by Amanda Foody
But he knew why. He couldn’t bear to see the disappointment in her eyes if she knew the truth. The one thing he hadn’t given to this city was his shame.
“I need to make things right,” he said quietly.
Jac nodded. It was exactly the sort of language his second understood. Three years ago, after Jac had lost months and friends and dignity to Lullaby, the first thing he did was make amends. After Levi paid Sedric and put this mess behind him, he intended to build the legacy and empire he’d always dreamed of.
Sometimes we’re not who we want to be because we’re supposed to be something else. That was what he’d told Enne the other night. And it made him realize, every time he felt guilt and disgust in his chest over what he was doing, that it was his own fault. Not Vianca’s. Not Sedric’s. His.
He was meant for more than this.
“Have you talked to Enne since yesterday?” Jac asked.
“No,” Levi said. The events of the past two days flooded over him like a strong drink. The way her body had felt tucked against his. How her breath had caught on the Mole when he’d whispered in her ear. The gleam in her eyes when she’d claimed she knew what she wanted, even as she looked at him like that. Like she knew exactly what she did to him. The other night, when she told him she was a Mizer, he’d thought he sensed her mutual desire. But as yesterday had proved, the flirting was definitely one-sided. He couldn’t let the hopeless attraction get to his head—he had more important things to focus on.
“You need to be careful around her,” Jac warned.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure she’s good for you.”
Levi stopped and stared at him. “You weren’t wrong—you did know too much. You were already involved. But this is why I didn’t want her to tell you everything else.”
“Because I might get nervous about my friend’s safety?”
“Because you’re superstitious, and you worry too much.” To those who still followed the Faith, the the Mizers were a subject of lore. Some claimed that Mizers were the first to have talents, and all other talents resulted from reactions to volts held in people’s skin.
To Levi, it was all nonsense. Mizers were just people like everyone else.
But that wasn’t even what really bothered him. What bothered him was that he didn’t need Jac to tell him that falling for Enne was a dangerous idea.
“How well do you really know her?” Jac asked.
“Well enough. Can we not—”
“I never met Lourdes Alfero, like you did, but I know her reputation. She’s cold, cunning and...dangerous. I’m not saying Enne is lying about who she is—I think she was just as clueless about New Reynes as she acted. But the way she knows all our street rules? How Lola said she almost killed her? All the muck about her talents and her family...”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” Levi said, and he really wasn’t.
“What did Lourdes have in mind for her? What is Enne supposed to become?”
“I don’t think her goal is to become anything. She wants to find her mother, and she wants to...” Leave. The last part disappointed him more than it should.
“Maybe so, but...” Jac shook his head, sighing. “It doesn’t matter. You’re already wrecked, man.”
Another detail Levi didn’t need Jac to tell him. “Let’s just get this meeting with Chez over with.”
They walked to the edge of the square by the old fountain, which was bone dry and covered in dust. At its center, where water had once spurted, a sculpture of a Mizer queen stood, the details of her gown’s fabric worn down by the elements. Someone, many years ago, had decapitated her. The head still lay in the fountain, its features no longer distinguishable.
Chez was nowhere to be seen.
“Think he forgot?” Levi asked, even though he doubted Chez would forget a potential payment.
“I can stop by the house to look for him,” Jac said. “You good waiting here?”
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
Jac disappeared down an alley. Levi tapped his foot and stared at the black-stained clouds, only slivers of which were visible through Olde Town’s towers and spires.
Almost as soon as Jac was gone, Chez appeared from one of the off-shooting alleys. He flipped his knife around his knuckles and walked kind of stagger-like, strange for someone usually so swift on his feet. His massive shirt was damp enough that Levi could see his skin and all his ribs sticking out like piano keys. He’d probably swiped it from a drying clothesline on the way here.
It reminded him of how Chez had looked three years ago when Levi had dragged him out of the Brint and pumped life into him—a stranger, a kid. Chez wasn’t so self-righteous then.
Mansi followed him, a dark expression on her face. The anxious feeling in Levi’s chest tightened.
“’Lo, Pup,” Chez said.
“Don’t call me that,” Levi said automatically, all his senses suddenly on alert. Something was wrong.
Chez and Mansi stopped in front of him. It was so quiet Levi could hear the horns from the harbor, almost a mile away.
“There’s been a decision,” Chez said, still twirling his knife.
“What kind of decision?” Levi asked. He looked questioningly at Mansi, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“The Irons want me to challenge you,” he answered.
Levi stiffened. Challenge was a loaded term on the streets. It meant a fight to topple the lord from his seat. A duel to the death.
“You can’t be serious,” Levi said. He stared at his third’s ribs and hesitated to reach for his own knife. No way Chez would really go through with this.
“I am. The Scarhands are under new management. It’s time we were, too.”
Levi winced. Chez wouldn’t lose sleep over Reymond’s death, but he knew Reymond and Levi had been friends. His words were meant to slice.
“I have the volts, Chez,” Levi growled. “Isn’t that what you came for?”
