The Shadow Society

by Marie Rutkoski

  It was as if I had slapped him. Honestly, if I had known I’d get that kind of reaction from those words I would have said them earlier.

  He turned. Walked out of the kitchen. Walked down the hall, picking up the pace. Then straight out the front door, letting it slam behind him.

  Without mentioning when or where we’d next meet.

  The IBI deal, it seemed, was off.

  Well, I wasn’t going to cry over it. As it happened, Conn had given me a piece of useful information, about portals. The IBI had never said how they’d send me back to my world, and they’d never claimed that only they could do it. It was stupid of me not to notice that before.

  I’d find my own way home. In the meantime, I’d ask Orion if he knew anything about a five-year-old girl arrested in 1997.

  I raised the hood of my coat and left the house.

  There was no sign of Conn—and, really, that was for the best.

  I headed north on Michigan Avenue, hugging my arms to me for warmth. I had a long walk ahead. One free of certain people and public transportation systems I despised.

  The wind blew down the street, lifting a skeleton of ivy that trailed along a brick wall. It ruffled the tailcoat of a man walking toward me, the only other person on the street.

  His footsteps quickened. His eyes darted to mine. I had just enough time to realize that my sunglasses were in my coat pocket and that I had forgotten the wig in the house when a gust of wind blew back my hood.

  My black hair swirled in the air. The man stopped. Horror broke across his face.

  I thought he would run.

  And he did. Straight at me.

  He slammed into my chest and caught me by the throat before I could fall.

  25

  “Murderer!” he screamed. I scratched at his hands, trying to pry them from my throat, but he crushed harder. I couldn’t breathe.

  I fell to my knees and he raged down at me, his words getting so cruel and dirty that I was grateful when the rushing sound in my ears drowned out his voice. Lights spattered across my vision and I felt his spit on my face. The shock of it overwhelmed me, and things were starting to go dark when something rammed into the man’s side and knocked him away.

  Conn shoved him up against the brick wall, wrenched his arms behind his back, and cuffed him. The man struggled against the steel bracelets. He tried to break away as Conn hauled him to the nearest lamppost and chained him to it. “You traitor!” he howled at Conn, who stalked away.

  Toward me. He knelt on the cold sidewalk and held my shoulders with hands that felt kind. Yet his face was furious. “Darcy—”

  I shrank away. “I didn’t do it,” I croaked. “I couldn’t have killed anyone.”

  “I know.”

  I let him help me up and lead me down the street, far from the screaming man. “Why did he do that?” I wiped at the wetness on my cheeks, which could have been the man’s spit or my tears. “He doesn’t know me. He can’t know me.”

  “That doesn’t matter.” Conn’s mouth pressed into a line so thin it looked like it could cut. “To most people, Shades are all alike. You’re all murderers.”

  I was so dizzy and breathless that it was a full, long minute before I realized that Conn’s arm was warm around me. I stepped away.

  “Most people,” he said. “Not me.” As gentle as his words seemed, hostility flared from his body like fire. He reached for me.

  “Don’t.”

  His hand fell. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, I’m not.” He pressed his fingertips against his brow, hiding his face. I sensed the rage echoing behind his hands, even if I couldn’t see it anymore. He took a deep, deliberate breath. His hands fell away. “We don’t have much time,” he said. “I have to go back there and deal with that.” He tilted his head in the direction of the man. “Put this on.” He handed me my wig. “When I went back to the house and saw that you’d left, that you were gone, I…” He stopped. “If something had happened, it would have been my fault. I was stupid. I was”—he looked away—“unprofessional.”

  I rubbed my throat. I couldn’t believe that he was the one acting like it hurt to talk.

  He said, “If I hadn’t found you—”

  “So is he another IBI agent?” I nodded at the man. “Like Michael? Did you pay him to do that?”

  Conn didn’t speak. He looked stricken, which was nice to see. “You should go,” he said finally. “Meet me a week from this Thursday at the Jennie Twist Library, 118 Schiller Avenue, ten-forty a.m. Go to the third floor and browse for books. An IBI agent posing as a librarian will lead you to a private study room. I’ll see you on Thursday?”

  I shrugged. “You will if you find out more about that photo.”

  “I said you wouldn’t owe me anything for that, but I’ve changed my mind.”

  Of course he had.

  “You need to do something for me,” he said. “You need to learn how to ghost.”

