Ace of Shades (The Shadow Game Series)

by Amanda Foody

  Hordes of people rushed toward the exit of the factory, trampling each other and clogging the only escape route. Enne and Lola followed, but it was soon clear that the crowd wasn’t moving.

  Even on her tiptoes, Enne couldn’t see ahead. “What’s happening?”

  “The door must be closed.”

  Behind them, whiteboots charged into the crowd, their guns and batons raised. They looked like wolves herding sheep to slaughter.

  A man turned and smacked Enne’s side with his bag. She staggered as the heavy bundle knocked the wind out of her, and her heart slammed into her throat. Beside her, another person cursed when Enne knocked whatever they were carrying out of their hands. They were packed in here. Trapped.

  Enne fearfully reached for the revolver in her pocket, but Lola grabbed her wrist and shook her head. “Don’t bother,” she said, her eyes downcast. “That first night, when I took your gun... I unloaded it. I never gave the bullets back.”

  Enne’s eyes widened. She glanced down and opened the revolver’s compartment, and sure enough, it was empty.

  She resisted the urge to snap at Lola. Of all the times to be out of bullets... Enne might’ve been able to escape any real punishment from the whiteboots—though any encounter with them was a risk of exposure—but Lola had the Doves’ white in her hair. It didn’t matter what she had or hadn’t done—she’d be marked as guilty. If anyone was feeling the pain of their lack of ammo, it was Lola.

  “We need to find a way out,” Lola squeaked.

  Enne searched for another exit or a place to hide, but with the crowd, she could see nowhere but up. Above their heads, the kids on the rafters climbed toward a window. A boy pulled himself through it onto the roof. To safety.

  Her eyes fell on a huge piece of machinery, some sort of retired generator. Not far from that was a column with two bars that branched out like a Y.

  “Come on,” Enne said. Their hands still clasped, she pulled Lola through the crowd and toward the generator. Stepping on a lever, Enne climbed onto the huge mechanical cylinder and hoisted herself up.

  “You’re shatz,” Lola breathed once she realized Enne’s plan. She stared at the kids near the ceiling with wide eyes.

  But then she reached up and grasped Enne’s hand, and Enne pulled her up. After a few moments of hesitation, Lola jumped to the column. She landed awkwardly on one foot but managed to steady herself.

  Enne leaped and landed behind her. Lola scrambled up with her arms wrapped around the pole so tightly that her shirt bunched around her neck, exposing part of her stomach.

  “You need to climb faster,” Enne urged. “Before they notice us.”

  The whiteboots had reached the crowd. One of them grabbed a girl by her hair and pulled her down to her knees. Others pointed their clubs at the wide-eyed customers, who raised their arms in surrender. In the front, a group of men pounded against the closed door and screamed.

  Enne swung herself around the angled pole, her back facing down, and climbed the opposite column with her legs wrapped around the beam. Now she wouldn’t need to wait for Lola to move faster. The bolts on the side of the column were large enough to grasp.

  Enne made it to one of the metal rafters near the ceiling. It wasn’t until she’d seized it and swung her legs over that she looked down. The climb hadn’t appeared quite so high from the ground. Lola, on the other hand, seemed all too aware of this. She climbed to the steady rhythm of, “Muck, muck, muck.”

  At least a dozen children huddled on the rafters, some as young as seven. They watched Enne in fascination and nervousness as she stood—she probably looked rather intimidating in her black mask. Below, a few people pointed at her, saw her. Enne was reminded once again that she was no longer invisible. She was powerful—but she was also vulnerable.

  Lola appeared several feet away, dripping sweat. She hauled herself up with all the gracefulness of a walrus. “Shatz. You’re shatz.”

  Enne ignored her and calculated the route to the window that she’d seen the boy escape from earlier. Then she realized why the other children hadn’t moved: there was a twelve-foot gap between their beam and the one near the window. A huge black cord spanned across the distance, pulled taut. Several kids on either side worked to knot it to the closest beams.

  A tightrope.

  Lola blanched. “There’s no mucking way.”

