Naya nodded, then rubbed the saint’s medal around her neck. Her expression went a little vacant again. “Temperance, we await your direction. You have heard our plea for assistance. How can we help you make manifest?” Her eyelids fluttered. “Nourish her with the energy,” she said, “to help her cross the veil. She says that I can bridge the gap to help you focus it. To help you direct it.”
I nodded again. I didn’t fully understand what Temperance was, but I had an idea of how it could work. Temperance was basically a spirit without a body. Naya was the link between us, the wire for the current I could provide. If I pretended Temperance was like a lightbulb in the tunnels, I might be able to give her some energy.
The only question was—could I do it without killing both of us?
“Give me your hand,” I told Naya. She reached out and took my palm, and I squeezed our fingers together. “With your other hand, can you—not touch—but somehow reach Temperance? Like, have her center herself near you?”
Naya nodded, and Temperance must have moved, because I felt the spark of energy along the length of our arms.
“Here goes,” I said, and closed my eyes. I imagined the three of us were a circuit, like the connected wires in a circuit board. I pulled up the well of energy, and instead of letting it flow into a bulb above me, tried to imagine it twisting, funneling from my extended arm into Naya’s, slinking softly through her, and into the ghost at her side.
I felt my hair rise and lift around my head as energy swirled and Naya’s fingers began to shake in my hands.
“Holy crap,” I heard Scout say.
My eyes popped open, and I glanced at Naya. “Are you okay?”
Her eyes were clenched closed. “I’m fine. Just keep going.”
“I saw her.”
I looked back at Scout, her face pale, her eyes wide, and the key around her neck—something worn by every girl at St. Sophia’s—lifting in the currents of magic. “I saw her. She wore a brown skirt. You were doing it. Keep going.”
I nodded, then closed my eyes again and imagined a long cord of energy between the three of us—two current Adepts and an Adept from a former time. I pushed the energy along the current, not too much, just a little at a time, narrowing in as it spindled between us, like a fine thread being spun from a pile of frothy yarn.
I imagined the energy moving through Naya, slipping past her again, into the whirl of energy that was Temperance Bay. I tried to fill her with it, and with Naya acting as a conduit, I could feel her on the other side—her ache to be heard by the world around her, to be seen and remembered once again. It was a hunger, and as I offered her the energy, I felt her relief. When that hunger eased, I pulled back on the power again, slowing it to a trickle, and finally cutting it off.
Our hands still linked together, I opened my eyes. Everyone’s gazes were focused to my right, past Naya, at the girl who stood beside her, gaze on me.
She wasn’t quite solid—more like an old movie projection than an actual girl. But even still, there she was. She had wavy brown hair that fell nearly to her waist, and she wore a simple, straight brown skirt and long-sleeved sweater. Her eyes were big and brown, and although she wore no makeup, her cheeks were flushed pink, like she’d just come in from the cold.
Maybe she had. Maybe the gray land was cold.
She moved toward me, her image flickering at the edges as she moved, her body transparent. She held out her hands. I let go of Naya’s hand and extended both of my shaking hands toward Temperance.
And then we touched.
I couldn’t hold her hands—but I could feel them. Their outlines. Their edges. She was made of energy and light, coalesced into a form we could see, but still not quite real.
“Temperance Bay,” she said, her voice soft and barely audible.
“Lily Parker.”
She smiled back at me. I knew she was thanking me, so I returned her smile. “How long will it last?”
“Not long,” she said, then turned to look at Naya, who nodded at both of us.
“Temperance,” she said, “we think that building was used by the enemy, but we aren’t sure why. We need to know what went on in there, and we need to know if anyone is still using it. Can you move through it? Take a look and see what kinds of things they were doing? We need to know if there are computers or papers—documents of any kind that might be useful.”
Temperance nodded, then walked toward the doors, one slow step at a time. She moved right through the trip wires and then the doors—and then she was gone.
“And now we wait,” Naya said.
