The Shadow Society

by Marie Rutkoski

  “Of course.”

  “Haven’t you ever noticed how they speak to one another? How they use names?”

  “We study humans for self-defense. You’re talking about cultural habits. We don’t care about that. You’re home now, Darcy. You’re one of us. You need to learn what matters.”

  “Am I home?” I looked around the park, and it hit me that it wasn’t a park. It was Graceland Cemetery. “You’re kidding.”

  He brushed the snow off a marble grave slab and pried up one edge. It lifted like a hatch, revealing an underground tunnel. “After you.”

  Give me some credit. I did consider the possibility that the underground tunnel wasn’t going to lead to a party with streamers and balloons and a big banner saying, “Welcome home, Darcy!” But I went down anyway.

  I dropped about fifteen feet. The shock of hitting the packed earth below made me stumble and really dislike Orion, who landed as lightly as a cat. He had probably ghosted his way down most of the tunnel. Cheater.

  He reached into a tangle of roots and must have flipped some kind of switch. The tunnel glowed with sudden light, illuminating a passageway where the earth merged into stone walls and floors.

  “How do you get electricity down here?” I asked, peering down the tunnel. Yes, I was stalling. That fall had shaken some sense into my head, reminding me (now that it was too late, now that I was trapped in an underground Lair of Doom) that Shades were supposed to be mass murderers. Hadn’t Orion threatened to slaughter that angry mob?

  But no, that had been a joke. Or a bluff. Or both.

  Right?

  I kept babbling. “Doesn’t the IBI notice power being sucked out of the city to a hole under Graceland Cemetery? You might as well set up a flashing sign saying ‘We’re here. Come and get us!’ over one of the mausoleums.”

  “We use solar energy. Many of the gravestones absorb sunlight, and its energy is conducted, stored, and used here.” He paused.

  The funny thing about being alone with someone who was maybe an Evildoer with a capital E is that, no matter how attractive he is (in a gaunt, French runway model kind of way), a pause isn’t just a pause. It’s a heavy, sharp weapon. “You look nervous,” he said.

  “Me?”

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “Nope. Nothing.” Aside from planning to spy on you and report back to your enemy, whom I happen to hate.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought you to the Sanctuary. This might go badly if you’re not ready yet. I can return you to the surface.”

  “No. I’m … you’re right. I am nervous. There’s a lot I don’t know. About who I really am. How to act. You said it yourself: I need to learn what matters, as a Shade. I hope that everyone else will be as nice as you.”

  That won me a warm look. Ah, flattery. How had I overlooked this very useful tool all my life?

  Orion led the way down the tunnel. I followed, and stopped asking questions about how this place had been built. I didn’t need to. Orion had taken my question about electricity as an invitation to give an eager lecture about the Sanctuary, which was built in the nineteenth century. Its halls were made from Illinois limestone, he said, and its running water was pumped in from Lake Michigan.

  The echoing tunnel flowed into a spiraling staircase that sucked us deeper into the earth as Orion explained that Shades had constructed the Sanctuary when their society began to change from a close-knit community based solely in Chicago to a nomadic collection of clans that traveled far and wide. “Different groups within the Society have different interests. We don’t always agree. Yet we have a common adversary, and a common history. These things will always bring us together, and the Sanctuary provides a home to all Shades, wherever they come from.”

  The tunnel opened into a chamber with soaring ceilings. High up—maybe hundreds of feet high—arcades lined the walls. Passageways with balconies looped overhead, and I was so busy wondering if anybody up there was looking down at us that I didn’t notice the appearance of another Shade until I bumped into her.

  “Idiot!” The young woman had tiny hands. Tiny or not, they felt pretty strong when she gave me a good shove. “Have you no manners? Orion, who is this filthy creature?”

  “Well, it’s a very interesting story—”

  “Get to the point.”

  Orion described our meeting. “So you see, Darcy meant no disrespect. Of course she should have avoided physical contact with you, but she can’t ghost. She has lived in the Alter almost her entire life—”

  “Then she is no proper Shade! What were you thinking, bringing her here?”