  “How did they already get over there?” Enne asked the kids.

  “They came in from there. From the roof,” answered a girl with waist-length black hair. She looked to be about eleven. “We took the stairs.” She nodded to the opposite end of the factory, where a stairwell climbed most of the way up a corner wall to reach an office level. Enne hadn’t seen it, being so far away, with all the whiteboots between here and there. She and Lola had taken a more strenuous route. No wonder the kids had looked at them with such amazement.

  “We should just wait,” Lola said, her voice shaking. “The whiteboots will leave eventually.”

  “Or come up eventually,” the girl muttered.

  Enne looked down again. Several of the whiteboots already stood still, watching them, waiting them out.

  “The whiteboots will be gentle with you,” Enne told the girl. “You’re all young, what could they—”

  The girl shook her head and showed Enne her hands. They were covered in scars. Enne realized all of them bore matching marks. They were children.

  “We just swore,” the girl explained. “Eight Fingers never let us, but Scavenger did.”

  Which meant all of them—not just Lola—were in danger.

  Enne inched over to the cord. No net to catch her here.

  “You could just wrap your legs around the cord and hang upside down,” Enne said as Lola crawled on her stomach closer to her, her chin pressed against the cool metal of the rafter. She looked absurd, all trembling and pale. Then Enne realized that maybe it was she who looked absurd, confident enough to stand and give direction.

  “There are holes in the wire,” Lola said, indicating several bare patches with no covering. At the cord’s other end, it was plugged into a machine on the ceiling. “That might be on. Touch it, and you’re fried.”

  “Rubber soles,” Enne reminded her. She flicked the cord in a safe spot. It wasn’t perfectly taut, but the give wasn’t severe.

  “Fall and you die,” Lola countered.

  “Then use your clothes.”

  The black-haired girl slid off her jacket. She carefully walked around Enne, then slipped her coat over the cord and wrapped both sleeves around her wrists and clenched hands.

  “You’re actually doing that?” hissed the boy beside her. He had swollen cheeks, like he’d recently had a tooth pulled.

  She shot him a devious smirk. “Yeah. Tell them all to watch.”

  She fell. The jacket turned over the cord, holding her, and she wrapped her legs around the wire. The other children watched in awe as she crawled upside down to the other side.

  They were moving, and that was a start. “You go next,” the girl called across to the boy.

  Crying unabashedly, he slipped his knitted scarf over the cord and bound it to his wrists. He slowly eased his way off the beam and wrapped his ankles around the top of the wire. It took him ages to move even an inch.

  “Kelvin, you gotta move faster,” the girl urged impatiently from the other side. “There are others waiting.” However, only a few of the others looked willing to even attempt the cross.

  “I... I’m...” Kelvin stammered. He was a third of the way across now and shaking uncontrollably.

  “He looks like he’s gonna piss himself,” another girl behind Enne, around nine years old, said loudly enough for Kelvin to hear. Enne was torn between shock at her language and fear that Kelvin actually might.

  He was halfway across now. The nine-year-old took off her jacket to go next.
r />   Kelvin’s scarf snapped.

  He didn’t react fast enough. His ankles unlatched, and he fell, screaming. The girl on the other side reached out desperately, as if she could catch him from so far away.

  The crowd shrieked when Kelvin hit an old conveyor belt with a bone-crunching thud. His blood splattered across the metal, and his neck was bent at an unnatural angle. Enne hurriedly looked away, fighting her urge to be sick.

  One of the boys behind Enne vomited into his hands. The girl on the other side hugged the beam and stared down at Kelvin’s body, moaning to herself.

  The crowds grew louder at the gruesome display, and the chaos below them became more and more violent. As the protesters brawled with the whiteboots, several other officials were making their way toward the stairs. Toward them.

  “Time to move,” the nine-year-old squeaked. “My jacket isn’t gonna break, so I’m going.”

  She made it across. By that time, the first girl had crawled off the beam to the window. Lola and Enne shared a look, an unspoken agreement to wait until the other children had crossed, despite the whiteboots charging up the stairs. Lola closed her eyes and pressed her face to the beam. Every few seconds, she lifted one hand to make sure that her top hat was still pinned to her hair.

