Silver Shadows

CHAPTER 7 Sydney

IT TOOK ALMOST A WEEK for the other detainees to stop moving their desks away from me or cringing if we happened to touch. They were still nowhere near being friendly to me, but Duncan swore I was making remarkable progress.

“I’ve seen it take weeks or even months to reach this point,” he told me in art class one day. “Before long, you’ll get asked to sit with the cool kids at lunch.”

“You could ask me,” I pointed out.

He grinned as he touched up a leaf on today’s still-life project: replicating the potted fern that lived on Addison’s desk. “You know the rules, kiddo. Someone else besides me has to reach out to you. Hang in there. Someone’ll get in trouble soon, and then your time will come. Jonah’s in trouble a lot. So is Hope. You’ll see.”

Since that first day, Duncan had pretty much restricted our social interaction to this class, aside from the occasional wisecrack in the halls if no one was close enough to hear. Consequently, I found myself craving art time. It was the only time anyone spoke to me like I was a real person. The other detainees ignored me throughout the day, and my instructors, whether it was in class or in purging, never failed to remind me of what a sinner I was. Duncan’s friendship centered me, reminding me that there was hope beyond this place. He was still cautious—even in this class—with his conversation. Although he rarely mentioned Chantal, the friend—who I secretly believed had been more than a friend—that the Alchemists had taken away, I could tell that her loss haunted him. He’d chat and smile with the others during meals but made a point of not talking to any one person excessively there or in classes. I think he was too afraid of risking anyone to the Alchemists’ wrath, even a casual acquaintance.

“You’re pretty good at this,” I said, noting the detail on his leaves. “Does that come from being here so long?”

“Nah, I used to paint as a hobby before coming here. I hate this still-life crap, though.” He paused to stare at his fern. “I’d kill just to free paint something abstract. I’d love to paint the sky. Who am I kidding? I’d love to see the sky. I never painted many outdoor scenes when I was assigned in Manhattan. Thought I was too good for it and would save myself for some Arizona sunset.”

“Manhattan? Wow. That’s pretty intense.”

“Intense,” he agreed. “And busy and loud and noisy. I hated it … and now I’d do anything to be back there. That’s where you and your broody boyfriend should end up.”

“We always talked about going somewhere like Rome,” I said.

Duncan scoffed. “Rome. Why deal with the language barrier when you can get everything you want stateside? You guys can get some sketchy apartment that you work two jobs to afford while you take classes on anything imaginable and he hangs out with his unemployed artist friends in Bushwick. Come home at night to eat Korean food with your kooky neighbors, then make love on your shabby mattress on the floor. The next day, start all over again.” He resumed painting. “Not a bad way of life.”

“Not bad at all,” I said, smiling in spite of myself. I could feel that smile fade as a pain lurched in my heart at the thought of any future with Adrian. What Duncan had described was as good as any of the “escape plans” Adrian and I used to concoct … and, at this moment, just as impossible. “Duncan … what did you mean when you said you’d do anything to be back there?”

“Don’t,” he warned.

“Don’t what?”

“You know what. I was just using an expression.”

“Yeah,” I began, “but if there was a way you could get out of here and—”

“There’s not,” he said bluntly. “You’re not the first to suggest it. You won’t be the last. And if I can help it, you won’t be thrown back into solitary for doing something stupid. I’ve told you, there’s no way out.”

I thought very carefully how to proceed. In the last year, he probably had seen others attempt to get out of here and, judging from his reaction, had watched them all fail. I’d asked him about exits a number of times, and like me, he’d never discovered where they were. I needed to find a different approach and gather other information that might lead to our freedom.

“Will you answer just two things for me?” I asked at last. “Not about exits?”

“If I can,” he said warily, still not making eye contact.

“Do you know where we are?”

“No,” he said promptly. “No one does, which is part of their plan. The only thing I’m sure of is that every level we ever go on is underground. That’s why there are no windows or obvious exits out.”

“Do you know how they get the gas in here? Don’t act like you don’t know what I mean,” I added, seeing him start to scowl. “You had to notice it when you were in solitary confinement. And they’re using it now to knock us out at night and keep us agitated and paranoid when we’re awake.”

