by Amanda Foody
“You know what it would take.”
“I...” She bit her lip, and Jac hated the way it made him stare.
When the pause lasted a second too long, he pulled away and let her stumble inside. He wasn’t going to resort to kicking her foot out of the way. So instead, he did the mature thing: he ran up the stairs and locked his apartment door behind him.
Much like his last one, Jac’s apartment was cramped and empty of nearly all belongings. His bed stood across from a small gas stove, and a clothesline spanned from the kitchen table to the closet.
“Todd!” Sophia pounded on his door. He ignored her and fumbled around his drawers for a pack of cigarettes. “Please.” Her voice cracked. She’d never been good at begging.
Jac found his secret pack hidden inside what looked like a deck of cards. He lit one and collapsed onto his unmade bed.
“I haven’t told you these things because you’ll look at me differently,” Sophia said through the door. “And I know that isn’t fair to you. I know it’s not.”
She paused, as though waiting for Jac to let her inside. But she hadn’t actually told him any answers yet, only more meaningless, pretty words. So he didn’t move, and let her continue.
“Delia, Charles, and I are all half siblings. We all have different mothers, and so we all each have different split talents. Delia was a split-Apothecary. Charles comes from a Dorner family, just like you. But his split talent manifested differently than yours. He can give pain, rather than take it.”
Jac had met others with the same surname before. It was uncommon, but not unheard of. He didn’t know his parents, but he preferred to assume he and Charles weren’t actually related.
A talent for giving pain certainly explained Charles’s reputation. The memory of his words when he shook Jac’s hand made him shiver. I bet I’ve made her scream louder than you. Jac recalled the scars on the den manager’s arms—wounds he hadn’t actually needed to inflict with his talent, when all it took to give pain was a touch.
The sound of Sophia’s voice dropped lower, like she’d slid down to the floor.
“I know Charles’s invitation is for a fight,” she said. “You won’t be able to outmatch him, even though you’re stronger. Not with his talents.”
“How does he know who I am?” Jac asked. “About my past?”
“Hospital records, probably. He can get access to those things.”
Eventually, Jac decided to sit by the door, where it was easier to listen. It would’ve been even easier if he let her inside, but he wasn’t ready for that yet. He’d meant it when he told her all or nothing.
“I explained to you how good and bad deeds can manipulate luck. I carry charms. Uncle Garth used to be all about charities. But our father had other methods. As you might know from the Faith, there’s more than one type of penance. Charles, Sedric, and Delia all preferred the physical variety.”
Jac’s stomach turned. There were Faith stories that included that, but he’d never known anyone to practice them.
“I remember the scars Sedric had on his back, like grooves,” Sophia whispered. “My father started Delia and Charles on it young—too young—but he coddled me. Charles always had to sneak behind his back if he wanted to torment me. He used to hurt himself just so he could give the pain to someone else. He loved to play with people’s fears—or give them new ones.”
Jac realized, for all the secrets he demanded of her, he didn’t want to hear about this, so he quickly asked, “Why do Charles and Delia see another face when they look at you? I saw that picture of you as a child. You only look older, not different. But they see someone else.” He’d never heard of a skin-stitcher who could do that. They were usually hired by rich people to adjust their noses or jawlines. The procedures were long, painful, and permanent.
“This is the part where you stop believing me,” Sophia murmured.
“Try me.”
Jac could almost sense her stiffen on the other side of the door. If there’d been nothing between them, he might’ve reached for her hand, given her some sort of assurance that he was grateful for this information. But he was also protecting himself. He hadn’t forgotten where they were, and how small his apartment was beyond his bed. He hadn’t forgotten the way she’d looked at him and touched him at Liver Shot. How he’d liked it.
All or nothing was as much a demand from her as it was a promise to himself.
“Do you believe in demons?”
Jac shuddered and repeated Harvey’s words about malisons from last night. “Strictly speaking, according to the Faith, demons exist whether you believe in them or not.”
“And what about the Bargainer?”
That story didn’t come from the Faith—it came from a legend, one of the oldest and most ludicrous of the North Side. The subject of it had many names—the Bargainer, the Devil. In the stories, you could bargain with them for anything...even your own soul.
“Not every street legend is true,” Jac answered.
“This one is.”
An icy dread filled his chest that even the nicotine couldn’t send away.
“After my father died, I ran away,” she said. “I can’t remember if I went looking for her, or if she found me. And I swear, it was just like those Faith stories. I remember her red eyes. I remember I asked for her to make me unrecognizable to my siblings, even if I stood right in front of them. To Delia and Charles, I’m a different person entirely—different face, different voice. It was incredible, the first time I tested it.”
But if the Bargainer did exist and really was like Faith’s stories, then what she’d given Sophia wasn’t a gift—it was a curse, a shade. And no doubt it came with a price.
“What did she take in return?” Jac asked, chills creeping across his skin.
“My split talent. I don’t know why—I don’t remember it. She carved it out and all my memories of it, too. It’s like I’m nothing but a Torren.” Her voice shook, and Jac realized she was crying. He hurriedly stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. “I told you I’d sacrificed for this, and I meant it. Destroying Luckluster is all I have left. I’m nothing without that.”