“Waiting” meant sitting cross-legged on the ground, the others chatting while I waited to get a little of my own energy back. It hadn’t occurred to me that filling Temperance up with power meant draining some of my own. My arms and legs felt heavy, like I’d run a marathon or was coming down with the flu. Jason sat beside me, eyes scanning the corridor as he offered me granola bars and water to boost my energy.
For Detroit, “waiting” meant working her mechanical magic. While we crouched in the entryway, she pushed the buttons on the sides of her giant black watch. After a second, a coin-shaped piece of black plastic popped out like a CD being ejected from a laptop.
“What’s that?” Scout asked.
“Camera,” Detroit whispered, then gestured toward the double doors. “I figure since we’re here, we might as well be proactive. The pictures aren’t fabulous, but it’ll give us eyes on the doors without risking Adepts.”
She glanced around, her gaze settling on the concrete eave at our end of the corridor. “That’ll work. Should give us a clear view.” She looked around. “Could anyone help me get a lift up?”
“I’ll help,” Jason said. He went down on one knee, the other propped up like a step, and held out a hand. Without hesitation, Detroit took his hand for balance, stepped up onto Jason’s propped knee, and pressed the plastic coin into the concrete.
“Now I have a way to check in on whatever this is at the lab,” Detroit said.
“You guys have a lab?” Scout asked.
Detroit looked up, surprise in her face. “Sure. Don’t you?”
“You’re joking, right?”
Detroit just blinked at Scout. “No.”
“Uh, yeah, that room we met in earlier? That’s our entire Enclave.”
“No way. You guys are running a low-budg operation. We’ve got a lab, conference rooms, kitchenette, nap rooms. I mean, it’s not lush or anything—it’s a bomb shelter built in the nineteen sixties or something.”
“Not lush, she says, but they have a nap room.” Scout made a noise of disgust, then glanced at me. “You know what we need? A benefactor.”
“Aren’t your parents, like, superwealthy?” I wondered.
“We need a generous benefactor,” she clarified. “My parents are pretty Green-focused. Ah! I made a pun.”
Detroit offered Scout an arch look, like she didn’t appreciate the use of humor in dire Adepty situations. I was beginning to wonder how they ran things over in Enclave Two. So far, it seemed like a pretty (up)tight ship.
“You know, I hate that we’ve come this far—and through a gauntlet of fangs—and we aren’t even going to take a look inside that building.”
We all looked at Michael, who shrugged. “I’m just saying. I mean, I know there’s bad juju there, but I hate to have come all that way for nothing.”
“Not nothing,” Naya pointed out. “You’ll find out what’s inside when Temperance returns.”
“She’s right,” Jason said. “And we don’t need to go looking for more trouble. We have to tell him about the vamps, and we’ve already got a black mark against the Enclave. We don’t need another one.”
“Yeah, we heard about that,” Detroit said. She opened a pocket in her jacket, then pulled out a pack of gum. After pulling out a stick, she passed it around the room. I took one, unwrapped the foil, and popped it in my mouth. It was an odd flavor—something old-fashioned that tasted like spicy cloves—but it wasn’t bad.
Scout frowned at Detroit. “What exactly did you hear?”
“Just that you guys had some internal issues. That you didn’t follow Varsity’s lead on some mission. You’re kind of a cautionary tale now.”
Scout’s features tightened. “Varsity’s lead was to leave me locked down in a Reaper sanctuary while Jeremiah and his minions ate me for lunch.”
Detroit’s lips parted. “I’m—oh, my God. I’m so sorry. That’s not what they said and I hadn’t heard—”
Scout held up a hand. “Let’s just drop it.”
“I’m really, truly sorry. I didn’t know. They didn’t tell us the whole story.”
Scout nodded, but the hallway went silent, and the tension in the air wasn’t just because of the secret building next door.
8
It was another fifteen or twenty minutes before our ghostly spy made her way back to the doors where we waited. By that point, she was mostly a cold mist, a fuzzy outline of the girl we’d seen a little while ago.
