Page 14 of Queen of Volts

At Poppy’s brandished Shadow Card, the color drained out of Delaney’s face, and it took her several moments to gather herself. “Th-the card is nothing. It’s not important. Come on. We can walk home.”

But while Delaney stalked off across the lawn, Poppy lingered behind.

“She thinks I’m fragile,” Poppy told Sophia, “but I only followed her because I think she’s the one who’s breaking.” Those were surprising words from someone whose father had just been murdered. But maybe Poppy wasn’t dwelling on it yet, like Sophia.

Then she handed Sophia a business card to a ballet company.

“We both dance here. Come find us. I can play along with her tonight, but I’d like some real answers. And maybe a friend.” She gave Sophia a weak smile, then left to follow Delaney.

Sophia pursed her lips. She wasn’t looking for friends. And she’d made up her mind not to dwell on the game.

She walked down the street until she reached the first crossroads, and then—feet aching in her heels, the high of chasing legends now replaced with a bone-deep fatigue—she waited.

No one came.

All out of bad ideas, Sophia went home, where she found another cigarette taped beneath the nightstand drawer.

HARVEY

Rebecca Janus lay in bed coughing up blood, and Harvey tried very hard to feel sorry.

Bryce doted on her, inspecting her sweat-soiled bandages and offering her water. Rebecca’s long blond hair was greasy from not showering, and wine-colored splotches had blossomed like bruises across her skin from her cursed illness. There was no cure for it. After all, it wasn’t natural. A vile sickness for a vile heart, Harvey figured.

“I don’t know why you bothered,” Rebecca told Harvey, who lingered awkwardly over her sickbed. Rebecca’s eyes were fixed on the golden card he fiddled with—Strength. It’d belonged to Jac Mardlin. Five days since the burial, and Harvey couldn’t shake the image of Jac’s Creed from his head.

The three of them were in the abandoned and historic Royal Prison, in a cell refurbished into a bedroom. Bryce’s and Rebecca’s bedroom. Harvey had chosen his in the corner of the building farthest from this one. The walls of this place were very thin. “If I felt better, I would’ve burned the body myself.”

“I’m sure you would have,” Harvey said dryly. Then he gave her the biggest smile he could muster.

Rebecca flinched away from him. “Don’t you dare try to use your talent on me.”

Harvey was careful with his smiles. He was a Chainer, someone with a talent to bind those in debt to them to a certain place. His father had made a fortune operating a drug den on Chain Street where, day and night, Lullaby and Rapture addicts lived. Too lulled or buzzed to work and without means to pay back their debt, they could never leave. It was a slaughterhouse, except the deaths were slow, and the cattle was human.

Chainers also had an affinity for making people trust them. Harvey knew how his smiles made a stranger relax their shoulders, how his words made people lean in closer. Bryce had assured him a number of times that he knew Harvey couldn’t help this ability, but Harvey could, and he knew the truth—Bryce would rather accuse his friend of manipulating him than admit he was still charmed.

Now neither Bryce nor Rebecca trusted any of his smiles, whether they were loaded or not. In fact, Rebecca treated Harvey’s very happiness like a threat.

“I’m only trying to be sympathetic,” Harvey lied, replacing his smile with false hurt. “Is there something I could get you?”

“A new set of lungs,” Rebecca croaked.

Harvey wished it was a joke.

“So soon?” Bryce squeezed her hand. “It’s barely been a few weeks.”

“Yes, well, Iamdying,” Rebecca said, making Bryce wince.

Since last summer, Rebecca and Bryce had been hiring skin stitchers to deliver new organs to replace her decaying ones. Ever since her illness had started one year ago, it was spreading throughout her bloodstream, infecting her organs one by one. At this point, Harvey imagined half of Rebecca’s insides to look rotten and shriveled, like pickled pieces of fruit. He didn’t know where the skin stitchers obtained the body parts, but they were always fresh.

“Don’t say that,” Bryce pleaded. “Your wound will heal, and then you’ll feel better.”

“But I’ll still be sick,” Rebecca said. She let out a dramatic, bloody cough. “And soon I’ll be dead.”

So we can hope, Harvey thought. He should feel guilty for such cruelty—it was certainly a sin—but lately, hating Rebecca was the only thing in his life he didn’t feel guilty about.

It wasn’t that Rebecca was a girl—Harvey might’ve been bitter, but he wasn’t an asshole. And it wasn’t the general idea of Bryce loving someone other than him—even if, admittedly, that did hurt. It was that Rebecca wasn’tgood. She was a liar, a killer. Nearly every piece of her life she had stolen from somebody else. Most egregiously, she had changed Bryce, twisted him, wrapped him around her blood-stained finger as an accessory in her own ambitions. And Harvey could never forgive that.

She, like Bryce, belonged locked away in the House of Shadows. Rebecca’s split talent came from a shade-making family, those who specialized in making curses with malisons, much the way an orb-maker made volts with a Mizer.