“Why are you doing this?” I hadn’t meant to speak to him. I certainly hadn’t meant my words to sound so weak and tiny.
From his corner of the truck, Michael answered, “Because it’s fun. And we get paid.”
“Who is he?” I said to Conn.
“My partner.”
“So what was that, that night at the café?” I remembered Conn’s words to me, afterward: You trust me, don’t you. I drew my breath so sharply it seemed to cut. “You staged the attack. It was a trick. To make me like you.”
“Smart girl,” said Michael.
I looked straight at Conn. “Tell me,” I said thickly. “Tell me what is going on.”
He paused, then said, “If you really don’t know why you’re under arrest, I don’t have the authority to explain it to you.”
“If I don’t know? How would I—” I started to struggle to my feet.
A guard held me. “Sir? Another match?”
Conn shook his head. “She needs to be questioned. She’ll be fine. Won’t you, Darcy? You don’t want us to drag you out. Now, your firecuffs.” He tapped my glass chain. “You remember what they can do. You may not know, however, that they have different settings. When I cuffed you the first time, I used the lowest setting, for a small fire. Your chains are now set at the highest level. These”—he pointed at a guard’s silvery tube—“are flamethrowers. I want to make something very clear before we walk out of this truck. If you try to break your cuffs, if you try to escape, if you try to do anything that might make us think that you will be a danger to others, you will die. Do you understand?”
Silence.
“Answer me.” Fiercely.
“Yeah, I get it.”
“Good. Help her stand,” he told the guards.
Conn flung open the back of the truck.
17
I stepped outside, and staggered.
It wasn’t the chains that made me lose my balance, or that a guard jerked too hard. It wasn’t even the crowd in front of a huge building, a uniformed crew of men and women gathered, it seemed, for the sole purpose of glaring at me with such rage that it throbbed from them like heat off asphalt.
It was the building.
An old monstrosity with columns. These words were carved into the marble above the entrance: The Interdimensional Bureau of Investigation.
Even crazier? I recognized it. I recognized everything. The globe-topped street lamps. The marble archway. I knew that there were exactly twenty-seven steps leading up to the main entrance. And I should know, because I had drawn this building in great detail, down to the chipped ear on a stone gargoyle. It was all in my sketchbook. Everything except the inscription—which, unlike everything else, I didn’t recognize from the sketch I’d drawn that day in Mr. Linden’s classroom.
I recognized it from my memory. I had been here before. If I didn’t know how or why, that could only mean I’d seen it sometime before being abandoned outside the Chicago firehouse.
My memory was so untrustworthy. Maybe I had done something to deserve these people’s anger. Something awful. But what?
I could never kill anyone.
Some things you just know for sure, right?
But then, I also used to think that the world was solid and governed by certain laws. That people don’t disappear—unless we’re talking about parents dumping their kids on the DCFS and saying, “Ta. See you never.” Nobody actually vanishes into thin air.
Except me.
I remembered slamming a fist into my ex–foster father’s face and feeling his jaw crunch under my knuckles. It had felt good.
Maybe I was dangerous after all.
Maybe I had no idea who I was, or what I was capable of.
My thoughts were swirling, tumbling like a load of dirty laundry. I barely noticed my surroundings as they marched me up those twenty-seven steps and through the entrance. My three personal guards were dragging me toward a guarded gate that crackled with energy, when Conn caught Michael by the shoulder.
“This is my arrest,” Conn said.
Michael’s eyes narrowed. “Yours?”
“You weren’t there when it happened. And I outrank you.”
Michael shrugged off his hand. “Well, screw you, too,” he spat, and stalked away.
“McCrea.” One of the guards at the gate grinned at me. “Nice catch.”
“ID,” the other guy droned.
“I lost it,” said Conn.
“What?” said the first guard. “Prince Connor the Perfect, valedictorian of the IBI Academy, lost his badge? Well, I am truly sorry to say that I don’t think we can let you in without proper identification.”
Conn snapped at him with the irritation of somebody at the end of his rope. The first guard kept teasing him while the second one picked at his teeth with a thumbnail. Things carried on like this for some time. I had an almost serious thought of breaking my chains, just to make Conn and his old school buddy shut up, when a uniformed girl rushed toward us. She gazed at Conn with syrupy hero worship. “Chief Ivers wants to see the Shade right away.”
“Ivers?” The first guard’s eyebrows shot up. He pressed his fingerprint against a shiny square embedded in the nearest post of the electrified gate. The zing and crackle was sucked out of the air in front of us, and Conn swept through the gate without a backward look, letting me and the ogres trail behind.
Their boots rang down a hall that smelled old. Slightly dank and booky, like a library or a church. Then a door was flung open and I was ushered into a room with two chairs, one of which was made of iron and bolted to the floor. In the other chair, which looked infinitely more comfortable, sat a gleeful middle-aged man rubbing his mustache. Ivers, I assumed.
“Agent McCrea.” Ivers stood, and pumped Conn’s hand. “Fine work you’ve done here. Back from the Alter in record time, with barely a scratch on you.” He smiled widely, showing a set of perfect teeth. “You’ll get a commendation for this, I assure you.”
Conn shrugged. “I was doing my job.”
“Don’t be so modest. I know you. You’re ruthless, kid, and it suits you. God knows that it’s helped you bag more Shades than anyone else your age.” Ivers clapped his large hands once and then spread them apart like a showman. “Let’s unwrap your present.”
The guards dragged me to the narrow, iron chair and shoved me down, shackling my chains to the arms and legs. Ivers settled his well-fed frame into the chair across from me and dismissed the guards. He peered at me with a hard twinkle as he did it, apparently to communicate that he wasn’t afraid to be left alone in my oh-so-savage company.