He opened the door, making her jolt and fall back. She scrambled to her feet and wiped at her eyes. It took a moment for Jac to realize what he’d done by letting her in.
All or nothing, he’d promised himself.
Jac had always wanted what was no good for him, but wanting Sophia felt different. Jac had used Lullaby to fill himself whole, if only for a few hours. To make him forget how he felt trapped and lousy and worthless, only to make him feel twice as awful when he woke.
This wanting felt like the opposite. Like each step toward her led to a destination instead of an escape.
Sophia wordlessly closed the door behind her.
Jac had never had a girl in his own apartment before, and a flush crept up his face as she examined it, messy and bare. Suddenly, it was him who felt exposed. She’d been worried he’d think she was shatz. Now she was probably wondering why he lived like this, like he was barely living at all.
“I don’t...own many things,” he said awkwardly. “I lost it all when they put the bounty on my head.” But even before then, he’d never had much.
“I don’t either, since I ran away,” Sophia told him, her back pressed against the door. They had both left pieces of their lives behind, for better or for worse.
Still, Jac resisted the urge to pick up discarded clothes off the floor. “I thought this would be temporary.”
“I know,” she answered.
“I mean, I could’ve gotten a new place, but I—”
“Jac,” she said, and he stopped. She rarely called him by his actual name, as though everything about their relationship was a game. But it had never felt like one to him.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she told him.
Jac tried to mold his face into something unreadable, but it was difficult. She’d somehow managed to reapply her cherry lipstick in between tear
s. He liked how it looked a little smudged.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Like I’m dangerous. It’s very hot.”
Jac laughed as he walked toward her. She was dangerous. Already, the burden of her secrets weighed down on him, as though nestled in the space between his bones. But as he leaned forward and pressed his mouth to hers, he knew he would never take any of it back.
Her lipstick even tasted like cherries.
Jac had kissed—and more than kissed—several girls before. But never in his own apartment, never with so much shared past and future between them.
He’d always thought of what he’d overcome as the broken pieces of himself, but even damaged as they were, he could still build something good upon them. With every kiss, he felt a little closer to collapsing. But with every kiss, he also felt more secure. The weight of her burdens supported his own.
Sophia stumbled as she kicked off her boots. Once she did, they stood at eye level. It made it easier to brush her hair to the side and kiss a trail down her neck. She sighed as she leaned into him, and her fingers dug into his back. She pulled him closer to her, so that there was no space between them—not for secrets, not for second guesses. Every moment of empty flirting and teasing, moments that had originally seemed like a game between them, now felt like promises, waiting to be collected.
Sophia pulled clumsily at the buttons of his shirt, but it was hard to undress him when he was already focused on undressing her. The breeze from his open window sent goose bumps prickling across bare skin. Jac shivered, but not from the cold. Then she pulled him into the bed and climbed on top of him, so she could make him shiver some more.
Her dark hair draped over the both of them, and while he soon discovered how much he liked to run his hands through it, it nearly made his heart stop dead to watch her do it. She might’ve been dangerous and cursed, but he still smiled against her lips when he said, “Do that again.”
Those words, however satisfying to say, proved far more so to hear from her.
“Do that again,” she commanded several minutes later, clutching at his wrist as his fingers wandered upwards. Jac obliged and trailed back down.
All or nothing, it turned out, did not mean one thing or the other. It meant whatever could be contained with the grasp of a single night. It meant giving now what the future could take away.
* * *
Many hours later, Jac carefully crawled out of bed so as not to disturb Sophia sleeping beside him. He had a lot of practice with that, but this time, he didn’t intend to sneak out.
Jac reached into his discarded jacket and pulled the invitation out of the pocket. He held it up to the moonlight and squinted as he attempted to make out the words. His eyes skipped over the letters to a date scribbled on the bottom.
11/8/25
Three months. That gave him time.
Jac needed to find Levi, to ask him for help—even advice.
And, if it came down to it, he needed to play.
LEVI
“Two weeks?” Levi barked angrily into the phone. “The Irons already missed their shifts yesterday. They have more tonight. We need those papers now.”
“Pup, you know how much I love doing business with you,” Jonas said, and his voice sounded slimy even through the receiver. “But I’m still making calls. You’re not the only one in the North Side suddenly scrambling for new identification papers.”
Levi slammed his fist on his desk. Since Enne had left this morning, his phone had rung every other minute with another concerned casino manager trying to cancel their contracts due to the lockdown on the North Side. The talent registration period would begin in three days’ time, and until the “violent crime lords were apprehended and brought to justice,” all those with either a blood or split Talent of Mysteries were required to be home by nine o’clock. All others, ten o’clock.
This is only a temporary situation, Levi had repeated over and over this morning. We’ll have it under control soon. But, of course, he’d been lying through his teeth. The wigheads had sent a military force to patrol the North Side, and the only thing the lords could do was wait until the tension died down.
“We can’t work without those papers,” Levi grunted.
“You’re supposed to be rich now, aren’t you? Surely you can get by for two weeks.”
