Page 20

Esme’s return to The Shade kept me busy while Phoenix and Kailani worked on figuring out the silvery cubes. We’d heard voices inside them, and we knew they had some kind of mechanism on the inside, but the details of how they worked remained a mystery.

Derek caught up with Kalon for a while. The Aeternae-turned-vampire had left his younger brothers behind and in charge of some of GASP’s local operations on Visio, while he and Esme had come over to The Shade, deeply concerned and eager to help. They knew as much as any of us, and they had agreed there was more to this. Something else would happen sooner or later. The clone incidents had just been the tip of the iceberg.

Phoenix had managed to crack open one of the cubes, revealing the circuitry inside. It was an odd combination of metals and tiny conductive crystals, each pulse of energy flowing visibly. “Look at this,” he said, having connected one side of the inner circuit board to a couple of pliers with electrical charges. Whenever he brought his special screwdriver closer to the board, energy began to flow from the electrically loaded pliers to the slim tip of the screwdriver. “There’s something happening here.”

“The circuit is alive,” Kailani replied, raising both eyebrows.

“Try touching it with the screwdriver,” Esme said, eyes fixed on the cube’s electronic entrails. “It’s obvious the energy current senses it.”

Phoenix nodded slowly and brought the screwdriver closer. As soon as its tip touched the circuit, lights flashed and voices echoed throughout the room—familiar voices, I realized with a gasp. Mine. Derek’s. Serena and Draven’s. Rose’s. “Whoa,” I managed, getting up from my seat.

“We should totally consider dinner in Paris for our wedding anniversary,” I heard Serena telling Draven. I remembered that moment. It was from a Sunday brunch we’d had.

“I know this,” I murmured, trying to remember the entire conversation. “Serena wanted Paris, but Draven had become fixated on—”

“Bali,” the Druid cut in, wide-eyed as he heard himself speak in the recording, saying the exact same thing, followed by Serena’s laughter. As soon as Phoenix pulled the screwdriver back, the sounds went away, and a heavy silence settled over the Great Dome.

“What the hell is this?” Ben muttered, staring at the cube.

Phoenix turned it over several times until he found a small hole to connect a wired pin. “It’s a storage and projection device,” he said. “It’s electronic, though the circuitry shouldn’t be able to function like this. My guess is that foreign magic is at least partially responsible. See these?” he added, pointing at tiny crystal dots that had been glued to a small green square. “These are quartz inserts, and that’s jade. They’re not supposed to work this way. The metals and wires are excellent conductors, yes, but the precious and semiprecious gemstones are an aberration in this setting.”

Derek and I looked at one another. “Isabelle’s clone was recording us,” I said.

“But what was the point of keeping the recordings here, in The Shade?” Esme asked. That was a good question, but none of us had an answer. “I would’ve taken these back to my leader, if I had one. I’m assuming she had one.”

“Someone is absolutely calling the shots with these creatures,” Rose sighed.

It took a few more tries and inspections with other strange-looking tools, but Phoenix was finally able to tap into the cube’s video source. He’d found the right switch on the circuit board, pointing the display lens at a flat white surface—a sheet of paper that Kailani held up for him. Images danced across it, accompanied by muffled voices and crackling music. “It’s a party,” the witch said. “With… guitar music. Holy crap, I remember this. Voss’s birthday from a month ago!”

“I need a bigger surface,” Phoenix told her. “The image and the sound are both displayed and limited by their projection surface. That sheet of paper won’t do if we want to see and hear the full picture.”

Kailani nodded and walked over to the nearest glass pane, pressing both palms against it. It turned matte white, and Phoenix brought the cube over, careful not to disturb the improvised contraption of pincers and pliers that made this projection possible. The closer he got to the white pane, the better we could see and the louder we could hear.

Yes, there was music playing. Field was strumming heavily on a Spanish guitar. They were on the beach beneath a starry night sky. “They’re near The Shade’s extension,” Kailani said. “I know that area.”

We were all quiet, watching the scene unravel before us. Field and Aida sat on a tall rock. He handled his guitar while she fawned over him, love leaving her face aglow. Below, a campfire had been lit. Voss and Richard were laughing and adding more wood to the flame. There weren’t many people present, but that had always been Voss’s nature. Isabelle, Chantal, and Astra had been invited, along with Kailani, Hunter, Jovi, and Anjani.

“I think we can make this hotter,” we heard Isabelle say, giggling as she approached the fire, holding something in her hand. It was a bottle of lighter fluid, which she squirted over the flames until they swelled and licked at the night sky. The fire got too big, too fast, startling Field and Aida with its sudden heat. They fell back, vanishing behind the rock.

Voss and the others broke into hysterical laughter, and I couldn’t help but smile when I saw him grinning at Isabelle. “That’ll stop his mewling,” he said, running a hand through his dark shaggy hair. “I keep telling him he’s terrible, but he keeps playing that damn thing anyway.”

A low growl emerged from behind them. Isabelle yelped and jumped back. Voss whirled around just as his mother jumped him in wolf form. She was big enough to knock him down. Voss ended up on his back, Aida licking his face as she held him down with her huge paws. It was a sweet moment, until Chantal smiled and discreetly took Isabelle away from the jolly beach party. We watched them walk up the sandy beach for a while, going deeper into the night and farther from the sounds of music and laughter.

“Did you get it yet?” Chantal asked. Only then did I understand that she was a clone. After all, so was Isabelle in this recording.

“No.”

“How much longer?”

“I don’t know. It’s not easy to find something that not even the witches know they’ve got!” Isabelle’s double replied bitterly. “I don’t need any of you breathing down my neck!”

