Page 20 of Queen of Volts

Levi had mentioned that the night after St. Morse, which they’d spent in the Irons’ reclaimed museum, exhausted, wounded, shell-shocked, listening to the radio report the horror they’d just lived through. Simply dwelling on it for a moment made Enne’s chest feel tight. Even if she’d uncovered a path forward, her composure still felt teetering at the edge of a wall, behind which she’d carefully quarantined every fear, every anxiety, every mistake.

Don’t worry. I’ve beaten worse.

“That means there might be a trail,” Enne said, her voice cracking slightly. She cleared her throat. “Maybe we can find this Dove. They could tell us where the hideout is.”

“It’s not like they’d just linger around Luckluster,” Roy said. “Plus, Luckluster is literally rubble now.”

“It didn’t happen at Luckluster,” Lola recalled. “It happened at a tavern Jac and Sophia worked at. Liver Shot.”

Roy furrowed his eyebrows. “Even so. Why would the suspect hang around? Wouldn’t they have returned to the Doves?”

“Ivory doesn’t exactly take kindly to failure,” answered Grace. “They might not have anywhere else to go. We could ask around. Maybe we can track them down.”

Enne grasped at this tendril of hope and clung to it. She stood up and declared, “Then it’s decided. Lola and I will go to search Jonas’s files, and—”

Grace put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her back down. “Easy, Séance. There are six more Spirits and over one hundred other Scarhands here right now. We can’tallleave, you least of all.”

Enne frowned. She didn’t like delegating tasks to her friends that she could easily handle herself.Sheshould be the one parsing through Jonas’s files—she’d seen them before.

But Grace was right. When news returned, someone needed to be here waiting for it. Someone needed to lead and make the next decision.

“Fine,” Enne breathed. “Grace, you and Roy can go to Liver Shot and play detectives—”

“It’s not playing,” Roy mumbled. “Iama detective—”

“Lola,” Enne continued, “you can look through Jonas’s files.”

“Why do I have to be partnered with the whiteboot?” Grace asked, glaring at the dregs of her coffee. “I’ll take Lola. Make Roy go play librarian.”

“Because Lola is better with research. And because you’re going after aDove, and Lola isn’t any good at fighting,” Enne told her. “No offense, Lola.”

“Too late,” she said flatly.

Grace sulked as she and Roy made for the door. “I’m not your partner,” she snapped at him.

He smirked. “If you say so.”

Lola rolled her eyes and followed them out, the tune of her harmonica drifting down the hallway with her.

When the others had left, Enne—a good bit soured—led Mansi to the main classroom in the finishing school, where the rest of the Spirits passed the time. Them and their thirteen cats, each of whom were named after dead street lords of North Side history. The girls lounged on pink fur throw blankets and plush carpet. The cats lounged everywhere other than their actual beds.

Charlotte looked up from behind her copy ofThe Guillory Street Gossip, a South Side tabloid. This edition featured a glamorous photograph of a severe-looking blonde girl named Delaney Dawson, whom Enne recognized as the ballet rival of Poppy Prescott, Enne’s old friend.

“Can I borrow that?” Enne asked her, desperate for some way to pass the time.

Charlotte handed it to her—its pages were sticky with melted chocolate. Feeling exceptionally useless, Enne collapsed on the couch and ignored the Scarhands peering at her from the hallway. She wished she could dosomething.A lord would. A Mizer would.

Instead, she flipped through the tabloid until she found a photo of Poppy, and she sighed, wondering what her friend must think of her now.

Grace and Roy returned before Lola did, a boy in tow. He was bleach-pale, freckly, and badly beaten up—one of his eyelids engorged and swollen as though it might burst. Yellow bruises covered his arms, some fresh, some not. He was almost nauseating to look at, like something spit out of a North Side gutter. Several of the girls—even Marcy, who normally blushed at the concept of any boy—covered their noses at his odor as Grace and Roy dropped him in a heap on their rug.

His hair was white, the way the Doves wore it.

He coughed a bit and looked around wildly, like a captive animal. He gawked first at the cats, with the same bewilderment as many of the Scarhands who’d visited their home. He then searched the faces of the girls until his dull green eyes found Enne’s.

He spit on the rug.

“Well, that’s contaminated now,” Charlotte muttered, and Marcy elbowed her in the stomach.