Page 52 of The Inheritance Games

“Equally important,” Max continued, “are you having a torrid affair with Jameson Hawthorne and should I plan for a spring wedding?”

“No.” I sat up in bed. “It’s not like that.”

“Bull fox-faxing ship.”

“I have to live with these people,” I told Max. “For a year. They already have enough reasons to hate me.” I wasn’t thinking about Skye or Zara or Xander or Nash when I said that. I was thinking about Grayson. Silver-eyed, suit-wearing, threat-issuing Grayson. “Getting involved with Jameson would just be throwing gasoline on the fire.”

“And what a lovely fire it would be,” Max murmured.

She was, without question, a bad influence. “I can’t,” I reiterated. “And besides… there was a girl.” I thought back to my dream and wondered if Jameson had taken Emily driving, if she had ever played one of Tobias Hawthorne’s games. “She died.”

“Back the fax up there. What do you mean, shedied? How?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

I pulled my comforter tight around me. “Her name was Emily. Do you know how many people named Emily there are in the world?”

“Is he still hung up on her?” Max asked. She was talking about Jameson, but my brain went back to that moment when I’d said Emily’s name to Grayson. It had gutted him. Destroyed him.

There was a rap at my door. “Max, I have to go.”

Oren spent more than an hour going over security protocols with me. He indicated that he would be happy to do the same thing, every morning at dawn, until it stuck.

“Point taken,” I told him. “I’ll be good.”

“No you won’t.” He gave me a look. “But I’ll be better.”

My second day—and the start of my first full week—at private school shaped up much like the week before. People did their best not to stare at me. Jameson avoided me. I avoided Thea. I wondered what gossip Jameson thought we would provoke if we were seen together, wondered if there had been whispers when Emily died.

I wonderedhowshe’d died.

You’re not a player.Nash’s words of caution came back to me, again and again, every time I caught sight of Jameson in the halls.You’re the glass ballerina—or the knife.

“I heard that you have a need for speed.” Xander pounced on me outside the physics lab. He was clearly in high spirits. “God bless the paparazzi, am I right? I also heard that you had a very special chat with my mother.”

I wasn’t sure if he was pumping me for information or commiserating. “Your mother is something else,” I said.

“Skye is a complicated woman.” Xander nodded sagely. “But she taught me how to read tarot and moisturize my cuticles, so who am I to complain?”

Skye wasn’t the one who’d forged them, pushed them, set them to challenges, expected the impossible. She wasn’t the one who’d made themmagic.

“Your brothers all got the same letter from your grandfather,” I told Xander, examining his reaction.

“Did they now?”

I narrowed my eyes slightly. “I know that you got it, too.”

“Maybe I did,” Xander admitted cheerily. “But hypothetically, if I had, and if I hypothetically were playing this game and wanted, just this once—and just hypothetically—to win…” He shrugged. “I’d want to do it my way.”

“Does your way involve robots and scones?”

“What doesn’t?” Grinning, Xander nudged me into the lab. Like everything at Country Day, it looked like a million dollars—figuratively. Probably more than a million dollars, literally. Curved lab tables circled the room. Floor-to-ceiling windows had replaced three of the four walls. There was colored writing on the windows—calculations in different handwritings, like scratch paper was just so passé. Each lab table came complete with a large monitor and a digital whiteboard. And that wasn’t even touching on the size of the microscopes.

I felt like I’d just walked into NASA.

There were only two free seats. One was next to Thea. The other was as far away from Thea as you could get, next to the girl I’d seen in the archive. Her dark red hair was pulled into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her coloring was stop-and-stare striking—hairthatred, skinthatpale—but her eyes were downcast.