Chantal’s clone gave her a cold grin. “Tick tock. You know she hates waiting. Time is not a concept she likes much.”

The recording ended there. The cubes had to be data packets from the time Isabelle’s clone spent among us, searching for that tiny dice she’d lost to Claudia’s doppelganger. Phoenix worked quickly to patch us into another storage unit. One by one, we watched footage as old as two months ago. We’d even witnessed the data transfer moments. The clone’s eyes did the recording, and the images were wirelessly transmitted into the cubes, which had a tiny green light that flickered, indicating transmission. Isabelle’s clone would occasionally bring each cube closer to her head in order for the transfers to go faster, it seemed.

The more we saw, the clearer it became that the clones had done quite a lot of intel gathering from our Shade. Just thinking through the whole truth made me shiver. Isabelle’s clone had been but one of many who had listened to us, who’d stolen from us.

“There’s no sight of our Isabelle,” Serena said after five cubes’ worth of footage. “Where is she, damn it?”

“We need to watch the rest of these things,” Phoenix replied, fumbling with another one. The image flashed across the white glass, the sound coming through with crystal clarity. “Here we go…”

This was an eerie scene. That much was obvious from the very first seconds. “Hold on, is this our Shade?” Derek asked, sounding as confused as I felt.

Isabelle’s clone was walking up a white sand beach. The Port was right behind her, and the woods ahead were huge and dark but… something was off. “The colors aren’t right,” I mumbled. The greens were off. The browns were almost gray. And the dull light didn’t make sense. It looked like The Shade I had known for years, and yet I was willing to bet all the money in the world that it wasn’t our Shade. “It’s not The Shade. It just… it just looks like it,” I concluded, trying to ignore the shivers that ran down my back.

The more I watched, the creepier it got. Isabelle’s clone crossed paths with many of us, only… I could tell they weren’t us. None of them were originals. Their smiles and the instruments they held and operated told me that much. I spotted the reflective disks that we had yet to fully understand. The black mist canisters responsible for creating some of the most horrific mental anguish in the known history of existence itself. No, these were clones. They were all clones, and they were all going in the same direction.

“What if this is their lair?” Rose said, unable to peel her eyes off the screen. “Think about it. Clones of us. Would it be weird to think they might live in a place like ours? I mean, what if we’re not the only things they copied?”

“That makes sense, actually,” Derek replied. “It’s deeply disturbing, of course, but… yeah. I’d see that.”

“Look over there,” Ben said, pointing at the moving images. Isabelle’s clone had made it deep into the woods, where a gorgeous two-story villa with wisteria-covered walls dominated the clearing. “That’s supposed to be the entrance to the witches’ Sanctuary. There’s no Sanctuary there, from what I can tell.”

Rose nodded. “But those are absolutely our redwoods.”

“Not ours, per se,” Esme sighed. “Derek is right. I think we’re looking at a modified copy of our world. It’s the only explanation for this…”

There were people gathering in the clearing. All the clones from every corner of that… “Shade.” I saw myself and Derek, too. Our children and grandchildren. Their uncles and aunts. Their cousins. Friends and colleagues. People we’d lived with for most of our lives, mimicked by these vicious creatures. A woman came out of the villa, and everything fell silent.

“Welcome, children,” she told them, smiling and obviously satisfied by the gigantic turnout. Isabelle’s clone was but a drop in this ocean. “Welcome. I know this has been a long journey for each of us. Some of you might have worried that what I promised might not come true. Some of you might be thinking you’re better off losing yourselves in the world, pretending to be someone you’re not. Do not despair, children…” The crowd grew restless, but the woman didn’t care. She glowed like a sunbeam, her hair long and golden, her dress black and white, her sapphire eyes burning like nothing I’d seen before. Even her voice… it was sweet and different, designed to send a rush of adrenalin through me as I listened. “Do not despair, for we shall have it. Soon, everything we have worked for will become a reality. Soon, we shall have it all. You! You shall have it all!”

The clones roared and clapped with delight, while the woman smiled and enjoyed their reaction, taking it all in, sipping from the joy of each and every person present.

“You know the switch is needed, and a perilous journey lies ahead. Certain conditions must be met,” she went on to say, growing suddenly serious. “Most importantly, we need more portals.”

“Every time you open one, one of us dies!” a clone shouted. “And we never know which one of us it will be until it’s too late!”

The golden woman was unmoved. “It is a minimal price to pay for greatness and freedom, don’t you think? Besides, there are more of you in my laboratories than there are stars in the sky. I only need to greenlight your production. So, it doesn’t matter which of you dies. Your lives are needed to fuel the portals, and your lives are absolutely replaceable. This is about more than just your well-deserved rewards, however. How much longer shall we let those Shadians think they own the world, huh?”

The clones burst into cheers, shaking their fists as the golden woman smiled once more.

“We will take it,” she said. “We will take it all!”

That was everything the crowd needed to explode, applauding and crying and laughing at the same time. By the time the video ended, we were slightly wiser but just as confused. It took us a while to even formulate thoughts after what we’d watched. We had so many questions.

“Do you think that’s where the kids are?” Phoenix said, asking the most important question of them all.

I wanted to say yes, but the thought horrified me because it meant our children were out there in that wretched plane of existence, surrounded by awful clones that were led by that golden woman with way too much power of persuasion in her voice.

“We need to get to them. Fast.” Derek said what I couldn’t. He was scared, too. I could see it in his eyes. Rose and Ben were troubled, stealing glances at one another. We knew what the general consensus was, but nobody wanted to say it aloud.

Our children were in deep trouble, if that was their current environment. The worst part was that we couldn’t do a damn thing to get to them. Not until one of those shimmering portals opened.