My mind was a better measure to figure out what was happening in Saul. We were alike. Nick and I. Unlike Belle, we’d both experienced the horrors of having someone move your bones and stretch your limbs without your say-so. But this was still too dangerous. I didn’t . . . I couldn’t.
I looked at the other girls for help, and thankfully, Lake and Chae Rin looked just as skeptical as I did. Belle, on the other hand, had a pensive tilt to her head that told me she was mulling it over.
“It may be of help to us,” Belle said. “We need to figure out the nature of Saul . . . and the soldier. This could be a crucial first step. And perhaps understanding the pattern behind Saul’s frequency can give us a way to track and capture him.”
“She . . . has a point, kid.” Chae Rin gripped my shoulder. “I’m not totally sold on this, but there are questions that need answers.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Shrugging off her hand, I wrapped my arms around my chest. “You and Lake have never even had to scry before, so how would you know? And none of you know how horrible it feels to . . . to . . .” To have your body taken over. I shuddered.
“No, we don’t,” Chae Rin replied coolly. “But what other options do we have?”
“This is kind of an urgent situation,” Lake chimed in.
I knew it too. But I didn’t have to like it. With a heavy sigh, I looked up at Chafik with my teeth gritted. “You’re one hundred percent sure you won’t lose me in there? Ten hundred percent sure?”
Chafik nodded. “Don’t worry. Our technicians will do everything in their power to make sure you are safe and secure. We already have a lab prepared in the Research and Development wing. Like I said, we will be monitoring you carefully to make sure there are no accidents. We only want Natalya’s consciousness to graze the surface. We want to see what happens when your minds interact. We won’t let it get beyond that.”
“Don’t worry . . . um . . . we’re all here,” Lake said reassuringly, though she didn’t seem too sure if it was worth anything. “It’ll be fine.”
“You say that now. Just watch. In a few hours you’ll have Natalya as a roommate instead of me.”
Lake thought about it. “Well, then, hopefully she won’t snore as badly as you do.”
She waited for me to catch on to her smile, but I couldn’t say I appreciated that joke. Once Lake realized her misstep, her shoulders slumped sheepishly.
Chae Rin scratched her head. “Look, kid, I get that we’re not exactly best friends or anything, but none of us want you gone. Right?”
“That’s a no-brainer,” Lake answered. “You said it yourself: We’re a team, yeah?”
But Belle took a little longer to respond than I would have liked. Her languid eyes stared off in the distance. She looked tired suddenly, as if all the energy had been sucked out of her in a moment. Perhaps fatigue had finally settled into her bones. But you never knew with Belle.
She nodded absently. “Let’s go,” she said in an almost whisper.
5
“CONSIDER IT A PHYSICAL,” I told myself as I entered the lab alone from the observatory room, but then, most of the physicals I’d had in the past were the normal kind with doctors and stethoscopes. There was indeed a doctor in the room, from what I could tell by both his long white lab coat and the way he just kind of stood around looking important. But instead of nurses, he surrounded himself with technicians tinkering with monitors and wires and all sorts of medical equipment I couldn’t name if I tried.
“Ah, she’s here,” said the doctor when I shut the door behind me. “Maia Finley? My name is Dr. Rachadi.” He was young, slender, dark, and handsome, but having a pretty face to look at made me feel only marginally better. “Have a seat over there. This shouldn’t take long.”
Before I even had the chance to follow his instructions, a couple of technicians started dragging me toward a long examination table. I couldn’t see any of the other girls or Director Chafik, but I knew they were behind the large black screen on the left side of the room, watching me as I lay down on the table, as the technicians hooked me up to a set of monitors and wrapped black straps around my arms.
“Fix the tripod,” Dr. Rachadi ordered a technician, who ran to reorient the camera stuck in the corner.
“What are you looking for?” I shivered, longing for the warmth of a bed. The room was unusually cold. “What is all this stuff?” Long tubes coiled around the floor and over the tables like metal vines.
Dr. Rachadi grabbed the long neck of a thin, clear monitor and rotated it so I could see the screen. “This entire apparatus,” he said, patting the mass of complicated equipment, “will simply help us measure your spectrographic frequency and brain waves concurrently. We will monitor your cylithium levels, which should spike as you attempt to make contact with Natalya.”
Make contact. They made it seem like they were leaving me stranded on an alien planet. They might as well have been.
“Cylithium. Right. Where all the magic comes from.”
“Through studies in the past, we’ve come to conceive of cylithium as a kind of conduit or medium that not only enables your ability to control the elements but also allows for the connections between the psyches of the Effigies. Through previous studies on Effigies, we’ve found that the cognitive experience of scrying correlates to cylithium production, which goes into overdrive during the process. Now, you won’t be scrying by yourself. For your safety, we’ll be inducing your meditative state, adjusting cylithium levels to a premeasured amount. And we’ll be using the instruments at the far panel behind me to ensure that the levels never get out of control.”
When I lifted my head, I could see the technicians at the front wall turning various metal knobs of different sizes.
“That way you maintain the delicate psychic balance between the two minds,” he said.
“Just don’t kill me.”
He swept his fingers along the screen and with a few taps an image of my body appeared, all outlined in metallic blue, bordered by stats and figures in writing too tiny for me to read from my table. “Maia Finley, age sixteen, blood type AB, weight—”
“That we don’t need to say out loud,” I said, and I would have sat up if I weren’t hooked into so much weird stuff. I wanted to rub my arms. The hairs were standing on end, and I couldn’t tell if it was because of my own fear or because of the subzero temperature of the lab. Everyone else was wearing layers. They could have warned me.
A voice rang out from the intercom. “Finley, please calm down.” It was Director Chafik. Calm down. Easy for him to say. As if he had any idea how nerve-racking this was.
“Yeah, don’t worry, kid. We’re all here.” Chae Rin.
Lake chimed in too. “We won’t leave until it’s all over, ’kay?”
Belle said nothing.