He pulled a chair in front of me and sat on its dusty sheet. But I knew that when things really mattered he’d rip off any sheet. He’d strip anything bare.

“Darcy, please say something. You have no idea what the past two weeks have been like for me.”

“I have no idea? Me?”

“I only meant—” He stood. Something flickered across his features. On anyone else’s face it might have been hurt. But this was Conn. His mouth hardened, and I remembered the word Ivers had used to describe him: ruthless. “You missed our meeting. You broke your agreement with the IBI. You are required to tell me why.”

So I told him about meeting Orion, about my prison, my escape attempt, my trial. I shouted it, my voice ringing so loud my ears hurt. I rose to my feet, and so did he, and all the while his eyes looked into mine, when they didn’t have any right. When they were, in spite of everything, too horribly beautiful to bear.

“You have no idea,” I said. “You have no idea what you’re making me do.”

The room echoed with my words. It echoed with everything that was between us.

“I want that photograph,” I said. “I need to know if it’s really me.”

“You haven’t told me enough.”

I stepped toward him, and even though he towered over me I felt my arm tense with the kind of power that could smash a man’s face. “Give it to me.”

His eyes narrowed. “Give me a location. You haven’t said where the Society lives.”

“I’ve told you plenty. Now you know how they live. You know about their customs. You know that there’s infighting.”

His expression turned scornful. “What makes you so sure this is news to the IBI?”

“Give me the photograph, or I walk out of here and you will never see me again. The deal is off.”

He stalked to a bookshelf that had only appeared empty. Now I noticed a few books stacked on the lowest shelf, resting near an envelope.

Conn tossed the envelope onto the velvet sofa. “You can’t keep it. You’ll have to leave it here. Yes, I understand that I can’t force you to listen to me. You’ve made your point. But if the Shades find that photograph they’ll ask questions you won’t want to answer, so make the smart choice. I’ll give you your privacy,” he added in a tone that made clear he was glad to get away. “I’ll be down the hall in the kitchen. Find me when you’re done.”

When the oak door swung shut behind him, I sank down onto the sofa. I touched the slim manila envelope and my arm went limp. It took a lot of strength to open the envelope, more than I would have thought possible, since this was what I had wanted: to find the truth about my past.

I shook the envelope, and the photograph fell into the palm of my hand.

The photograph was in color, but looked as if it had been taken in black and white, the girl’s cheeks were so pale, her hair and eyes so dark.

And I remembered.

The little girl’s birthday was soon. Right around the corner. I was going to be five years old. A baby tooth wiggled in my mouth and I wondered if it would fall out when I turned five, and who would remember my birthday here. I wanted to hold my mother’s hand and press my face against her stomach, where she was soft, but she wasn’t there and if she were she’d say what she always said, that I was too old for that. I needed to learn.

I gripped the photograph so hard that it bent and my image warped. The memory drained away before I could remember where “here” was, or why I was there, or what my mother’s face looked like. I tried, but my mind got stuck. What I knew—without knowing how I knew—was that this photograph had been taken before I was abandoned in the Alter.

The girl’s eyes stopped my heart. I hadn’t known, until I saw the photograph, how I had really felt that day outside the Chicago firehouse. Over the years I had told myself a certain story about that girl. That she had downed the caseworker’s hot chocolate and asked for more. That she hadn’t minded the DCFS doctor’s cold stethoscope because it was a lot less chilly than being outside. But the girl in the photograph had eyes stained with fear.

Me. I had been terrified.

I couldn’t actually remember where I’d been when the photograph was taken, but I didn’t need to. I knew the answer: the IBI.

I slid the photograph back into its envelope and smoothed a hand over its surface, as if soothing it to sleep. I looked up, because I had to look away from the memory of that girl, and noticed again the three books on the otherwise empty shelf.

Undusty books. New ones. Conn’s.

I drew closer.

Two of them were about mechanics. Dense, complicated stuff with blueprints and equations that gave me queasy Pre-Calc flashbacks.

The third was the collected poems of T. S. Eliot.

It made sense. Conn was thorough, and passionate about his job even if he’d never truly been that way about me. And he saw a lot, much more than the simple fact that I cared about J. Alfred. Of course he’d studied the poem. Pretending that he cared about it, too, had been part of his cover.

This didn’t explain, though, why he kept it with him still, now that he had nothing to fake, nothing to hide.

I set the book and the photograph on the shelf. There were mysteries I had to solve, I reminded myself. But not about Conn.

My boots made no sound on the hard hallway tiles. The kitchen door was wide open. When I entered, Conn was gazing out the window at the garden, where snowflakes drifted and swayed through the dead branches like silent white bees. Even though he was expecting me, he hadn’t yet realized I was there, and the light silvered his face into something vulnerable.

