The Shadow Society (34 page)

That sense, that
certainty
, that at least part of me was protected helped chase away the red-orange blindness that filled my eyes. I saw a network of fingers. I focused. I knew those hands on mine. Large and long and kind of messed up. Lots of old cuts. A vague memory stirred, and I realized that, once, I had wanted to touch every single one of those scars.

The fire continued to flicker at the edge of my vision, but as I blinked clarity began to return. I went still, and could feel that those hands felt my stillness, and that the worry in them lessened.

I glanced up. There was a face that I knew was dear to me, that sometimes slipped into my dreams. When I would wake up all I wanted was to sleep again. “Conn?” I whispered.

A shudder of relief went through him. “Yes,” he said. “The fire can’t touch us, Darcy. You know that, don’t you?”

I considered this. The fire tried to drag my gaze away from Conn’s face, but I stared back into his lake-colored eyes and thought about that: a lake. Dark and deep. “Yes,” I said.

“Ivers and Michael locked us in, but we won’t be in here forever, someone will come eventually…” Conn began to ramble. I remembered enough to know this was odd behavior for him. Conn did not ramble.
He’s trying to distract me,
I realized.

“I know,” I told him, though I didn’t mean it. I had wanted to comfort him, and his comfort seemed so dependent on mine. Then, as soon as the words left my mouth, I
did
know. I remembered how we had gotten here. Everything became clear.

Conn’s gaze dropped to somewhere near my neck. His eyes immediately met mine again, but I had noticed. I touched the skin beneath my collarbone. It stung, and my fingers came away bloody. “I did that,” I said. “I thought the fire was inside me.”

“It—”

“I know,” I stopped him. “It
isn’t
. I’m okay, Conn. Really. Just a little case of temporary insanity.”

He smiled faintly.

“I thought I was learning how to handle fire,” I said, “but it’s worse now that I remember my parents.” I swallowed against the parched feeling in my throat. “It’s so hot in here.”

“Try to ignore it.”

The flames kept mesmerizing me. It was hard not to look at them.

“Close your eyes,” Conn said.

I did.

Fingertips touched my face like rain. Cool palms were on my cheeks.

Water.

Conn.

My mouth opened with relief.

I felt the sudden intensity in Conn’s body, and the hesitation. I pulled him to me. A softness covered my lips, and I breathed into it, and it was like the first breath after none at all.

Conn was the rain, he was the water. Those were his lips on mine. I drank him in. I tasted my own urgency. I tasted his.

Our kiss fluttered and tugged, and it was strange, so strange to sense that the fire had won, that it had somehow slipped inside me, and that it was one I would never want to put out, even if it ravaged me whole.

Conn pulled away for a heartbeat, looked at me with hazy eyes, and lowered his mouth to my throat.

“Uh, Conn?” said a new, faraway voice.

We broke apart in confusion.

The voice spoke again. “Why are you in solitary confinement … making out with a Shade?”

Conn peered through the flames. “Paulo!” he shouted. “Cut the fire!”

“Yeah, well, is that a good idea? It doesn’t look like that Shade’s cuffed. I mean, she had her hands all over you. What is this, some new interrogation technique?”

“Paulo, just do it!”

The fire died. I ghosted out of the box to reappear at Paulo’s side, and he jumped, his hand skittering away from the control panel set into one of the iron walls. “You’re Jones,” he said. “You must be.”

“Let Conn out.”

Paulo threw his hands up defensively. “Okay. I was going to do that anyway.”

When Conn stepped out of the box he strode up to me and Paulo, who said, “What is going on, Conn? I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Do you know that Ivers has reassigned your division to attack the Sanctuary? He’s practically emptied the building of agents.”

“Does Fitzgerald know about this?” asked Conn.

“Doubt it.” Paulo spared a nervous glance my way, but I stayed very still. It didn’t seem to be a good idea to spook Conn’s only current ally in the IBI. “Fitzgerald always spends the holiday with her family, so unless someone’s contacted her—”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do. You know what this is, don’t you, Paulo? It’s a coup. Ivers may outrank me, but he’s breaking regulations to take agents assigned to me by Fitzgerald. He wouldn’t do that unless he knows he won’t pay for it, and the only way he won’t pay for it is if tonight he has a victory so big he can topple Fitzgerald and seize the directorship. You go to her and tell her that. You tell her that if she doesn’t stop the assault on the Sanctuary, she won’t have a job tomorrow.”

