Page 33 of Queen of Volts

Sophia didn’t look at him, but she could feel Harrison’s eye on her. It looked like hers—bright green and knowing, like he saw through her and her expertly applied composure. She felt small again, and she hated it.

But he’d given her a gift: another opportunity to return to the House of Shadows, to unearth whatever secrets lived there about the Bargainer. Just because Sophia had failed the first time didn’t mean she couldn’t succeed in the end. Despite Harrison, despite Bryce’s game, she would find a way to get her memories back.

“Meanwhile, I would put it past no one to kill another player as a means to save themselves or to end this game,” Harrison continued, “and as I am not like my mother, I consider it a priority to see the four of us survive together.”

Harrison threw his card in the center. The Lovers. His target:THE SUN.

“Who are your targets?” he asked them.

Sophia turned her card over.THE STAR.

Delaney jolted. “That’s Poppy’s card.”

Something troubled crossed Harrison’s expression, but he quickly erased it. “We’ll figure it out.”

But still, Delaney glanced at Sophia suspiciously. A piece of hair slipped from her bun.

“My target is Judgment,” Harvey said quietly. “I don’t know whose card that is.”

“The Sun, the Star, Judgment, the Tower,” Harrison listed off. “We should start with my target. As you know, if I die, you all die—that is how the omerta works, and there are no more Augustines left to kill me the way I killed my mother so that you all can be spared. Thankfully, I am Fenice’s target, and I don’t think she’s desperate enough to lay a hand on me just yet. The best the four of us can do for each other is secure mine.”

It seemed cowardly, but even Sophia couldn’t begrudge Harrison’s logic.

“But who owns that card?” Delaney asked.

“I have an idea,” Harrison replied softly. “Unfortunately, I don’t think she’ll be easily convinced. I don’t think she’ll be convinced at all.”

In the silence and exchanged glances that fell, Sophia finally did pity Harvey.

He shifted under the weight of their stares. “What do you mean?”

“You’re complicit in this,” Harrison told him. “The girls have already been given their task. I will be contacting my other friends, trying to uncover a feasible way to end the game. And so this errand will be your responsibility—yours alone. You’ll tell Bryce none of this.”

The realization seemed to dawn on Harvey, and—stricken—he grasped at his Creed. It reminded Sophia of the one Jac wore, but unlike Harvey’s, Jac’s had actually stood for something. Conviction.

“You want me to kill your target,” Harvey rasped. “The Sun.”

Harrison cast him, not a pitying look, but an appraising one. “This is your game, after all. I want you to play.”

LOLA

Lola had escaped death by an inch.

Death at the hand of her closest friend.

From what she could distinguish from her reflection in a murky Tropps Street window, her right ear was gone, blown off, with nothing remaining but ripples of raw, uneven flesh and a crusted sheath of dried blood. She could still hear through it, but the sound was muted. So for the entire journey back to Madame Fausting’s, she’d hung back at the group’s right, where she could still listen when Enne offered her an apology, when Grace or Roy turned to ask if she was all right.

But no one spoke. No one even looked at her.

They opened the front door of the finishing school to find a sea of expectant faces waiting for the oh-so-impressive Mizer’s entourage. The Scarhands’ clothes were so dirt-crusted they each looked like cockroaches invading the Spirits’ gag-worthy pastel and doily-themed parlor. Everyone’s chatter promptly died as the four of them staggered inside, reeking of sewer, each of their clothes speckled—or in Lola’s case, drenched—in blood.

Enne froze at the edge of the crowd, swaying as though off-balance. Lola realized with a start that the Scarhands who’d fled past her in the Mole tunnels had never returned, either. She guessed grimly that the Doves had intercepted them.

“Where’s Mina?” a Scarhand asked, their voice hitched.

“Where’s Henning?”

“Linus? Danielle?”