After she pointed to the corners of my mouth, I wiped the drool off and sighed.
The clay walls of the Sect facility shimmered orange and red under the sun. The gentle breeze in Marrakesh, Morocco, was a nice change from the desert torrents we’d faced hours ago, but the heat was just as relentless. Our Sect van was parked outside the premises, the dulled black automatic gates locked behind us. But the air-conditioning was broken, which meant that to keep ourselves from cooking, we had to keep the car doors open. A couple of flies buzzed in with the heat, one flitting annoyingly close to my ear. Waving it away, I lay back against my seat, wincing from the sun’s onslaught.
Her voice lingered somewhere deep in me. Maia . . . Maia . . . steady like a drumbeat, each strike an assault on my nerves. My fingers twitched as I brought them up to my forehead and shut my eyes, trying to block her out.
Effigies fought and died, and each death opened up the door for another girl to inherit the power of the last. No, not just the power—the legacy, the memories, and the consciousness, even if just in pieces. Natalya Filipova was the last in my line. That meant parts of her lived on inside me. The Russian-born legendary fire Effigy who had lived as a hero.
But she hadn’t died as one.
And she would never let me forget it.
It took me a moment to realize my hand was shaking against my forehead. Quickly, I brought it down and stared at it. The soft, sandy skin tone was mine. The dark lines stretching across the red of my palm. The white nails, cut short. This was my hand. Mine.
Even though I could remember how it felt to have Natalya move it through her will alone.
Mine. I clamped my hand shut as if the sharp pain of my nails digging into my skin sealed my desperate thoughts as truth.
Shivering, I checked the time on my phone. I hadn’t been asleep for thirty minutes, but that heavy, languid feeling lingered stubbornly in my bones. It still took my body time to recover from these missions. I’d traveled here and there, back and forth so many damn times, all the cities were starting to blend together—as was, apparently, my vision, right now. I rubbed my eyes. The weight of the stress of battle came down hard on my bones. Belle always said that the more you train, the more you get used to it, but apparently nobody told my muscles.
Well, at least I wasn’t the only one who’d conked out. Having taken the whole back bench for herself, as she usually did, Chae Rin curled up on her side with her headphones plugging her ears and slept peacefully, her bare legs sticking to the leather through the natural adhesive of heat and sweat. She was out of her Sect fatigues and back into her civilian clothes. We all were. It was hot enough in Morocco without torturing ourselves needlessly.
In the seat next to me, Lake fiddled with her phone with one hand and kept her minifan trained on her with the other. “They’re still out there?” she asked, peering out my door. “Should it be taking this long? Didn’t they already take the . . .” She paused and bit her lip. “The . . .”
Body. The body of the mysterious young man we’d found in the desert hideout. Sibyl ordered that he be processed at the African Division headquarters several miles away. This meant that even after surviving a dangerous, body-breaking mission, we still had to stick with the body, stowed safely away in its sterilized white bag, as it was transported to Morocco to ensure its successful arrival. The moment we passed through the tall black gates, a medical team was already waiting for us. We should have been able to leave by now, but after half an hour had passed, Belle was still outside talking to the director of the facility.
“While the untalented and undeserving are releasing rubbish singles that get rewarded with money and praise, I am going on secret missions, fighting for my life, and hauling away dead bodies.” Sighing, Lake closed her eyes against the fan-generated wind lapping against her face. “My one consolation in this whole dreadful scenario is Sibyl okayed us going to the TVCAs. Attending an awards show because you’re nominated for something and not because your agent wrangled an invite from some poor underpaid intern. How novel!” With her eyes still closed, she grinned. “It’s gonna be so great. I’m back in the game!”
I stared at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
But Lake was already checking out the nominations list on the awards show’s home page. There we were, under Favorite Badass Role Models, next to an eclectic list comprised of a teen physicist, a social media star, an Olympic athlete, and a pop star fresh out of rehab. The weird thing about being an Effigy was you could fit in perfectly among any of them.
Ah, the strangest beast of all: celebrity.
Well, Effigies were known all over the world. Even as we fought monsters in a kill-or-be-killed lifestyle that usually ended in our bloody, gruesome deaths, the media still reported on us as if we were no different from your typical reality star or starlet stumbling drunkenly out of a limo into the latest LA party. When I was a kid, I worshipped the Effigies. I bought the posters and the trading cards the Sect put out just like every other obsessed fangirl. But it was the hero part that thrilled me. The fame part I could do without.
“You’re not actually still planning on making us go to that,” I said wearily. “Are you?”
“In fact, I’ve already picked out your dresses!”
“Oh god.” My head rolled to the side and came to a rest against my seat belt. Unlike me, Lake relished the spotlight and thrived in it. Going from auditioning for some cheesy televised British talent show to debuting in a pop group to becoming an Effigy, staying famous wasn’t something she had to worry much about. Still, it’d been months since her solo pop single was supposed to drop, but her record label was delaying the release, and her fans were beginning to think it was a myth.
“Did you check out Doll Soldiers? Wait, let me go there.” On her phone, Lake signed in to the online forum of Effigy enthusiasts, the site I’d spent an unhealthy amount of time on before I’d, somewhat ironically, become an Effigy myself. I leaned over for a better look. Ah, the Belle Kill Count thread was still racking up the views, as expected.
Lake pointed at what was creatively called the Official TVCA Thread and grinned widely. “Our fans are organizing mass voting parties. Isn’t it awesome?”
She clicked the link. She really shouldn’t have.
“Oh . . .” Lake grimaced as she read the screen.