  He paused. “I shouldn’t have to remind you that our law requires us to offer shelter to any Shade.”

  “This matter should have been brought before the Council first. And it certainly will be.”

  She vanished.

  “The Council.” Orion sighed that kind of sigh that tells you that someone is totally screwed.

  That someone being almost certainly me.

  21

  I had traded one prison for another.

  It wasn’t long before Orion and I were surrounded by Shades. They flashed into being, their faces as pale as cold stars. No one laid a hand on me, but the threat in their eyes was clear, and Orion whispered that I should do as they said. This meant getting locked into a small cell with a narrow bed and a stockpile of bottled water.

  “The water has a high caloric content,” Orion said as the other Shades shut the door behind them, throwing the lock. “And it’s full of electrolytes, so—”

  “Let me guess. It’s essentially a full meal.”

  “I’m sorry, Darcy. It’s against the spirit of the Society to imprison you like this. No Shade should be kept in a cage.”

  Of course, most Shades couldn’t be imprisoned, not in any normal sense of the word. Which—I realized as I looked at the bolted door—meant that this room wasn’t designed to hold them.

  It was a cell for humans.

  “Take heart,” Orion said. “This is one of our nicer cells, and you won’t be here for long. I’ll plead your case with the Council.”

  Then he disappeared.

  There wasn’t much to the room, but I discovered that what I thought was a closet door actually led to a bathroom. I went weak-kneed at the thought of being clean. I stripped off my clothes, telling myself that things weren’t so bad, that I should take heart, like Orion said. Sure, being dragged to another dimension and finding out you’re not human is higher up on the scale of life-altering events than getting booted out by yet another set of foster parents. Maybe being in jail sucks a bit more than living in a group home. But I’d been through a lot. I could get through this.

  Naked, I shivered. I looked down at this body that was mine and yet not at all what I’d thought it was. Then I saw my bruise.

  I had a lot of them at this point, but this wasn’t just any bruise. The one that caught my eye was a small purple smudge on my wrist.

  “Hello, you,” I whispered. The memory of Conn’s touch welled up within me.

  And Darcy Jones, the tough girl with the snide remarks, the one who had been broken and remade every year, in every new home, in every new school, and every new life, crumpled. Tears slid into my mouth and then fell onto my hands until I covered my face.

  I didn’t want to be a Shade. I didn’t want to disappear. I hugged my arms to my chest. Stay, stay, I told my skin.

  If I vanished, I might never find myself again.

  * * *

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Shades came and went. They examined my injuries, asked me questions. By the time I started receiving visitors, I had sucked back my tears and scraped myself together, though I nearly lost it again when I found a hairpin lying on the slick shower tiles. The little stowaway. I must have missed it when I’d pulled apart my lopsided effort at elegant hair on that Saturday morning that felt like forever ago.

  I flicked the pin into the corner of the bathroom.

  Wh
en the Shades came, I told my story over and over again. That I didn’t remember how I’d gotten to the Alter as a child, that I hadn’t known what I was, that I’d been minding my own supposedly human business when an IBI agent hauled me into this world. I’d broken my firecuffs and ghosted out of IBI headquarters.

  “But you say you don’t know how to ghost and manifest,” said one Shade with a short black beard.

  “Manifest?”

  “Appear.”

  “It just kind of happens. Or doesn’t.” I knew that sounded lame. I didn’t need this guy’s skeptical look to remind me. He gave me one anyway.

  “Perhaps it’s pure instinct.” This came from a middle-aged woman with ropy arms and burns wrinkling half her face. “Think of her as a child, Veldt,” she told the man. “One that has been raised by wolves.”

  It probably wasn’t a great idea to scowl at one of the few people who seemed to be on my side. But when I did, she chuckled.

  “There is no humor in this situation,” Veldt snapped. “We have no proof that anything she says is true.”

  “Then what do you propose?” she countered. “Imprison her forever? Perhaps we should experiment on her. Cut her open to discover why she can’t control her shadow.”