“They’d be a temporary solution to a permanent problem.” Chez raised his knife to chest level. “I don’t feel sorry for you. Not a bit. All that work for Vianca, and none goes to us. The Irons will be safer with you gone.”
“I saved your life,” Levi said, still in disbelief. “I’ve been your friend.”
“That was a long time ago.”
Levi looked at Mansi. Chez, he could believe. The other Irons, maybe. But Mansi? Mansi had looked up to him since the beginning. When had that changed?
She crossed her arms and turned away. It felt like a nail had been driven into his chest, into his coffin.
Maybe he deserved this. Maybe the Irons deserved better.
But he would still fight for what was his.
He removed the pistol he’d been carrying and handed it to Mansi. Duels were knives only. And, despite everything, if he did lose, he wanted Mansi to have it.
If he was being honest with himself, he didn’t think that he could beat a Phillips in a fight—Chez had to be three times faster than him. But it was damn hard to break a street oath. He’d be hurting. Maybe that was all the advantage Levi would need to win.
To win. A challenge was a duel to the death. So it was Chez or Levi. Only one of them would be walking out of Olde Town with their throat intact.
Levi pulled out his knife and moved into a fighting stance, but his legs trembled and his arms felt weak. He wasn’t supposed to die here, just another kid playing lord whom no one would remember.
Chez lunged forward. Levi dodged his knife but missed the punch he’d aimed at Chez’s shoulder. His third was all skin and no bones, quicker with a blade and, of course, fast as lightning.
Chez ran forward and sank his knife into Levi’s leg. Levi let out a scream and frantically jabbed his own blade as he fell, but he never made contact. Hot blood boiled out of his thigh. Chez kicked
him in the side one, two, three times.
Besides the pain, all Levi could think of was how fast he’d gone down.
Four, five. His stomach flipped over, and he swallowed down a tide of vomit. If he was going to die, he wouldn’t die covered in his own sick. He should’ve probably been thinking about something more profound, but he didn’t have a family who would miss him or lovers who would weep. All he had was his dignity.
“Chez!” someone shouted. Levi’s heart was pounding too loudly to hear who it was. The nerves around the knife wound in his leg screamed, and his stomach ached all over. “Stop it!”
Chez kicked Levi again, this time in the head.
Everything darkened. His thoughts whirled around his brain like a funnel, and he wondered if maybe it was the ground spinning and spinning and spinning, sucking him inside the earth.
A few more screams. Then some grunts. A clatter. Footsteps. Levi couldn’t tell if it happened in a millisecond or in minutes, but then something pressed against his leg, and Levi stifled a scream.
The person bending over him was a shadow, but everything was a shadow in Olde Town. “Muck. Muck, this is really happening.” The person wrenched his hand away, and the pain in Levi’s leg lessened slightly. He could sense his aura, weightless and translucent. Jac. “Stay with me. You c-can’t die on me.”
Jac’s words spun, too.
Panicked hands found their way down Levi’s shirt, against his chest. A welcome warmth filled him, easing the pain, coaxing him back into lucidity.
His eyes widened. “No,” he moaned, swatting Jac away.
As the hands let go, so, too, did the warmth. Levi began to shiver. Only the cold and the pain remained, sharp enough to numb everything else. All his adrenaline, gone, and with it, his sense of feeling.
All his life, gone.
The ground caved in, and he hit bottom.
ENNE
Enne stood in the hallway of black and white doors, searching for the right one. She spun in a circle, looking for something familiar. The previous door she’d opened had been her memory of the last time she spoke to Lourdes, but she couldn’t remember which door it was. The hallway stretched endlessly in both directions, every inch of it the same.
She walked to a black door. Those belonged to her.
Inside, she heard thunder.
She opened it hesitantly and peeked into its darkness. Unlike her first visit to the hallway, when she had relived a memory, this time, she was a spectator.
She was in the basement of a home she didn’t recognize, and a storm raged outside. A young person clutched what looked like a three-year-old Enne in her arms. As a toddler, Enne’s hair had been curlier, her eyes less wide set. She was red in the face from crying, scared by the storm.
The person shushed her softly. “Loddie has you. Loddie has you.” That was the name Enne had called Lourdes when she was little.
But this person was surely too young to be Lourdes, Enne thought, even though it was clearly her. That evening, her long blond hair was tied at the nape of her neck and braided down to her waist. She wore fluid clothes, but they didn’t fit her properly—it was a time before Lourdes had tailored all her outfits. Otherwise, her women’s clothes were always too short, her men’s always hanging or tight in the wrong areas. If Enne had to guess, Lourdes was about eighteen in this memory.
Neither the child nor Lourdes took any notice of Enne standing there, so she sat down next to her mother, curled her legs to her chest and listened with them to the storm.
Eventually, the toddler stopped whimpering and fell asleep. Lourdes leaned her head back against the wall, her face weary. She winced with every new crack of thunder and, eventually, also began to cry.
It was strange to see Lourdes like this. There was something rawer about her. In all Enne’s memories, Lourdes had never cried. Apparently, she hadn’t always been so reserved.
Tell me what happened, Enne wanted to say. Tell me your story.
But, of course, her mother couldn’t hear her.