  * * *

  AS DAYS PASSED, I should have been trying to meet Conn’s requirement, but I could only think about how much I missed food, which was nowhere to be found in the Sanctuary.

  The bottles of water did their trick, I guess. I was never physically hungry. But I was full of longing. I wanted fries so hot they’d burn the roof of my mouth. Spaghetti wound tight around a fork. Crunchy cucumbers. Toasted bread with a slick coat of butter. A bowl of ice cream as I curled up on Marsha’s couch by the radiator.

  When I asked Orion where they kept the real food, he said, “You mean human food.”

  “I just want something that tastes good.”

  He cocked one brow. “You don’t have to search far for that.”

  “Orion.”

  “Darcy.” He leaned against the large oak tree growing in the center of my new Sanctuary bedroom. It had been three days since I’d seen Conn.

  “I’m serious.” I reached for the closest branch and began to climb. “It’s driving me crazy.” My foot slipped against the bark.

  “I heard that,” Orion called from below. “You’re going to fall.” He almost sounded like he wished I would.

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Only because you think I’ll catch you.”

  I snorted.

  “I heard that, too,” he said.

  I reached the top of the branches and surveyed my room with its shiny black marble floors. The large bed was draped with fine white linen, and lamps glowed from deeply set niches in the walls.

  Orion appeared on a branch next to me. He lounged, swinging one foot in the air. “Why are you climbing this tree?”

  “To make it rustle.”

  “To make it rustle?”

  “The Society’s given me this swanky room with a great big galloping tree growing out of the floor, and I can’t sleep at night because it’s too quiet. Trees always rustle, Orion. But there’s no wind here, no windows, not even a draft.”

  “Hmm.” Orion’s midnight eyes grew thoughtful. “I understand. It’s hard to accept what humans have taken away from us. We can’t enjoy the world above—the trees, the sky—without feeling hunted, so we do our best to bring the world into our home. But you’re right. It’s not the same.”

  Orion hadn’t understood, not really, or he would have realized that even though what I’d said was true, I’d also climbed the tree to place some distance between us. And now he was mere inches away.

  “You only want food because you’re used to it,” Orion said. “And because you’re always in your body. If you were a ghost, you wouldn’t be hungry. That’s why we don’t bother keeping human food in the Sanctuary. It spoils, and we don’t need to eat often. So we drink IBI water.”

  “Are you telling me the IBI never eats real food?” When Conn had given me that water in IBI headquarters, I’d thought it was supposed to be a quick fix, not a way of life.

  I was right. “They use the water for military operations,” Orion said. He propped an elbow on the trun
k and rested his temple against his fist. “It’s a recent invention of theirs, and a good one. We love stealing their supplies.”

  “If I ghosted, how long could I go without food?”

  “As long as you needed.” He paused. “I think you’re missing the point. When you ghost, your body ceases to exist, so everything that it does stops. You stop digesting food. You stop growing hair. You stop aging.”

  I nearly fell out of the tree. “Are you saying that Shades live forever?”

  “We can live a very long time.”

  “So you could … put your body on pause, manifest ten years later, and still look exactly the same?”

  “You could, too.”

  This meant that no one in the Society was the age they seemed. It meant that age had no meaning. I clung hard to the tree trunk. This was disorienting. It made my brain feel like a planet that had been zapped with an antigravity beam. All my thoughts were soaring off the ground and crashing into each other. Some things were starting to make sense, though, like how Zephyr could be in charge of the Council when she looked like a college student. “How old is Zephyr?”

  “I think she’s in her nineties.”

  “What?”

  “Ninety-seven? Ninety-eight? I can’t remember.”

  “Wait. How old are you?” Orion looked my age, but for all I knew, he could be a grandfather.

  “You look faint. Maybe we should climb down and have this conversation on solid ground.”

  “Orion.”

  “I’m nineteen.” He studied me. “Does that make you see me differently?”

  My mind skipped back to something he’d said earlier. That I could look young longer, too. That I could prolong my life. That I— “Oh my God,” I said. “How old am I?”

  Orion shrugged. “Probably more or less the age you think you are. You were abandoned in the Alter as a child, and most children can’t control their shadows very well. They don’t have the training or attention span. But since you can’t remember your early childhood, we’ve no idea how much of your life, total, you’ve spent as a ghost. Nothing’s certain.”

  I began to climb down from the tree. I was shaking. In the end, Orion did have to catch me. He was waiting at the bottom when I missed a branch.

