Page 159 of Queen of Volts

“But I didn’t ask you. I askedher.”

Enne stiffened beside him, and Levi braced himself for her to snap back. Instead, she cleared her throat and said, “Yes, we’re making this trade together.”

Arabella studied the coin, her expression dark. Something in it made Levi take a step back, pulling Enne with him. Muck. She knew they were bluffing.

“I expected better of you both, but especially you, orb-maker,” Arabella said. “You should know—you can’t play against someone who already holds all the cards.”

“We need to run,” Enne whispered to Levi.

“She’s faster.”

Levi eyed their surroundings. There was no one—not a passerby, not even a bum. No one to interfere. No one to save them. “Do you trust me?” he asked her.

She squeezed his hand. “Haven’t I already proven that?”

Before Arabella could reach forward to land a strike, Levi grabbed Enne around the waist and threw both of them into the Brint.

The coldness of the river shocked his senses. His skin screamed—his burns the worst. He tried to keep his mouth closed, to hold his breath, but he could still taste the water. And it tasted horrible—like all the waste of the City of Sin, its drains and its sewers, seeping out into the ocean.

The current wasn’t fast—it wouldn’t sweep them away to safety, and there was only so far they could swim without coming up for air and exposing themselves.

But Levi wasn’t counting on distance. He was counting on the privacy. This might be the only moment they had away from Arabella, their only chance. And the Bargainer had been right—Enne and Levi didn’t have any of the right cards. But that had never been what made Levi a good card dealer. No matter his poker face, his luck, his cleverness, he’d always been the Iron Lord because he cheated.

And the key to cheating was making sure the other player never saw the sleight of hand.

Levi pressed his lips against Enne’s ear. “Do you trust me?” His voice was garbled in the water.

He’d asked her the same thing moments earlier, but she must’ve known this time was different. He couldn’t see her—not in this darkness—but he pressed his forehead to hers. He didn’t know how else to convey the weight of the question. Even by cheating, it would take a great sacrifice to win this game. From each of them. And he didn’t know if she’d be willing to make hers.

He felt her nod, and he wasted no time. He reached down for her hands, and he pushed up the fabric of her sleeve. Earlier, he’d wished for quiet, but concentration was impossible in the freezing water, in the darkness. His fingers slipped against her skin, and it ached to touch her with his wounded hand.

But he found what he’d been looking for—the volts. He clumsily grasped for them. They pooled into the water around them, offering the light Levi desperately needed. He was an orb-maker, but nothing about what he did felt natural or easy. He didn’t even know if it would work.

He clutched at the volts. Normally, at this point, he would pull them—severing their link to Enne. But this time he held them, and waited.

Sure enough, the stain of the shade around his fingers found the volts. It seeped over them like it had the token, swallowing the light.

Levi tried to let go, but he couldn’t. The shade, rather than leaving him, spread farther. He screamed—air escaping bubbles from his mouth—as the pain stretched up his shoulder, his stomach. His head quaked from it, and he breathed in a lungful of polluted water, choking.

Something had happened to Enne, too. She stiffened, and she slipped out of his grasp. He felt the current’s pushback as she swam upward to air. And he drifted down, down, the pain of the shade spreading across his body too much for him to move. He barely felt it when his back hit the riverbed. His chest felt like it was caving inward, and he accidentally sucked in a mouthful of Brint water.

I’m dying, he thought. And it wasn’t just the drowning—it was the burning. He heaved violently, trying to eject the fluid he’d taken in. He tasted iron in the water. Blood.

That was when he realized what this was. He’d corrupted Enne’s talent, and so he was dying, just like Rebecca was dying.

This was his sacrifice.

Levi had always been willing to die in New Reynes. If he died tonight, what legends would they tell of him? He used to measure himself in everything he’d won, but lying there, he could only think of what he’d lost. Too much.

But he no longer cared for legends—his legend, so he’d learned, was a piece of this game far beyond his control. And his story, hisrealstory, was not over yet. It was the one Levi had inherited but never wanted, of tragedy and tyranny that he recognized in the way strangers looked at him, the burden of a history played out before he’d been born.

And the ending of this story came down to a choice: he could drown at the bottom of the Brint, like a common gangster not important enough to hang, but a Sinner all the same. Or he could die on the city cobblestones, facing the person who had orchestrated the Revolution. It would be the South Side—not the North—but if he were being honest, he was better suited there, anyway.

With the last energy he had left, Levi kicked off the riverbed and swam his way up. He gasped and coughed as he broke the surface. And once he started coughing, he couldn’t stop. He crawled up onto the riverwalk, the city lights spinning around him. He pressed his cheek onto the ground. He still tasted blood.

“You’d offer me your talent,” he heard Arabella say slowly, “when no one else would.”

Levi looked up, blinking the water out of his eyes.