Enne didn’t leave until Lourdes fell asleep. Then she slipped out and through the next black door in the hallway, eager for more forgotten time spent with her mother.
Except in this scene, Enne was alone. She was sixteen years old, and she wasn’t where she was supposed to be. She crept across the upstairs hallway in her nightgown, an unused lantern at her side. Last time she’d attempted this, Lourdes had discovered her in the act, and it had devolved into a shouting match—one of the first they’d ever had. But Lourdes was on another one of her trips to New Reynes, and Enne was alone in the house, except for the staff.
She knelt in front of Lourdes’s office door and pulled a pin from her hair.
It took nearly thirty minutes for her to pick the lock. She had no idea what she was doing, but the longer she sat there, fiddling, the more understanding she developed of the mechanisms. Finally, she heard the lock click, and she turned the knob and crawled into the room.
The office was stark, almost empty. She went for the desk first, yanking out drawers full of pencils and rubbish—Lourdes had always been impressively messy—searching for...something, anything to explain her mother’s business in the City of Sin. Enne turned on the lantern, heart pounding, and examined the bank slips in the cabinet.
The address on the papers was in New Reynes, but neither sixteen-year-old Enne nor the Enne peering over her shoulder recognized the address.
1089 Virtue Street, New Reynes.
The statement was dated from a few months ago—from Lourdes’s last trip to the city. And—both their eyes widened as they examined the document—it was for a bank account with a balance of over two hundred million volts.
Both of them gasped.
Memory Enne threw the papers back in the cabinet and slammed it closed, and the Enne who watched her remembered what she’d been thinking. It was wealth unlike that of anyone she knew, anything she’d ever heard of. Enne knew Lourdes had inherited money from her own mysterious family, but she’d never imagined anything like that.
The memory used to hold shame for Enne. This was the one time she had betrayed Lourdes’s trust and uncovered a secret she shouldn’t have known. But as her present self left the room and returned to the hallway, her guilt was gone. She wished she’d explored more of the office that night. Maybe she would have stumbled across another clue, something to help in the present search for her mother. Had Enne known any of the secrets she knew now, everything would be different. Enne would’ve journeyed to New Reynes sooner, or asked to go with Lourdes.
She found a new black door. It was the first one that wasn’t a memory.
The room smelled sweet. Enne stood facing a mirror. Below her, a joint of Mistress burned in an ashtray, its soot golden, matching her costume and the shimmery eyeshadow she wore. Enne’s boots were black, heeled and rose to midthigh. A garter belt snaked up her legs and disappeared underneath a corseted dress, which was sequined from navel to cleavage and crisscrossed in violet ribbon. The bust was strapless, meant to be removed more than admired. The feathers protruding from its bottom would do little to cover her if she bent over.
Still, it was hard to feel exposed when there was no one here but her. She shuffled through the cosmetic products on the counter, then reached for a sweet-smelling perfume and a lipstick black as licorice.
She examined herself in the mirror. No one would call her a doll in this outfit.
Or much of a lady.
She smiled to herself. There was no one but her to know. After all—this was only a dream.
Jazzy music played outside, and she followed it to the stage. The lights were too bright to see into the audience, if there was anyone there at all. She remembered Demi’s routine with a mixture of embarrassment and thrill. Without the leering eyes of anyone watching her, she felt powerful in these clothes. Attractive. If the world were a differe
nt sort of place, she might trim off the feathers and wear it for fun.
She danced alone on the stage. Nothing suggestive...at first. It took a few minutes for her to decide such a style would be fun to try. She unlaced the ribbons on her corset.
Several minutes into the routine, she became aware of the fact that she was no longer dreaming. Her head was pressed against the pillow. Her nightdress was twisted around her stomach, her feet dangling off the edge of the bed. But she wasn’t done exploring the dream just yet, so she didn’t open her eyes.
At some point, in her sleepy, half-conscious state, she inserted someone else into her fantasy. An admiring gaze. Hands trailing down her hips. Lips brushing against her chest.
The light in her window brightened from the sunrise. She was now mostly conscious and exceptionally frustrated. She untwisted her nightdress and scratched an itch on her thigh, then her hand trailed up and lingered between her legs, making up for the fantasy that was slowly fading. If she were anywhere else but New Reynes—in her dormitory, in her own bedroom—she probably wouldn’t have dared. She rubbed her lips together, as if she could still feel the smoothness of the black lipstick, could still feel the thrilling empowerment of the stage lights and the stranger’s stomach pressed against hers.
When she finished, she was breathless and sweaty. She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling of her St. Morse apartment. At first, she felt embarrassed, even if it was no different from that stage where no one could see her. She’d never been a prude, but inexperience lent itself to shyness, even around herself.
She climbed out of bed and sat at her vanity. Her face was slightly flushed, and the indentations of the pillow lined her cheek.
She examined her lipsticks and selected the shade closest to black.
* * *
Enne waited in the St. Morse lobby, tapping her foot. It was past the meeting time, and no one else had arrived yet. When she’d knocked on Levi’s door, there’d been no answer, and she honestly wasn’t certain if Lola would even show.