Page 4 of Queen of Volts

“Get out,”Zula snapped, closing her eyes so her tattooed ones could seem to glare at Lola instead.

Lola’s confidence tore even easier than the papers. “I—I just want—”

“No, you don’t. You don’t want this.”

Truthfully, Lola Sanguick had never wanted any of it. She hadn’t wanted to work for the Orphan Guild, but the criminal temp agency had offered a flimsy means to find her last surviving brother when nothing else did. She hadn’t wanted to pledge her allegiance to Enne with a shard of glass pressed against her throat. She hadn’t wanted to find herself at the center of a new street war, of a tragic legend, one all of her friends seemed so willing to die for.

Well, she wasn’t going to let them.

Lola pulled a card out of her pocket and threw it on the desk. The illustration of the Hermit stared warily at the both of them.

Zula’s face went ashen. She glanced—imperceptibly—at the stack of papers beside her, and Lola wondered if another card like hers lay hidden beneath, one also with gold foil on its back instead of silver. Zula knew many of the city’s secrets; maybe she was a player, too.

Lola pressed further. “Whatever this game is, whatever Bryce Balfour is—” because despite the claims of Bryce’s display of power at St. Morse, Lola still struggled to believe in malisons “—it’s not about whether I want it. I’m already in it.”

Zula’s gaze swept over her with a look almost like pity. Lola tried not to feel self-conscious. If she’d wanted to inspire confidence, she should’ve dressed the part. Instead, Lola’s houndstooth trousers were wrinkled and gaped at the ankle, and her crimson hair had grown out at the root, letting her natural, lighter red peek through. The dark under-eye circles. The deranged annotations and clippings she’d waved about. Lola hadn’t even raised a gun the night it all happened at St. Morse, but she still looked like collateral damage.

Finally, Zula spoke. “I was with Lourdes Alfero not long after she received that same card, the Hermit, when it’d meant a warning from the Shadow Game. But this card is gold. It’s clearly meant for something else.” Zula’s expression softened for the first time. “You remind me of her, though. Quiet. Stubborn. The three of us are the sort meant to tell the story, once all the violence is over.”

If that were true, then Lourdes Alfero would still be here, and Zula wouldn’t be the last Pseudonym left alive.

“I don’t have answers for you,” Zula told her, “so you might as well—”

“I want to work for you,” Lola blurted. “Teach me. Let me prove that you can trust me.”

Zula shook her head. “It has little to do with trust. I know the answers you seek, but I’ve been forbidden from speaking the truth. That was the bargain he made.”

Lola’s mind whirled with Zula’s words. Someone had made a deal to hide the truth? Only the Bargainer was capable of sealing away such information, so that the words couldn’t even be uttered. This only confirmed Lola’s instinct that the truth was valuable and that she needed to find it. No matter what.

“I don’t care. Let me stay,” Lola urged.

Zula gathered Lola’s papers and slid them back into the briefcase. “You don’t want to work here. I’m afraid the paper won’t be open much longer, anyway. With Vianca Augustine and Worner Prescott dead, what dregs remain of the monarchist party will likely dissolve. And Chancellor Fenice will see to it that they do, I’m sure.”

“But I do want to,” Lola countered.

Zula’s eyes flashed. “They’re all dead. Every one of them but me. Is that what you want to be a part of?”

Lola had no desire to die, but shewasgrowing desperate. These secrets didn’t feel like pieces of history that she could ignore. They feltimportant. Lola might not have wanted any part of this, but Enne was still Lola’s best friend. And now that the world had learned that the famous criminal called Séance was really a Mizer, they would only see Enne as a threat. Maybe unraveling the mysteries of Enne’s past could help change that.

“No, I don’t have a death wish,” answered Lola. “But I’d like to finish what the Pseudonyms started.”

Zula snorted. “Don’t insult my friends’ memories. None of this is what they wanted.”

Jac Mardlin’s face came to Lola’s mind, his ridiculous fake glasses and dimples. The thought of him left a raw and aching wound in her heart, as though one of the knives from her own collection had been plunged into it. Even if his death had been an accident, Jac had died a legend. He’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted. And Lola would never, ever understand how she was supposed to find peace in that.

Lola opened her mouth to apologize for bothering Zula, to return to her girlfriend, Tock, likely still in bed and waiting for her, but then Zula handed Lola back her card.

“Are you prepared to die for this?” Zula asked her, her voice heavy with wariness, her frail hands quaking from stretching out her arm. Lola realized Zula didn’t use cruelty to wound—she used it to warn away anyone left who dared to tread too close. And so she locked herself alone in her office, writing and watching and waiting for the day the leader of the Republic came to take her work and then her head.

“I am,” Lola answered, and she was horrified to discover it wasn’t a lie. Maybe that made her no better than her friends, but unlike them, Lola wouldn’t throw her life away to become a legend—she’d die to make sure the legends were finished.

“Then come back to me when you find this one answer,” Zula said, clicking Lola’s briefcase decidedly closed. “You can be my protégée, little Lourdes, when you learn Lourdes Alfero’s true name.”

ENNE

Enne Scordata had died four times that afternoon.

First, from a knife jabbed between the ribs. Then another in her side. A pistol fired at her temple. An arm around her neck, tightening and twisting until it snapped.