Page 142 of Queen of Volts

But then Lourdes acknowledged her. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. She averted Enne’s gaze and shuffled through the papers on her desk—articles Lourdes had written as a Pseudonym, evidence of her double life. Lourdes had always presented as either female or neither gender, and though Lourdes’s style remained subdued regardless, today she’d opted for feminine—a simple gray skirt and matching blouse, her long blond hair swept up in tight pins.

While Enne struggled to collect herself, Lourdes continued. “I regret so much, but more than anything, I regret preparing you for none of it.”

She hadn’t, but in the eight months since her death, Enne didn’t want apologies, no matter how much Lourdes’s decisions had hurt her. Enne missed her far more than she’d ever resented her.

Enne let go of the others’ hands and sprang forward. She threw her arms around her mother and was relieved to find her solid and warm.

“Are you real?” Enne whispered, burying her face in Lourdes’s neck.

“No,” Lourdes answered, which was very like Lourdes, not to sugarcoat. “But I am me. The way people remember me—including you.”

Enne had an endless amount of questions she wished to ask, but she started with the one that hurt the most. “Why didn’t you tell me who I was?”

“Because I’d hoped you’d never need to know.”

Lourdes pulled away but kept her grip on Enne’s shoulders. Tenderly, she touched the edges of Enne’s short hair, and Enne was relieved her mother had so easily recognized her—not just from her hair, but in her expression and the way she carried herself, after all the horror she’d lived through. Enne wasn’t sure she’d have recognized herself.

“But I deserved to know,” Enne said hotly. “I worked...so hard trying to be someone I wasn’t. You watched me struggle.” Even though so much had transpired since Enne came to New Reynes, the scars Bellamy had left on her still felt fresh. Her feet were still calloused, still pink where her blisters had healed. From nights spent rehearsing instead of sleeping, clinging to a vision of herself that was based entirely on what others thought of her. Trying to be anything other than no one.

“I’d planned to tell you when I thought you were old enough,” Lourdes murmured. “But you were already older than I was when I was roped into problems no one should have to face.”

“When Veil kidnapped you and forced you to swear your protection to him,” Enne said. “My father.”

Lourdes nodded grimly. “He’d damned me. My talent...once I swear it, I can’t act in my own interest—not if it hurts his. It meant I could never go home.”

Enne shuddered. “That’s despicable.”

“I hated him, at first,” Lourdes said. “But once I learned the truth about the Revolution, about the pact my father had made with the Bargainer, I realized I didn’t have a home to go back to.”

Enne knew that feeling all too well. She didn’t think she’d ever return to Bellamy.

The thought of everything Lourdes must’ve gone through made her throat tighten. “You hadn’t wanted this,” Enne said hoarsely. “You hadn’t wanted me.”

Lourdes’s face softened. “I could’ve traveled with you to the other end of the world and never returned. I didn’t have to swear my protection toyou. But I did. And I came back to New Reynes every chance I got to make this world better for you, in case it ever found out who you were.”

Enne felt another hand on her shoulder, and she turned to see Levi, and Sophia behind him. She’d forgotten anyone else was in the room.

Lourdes’s eyes settled on Levi. “I remember you. I gave you a recommendation to St. Morse.” She frowned. “I owe you an apology, as well. I never imagined Vianca would use her talent on someone so young, a talent she can only bestow on only a precious few. I’m so very sorry. I know how it feels to be trapped.”

“I-it’s fine,” Levi said awkwardly. He tugged on Enne’s shoulder, meeting her eyes seriously. Enne remembered that they were here for more than a reunion.

“Are you the person I was meant to find?” Enne asked Lourdes.

Lourdes shook her head. “I’m afraid not. You should go find them.”

But Enne still had a list of questions to ask Lourdes. She wanted to ask about Gabrielle Dondelair, her birth mother, what she’d been like. About Lourdes’s childhood. About her many accomplishments in the City of Sin.

Tears spilled down Enne’s cheeks, and she wiped them away on the back of her hand. “I love you,” she told her.

Lourdes embraced her one last time. “I love you, too.”

The room faded as Enne approached the door, the tendrils of the illusion slipping away, like water between her fingers. When Enne glanced down, she saw pale threads of light, the same as she remembered from the Shadow Game. They reminded her of volts, the way they looked when Levi extracted them, wispy and soft, until they transformed into static in his hands. If these were the threads that held the shade together, then maybe Mizers and malisons weren’t so different.

“Are you okay?” Levi asked once the door closed behind them, but Enne was distracted, still studying the threads. She looked up and sighted others strung around the hallway, tied between doorknobs, suspended from the ceiling, linking every piece of this place together. “Enne—”

“I’m fine,” Enne said, her voice cracking. She wasn’t—leftover tears still streaked down her face—but she didn’t have time to fall apart. And there would be time, when all of this was over, when she could stop looking over her shoulder. Lourdes had fought for that for her, and Enne had to believe that her mother’s sacrifice hadn’t been for nothing. That everything Enne had done hadn’t been for nothing.

One door, more than any of the others, was covered in threads. They slipped beneath it, looped around its hinges, disappeared within its keyhole, and circled the large metal knocker nailed to its center, one in the shape of an eye, its handle the lid. The door was black—her door—and Enne could feel something was different about it. An urgency seeped from it. The threads hummed, like the strings of a piano, each discordant with each other.