Page 13 of Queen of Volts

But that only meant she had come to the right place, after all.

Her confidence rose, and she managed one of her sweetest of smiles. “I didn’t steal it,” Sophia told them.

“Then who gave theirs to a teenage girl?”

Sophia’s lips twitched in annoyance. “Harrison Augustine,” she answered, smugly taking in their surprised expressions. As of last week, Harrison was one of the most powerful politicians in the Republic.

“How exhausting,” the man drawled.

Someone grabbed Sophia’s arm, pulling her back. It was the freckly girl from earlier, the one with the too-tight ponytail—Delaney. She looked far less demure and doe-eyed up close. Her baby blue nails dug sharply into Sophia’s skin.

“Harrison sent you here?” Delaney hissed. “Did he ask you to spy on me?”

“He didn’t send me here. He just gave me a key.” Sophia squirmed out of the girl’s clutch. She didn’t want to talk about Harrison—that would mean dwelling on the deal she’d made: entrance into the House of Shadows in exchange for his omerta. Her most desperate bad idea. Especially when she’d yet to find a trace of who she was looking for. “I thought...I...”

“You thought what?” Delaney snapped. She had a haughtiness to her voice that matched her preppy hairstyle. Both Delaney and Poppy reeked of South Side, like trust funds and noxiously floral perfume.

“I thought I might find the Bargainer here. Or learn at least where she is.”

Delaney scoffed. “You think everyone would be sitting around like this if we knew that? Look at this place. The party’s over.”

The Bargainer was a powerful malison, someone with the talent to make shades—much the way a Mizer made volts. According to legend, the malisons of the Republic dwelled here in the House of Shadows. But by the tense, stifled air of this place at the mention of her name, the Bargainer was not welcome here.

Which meant Sophia had traded the omerta for nothing.

Her lips trembled, but she would not cry. Not in public. Not while wearing expensive mascara.

Poppy squeezed in between them, saving Sophia from having to respond. She grabbed both of their hands, as if the three of them really had come here together. Sophia was so numb that she let Poppy drag her back to the front door, even as the two girls bickered the whole way.

Sophia had become worse than driftwood—she was sinking. She flinched as she walked into the darkness of outside, memories of her twisted older brother prowling in the back of her mind. She wrenched her hand away from Poppy’s. A touch was all it had taken for Charles’s split talent to give pain, and it would take more than a few days after his death for Sophia to forget the fears he’d instilled in her.

“So this is what you’ve been gone for?” Poppy demanded from her not-girlfriend. “Who even are those people? What is this place?”

Delaney sighed. “It doesn’t matter—I already got what I came for. Let’s just go home.”

“What did you come for?” Poppy asked sharply.

Sophia knew she should leave them and return to Jac’s apartment, where she’d been sleeping since she’d burned Luckluster Casino without him. But she hadn’t made a plan for getting home—truthfully, she didn’t want to go back there, anyway. She’d been finding Jac’s cigarettes tucked into places where he didn’t think she’d look.

“I received a gift the other day,” Delaney said carefully. “And I wanted to know what it was. Turns out it didn’t come from here.”

Her words returned Sophia to the present. “What kind of gift?” For Delaney to come here for answers, the gift must have been a Shadow Card, an invitation to the Shadow Game. After all, it was played here, in this building. Sophia herself had received a card last week, but the color of it was wrong. She didn’t know what game it belonged to.

Sophia slid hers out of her pocket and held it up. The Wheel of Fortune—depicted with what resembled a roulette wheel and black clouds like factory smog in the background. An appropriate choice for a Torren blood talent.

Delaney’s brown eyes widened, and she pushed Sophia’s hand away while shooting a frantic glance at Poppy, in case the other girl had seen. Then Delaney let out a shaky laugh. “It’s nothing—”

“Oh, one of those?” Poppy opened her Maxirello purse and whipped out a Shadow Card of her own, its gold foil matching the delicate rings on each of her fingers. The Star. The woman in it with long blond hair even looked like Poppy. “I found this a week ago. What is it for?”

Sophia’s thoughts jumbled together as she tried to process what this meant. After the massacre and battle at St. Morse, a number of people she knew had found these gold-foiled cards: Levi Glaisyer, Enne Scordata, Tock Ridley, Lola Sanguick, Grace Watson, Roy Pritchard, Harrison Augustine.

Jac Mardlin, not that he’d been able to collect his.

Sophia hadn’t dwelled on what the cards meant, as she’d been too busy trying not to dwell on anything. Not on how she’d impulsively entered into a dangerous contract with a dangerous man. Not on how burning Luckluster Casino hadn’t felt half as satisfying as she’d thought it would, that she could hate her family but still feel wretched and guilty for betraying them, her own blood. Not on how Jac was really gone—gone as in not waiting for her back in his apartment, gone as in never coming back.

If Poppy and Delaney also had Shadow Cards, whatever game this entailed was bigger than Sophia had thought. But she couldn’t dwell on it. Dwelling meant drifting, sinking, drowning.

No. She needed to focus on finding the Bargainer and stealing her memories back. That goal was the only life raft she had.