Page 45 of House of Marionne

“Nothing yet, huh?” She glances at my head.

Rose flinches, eyeing our conversation, and guilt hooks in my stomach.

“Never mind,” I say. “I’ll ask you later.”

Shelby gives me a you’re-too-nice look.

“You didn’t miss anything,” I tell Rose, trying to change the subject when I notice puffiness under her eyes. “Are you all right?”

She doesn’t say a word, and that says everything. I glance at her disheveled hair and the rest of her. Wrinkled clothes, the same she wore yesterday, are stained with makeup on the sleeves.

“Rose, I’m sorry. Any itching?”

She shakes her head, her eyes watering.

“How long do you have?” I whisper when Dexler calls everyone’s attention to the front.

She points to her desk.

“Today?!”

Shelby nudges me with her elbow to keep it down as Dexler glances our way. But it’s too late.

“Miss Marionne, what did I just explain?”

There’s no way out of this one. “I wasn’t listening, I apologize.”

“Is that because you don’t think what I have to say is important or . . . ?”

Cold flickers through me. “No, it absolutely is. I—”

“Then I expect you to act like it.”

The tongue-lashing leaves me hunched over my paper of notes, fixated on every next syllable out of Dexler’s mouth. Rose is stiff next to me and silent. I think of Octos, hoping it doesn’t come to the worst for her.

The way things unfolded with Octos still doesn’t sit right with me. Something about him was so genuine, so honest. The way his shoulders shrugged with pride when he spoke of his family. The surprise on his face when he saw what the elixir did. I’m pretty good at reading people, and I’m not sure Jordan’s pegged him entirely right.

When our materials are passed out, we’re arranged into groups. Shelby, Rose, and I link up and scoot our chairs to an island of our own in the corner of the room.

“Decomposing,” I say, spacing out our materials. Two different types of bones and a beetle. “We have to fossilize these ingredients and collect their ash in a jar.”

Rose broods, her hands shoved in her lap.

“You want to ready the kor?” I ask her. “It’s fire again today.”

“What’s the point? Nothing’s helping. I’ve tried everything.”

Shelby glances between us, sighing before grabbing the kor. I don’t miss her slight eye roll. She works her fingers over the wick to ignite the kor. I grab the bone, rolling it in my hands. It’s light and fragile. A little bendy. I shiver at the thought of where it could have come from.

“The closest natural path, remember,” Shelby says.

My toushana could turn this to dust in one point three seconds, but that’s not going to fly. I search for a glimmer of warmth, turning the bone over the fire. I picture it decomposing under soil, the sped-up process of time. The warmth in my fingers hums louder as I tug at it.

It crumples at its edges, pieces falling away. I tighten my grip, determined to hold on to my proper magic. But something causes it to stutter and the heat dissolves. “No!” But the flicker of progress is lost and the bone is an unchanged log in my hands.

“What’s wrong?” Shelby asks.

I shove back from the table in frustration.