Flashback ( PDFDrive )

The good news was, the security for the festival seemed solid. Every
guard they could spare was already being secretly transported to the
festival grounds at the base of the Prism Peaks and hidden behind
different illusions that Luzia, Orem, Tam, Wylie, and any other
Flashers and Shades the Council trusted were carefully preparing.
That way the amount of soldiers would look the same as previous years
—but they’d have a secret army ready and waiting. Dwarves would
also be lurking underground, and several gnomes had volunteered to
take up positions in any nearby trees. King Dimitar also sent a dozen
soldiers to serve under Bo’s command, and Bo had taken a temporary
leave from guarding Sophie to hide at the festival site, in case Cadfael
and the other deserters showed up like Fintan had implied.
But the true genius to the strategy was the other illusions that
Luzia had designed to camouflage all the Neverseen’s biggest targets.
The “Councillors” that the audience would be staring at would
actually be a projection of the real Council, who would be hidden
behind one of the larger groups of soldiers and “broadcasting”
everything they said. Orem would be doing the same for his
presentation. And anyone who saw Sophie or her friends, family, and
bodyguards milling about the audience would actually be seeing
projected doppelgängers set up specifically near the hidden guards
like bait in a trap. In reality, they’d be patrolling the crowd in disguise,
searching for signs of the Neverseen.
It was a whole new level of artful duplicity, and everyone was
incredibly proud of how smoothly it was coming together.
But it didn’t silence Sophie’s haunting whisper.
What are we missing? What are we missing? What are we missing?
And with two days to go, she figured out what it was.