“You were right,” I told him. “The photo is of me.”

He turned. The news did not make him happy.

“What?” I said. “What does that mean?”

“It means that you were taken into IBI custody. You were arrested.”

“For what?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Information connected to that photograph is classified.”

“Unclassify it, then.”

“It’s not that easy. There’s a file about that girl—about you—but it outranks me.”

“Conn—” I don’t know what I would have said, how I could have convinced him, but he interrupted. “I’ll find out for you,” he said.

I waited for him to add something, and when he didn’t I crossed my arms. “What will I owe you for that?”

Anger flared across his face. Then it was gone, like every other trace of emotion he had ever shown me. “Nothing. But … don’t get your hopes up. It’ll take me a while to find anything out, and you might not like what I find. There are ways of getting around a classified file, especially in this case, because it’s strange for the IBI to arrest a child Shade. That’s one of the reasons the photograph caught my eye when I saw it in the database. People will remember that arrest. I can talk to some of the older agents in the Bureau, pull unclassified files from that year—”

“It was 1997. I don’t remember much else.”

“1997? You’re sure?”

I nodded.

“All right,” he said slowly. “This will take time. But I’ll do my best.”

The crazy thing was, everything that made me resent Conn was exactly what made me sure that his best was very good.

“Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t let a Shade catch you doing it. I’m pretty sure the Society is watching me, and I don’t want them to have any reason to connect me to you.”

“What do you mean, the Society is watching you?”

“I was followed by a Shade.”

“When?”

“Just before I got here.”

“And you’re telling me now?” He was instantly alert, his gaze skittering into the corners of the room.

“Don’t worry, the Shade’s not here.”

“You can’t know that,” he said. I watched his eyes transform the kitchen into a potential war zone. “Everything we said could have been heard. Everything.”

“Trust me,” I said, and explained how Shades cast shadows. “So some humans could see that Shades are there, even if they’re incorporeal. That’s what Orion said.”

“That’s incredible.” It took me a moment to realize that the sound in Conn’s voice was hope. “Why haven’t we heard of this before?”

I shrugged. “Maybe people doubt what they see. Maybe they think it’s a trick of the light.”

“But why some humans and not others?”

“I don’t know. You figure it out.”

He fell silent, and I realized it was warmer in the kitchen than in the rest of the house, and slightly damp, as if water had recently been boiled to make tea or pasta. Pencils lay on the table of a breakfast nook for four, and there was a toothbrush in a glass by the sink. In a barely noticeable way, Conn had been practically living here. I felt a flicker of a feeling I couldn’t name.

“Priming,” he said.

“What?” I was less startled by the word than by my discovery.

“Priming is a psychology term.” He caught my glance. “I’m trained in psychology. Agents have to be, for interrogation.”

Whatever emotion I’d been feeling withered. “Of course you do.”

“Priming is when the mind is prepared to understand something that would otherwise be too extraordinary to believe. Like interdimensional portals. Even if somebody in the Alter is standing by the Water Tower, he’s not going to stumble through that portal into our world. He won’t even see it, because he can’t conceive that it’s there. But if someone told him it was, or if his mind was otherwise primed for the possibility, he might see it. Maybe that’s how seeing the shadows works.”

“Like an optical illusion—the one everyone knows, that looks like a white goblet. Then someone tells you that, no, it’s really two black faces in profile, and suddenly they’re there.”

“Exactly.” He smiled. “This is valuable information, Darcy. Thank you.”

“Valuable enough for me to skip town and head back to Lakebrook, courtesy of the IBI?”

His smile grew smaller. “Not quite.”

“Then what is?”

“The exact location of the Sanctuary would be a good start.”

“Excuse me if I don’t leap at the chance to give the IBI the perfect site for a big bonfire. You’d wipe them out.”

He made an impatient noise. “We’re not monsters.”

“Really. What about the Great Fire?”

“What about it?”

“Humans killed every last Shade in my world.”

“Yes, in your world.”

“So if there’s a war,” I said, “humans started it.”

His expression was quickly growing angry. “It was more than a hundred years ago. Besides, you can’t possibly blame this Chicago for something that didn’t even happen here.”

“This Chicago is drooling after the Great Fire.”

His voice got dangerous. “Meaning?”

“You people are obsessed with it. You name streets after it. You make art out of it. Just because the Holocaust happened a long time ago in Europe doesn’t mean it’s okay for me to build a shrine to Hitler in my backyard.”

“Street signs. Street signs,” he hissed. “I forgive the Society, then. They murdered innocent people, but I forgive them, because now I understand that the street signs hurt their feelings.”

I leaned back against the window and felt the cold glass against my shoulder blades. “I will never tell you the location. I don’t trust you.”

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.