“But Ivers will get to Graceland Cemetery any minute now.”

I almost seized Paulo. “What time is it?”

“About eleven-thirty p.m.”

Conn said, “We’ve got to go, Darcy.”

“But, Conn,” said Paulo, “if our agents surround the Sanctuary, the Shades are going to notice, and if the IBI
doesn’t
attack, the Shades will.”

“We won’t let that happen. Just reach Fitzgerald. Promise me you’ll do that.”

Paulo hesitated.

“Unless you want to see Ivers running the IBI.”

Paulo let out a resigned sigh that seemed a good enough promise to Conn, because he took my hand and began to run.

As we raced down the corridor, I said, “Is that true? Is that what Ivers is trying to do?”

“I don’t know. But it’ll make Fitzgerald act.”

“
If
Paulo calls her.
If
she gets there in time.”

Conn didn’t say anything to that, and as the word “time” echoed in my head I realized something that almost stopped me in my tracks. “We don’t have time to do both.”

Conn glanced at me and began to run even faster.

“It’s impossible,” I said desperately. “We can’t stop Meridian from burning Deacon’s house
and
keep the IBI and the Society from tearing each other apart at the Sanctuary. Deacon’s house and Graceland Cemetery are at opposite ends of town.”

We jumped down a flight of stairs.

“It’s too late,” I said. “Everything’s too late.”

Conn paused before a door and pressed his thumb against a lockpad. The door swung open. “It isn’t,” he said. “Not if we split up.”

“Bad idea.” I followed him into a garage. “No way.”

“It’s the only way.” He stopped. “Darcy. There are two tasks. We are two people.”

“Then I’ll go to the Sanctuary.” It seemed more dangerous, the place where anything could happen. It was the place where Conn would most likely get hurt, even killed.

He shook his head. “Let me go. Please.”

“
No
. The Society
will
attack if it’s to defend their home.”

“I think I can stop them.”

“How? With your two bare hands? You’re insane.”

“I’ll talk to them. I’ll convince the Shades not to attack.”

“Conn—”

“I know what to say.” He cupped my face in his hands. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes, but—”

“Good,” he said. “Now, realistically, Meridian’s fire will happen. The only thing you can do at this point is damage control—and you’ve already started that, since you’re brilliant. You alerted the firefighters. As for Deacon’s house, it’s just a tourist attraction no one lives in. It can burn.” Conn handed me a small, square object the size of a quarter. “This is a sort of megaphone. Talk to the crowd. Keep them from panicking. That will save lives.”

“Me. You want me, a Shade, to keep humans from panicking.” My voice rose and echoed in the cavernous garage. “The very
sight
of me will make them panic.”

“They’ll trust you. Like I do. You will make them trust you. Okay?”

That word felt like a harness loaded with the world. But when I looked at Conn his eyes held a strength that helped me find my own. “Okay.”

“Let’s go. I’ll drop you off midway.”

It was then that I looked over his shoulder and saw the machine behind him. “What is that? Is that a motorcycle?” As soon as I said that I realized that
this
was what Conn had been drawing in his sketchbook.

“No,” he said. “It’s a hypercycle.”

“Conn, did you
make
this?”

“Come on.” He reached for the helmet hanging by its strap from one of the handlebars and straddled the machine.

“Well,” I said, “at least I get a helmet this time.”

He laughed. “You don’t need a helmet, Darcy, and you never did. This is for me.”

I climbed up and held on to him tight.

The engine caught with a roar and we peeled out of the garage.

48

I found out why Conn needed his helmet, and why he hadn’t worn one on our trip to the railroad tracks in the Alter.

It was because, for him, riding a motorcycle was like riding a bike.

And the hypercycle absolutely was
not
.

The machine screamed down the street.

