Page 28 of Queen of Volts

The group pushed and shoved their way back through the bars. It wasn’t until they scrambled through that they realized their group of thirty had been reduced to eighteen.

“Time to go,” Roy croaked.

“We can’t just abandon those Scarhands,” Grace hissed.

“Yes, we can,” muttered a Scarhand behind Enne. And with that, another five of them took off sprinting down the tunnel toward the exit, leaving the few who remained alone in the near darkness.

Enne wanted to run, too, but she didn’t like the idea of turning her back to whatever lurked in these tunnels. So she stood, frozen, her revolver white-knuckled in two trembling hands.The gun. The gun.She tried her best to wrestle those thoughts away, but they were still there, if only a whisper. She shouldn’t have come here. It was dangerous. She hadn’t been sleeping. She kept seeing Jac—

Footsteps thudded, growing closer—and fast.

Enne reacted even faster. She fired.

Bang!

Someone let out a loud, hissing curse, and Enne realized with a heart-lurching jolt that she had shot in the direction of the subway’s exit, where the five Scarhands had fled.

But it wasn’t a Scarhand.

Grace pointed the flashlight behind them, and Enne saw red. Red hair, red blood.

Then Lola was there, upright but swaying, her face contorted in pain and her hand clutching her right ear. Crimson pooled down her neck, her scarf, her sleeves.

Enne snapped back into focus all at once, her out-of-body sensation broken.Herhands.Hergun.Herbullet. The revolver fell from her hands and clacked against the cement floor. Dizzy, she squeezed her eyes shut, but she still saw Lola, and she still saw Jac.

“Why the fuck would you shoot?” Grace asked hotly.

Roy, meanwhile, hurried to Lola’s side. “Let me see—I know first aid—I—”

“Don’t,”Lola snapped as Roy tried to tug her hands away to examine the wound. “I’m fine. I think. I just—I came here to tell you that—”

“Coming here was a mistake,” someone else answered from deeper in the tunnel’s gut.

Enne froze. She recognized that voice, but it didn’t make sense. That woman was dead.

As Grace swung the flashlight forward, a figure came into view. The woman staggered as she walked, but if anything, the weakness only added to her terrifying air. She wore a white dress that hung on her similar to a hospital gown, with bandages around her limbs trailing behind her as she strode closer, their ends damp from the puddles on the floor. She was fair, with white hair that made her look far older than her likely forty years.

Ivory coughed violently, and each sound made every person who watched her shudder.

Everyone except Grace. “She’s weak,” Grace grunted. “I can take her.”

“Don’t even dare,” Roy said, with a tone like he really would fight her if she tried.

Enne’s thoughts train-wrecked. Ivory wasalive. Did that mean Jonas had betrayed them, even from beyond the grave? Or had he made an error? Enne looked down to where her gun had fallen, knowing she should reach for it, but the mere sight of it made her limbs freeze in panic.

She’d shot at Lola.

She’d killed Jac.

As Ivory came closer, Enne saw the stains down her shirt and along her sleeves—blood. They looked too fresh to be from the gunshot wound Levi had given her a few days ago, these splatters crimson and slick.

“Rebecca is Ivory,” Lola rasped.

“What do you mean?” asked Grace.

A delirious memory crossed Enne’s mind—of Rebecca blocking Enne’s and Lola’s exit from the Orphan Guild, of the coughing and blood smeared across her lips. But that didn’t make sense. The woman in front of her clearly wasnotRebecca.

“Did you really think we lived in this filth?” Ivory asked, letting out a cackling, condescending laugh—exactly like Rebecca would.