close to his elbow, and down we went.
The roller-coaster ride was okay this time. Orion had promised that physical problems like green-sick nausea wouldn’t bother me if I didn’t have a body, and thank God he was right.
Conn leaned against the subway car wall, unfastened the top button of his coat, and slipped a notebook out of an inside pocket. It was the same one he’d had in the library, the one with drawings of gears. He clicked a pencil and began to sketch amazingly even lines for someone rattling along on the subway ride from hell. He held the book firmly open, resting it on his left forearm, his fingers clasping the top of the pages. He was drawing a machine. It was nothing like my sketches, with free lines dashed across the page. Conn’s pencil was careful. Serious. And what was unfolding, I realized, was a design for something that looked like a motorcycle, but way scarier.