We scraped around a corner and hit heavy traffic—all the partygoers, the cars cramming the streets to get wherever they wanted to be by midnight. It filled me with frustrated despair to think that this—
traffic
—was going to stop us. But then Conn’s helmeted head turned skyward, and I followed his gaze and noticed, as I had on my first day exploring this Chicago, that odd metal rail looping high around the buildings. I had just enough time to wonder why Conn was looking at it and what it had to do with escaping this demonic snarl of traffic, when he jerked at the handlebars and the hypercycle kicked beneath us. It rocketed into the air and slammed its wheels down on the rail, then swung to ride along at a right angle with the building, the machine parallel to the ground.

I probably yelped or did something similarly unheroic. I mean, hey, I’m practically invulnerable, but more than a decade of human living is pretty hard to shake. Humans like their spines. They like them attached to the rest of their bones. They usually don’t like being a hundred feet in the air, hurtling along at killer speeds, their bodies hanging over the streets below.

Then I saw that the city block was about to come to an abrupt end. We were reaching an intersection, and the buildings we were driving on were going to sheer off into thin air.

The hypercycle sped toward the edge. I clung to Conn’s waist and buried my face against his back. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this.

But before I could decide whether to close my eyes, the hypercycle kicked again and we launched across space to slam onto the rail waiting for us on the other side of the street.

Another thing about humans—and I wasn’t entirely sure whether this was true for Shades, too—is that they can get used to almost anything. I’d been human long enough that after about fifteen minutes on the hypercycle I relaxed enough to have an idea. “Hey!” I yelled near Conn’s ear. “Can you hear me?”

He nodded.

“Most people die of smoke inhalation in fires,” I shouted. “Not from the fire itself. If you can stop a battle over the Sanctuary, ask the Society for help. Shades can ghost up high buildings to smash windows for fresh air. They can tell firefighters where people are trapped. If the Shades can handle being near the fire. If they’re willing.”

We jumped over another street, and I could feel Conn thinking as we arced through the air. Then we hit the other side, and he nodded.

Soon after that, the engine seemed to fail. I clamped my legs to the sides of the machine and hung on to Conn for dear life—whether his life or mine, I didn’t know. They felt like one and the same.

The hypercycle hovered, its wheels spinning in place, and Conn flung up the visor of his helmet and turned to look over his shoulder at me. “Here,” he said. “We have to split up here.” He took one hand off the handlebars—a suicidal move, if you ask me—and pointed west. “That’s Deacon Street. Head that way, and it’ll take you straight to the celebration.”

I didn’t know what to say, because everything I wanted to tell Conn felt more dangerous than fire.

“Darcy?” he said.

“Be careful.”

He gave me a half smile. “You, too.”

For a moment, I wondered if all the things he wasn’t saying were the same things I wasn’t saying. Then I ghosted, and turned so that I wouldn’t have to see him speeding away.

The streets below swam with people, the crowds getting thicker and louder as I flew toward Deacon’s house. I could see the nineteenth-century sidewalks radiating from the house like spokes from the center of a wheel.

I passed an old clock tower—11:55 p.m. Five minutes till midnight.

In front of Deacon’s house was a low stage. Dancers in flame-colored leotards leaped and spun across its surface as a man who I guessed was the mayor watched from a chair seated at the far end of the stage. I glanced at the clock, and saw another clock in my mind, the sculpture that Conn and I had made for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It struck me then that the poem wasn’t simply about love, but about how love demands the risk of one’s whole self. Could I really do that? Could I shake my identity to its foundations? Could I put my life on the line?

I looked out into the sea of strangers who would recoil the moment I appeared. Of course they would. I was a Shade. My name was Lark. Yet I was also Darcy Jones, and somehow I would have to love both parts of me, or I would never be able to save anyone, and would never know the answer to this question:

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

There wasn’t time for me to think about what to say—or even what to do. I simply did it. I manifested in the center of the stage.

A dancer screamed, then another, and then they poured off the stage, running away as fast as they could. Some secret service types pounced on the mayor, protecting him with their bodies, while someone in the crowd yelled, “Assassination! It’s an assassination attempt!”

“No!” I shouted into Conn’s micro-megaphone, and was shocked to hear how loud my voice was. People blocks away must have been able to hear me. “I’m not trying to kill your mayor. I just want to talk.”