“She’s fading,” Naya said, standing up as Temperance came through the door—literally.
Temperance tried to speak, but the sound was a tinny whisper.
“She’s communicating that the place is big,” Naya said. “She saw only a little of it, but thinks there’s more to see.”
Temperance suddenly pulsed—her light completely fading before she popped back into the visible world again.
I looked around. “Should we try another dose of power?”
Jason stepped beside me, gaze on Temperance. “I’m not crazy about that idea,” he said. “You’re still pretty drained, and we still need to get back to the enclave. If you totally burn out now, that leaves us without even a chance of firespell on the way back. And we’re taking the long way back.” He gave Detroit a pointed look.
“I can fix this,” she said. She opened her bag and pulled out a small black box. She put the box on the floor, then fiddled with it until it began to hum, and the top slid open. A lens emerged from the top and a cone of pale, white light shined upward toward the ceiling.
Detroit frowned at it, probably tuned in to some kind of mechanical details the rest of us couldn’t even see, then sat down on her knees beside it and began to adjust dials and sliding bars on the side. “I wasn’t really keen on using it this go-round—it’s a new prototype. But since we can’t use firespell, might as well try it out.” She sat back on her heels and glanced up at Naya. “Okay, you’re ‘go’ for launch.”
Naya nodded, then closed her eyes and offered an incantation. “By the spirit of St. Michael, the warrior of angels and protector of spirits, I call forth Temperance Bay. Hear my plea, Temperance, and come forth to help us battle that which would tear us asunder.”
The light flickered once, but nothing else happened.
I glanced sideways at Scout, who shrugged.
“Temperance Bay,” Naya called again. “We beseech you to hear our request. There is power in this room. Power to make you visible. Come forth and find it and be seen once more.”
A rush of cold air blew across our little alcove, the box vibrating with the force of it. My hair stood on end, and I clenched Jason’s hand tight. However helpful Temperance might have been, she carried the feeling of something wrong. Maybe it wasn’t because of who she was, but of what she was, of where she’d come from. Whatever the reason, you couldn’t deny that creepy feeling of something other in the room.
“The power is here, among us,” Naya said.
The air began to swirl, the cone of light flickering as Temperance moved among us trying to figure out how to use Detroit’s machine. The light began to flicker wildly like a brilliant strobe before bursting from the box.
And it wasn’t just light.
Temperance floated above us in the cone of light, again in her brown skirt and sweater. I wondered if those were the clothes she’d worn when she died—if she was doomed to wear the same thing forever.
She began to talk, and we could hear the staticky, far-away echo of her voice from Detroit’s machine. “I am here—here—here,” she said, her words stuttering through the machine.
“Temperance,” Naya asked, “what did you see?”
“It is a sanctuary,” she said.
I gnawed on the edge of my lip. That was so not the news we wanted.
“How do you know it’s a sanctuary?” Scout asked. Her voice was soft.
“The mark—mark—mark of the Dark Elite is there, but dust has fallen. The building is quiet. Quiet.”
“Keep going,” Naya said, her voice all-business. Not a request, but a demand. Her own magic at work.
“It’s like a clinic,” Temperance said.
“What do you mean, a clinic?” Michael asked.
“Instruments. Machines. Syringes.”
“That can’t be right,” Jason put in. “The Reapers don’t need medical facilities. Their only medical issue is energy, and they’ve already got that covered.”
A sudden breeze—icy cold and knife sharp—cut across the corridor. Temperance’s image glowed a little brighter, her eyes sharpening. Without warning, her image blossomed and grew, and she was nine feet tall, her arms long and covered in grungy fabric, her hair streaming out, her eyes giant dark orbs. “The unliving do not make mistakes.”
There were gasps. But I remembered what Naya had said—Temperance was an Adept of illusion. The image, however creepy, wasn’t real. Naya’s eyes were closed again, probably as she concentrated on keeping Temperance in the room, so I took action.