“They don’t need any drugs for that,” he remarked. “Groupthink does a fine job of spreading that paranoia on its own.”

“Don’t dodge. Do you or do you not know where the gas comes from?”

“Come on, just because a fern’s a vascular plant doesn’t mean it’s producing carbon dioxide any differently,” he interrupted. I was taken aback, both by the weird subject change and the slight raising of his voice. “All the chemical reactions in basic photosynthesis are still there. It’s just a question of using spores instead of seeds.”

I was too lost to respond right away, and then I saw what he already had: Emma was standing near us, searching a drawer for colored pencils. And it was clear she was listening.

I swallowed and tried to string some semblance of words together. “I wasn’t arguing that. I was just pointing out what the fossil record says about megaphylls and microphylls. You’re the one who started getting bogged down with photosynthesis.”

Emma found what she needed and walked away, causing my knees to nearly give out from under me. “Oh my God,” I said, once she was out of earshot.

“That,” said Duncan, “is why you need to be more careful.”

Class ended, and I spent the rest of the day nervously waiting for Emma to report me to some authority, who’d haul me off for purging or, worse, back to the darkness. Of all the people to overhear us! The other detainees might not be social with me yet, but I’d already been able to observe who were better or worse candidates for allies. And Emma? She was the worst. Some of the others would occasionally slip up, much like Hope had that first day, making a wayward comment that got them in trouble. But my too-good roommate never, ever deviated from perfect Alchemist rhetoric. In fact, she went out of her way to bust others who didn’t fall in line. I honestly couldn’t figure out why she was still here.

But no one came for me. Emma didn’t so much as glance my way, and I dared hope that the only thing she’d heard was Duncan’s hasty photosynthesis excuse.

Communion time came around, and we all filed into the chapel. Some sat down in the folded chairs while others wandered the room like me. Yesterday had been Sunday, and in place of communion time, we’d gathered here in the pews, along with all our instructors, while a hierophant came and gave us a bona fide church service and prayed for our souls. It was the only part of our routine that had changed. Otherwise, we had the same classes on weekends as we did on weekdays. But that one service was empowering, not because of its message but because it was another way to mark time. Every piece of information I could get in this place could only be used to help me … I hoped.

That was why I read the Wall of Truth each day before our meeting. There was a history here of detainees who had come before me, and I longed to learn something. Mostly, all I found were the same sort of messages, and today was no exception. I have sinned against my kind and greatly regret it. Please take me back into the fold. The only salvation is human salvation. Another message read: Please let me out. Seeing Sheridan walk into the room, I was about to join the others when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. It was in a region of the wall I hadn’t gotten to yet, in scrawling writing:

Carly, I’m sorry.—K. D.

I felt my jaw drop. Was it possible … could it really be … the more I stared at it, the more I was certain of what I was seeing: an apology to my sister Carly, from Keith Darnell, the guy who’d raped her. I supposed it could be a different Carly and someone else with the same initials … but my gut told me otherwise. I knew Keith had been in re-education. His crimes had been of a much different nature than mine, and he’d also been released recently—recently being more than five months ago. He’d also practically been like a zombie by the time he’d gotten out of here. It was surreal thinking that he’d walked these same halls, gone to these same classes, endured the same purging. It was even more disturbing to wonder if I might be like him when I got out of here.

“Sydney?” asked Sheridan pleasantly. “Won’t you join us?”

Flushing, I realized I was the only one not sitting and hurried over to join the others. “Sorry,” I murmured.

“The Wall of Truth can be a very inspiring place,” said Sheridan. “Did you find something that spoke to your soul?”

I thought very carefully before answering and then decided the truth wouldn’t hurt me here. It might also help, since Sheridan was always trying to get me to talk. “Mostly I was surprised,” I said. “I recognized the name of someone I knew … someone who was here before me.”

“Did that person help corrupt you?” asked Lacey in innocent curiosity. It was one of the few times someone had shown semi-personal interest in me.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I was actually the one who reported him—who got him sent here.” Everyone looked interested, so I continued. “He was in business with a Moroi—an old, senile Moroi—and taking his blood. He told the Moroi it was being used for healing purposes, but he—this guy I knew—was actually selling it to a local tattooist who was in turn using it to sell performance-enhancing tattoos to human high school students. The blood in the ink would make them better at things, especially sports, but there were dangerous side effects.”