  “Told you so.” He set me on the bed, then stretched himself on the blanket, a black, sinuous line against the white. “There. Now don’t you feel better?”

  I remained seated at the edge of the bed, but for once I didn’t move away from Orion, because I was suddenly grateful that he was there to hold on to. If I wanted.

  Which, you know, I didn’t.

  But I could.

  “Every time I think I’ve gotten used to my new life, something newer happens,” I said.

  “How old your body will be is a choice, Darcy. There are Shades like Zephyr who want to get as close to immortality as possible. They think a longer life means more wisdom, and that more wisdom means more power. But the body has its powers, too, and its own ways of being wise.

  “I’ve spent”—he glanced down at himself—“perhaps two years total of my life as a ghost. Even brief minutes out of my body add up, eventually. But two years is nothing. I need to know how to live in my skin if I’m to be ready for whatever humans might try next. They attack us when they can. A few months ago, a Shade was burned to death in the streets by an angry mob.”

  I knew the answer, but still I asked, “Why?”

  “Why?” He gave a hard laugh. “Why not? Because he was there. Why were humans chasing you, the day we met?”

  I would never get used to it. I’d never be able to believe that so many people wanted me dead. How terrible, to die. How worse, for my death to make someone happy. I touched the scar on my neck, and a memory almost quivered through me. Then it ebbed, and faded.

  “Darcy.” Orion’s voice startled me. “Finding out what you can do is good news. The gift to ghost and manifest is your heritage. Do you realize how jealous humans would be if they knew?”

  “They don’t?”

  “They did, long ago in the Alter, and look where it got us. The Society has tried very hard in the past hundred or so years to hide this from humans. When we’re arrested, we give false names, false ages. Even if we’re voxed.”

  With a sinking feeling, I realized that details I’d thought would be important about my photograph—like a name, an exact date—might be totally useless. It was as Orion said: nothing was certain. Unless Conn found out why I’d been arrested as a child, I’d get no closer to my past.

  “How long can we live?” I asked.

  “The oldest Shade in history died at almost two hundred. We don’t get sick, but the body wears out eventually.”

  I gave him an incredulous look, which he misinterpreted as disappointment. “It’s not forever,” he said defensively, “but it’s a long time. You should be glad.”

  His expression was growing troubled. The last thing I wanted was for him to think I wasn’t stoked about being a Shade, so I smiled at him, though inwardly I kicked myself for letting this conversation go the way it had. I’d meant to talk to Orion about interdimensional portals. Now I realized that I couldn’t do that without tipping him off to the fact that I wanted to lunge through one of them and head home. He was too sensitive to any hint that I was less than thrilled with Shadedom.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Humans are lame. They can have their spaghetti with pesto made from fresh basil with lots of Parmesan and pine nuts. Who needs it? I’d much rather be able to ghost when I want and live how I want, however long I want.”

  “Bravo!”

  “I bet you thought I was feeling sad or something, but—” I cast about for some kind of explanation and remembered how Orion had asked if learning his age had made me feel differently about him.

  Insecurity. The realization was stunning. Orion, always confident, always outrageously flirty, had had a moment of insecurity. Because of how I might see him.

  Because of me.

  “I was worried that you think I look ancient,” I said. “Worn out. Damaged.” I showed him my hands. “I have these scars.”

  He sat up and took my hands in his. “You don’t look worn out. You look like a warrior.”

  Not exactly what every girl longs to hear.

  I felt the strength in Orion’s long, thin hands and wondered if I dared to ask him what had been haunting me. Was it a safe question?

  Was anything?

  We used to sell Mexican jumping beans at the Jumping Bean Café. They were encased in plastic boxes, and hopped and danced like they were full of voodoo. They weren’t really alive, but something inside them was. A worm. A tiny parasite that had eaten its way to the center of each bean. When it moved, the bean jumped.

  I had an idea. It had burrowed inside me like one of those worms.

  “I want to ask you something,” I told Orion.

  “You can ask me anything.”

  “Could my disappearance from this world … my memory loss … could it have something to do with the Ravenswood Medical Center attack?”

  He dropped my hands. “What do you know about Ravenswood?”

  “I know it happened in 1997. I was five years old then. It was the year I was abandoned in the Alter.” It was also the year the IBI took my photograph. “Maybe it’s no coincidence.”

  “Impossible.” He shook his head. “The Shades involved in that operation died.”

  I remembered the sickening image splayed on the wall behind Fitzgerald. “So it happened. The Society really did it.”

  “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.”