Two weeks, sure. But if all the casinos pulled out, how would they get by after?
“And you’re supposed to be the most connected person in the city,” Levi countered. “I don’t see why—”
“You think you’re the only one with these problems?” Jonas shouted. “Scrap Market has been permanently shut down—the Scarhands are scattered across the city. I’m sitting in a basement closet with fourteen different phone lines, all ringing with calls from my clients and suppliers, but you know which one rings the most? Yours. So maybe you could try solving some of my problems before you expect me to solve yours.”
Levi pressed his head against the desk. He didn’t have any clever ideas. Not this time.
Sure enough, Levi made out the ringing of another phone in the background. “Do you really think I’m taking custom orders right now?” he heard Jonas bark to some other client.
“Well, smart-ass?” Jonas snapped, once again on Levi’s line. “You got a solution for me?”
“We’re all mucked!” Levi growled and slammed the receiver back down.
As soon as he did, his phone rang again. He ripped the cord out of the wall and collapsed onto his bed. It was hard to believe he and Enne had lain here only two nights before, talking as if the rest of the world didn’t exist, when really, the rest of the world was ending.
* * *
In his dream, Levi’s footsteps echoed down the alternating black-and-white tiles of the hallway. He approached a white door, hoping it held the answers he needed, but all it contained was a nightmare.
Levi’s father had a regal face, with wide, square features, a strong jaw, and brown skin like Levi’s own. He wore the same linen tunic whenever he worked as an orb-maker, the one with gold embroidery along the collar—finer than anything else they owned. Their family home was just a collection of cheap furniture and hidden treasures. It’d also felt empty since his mother died. Levi still slept in the bedroom across the hall from his father, but no one had truly lived in this place for over a year.
“So when will you leave?” his father asked him, startling Levi from the book he read. Levi quickly concealed his surprise—and his guilt—and molded his face into something expressionless. He’d gotten good at doing that. “That’s what you’re planning to do, right? To leave?”
“No,” Levi lied.
“Don’t lie to me.” His father ripped the book out of Levi’s hands. Levi carefully sat up from his seat, in case he’d need to run. “You think you can go anywhere? There are restrictions on this family, even if you might pretend you’re not part of it.”
Levi wasn’t pretending. He was rejecting. He’d spent years listening to his father’s stories about the Revolution, about the tragic events that had led them to this miserable house on a cliff so far from their original home. He’d listened, and he rejected it. He rejected his father’s victimized apologies for the plates, the windows, the bones he’d broken. He rejected his father’s claims that the Mizers had been fair rulers, when history told otherwise. He rejected the idea that he was trapped here, bound to this same house, to this same tragedy.
“I’m going to New Reynes,” he said quietly.
His father started toward him, but Levi had already stood up and backed into the parlor.
“You know what they did to all the orb-makers who served the queen in Reynes?” his father asked. “They hanged them.”
That had been twenty years ago. Another tragedy Levi refused to claim.
His father reached for the book Levi had left on the cushions. It was thick, with sharp leather edges and a real weight to it.
As freeing as it’d seemed to reject the Glaisyer name
, it hadn’t felt so simple to leave. That night, he cried out of guilt the entire train ride to New Reynes, his ticket bought by one of his father’s treasures that he’d stolen and sold. He cried because its new owner wouldn’t understand what it meant. They wouldn’t know that Levi’s grandfather’s head had been hanged like an ornament from the palace walls before they’d burned. They wouldn’t know that Levi’s father had smuggled the treasure in his shoes when he fled the city. They wouldn’t know the story because it was tragic, and no one wanted to hear a tragic story, Levi least of anyone.
That was why his new life wouldn’t begin with tragedy. In the legend he planned on writing for himself, he had come from nothing. He whispered it under his breath so often that, by the time his train pulled to a stop in the City of Sin’s North Side, he’d even begun to believe it.
* * *
Levi woke from his unpleasant nap to find Jac standing over him. He jolted and sat up. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?” He shook out the grogginess in his head and looked out the window. It was still daylight, so he couldn’t have slept for long.
“Nice to see you, too,” Jac said, a strange edge to his voice.
Of course, Jac was allowed to be on edge—as anyone would be, with all this curfew business—but that didn’t stop Levi from examining him. He checked the circles under his eyes—dark, but not too dark. He stared at Jac’s pupils, undilated. At his fingers, untrembling. Those were all good signs, but he still had a vicious cut across his lip from fighting. Altogether though, Jac probably looked better than he did.
“All done?” Jac gritted through his teeth. Levi cleared his throat. He wasn’t trying to be rude—he was trying to be a good friend. “I’ve been wanting to talk.”
“So have I,” Levi said. “I’m glad you came.”
But then a terrible thought occurred to him, sitting in this bed. Enne’s aura still clung to one of the pillows, making his sheets smell faintly of coffee. Levi changed places for his desk.
“You don’t look glad,” Jac said.
Levi had rehearsed his words to his friend over the past few days. I’m sorry I broke my promise, he’d say. But I’m sorry I made it. I know I asked—