“Did your friend know?” asked Hope wonderingly. “That it was hurting humans?”

“He wasn’t my friend,” I said sharply. “Even before this started. And yes, he knew. He didn’t care, though. All he was focused on was the profit he was making.”

The other detainees were enraptured, maybe because they’d never heard me speak so much or maybe because they’d never heard of a scandal like this. “I bet that Moroi knew,” said Stuart darkly. “I bet he knew everything—what the tattoos were really being used for and how dangerous they were. He was probably just playing at being senile.”

The old Sydney—that is, the Sydney who’d been here on her first day—would’ve been quick to defend Clarence and his innocence in Keith’s scheme. This Sydney, who’d seen detainees punished for lesser comments and had endured two purgings this week, knew better. “It wasn’t my job to judge the Moroi’s behavior,” I said. “They’ll do what their natures tell them to do. But I knew no human should be subjecting other humans to the dangers my associate was. That was why I had to turn him in.”

To my amazement, a round of nods met me, and even Sheridan regarded me with approval. Then, she spoke. “That’s a very wise insight, Sydney. And yet something must have gone terribly wrong if you learned no lessons from that incident and ended up here yourself.”

All those eyes swiveled from her to me, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I discussed Adrian occasionally with Duncan, but this was different. Duncan didn’t judge or tear my romance apart. How could I bring up something so precious and powerful to me in front of this group, who would revile it and make it sound dirty? What I had with Adrian was beautiful. I didn’t want to lay it out to be trampled here.

And yet, how could I not? If I didn’t give them something, if I didn’t play their games … then how long would I be here? A year—or more—like Duncan? I’d told myself, back in that dark cell, that I’d say anything to get me out of here. I had to make good on that. Lies told here wouldn’t matter if they got me back to Adrian.

“I let my guard down,” I said simply. “My assignment had me working around a lot of Moroi, and I stopped thinking of them as the creatures they are. I guess after my associate, the lines of good and evil got blurred for me.”

I braced myself for Sheridan to start grilling me on the more intimate details of what had happened, but it was another girl, one named Amelia, who spoke up with something wholly unexpected. “That almost makes sense,” she said. “I mean, I wouldn’t have taken it to the, uh, extremes you did, but if you’d been around a corrupt human, it could maybe make you lose faith in your own kind and erroneously turn to the Moroi.”

Another guy I’d rarely spoken to, Devin, nodded in agreement. “Some of them can almost seem deceptively nice.”

Sheridan frowned slightly, and I thought those two might get in trouble for comments semi-favorable to the Moroi. She apparently decided to let it slide in favor of the progress I’d made today. “It’s very easy to get confused, especially when you’re out on assignment by yourself and things take unexpected turns. The important thing to remember is that we have an entire infrastructure in place to help you. If you have questions about right or wrong, don’t turn to the Moroi. Turn to us, and we’ll tell you what’s right.”

Because heaven forbid any of us think for ourselves, I thought bitterly. I was spared further romantic questioning as Sheridan turned her attention on the others to hear what kind of enlightenment they’d had that day. Not only was I off the hook, I’d apparently scored points with Sheridan and—as I saw when dinner came around—with some of my detainees.

When I took my tray from Baxter and started to walk toward an empty table, Amelia beckoned me to hers with a curt nod. I sat down beside her, and although no one actually made conversation with me for the meal, no one ordered me away or berated me. I ate wordlessly, instead taking in everything I heard around me. Most of their talk was typical of what I’d hear in Amberwood’s cafeteria, comments about the school day or roommates that snored. But it gave me more and more insight into their personalities, and I again began gauging who might be an ally.

Duncan had been sitting with others at another table, but when we passed each other leaving the cafeteria, he murmured, “See? I told you you were making progress. Now don’t screw it up.”

