“I need a bigger surface,” Phoenix told her. “The image and the sound are both displayed and limited by their projection surface. That sheet of paper won’t do if we want to see and hear the full picture.”
Kailani nodded and walked over to the nearest glass pane, pressing both palms against it. It turned matte white, and Phoenix brought the cube over, careful not to disturb the improvised contraption of pincers and pliers that made this projection possible. The closer he got to the white pane, the better we could see and the louder we could hear.
Yes, there was music playing. Field was strumming heavily on a Spanish guitar. They were on the beach beneath a starry night sky. “They’re near The Shade’s extension,” Kailani said. “I know that area.”
We were all quiet, watching the scene unravel before us. Field and Aida sat on a tall rock. He handled his guitar while she fawned over him, love leaving her face aglow. Below, a campfire had been lit. Voss and Richard were laughing and adding more wood to the flame. There weren’t many people present, but that had always been Voss’s nature. Isabelle, Chantal, and Astra had been invited, along with Kailani, Hunter, Jovi, and Anjani.
“I think we can make this hotter,” we heard Isabelle say, giggling as she approached the fire, holding something in her hand. It was a bottle of lighter fluid, which she squirted over the flames until they swelled and licked at the night sky. The fire got too big, too fast, startling Field and Aida with its sudden heat. They fell back, vanishing behind the rock.
Voss and the others broke into hysterical laughter, and I couldn’t help but smile when I saw him grinning at Isabelle. “That’ll stop his mewling,” he said, running a hand through his dark shaggy hair. “I keep telling him he’s terrible, but he keeps playing that damn thing anyway.”
A low growl emerged from behind them. Isabelle yelped and jumped back. Voss whirled around just as his mother jumped him in wolf form. She was big enough to knock him down. Voss ended up on his back, Aida licking his face as she held him down with her huge paws. It was a sweet moment, until Chantal smiled and discreetly took Isabelle away from the jolly beach party. We watched them walk up the sandy beach for a while, going deeper into the night and farther from the sounds of music and laughter.
“Did you get it yet?” Chantal asked. Only then did I understand that she was a clone. After all, so was Isabelle in this recording.
“No.”
“How much longer?”
“I don’t know. It’s not easy to find something that not even the witches know they’ve got!” Isabelle’s double replied bitterly. “I don’t need any of you breathing down my neck!”
Chantal’s clone gave her a cold grin. “Tick tock. You know she hates waiting. Time is not a concept she likes much.”
The recording ended there. The cubes had to be data packets from the time Isabelle’s clone spent among us, searching for that tiny dice she’d lost to Claudia’s doppelganger. Phoenix worked quickly to patch us into another storage unit. One by one, we watched footage as old as two months ago. We’d even witnessed the data transfer moments. The clone’s eyes did the recording, and the images were wirelessly transmitted into the cubes, which had a tiny green light that flickered, indicating transmission. Isabelle’s clone would occasionally bring each cube closer to her head in order for the transfers to go faster, it seemed.
The more we saw, the clearer it became that the clones had done quite a lot of intel gathering from our Shade. Just thinking through the whole truth made me shiver. Isabelle’s clone had been but one of many who had listened to us, who’d stolen from us.
“There’s no sight of our Isabelle,” Serena said after five cubes’ worth of footage. “Where is she, damn it?”
“We need to watch the rest of these things,” Phoenix replied, fumbling with another one. The image flashed across the white glass, the sound coming through with crystal clarity. “Here we go…”
This was an eerie scene. That much was obvious from the very first seconds. “Hold on, is this our Shade?” Derek asked, sounding as confused as I felt.
Isabelle’s clone was walking up a white sand beach. The Port was right behind her, and the woods ahead were huge and dark but… something was off. “The colors aren’t right,” I mumbled. The greens were off. The browns were almost gray. And the dull light didn’t make sense. It looked like The Shade I had known for years, and yet I was willing to bet all the money in the world that it wasn’t our Shade. “It’s not The Shade. It just… it just looks like it,” I concluded, trying to ignore the shivers that ran down my back.
The more I watched, the creepier it got. Isabelle’s clone crossed paths with many of us, only… I could tell they weren’t us. None of them were originals. Their smiles and the instruments they held and operated told me that much. I spotted the reflective disks that we had yet to fully understand. The black mist canisters responsible for creating some of the most horrific mental anguish in the known history of existence itself. No, these were clones. They were all clones, and they were all going in the same direction.
“What if this is their lair?” Rose said, unable to peel her eyes off the screen. “Think about it. Clones of us. Would it be weird to think they might live in a place like ours? I mean, what if we’re not the only things they copied?”
“That makes sense, actually,” Derek replied. “It’s deeply disturbing, of course, but… yeah. I’d see that.”
“Look over there,” Ben