  There was crying and pauses and cursing, but no more accidents. Everyone reached the other side.

  “I should go last,” Enne said to Lola. “I’ll be the quickest.”

  “If I die, I will haunt you. And your children. And your children’s children—”

  “Just go.” They didn’t have time to waste. The whiteboots had made it to the ceiling’s rafters. Although they were admittedly far away, they wouldn’t be for long. Lola wore the mark of an assassin—the whiteboots very well might shoot first and ask questions later.

  “Muck,” Lola murmured. She put her coat around the cord and slid upside down. During that split second of falling, she bit on her lip so hard it bled. Lola muttered to herself and moved inches at a time—quickly, in a worm-like fashion that would’ve made Enne laugh in any other situation—and was three-quarters of the way there when her hat slid off, exposing the white of her hair.

  Gunshot.

  It missed. Lola shrieked and grabbed hold of the beam on the other side. Two more gunshots. Enne crouched, her stomach in her throat. No. Please no, she thought. I didn’t even want to come here. I shouldn’t have come at all.

  Lola pulled herself onto the beam and slid forward on her stomach toward the window. She motioned for Enne to hurry, but Enne was frozen. A bullet clattered off the beam below her feet.

  Enne recited Lourdes’s rules to herself.

  Don’t let them see your fear.

  She took her first step on the cord. She was steady. Breathe.

  Never allow yourself to be lost.

  She took another. A gunshot whizzed past her outstretched arm.

  She ran. Quickly, lightly.

  One stride. Two strides. Three strides. Then she slipped.

  She caught the rope by her underarms, and for a few seconds, no one shot. They thought that she was about to fall.

  Trust no one unless you must.

  She raised her arms so that the cord slid into her hands. It was a miracle she hadn’t touched bare wire. One kick forward turned into a swing. Two swings and she got her legs on the beam.

  Lola jumped through the window while Enne lay down and kissed the metal of the rafter. Enne stood up and followed hurriedly, her acrobatic grace failing her in her rush to escape. Her foot caught the windowpane, and she toppled over the other side onto a roof. Enne landed on her back, and it knocked the wind out of her.

  Lola, lying beside her, punched her shoulder. Good job, Enne thought she meant. You’re shatz, she probably also meant. She couldn’t argue.

  Enne sat up and leaned against the wall. She was breathing hard and fighting down the urge to either laugh or cry.

  The Scarhands gawked, gathered around a different window, where they’d watched Lola and Enne brave the cord. The girl who’d known Kelvin covered her face with the coat she’d used to cross, her shoulders heaving.

  “We should still be moving,” Enne said. “The whiteboots saw us leave.” She looked out into the distance, at the unappealing view of the Factory District.

  Someone tapped her arm. It was one of the kids. “Who are you?”

  “Séance,” Lola answered for her. Enne shot the blood gazer a furious look. What sort of game was she playing?

  “Are you one of the Scarhands?” She looked at Enne’s unmarked palms with confusion.

  Lola grinned. “Would Scavenger be brave enough to do that?”

  “No way,” the girl said. She looked at Enne with the kind of reverence she had once seen Mansi direct at Levi.

  Enne had nearly forgotten why they’d come to Scrap Market in the first place. Ignoring them, she pulled the newspaper from her pocket and flipped through the pages until she found Lourdes’s article.

  Lola nodded urgently. “We should leave.” But Enne wasn’t paying attention.

  The ink was too blotched to read anything but the title: “Not Forgotten.” The paper looked as if someone had submerged it in water.

  Enne stared at the incomprehensible words and balled the newspaper in her fist. “That. Horrid. Man.”

  This had been her last chance to hear Lourdes’s voice, and it had been a trick. Tears blurred her vision. Usually she’d feel embarrassed for crying in front of others, but now she no longer cared.

  Lola put her arm around Enne’s shoulder. It was an intimate gesture for someone who carried such conflicted feelings about Enne’s well-being.

