Page 23 of Queen of Volts

The young woman shrugged. “I didn’t know him that well.”

Jonas had been second and then lord of the largest gang in New Reynes, yet no one had known him.

Lola sighed. First Lourdes, now Jonas. Following in the footsteps of tragic figures didn’t likely lead anywhere good.

But after tearing apart the living room, kitchen cabinets, and pantry—Jonas had as terrible taste in snacks as he did wall decor—she found the safe in the same way she’d found the key, by asking herself: If it was her, where would she hide it?

She spotted it in an empty spare bedroom, tucked behind the radiator. It measured no larger than a shoebox, one of those portable safes—perfect for someone like a Scarhand, a gang that, for years, had never kept a permanent headquarters. This was something Jonas could take everywhere with him. Knowing him, he could probably fit it beneath his pillow.

Lola unlocked it and knelt on the floor, pulling out a handful of folders belonging to the people Jonas had deemed the players of this city: Josephine Fenice, Erienne Salta, Levi Glaisyer, Charles Torren, Aldrich Owain, and more. Lola was both relieved and strangely offended to find herself not among them.

But there were three files that made her heart clench.

The first belonged to Jac Mardlin, the person who told her he’d never wanted to be a player. Or maybe she had told him that, and he hadn’t corrected her. Either way, it hurt that she’d been so willfully wrong, that she hadn’tseenwhen seeing and listening and observing were exactly what she prided herself for. Maybe he rested happily knowing that he’d gotten his legend. But even if Lola had always known—much as Zula had said—that she would be the one to tell these tragic stories when all of this was over, she’d never wanted to be telling his.

Still, she flipped through Jac’s file, curious. Hospital records, wanted posters, financial logs from his old debts to his One-Way House. It was too much, too personal. Overwhelmed, Lola snapped the folder closed, and resentment spewed up her throat. Lola didn’t even like boys, but they still found a way to break her heart.

“Fuck you,” she whispered, but she didn’t mean it.

The next file belonged to Lourdes Alfero.

And the last belonged to Ivory.

Lola took a deep breath and collected herself. Her own desires itched to open Lourdes’s folder and examine its secrets, but hours had passed since she’d left the finishing school.

And so Lola opened Ivory’s folder first, one that was—more than any of the others in the safe—clearly the most worn. Sweat and coffee and inky fingerprints stained the corners of the documents, their edges curled and brown. Notes in Jonas’s scratchy handwriting filled every margin in pigeon scrawl. The papers even smelled like Jonas—the acrid stench of something dead, a characteristic of his talent to swipe volts off of corpses. They also smelled like beef jerky.

The folder was confusing and irrationally organized, with other folders wedged inside it and papers that seemingly belonged somewhere else. There was some kind of entry written by Reymond Kitamura, Jonas’s predecessor as Scar Lord, who had once been a Dove. There was Jonas’s own file tucked inside, double-labeled with his own name and then another—and Lola guessed the name Maccabees had always been an alias. There was a file of a girl, a dead girl, who shared Jonas’s true blood name.

And then there was the file of Rebecca Janus, Bryce’s girlfriend who helped him manage the Orphan Guild. Lola knew her the way she knew the flu—miserable, stomach-curdling, something she’d never like to meet again. But as Lola’s gaze swept over the mess of it all, she kept returning to this one folder. Despite her two years of work for the Orphan Guild, Lola had never known Rebecca’s blood name.

If Lola had been anyone other than a devotee of research, she might not have uncovered the truth hidden among the mayhem of Jonas’s paperwork. Ivory’s file clearly represented the heart of Jonas’s obsession for scavenging secrets. There were so many documents and photographs to parse through, it was exactly the sort of conspiracy Lola could see someone going shatz over.

“Janus,” Lola said, rolling the name over her tongue. The Janus family had a shape-changing talent. They could adopt or transfer three faces the way an Augustine possessed three omertas.

She read through Reymond Kitamura’s letters to an old business partner, describing his confrontation with Ivory when she’d taken her dagger and given him his nickname Eight Fingers, back when he’d been a Dove. She’d been acting differently for months. She didn’t remember things, important things. As though she had suddenly become a different person.

There were documents and notes from the murder of the dead girl—Jonas’s sister, Lola realized. No wonder Ivory was his obsession; whatever mystery lurked within all this was personal. When his sister’s body had been exhumed for further evidence, there had been two corpses found within the casket—each one with an identical face. Jonas’s sister’s face. But she hadn’t had a twin.

Can a Janus alter someone else’s face?Jonas’s notes asked.

No better way to hide a body.

In the meeting at the Catacombs, it was like Ivory knew Bryce well.

Lola cupped her hand to her mouth as she started to piece it together. She counted on her fingers. The first face: her own. The second face: the one she’d stolen from Ivory. The third face: Jonas’s sister’s face, which she gave to Ivory’s body.

Ivory is dead, Jonas had written to Enne. The words were truth, but they’d all interpreted them wrong.

Ivory was dead, and she had been dead for a long time.

Rebecca wore her face now.

Lola raced down the stairs, her stomach in knots. “I need to get to a payphone,” she told the Scarhand breathlessly. Then she grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her outside into the stench. If Enne had already found the location of the Dove hideout, then she wasn’t about to conquer a fallen kingdom—she would find its queen alive and waiting for her.

Lola’s hands shook so much that she could barely dial the number. She called the finishing school.

“Hello?” she asked, her voice trembling.