  That sounded like one of those fake, extreme things people say in order to sound snarky. But Veldt hadn’t rolled his eyes. He hadn’t told her she was being ridiculous. Fear zigzagged through me—not quite panic, not yet. But getting there.

  “Is that what you think we should do?” the woman continued. “No. A thousand times no. She is one of us.”

  Veldt made a frustrated noise. “Now, more than ever, we need to be careful.”

  “We need to embrace the risks of who we are!”

  They continued to bicker in a deadlocked way, and my fear ebbed when it seemed that there were no immediate plans for eviscerating me.

  I hadn’t missed the significance of what Veldt had suggested: something was afoot inside the Society. Now, more than ever. I wanted to ask him what he’d meant by that, but I figured that if the IBI was right and the Society was planning an attack, asking questions that came too close to that truth wouldn’t help my Little Lost Lamb image.

  One question seemed innocent enough. “Can you tell me what day it is?” I interrupted. “I’m losing track of time. No window, no clock. Trapped hundreds of miles below the earth’s surface, you know?”

  “Wednesday,” said the woman.

  Wednesday. My meeting with Conn was supposed to be yesterday. I wondered what he’d felt, waiting, and how long he’d stayed, and what his final thought had been before giving up and heading home. I imagined him pacing. Anxious, even if only for himself and the trouble he’d get into when he told Fitzgerald that the Shade had slipped through his fingers. I saw his face taut with worry.

  It almost cheered me up.

  * * *

  I SLEPT. Drank tons of water. You might not think water has a taste, but it does—a kind of non-taste taste—and I got sick of it. Time stretched and bent and tied itself into knots and finally ceased to exist. I began to wonder if I was losing my mind, or if one of the several fires I’d been tormented with had damaged my eyes, because sometimes I saw dark blurs in the corner of my vision, flickering against the walls.

  “Really?” Orion said when I told him during one of his visits. “That’s wonderful!”

  “Please tell me that the Society doesn’t think that going blind is a holy rite of passage.”

  “Of course not,” he said when he had stopped laughing. “You’re just coming into your own. Shades don’t disappear completely. We leave a trace. A shadow. Most humans, however, never see it. The fact that you do means that you’re starting to remember what it means to be a Shade.”

  This strange thought—that I was learning how to not be human—crinkled my brain, completely distracting me from an important significance of what he’d just said. Then I got it. “Are you saying that Shades have been in my room? Spying on me?”

  He brushed aside my anger. “You’re under observation, Darcy. What did you expect?”

  “There are laws against that in my world!”

  “Your world?” His black eyes narrowed, all laughter gone. “And in your world, is it unheard of for prisoners to be monitored by, say, video cameras?”

  “But I had no idea! I never even thought…” I felt like I’d been dipped in slime, and it occurred to me that this was what people in this world had to deal with on a daily basis. The possibility of being surveilled. Never trusting that any moment was truly private. “No wonder humans hate you.”

  “Unbelievable.” There was a dangerous curl to his mouth. “It’s unbelievable how ignorant you are. Do you even know what caused the break between your reality and ours?”

  “Yes.” I drew myself up to my full height. “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. It was the Great Chicago Fire.”

  “And who caused it?”

  “Mrs. O’Leary.”

  He choked.

  “I mean, her cow. Like in the song.” I sang the rhyme every Chicagoland kid is taught in school:

  “Late one night when we were all in bed,

  Mrs. O’Leary lit a lantern in the shed.

  The cow kicked it over, and Mrs. O’Leary said,

  ‘It’s going to be a hot time in the old town tonight.

  Fire! Fire! Fire!’”

  “That,” said Orion, “is absurd. It was a witch hunt. A witch hunt burned down the city. Surely you must have been curious about the fact that there are no Shades in the Alter.”

  “Not really. It’s hard to notice the absence of people you don’t know exist.”

  “There are no Shades in the Alter because they were murdered. Every man, woman, and child. It was a genocide.”

  Words have different weights. This one would break any scale. It lay there, heavy and hard, between us.