  “We need to leave,” Lola said. “You’re the lord.” Her words sounded forced—an act. She leaned down closer to Enne’s ear. “They’re waiting for you to move. And we all need to get out of here.”

  The others surrounding them watched Enne hesitantly, as if waiting instruction. As if Enne really was a street lord.

  Lola’s desperate look urged her into action. They crawled across the sloping roof of the warehouse, then jumped to the building beside it. Enne landed gracefully on her feet. Lola, however, crumbled to her knees as soon as she hit the cement.

  Unsurprisingly, hopping roofs was an exhausting activity. When they reached a rooftop several blocks away from the factory, Enne and Lola huffed for breath, and the blood gazer’s hands were covered in scrapes from repeatedly stumbling and bracing herself. They were a safe enough distance away that the kids had begun to scatter. Now it was just the two of them.

  “There are thousands of them in the North Side, just like that,” Lola said. “Pulling stunts. Haunting gang territories. Hoping to be noticed by the Guild or by their lords.” She grimaced. “They’d be the most vulnerable if another war broke out on the North Side. There’s no one to protect them.”

  Enne’s heart twisted into something painful and ugly. She didn’t have it in her right now to listen to one of Lola’s accusatory tirades.

  “Why did you call me Séance?” she asked, fighting to keep the tension out of her voice.

  “All lords have a street name.”

  “I thought you wanted me dead. ‘A weapon to whoever owns me’ and all?”

  “I still think you’re dangerous. Maybe more dangerous than I first believed. I thought the city would claim you—break you.” Lola paused, looking intensely into Enne’s eyes. “Now I think the city could be yours to claim.”

  Enne grimaced. “That wasn’t your decision to make.”

  Lola was too late, anyway. Enne was already broken, already claimed.

  “Do you want to know the real reason I dyed my hair white?” Lola clenched her fists and turned toward the skyline. “After we lost our parents, my brothers and I swore we wouldn’t go near the gangs. We were young, so we worked under the table. My oldest brother was att
ending a music conservatory on the South Side, and once he finished, he was going to take care of all of us.

  “Then I found out he’d been lying. He’d joined a gang, thought it was an easier way to provide. And when that gang fell, I watched him get shot. I watched him die.”

  Enne held her breath. She hadn’t asked for Lola’s story—she wasn’t prepared for it. It was an unwelcome reminder that her tragedy wasn’t the only one in the world, that she wasn’t the only one who carried scars. Now she understood why Lola hated guns.

  “After that, it was only me and my younger brother left. But Justin, he didn’t just mourn our brother—he obsessed over him, the gangs, the North Side. He stopped caring about me. He stopped caring about anything except his own ambitions. He joined the Doves.”

  Lola took off her top hat, letting down her white hair. “When you join the Doves, your name is replaced with a new one. You do not leave. You speak to no one.” Lola clenched her fist. “And so I moved to Dove Land, dyed my hair white and started working for the Orphan Guild...all for a chance at a scrap of information, anything to lead me back to Justin, to know if he’s even alive. Even if he doesn’t care, I still do.”

  Lola finally turned to face her, her expression unusually soft. “So I get it. We’re each looking for someone. We’d each do whatever it takes to find them. In the end, we’re the same. And if...” She cleared her throat. “If you did call yourself a lord, if you claimed real power, then maybe you could help me find him.”

  Enne took a deep, strained breath. It had felt wrong to interrupt Lola during her story, but now that Lola had told her truth, Enne would need to share hers.

  “Lourdes is dead, Lola,” Enne said softly, and Lola tensed. “She was dead before I even came to New Reynes.” Enne sat and hugged her knees to herself. “I don’t even know why I came with you to Scrap Market. Looking for the article was a waste of time.”

  She’d been deluding herself, anyway. Lourdes wouldn’t have spoken to her daughter through the words of the article. It would have been ink, not a voice. She would’ve written about revolutions or elections or change, and none of those things really mattered. She wouldn’t have told Enne that she loved her. She wouldn’t have been able to hear Enne tell her that she loved her, too.