I almost smiled but had learned my lesson earlier today about getting too comfortable. So I kept what I hoped was a solemn and diligent look on my face as we shuffled off to the library to select our boring reading choices for the night. I ended up over in the history section, hoping for something a little more interesting than what I’d checked out recently. Alchemist histories were still full of lessons on morals and good behaviors, but at least those lessons weren’t explicitly directed at the reader, as most of the other self-help books were. I was debating over a couple of different medieval accounts when someone knelt beside me.

“Why did you want to know about the gas?” asked a quiet voice. I did a double take. It was Emma.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said lightly. “Do you mean in art today? Duncan and I were discussing the ferns.”

“Uh-huh.” She pulled out a book of Renaissance-era diaries and flipped through the pages. “I’m not going to say a word to you in our room, you know. It’s under surveillance. But if you want my help now, you’ve got about sixty seconds.”

“Why would you help me?” I demanded. “Assuming I even want it? Are you trying to trap me into something so that you can make yourself look better?”

She snorted. “If I wanted to ‘trap you into something,’ I’d have done it ages ago in our room, caught on video. Forty-five seconds. Why do you want to know about the gas?”

Anxiety crawled over me as I waffled on what to do. In my assessments of who might be an ally, Emma had never come up at all. And yet, here she was, offering the closest to sedition that anyone—even my friend Duncan—had presented so far. That made it all the more likely I was being set up, yet part of me just couldn’t resist the opportunity.

“The gas keeps us here as much as the guards and walls,” I said at last. “I just want to understand it.” Hopefully that wasn’t too incriminating.

Emma slipped the book back and selected another diary, this one with fancy embellishments. “The controls are in a workroom that’s on the same level as purging. Each bedroom also has a small pipe feeding in from that system. It’s right behind a ventilation panel near the ceiling.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I walked by some repair guys doing maintenance in an empty room once.”

“So it’d be easier to block it on a room-by-room basis than at the control level,” I murmured.

She shook her head. “Not when it’s right in line with the cameras in the bedrooms. The guards would be on you before you even had the panel off. Which you’d need a screwdriver for.”

She started to set her book back, and I took it from her. Glittering inks decorated the cover, and the corner of each chapter was covered with a flat piece of metal. I ran my fingers over one. “A flathead screwdriver?” I asked, sizing up the thickness of the metal corner. If I could pull it off, it’d make an okay tool to undo a screw.

A slow smile spread over Emma’s face. “As a matter of fact, yes. You get creativity points, I’ll give you that.” She studied me a few moments more. “Why do you want to block the gas? Seems like we’ve got a lot bigger problems—you know, the biggest one being that we’re stuck here.”

“You tell me something first,” I said, still not sure if Emma was part of some great sting operation that was going to get me in even worse trouble. “You’re pretty much the poster child for model Alchemist behavior. What did you do to get here?”

She hesitated before answering. “I sent away some guardians that had been assigned to help my Alchemist group in Kiev. There were some Moroi I knew that I thought needed the protection more than we did.”

“I can see where that would upset the powers-that-be,” I admitted. “But it seems like there are worse things, especially with how good you’ve been. Why are you still here?”

Her cocky smile shifted to something more bitter. “Because my sister isn’t. She went through all of this too, was discharged, and then went even more rogue than before. No one knows where she is, and now, no matter how many strides I make, they’re ensuring they don’t make the same mistake twice in letting me go too soon. Bad blood in our family, I guess.”

That would certainly explain things. She seemed sincere too, but she was also an Alchemist, and we were good at conning others. Another question popped into my head as my eyes darted across the room to where Duncan and a few others perused the sociology section. “Why has Duncan been here so long? He seems to be on good behavior. Bad blood in his family too?”

Emma followed my gaze. “My guess? Too good of behavior.”

“Is that even possible?” I asked, startled.

She shrugged. “He’s so docile, I think they’re worried he won’t be able to stand up to vampire influence, even if he wants to. So they’re afraid to let him out just yet. But they don’t want him to have too much of a spine because that kind of goes against the operating procedure here. I think he wants to be braver … but something holds him back—I mean, more than the usual stuff holding us all back.”

