“Of course we did. I don’t know much about Ravenswood, though. It happened when I was young, and many of the details are still cloaked in secrecy. Only a few people knew about the mission, and fewer still were directly involved.” He gave me a shrewd look. “Is your memory returning?”

“Maybe.” I couldn’t tell Orion that the parasite in my mind had the voice of the screaming man. Murderer, he had called me.

I had lied when I told Orion why I couldn’t sleep at night. It had nothing to do with the tree.

Murderer.

“I don’t want to talk about Ravenswood anymore,” I said. “I want to ask you a favor.”

“Yes?”

“Will you teach me how to ghost?”

Orion clapped his hands and laughed. “Finally!”

26

I’d been trying for hours, with no sign of success.

“No,” said Orion. “Don’t breathe. You’re supposed to stop everything. Your heart. The blood pumping in your veins. Even your breath.”

We were in a room on one of the upper floors of the Sanctuary, with wide windows overlooking the Great Hall many feet below. Orion had said it would be too distracting for him to practice in my bedroom.

“I can’t stop my heart from beating,” I said.

“You can. You simply don’t want to.”

“What I want is for you to stop nagging me. Stop giving stupid advice. You’re supposed to help.”

“And you’re not a child,” he said. “In fact, children are easier to train than you, because at least they’re thrilled to ghost. You act like your gift is a burden.”

Orion was infuriating. He was also right. I’d gotten better at telling lies, though my voice always sounded brittle to me, like my words would shatter upon impact. Yet members of the Council had believed me, and so did Orion. Still, I hadn’t figured out how to lie to myself.

I didn’t really want to ghost.

I know. I had asked Orion. I had asked for this, and not because Conn had ordered me to. It was because of that screaming man.

In my dreams he grabbed me over and over again. In my dreams I died.

Murderer.

I used to think that at least I could rely on myself. That I was strong. Now I felt like someone with no control. Someone who fell out of trees. Who heard one word and was so paralyzed that she had to rely on the help of someone she hated.

This was Conn’s fault. That afternoon at Marsha’s house, he had broken something. Not only my trust in him. He had also broken my trust in myself.

“I thought learning how to ghost would make me feel stronger,” I told Orion. “But I can’t do this.”

“Of course you can. You have.”

A memory trembled inside me. I heard my father’s voice, rumbly deep, buried so far down in his chest that I wouldn’t have been able to find it even if I looked really hard. You need to learn, he told me.

I looked at Orion. I had ghosted. Not just recently. Also long ago, long before I’d seen the Alter.

But I’d never been any good at it.

“You don’t know how to control your shadow,” Orion said. “That’s all.”

“Okay.” I pressed a cold palm against my throbbing forehead. I tried to cling to the memory, yet it shredded and vanished. “How do I stop my heart?”

“You do it with what you have when your body’s gone. You do it with your mind. You do it with your soul.”

Pretty words. But they didn’t help me either.

Finally, when my headache was raging and I didn’t want to say so because Orion would tell me that if I ghosted, the pain would go away, I opened my eyes and looked around the room. Trunks were stacked against the black walls. “You said that this is a practice room. Practice for what?”

“Warfare.”

I opened a trunk. It was filled with short metal batons. I’d seen these before, strapped to the h*ps of the guards in the truck. “That’s IBI equipment. Those are flamethrowers. You brought fire into the Sanctuary?”

Orion shut the trunk. “Don’t touch that.”

“Orion.” I paused. “Did you follow me?”

“What?”

“The other day, when I left the Sanctuary to explore the city. Did you follow me?”

“Why would I do that? You said you wanted to go alone.”

“Well, someone followed me. I saw the shadow.”

Orion’s mouth pinched. “Contrary to what you might think, I don’t push myself where I’m not wanted.”

“I didn’t mean—” This was going badly. Ghosting was going nowhere, now Orion was pissed, and I had just seen evidence of weapons that the IBI would like to know more about—a lot more about. And Orion was clearly in no mood to be milked for information.

It occurred to me that I was going to have to find other Shades to make friends with.

“I’m sorry,” I told Orion. “I’m not thinking straight. My head really hurts.”

“If you ghosted—”

“Hey, maybe you can give me some advice,” I interrupted. “I want to get to know this Chicago, but the subway sucks.” I explained what had happened on the train. “The humans didn’t notice me, but I had no clue where to get off. I can’t walk everywhere, and until I learn how to ghost—”

“You will,” he said comfortingly, and I saw that if there was one thing he could understand, it was my frustration over not being able to control my shadow. “In the meantime, we’re going to the Archives.”

* * *

THE ARCHIVES WAS IN THE MOST basementy part of the Sanctuary. It was a warehouse stacked with zillions of human objects—pots and pans, racks of clothes, umbrellas, wheelbarrows, knickknacks, bear traps, kayaks, and stuff stuff stuff, neatly labeled and arranged, stretching as far as the eye could see. It looked like a never-ending garage sale, and in front of it all was an elderly lady sitting at a desk.

“Oh.” She took off her glasses. She let them dangle from the beaded chain around her neck and looked straight at me. “It’s you.”

She was the Council member at my trial, the one who had called me a security risk.

“Her access here is restricted,” she told Orion. “You may come back another time, whenever you wish, so long as it’s without her.”

“You can only control her access because she can’t ghost,” said Orion. “You know perfectly well that any Shade can use any part of the Archives, if only because boxes and locks wouldn’t stop us. Your job is to keep human objects organized, Savannah, not deny Darcy her rights.”

She played with her glasses chain.

“We want to look at Section 7A,” said Orion. “That’s not a sensitive area.”

Savannah stood, stiffly. “I voted against you,” she told me.

“Surprise, surprise,” I said.