  “There were never very many of us,” Orion said. “We don’t know how we came to exist, though legend tells that the first Shades were born on the shores of Lake Michigan in a meteor shower, and that this is why fire can kill us. We came from fire, and so fire will return us to the darkness.

  “Humans hated us, and we were afraid of our own shadows. Afraid to embrace who we were. Afraid of what humans might do. They did it anyway. They burned us from our homes. They set women on fire with torches made from the hair of their children. The fire swept out of control and raged through the city for three days. When the ash settled, the Society was gone and humans in the Alter insisted that nothing, not even a memory, should remain of it. It was forbidden to speak about Shades, and all evidence that they had ever existed was burned.

  “Humans here revere the Great Fire. There are monuments to it in the center of town. Not a day goes by that the Society doesn’t dread that this world will try to reenact what yours did.” His eyes pinned mine. “The humans struck first. Anything else that we did later, we did in self-defense. Consider that. Consider it while you wait for the judgment of the Council. Given your current attitude, there will be time for you to think about it.”

  He vanished.

  I hated Orion. Who was he to expect me to embrace the ways of people I didn’t know? I hated the entire spying Society, for watching me while I wept. I hated Fitzgerald, for making me lie. Didn’t she know how hard it was to fake it, to create a new me, every time I met a Shade? It was exhausting. It was horrible. So was she.

  I even hated my friends, for not being there.

  I hated Conn. For everything.

  And I hated J. Alfred Prufrock.

  Because he waits and wanders and dithers and can never make up his mind. Because he tells himself there’s time to think and think and think. But there’s not enough time. There never is. Not for anybody in this whole universe. We always want more. Why waste it doing nothing?

  It was time to take matters into my own hands.

  A brilliant thought crashed and shook in my mind like a gong. I raced into the bathroom, fell to my ha
nds and knees, and snatched the hairpin from its dusty corner.

  Know why jailbreakers and burglars in movies always use a bobby pin to unlock doors?

  Because it works.

  22

  What they don’t show you in movies, and what the Ingleside Home girls had showed me long ago, is that you also need a tension wrench.

  I glanced around the room, searching for shadows that didn’t belong there. I didn’t see any, but they could appear any second. I grabbed my backpack and stuffed it with water bottles.

  Now for the tension wrench.

  After some thought, I attacked the bed. It was squeaky and old and—thank God—held together with screws. I twisted off a few and pulled away a metal bed slat. It would do.

  I stared at the lock on the door. It looked simple enough. The Ingleside girls would laugh at this so-called security. But I figured that the Shades weren’t super worried about me breaking out because A) they could probably tackle me in the halls, and B) I didn’t know how to get out of the Sanctuary. I had a plan for Problem A. As for B … well, I’d worry about B later.

  I bent the bobby pin into a right angle. Now I could use it as a pick. All I had to do was wriggle it into the lock and free the cylinder that blocked the whole mechanism. Little pins kept that cylinder in place.

  I stuck my pick in the lock and raked it along the pins. My hand shook. But I set the pins, pushing them back on their springs. The cylinder slid in its chamber, the lock shuddered open. I was free.

  And the Shade stationed outside my door noticed.

  I snatched a water bottle from my backpack and threw it at his head. He vanished, and the bottle smashed against the wall behind him. I ran, gripping the bed slat in one hand.

  Shadows swarmed behind me as I tried to retrace the steps Orion and I had taken to my prison. Sometimes a Shade would manifest at my side, and I’d lash out with the bed slat. Several of them tried to block my path. I fired bottles at them. I pounded into the Great Hall and had spotted the tunnel leading to the earth’s surface when countless Shades erupted into being, surrounding me with their dizzying similarity. Their gleaming eyes and skin and fierce faces. I slung bottle after bottle at them until I had none left. Then I struck out with the slat. The Shades flickered away. Flickered back. Finally I hit one, cracking the slat down on his arm. He cried out, fell back, then lunged forward with a kick to my side. I hit the ground, and Shades poured on top of me.