Chantal, I thought. That was what held him back. He’d had enough of a spine to befriend me, but Emma’s words explained why he was so cautious in even that. Losing Chantal had left its mark and made him too fearful to do anything else. Hoping I wasn’t making a terrible mistake, I took a deep breath and turned back to Emma.

“If the gas is off, I can get a message to the outside. That’s all I can tell you.”

Her eyebrows rose at that. “Are you certain? Tonight?”

“Absolutely,” I said. Adrian would be searching for me in dreams. He just needed a window of natural sleep.

“Hang on a minute,” Emma said after a little more thought.

She stood up and walked across the room, over to where Amelia was browsing. They conversed until the chimes rang, signaling it was time to return to our rooms. Emma hurried back to me. “Check out that book,” she said, nodding to the embellished diary. “I won’t say another word to you once we walk out that door. Go back to our room, count to sixty, and then go to town on whatever you need to do with the vent.”

“But what about the camera—”

“You’re on your own now,” she said, and walked off without another word.

I gaped for a few moments and then scurried to join the others who were signing out books with the librarian. As I filed out with them, I tried to look natural and not like my heart might pound out of my chest. Was Emma serious? Or was this the ultimate setup? What could she have possibly done in one conversation that would suddenly make it okay to tamper with the ventilation system? Because when we got back to our room, I could see the small black camera that watched us was pointing straight in the direction of the vent in question. Anyone opening it would be easily spotted.

It had to be a setup, but Emma made it clear from her body language that she was going to have no further interaction with me as we got ready for bed. I silently counted and knew she must have as well because when I reached sixty, she spared me one sharp, meaningful look.

There are easier ways to set me up, I thought. Easier ways with worse consequences.

With a gulp, I pushed my bed over to the wall and used it to stand on, so that I had easy access to the vent panel. I’d pulled off a metal page corner from the book, and Emma’s assessment had been correct. Its thickness was right on par with a flathead screwdriver. Of course, it was nowhere near as ergonomically easy to use as a screwdriver, but after a little fiddling, I finally got all four corners of the panel loosened enough to pull it off. My nerves and shaking hands weren’t helping speed along the process, and I had no clue how long I might have to do this—or if Emma would warn me when time was up.

Inside, I found an ordinary ventilation shaft. It was too small to crawl through, so there’d be no movie-worthy escapes that way. As she’d told me, a small pipe was attached to the vent’s side, opening just behind the panel’s grates to feed its fumes into our room when the lights went out. Now I needed to block the pipe. I reached down to the bed, where I’d put an old sock retrieved from our room’s laundry hamper earlier. I didn’t put it past the Alchemists to take inventory of our clothing regularly, but I also knew when this was picked up, it was promptly dumped into a larger bin of clothes. If they noticed a missing sock, they wouldn’t know whose room it had come from. And surely even Alchemist dryers ate socks sometimes.

I crammed the sock into the pipe as best I could, hoping it was enough to keep the worst of the gas out. Behind me, under her breath, I heard Emma mutter, “Hurry.” My hands slick with sweat, I screwed the panel back into place and just barely remembered to move my bed before flouncing onto it with my book. The whole endeavor had taken less than five minutes, but was that enough?

Emma was fixated on her book and never so much as looked my way, but I caught the glimmer of a smile on her lips. Was that one of triumph over helping me achieve my goal? Or was she gloating at having tricked me into committing serious insubordination on camera?

If I had been busted, no one came for me that night. Our reading-time hour wound down, and before long, the lights went out and I heard the familiar click of the doors automatically locking. I snuggled into my sparsely made bed and waited for something else that had become familiar this last week: the artificially induced drowsiness brought on by the gas. It didn’t come.

It didn’t come.

I could hardly believe it. We’d pulled it off! I’d stopped the gas from getting into my room. The ironic part was, I could have used a little help in getting to sleep because I was so excited to talk to Adrian that I couldn’t calm down. It was like Christmas Eve. I lay in the dark for what had to be two hours before natural exhaustion won out and put me to sleep. My body was in a perpetual state of fatigue around here, both from the mental stress and the fact that the sleep we were given was just barely adequate. I slept soundly until the morning wakeup chimes, and that was when I realized the awful truth.

There’d been no dreams. Adrian hadn’t come.