She sniffed. “Fine,” she said to Orion. “Follow me.”

Our footsteps echoed in the musty air as she led us past some contraptions that I couldn’t name but that Jims would probably go wild over. I half expected to see a rocket ship that delivered chocolate sauce propped next to machines that looked like they could either blow something up or vacuum out a car.

Finally, Savannah waved an irritated hand. “Section 7A.”

Bicycles. Rows and rows of bicycles with rusted chains and colored chrome and sleek racing bodies. I even spotted a unicycle.

“Wow,” I said.

“Pick one,” said Orion.

It took only seconds for me to find the perfect bike. It was flashy. A candy-apple red with orange rubber handlebars and spokes so shiny that the wheels looked like exploding stars. A few weeks ago, I never would have chosen this bike for myself. But Lily would have.

Orion followed my gaze. “It’s very bright.” He squinted. “Don’t you think you’d draw attention to yourself?”

“No. No, I don’t.” I knew he was right, but I couldn’t say that I needed that bike, that I loved it because Lily would love it, and I loved her. I couldn’t say anything he’d understand.

Savannah shrugged. “If you can get away with riding around Chicago on that, then what Orion claimed at your trial must be true: you can pass for a human like no other Shade. Maybe we could put her to good use.”

“We don’t want to get her killed before she’s properly trained,” said Orion.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Savannah’s right. This bike will prove how much I can fool them.”

Orion smiled.

“And—” Savannah hesitated. “It is pretty.”

It was only then that I noticed that her glasses chain was strung with blue and yellow beads. At least one Shade, I realized, didn’t see the world in black and white.

I was wheeling the bike toward the Archives’ exit when my hand snatched something off the shelves. I’d grabbed it purely by instinct, out of some certainty that whatever it was, it belonged to me, and it was a moment before I really saw what I held. A box of oil paints.

“Can I take this, too?” I asked.

Savannah peered at it, pursing her lips. “It couldn’t do any harm.”

I tucked it under my arm. For the first time since I’d arrived in this world, I felt pleased. The box of paints reminded me that I wasn’t a totally different person, even if I wasn’t human. I still wanted to make beautiful things. And the bike made me think that Marsha had been right to give me a red sweater. Maybe it was time for me not just to seek beauty and color, but also to claim some for myself.

I gave the shiny bike an affectionate pat.

The only thing I didn’t like about it was that it would take me to Conn.

27

I got totally lost.

As I biked south my brain kept getting fooled into thinking I knew where I was. Once I even thought I saw Lily, though that was crazy and impossible, and the girl had dark hair. Lily would never let her natural color show. Still, as I biked past I let myself pretend it was her, and that I was home.

It was a bright, bright day. The snow had melted, and the streets were streaked with sunny water. My bike tires swished through the puddles, water spattering my ankles as I wove through the city, trying to figure out how to get to Schiller Avenue. It wasn’t easy. In the midst of all the bizarre differences of this Chicago—that metal rail running high along the buildings, the nauseatingly cute green lampposts, those decorated wooden sidewalks that Orion said raked in tons of money in tourism every year—I also had to keep an eye out for any stray shadows that might be following me. I almost crashed a dozen times.

But no humans spotted me as a Shade, and it didn’t look like I was being tailed by the Society. At least, not today.

When I found the address Conn had given me, I parked the bike and bounded up the library steps, past the bronze lions with their shiny paws that had been rubbed by thousands of strangers. I was late. I was also, I realized, eager to see Conn.

Which made sense. He had information I wanted.

The Jennie Twist Library didn’t exist in my Chicago (neither did Jennie Twist), but getting around the building was easy, thanks to a lifetime of navigating new schools. Plus, this library was super old-fashioned, down to its wood-paneled elevators. I got inside one of them and watched the golden arrow above the doors swoop past floor numbers. It occurred to me that Conn had chosen this place precisely because it didn’t have any sci-fi techy gear for me to deal with. It occurred to me that I was grateful.

I got out at the third floor and headed for the stacks. Browse, I told myself. I was supposed to browse until an IBI agent posing as a librarian found me. I riffled through the shelves, which were massive oak things that would flatten me like a cartoon character if they toppled over.

I started with the A’s. Alcott, Ardent, Austen. My hand stopped there. I was a pretty big fan of Jane Austen, and had read everything she’d written—which wasn’t enough. I always wanted more, more, more. So imagine my delight when, nestled in between Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, was something completely new: Reservation. I grabbed it off the shelf and was flipping through it when someone coughed. I turned to see a girl who was a few years older than me. She was very pretty. Angry, too.

“He’s waiting,” she hissed. She stalked away before I could respond, then paused and glanced over her shoulder. “Follow me.” She rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe he’s wasting his time with someone like you.”

I resisted the urge to whack her in the back of the head with my leather-bound book.

She whisked me toward a private study room, motioned for me to enter, then shut me in, alone with Conn.

He was sitting at a table, drawing something in a sketchbook that looked like a design for a machine. I instantly wanted to come closer, to see better, but reminded myself that I wasn’t supposed to be curious about Conn. My heart wasn’t supposed to stutter just because he lifted his tawny head and looked at me.

It made me mad. Even though my mind knew better, some part of my body couldn’t forget the tug and pull of Conn.

He closed the sketchbook. “You’re late.”

“And you’re obnoxious. But I won’t always be late.”

He blinked. Then he chuckled.

“You’re not supposed to laugh,” I said grumpily.

“It was funny.”

“Not that funny.”

“No, really.” He smiled. “I’d congratulate you on it, but only nice people give compliments. Unfortunately, I’m doomed to always be obnoxious.”

I had forgotten that he could be playful, and that when he was he almost glowed.