The doors lining the hallway alternated black and white, extending endlessly in both directions. The architecture resembled a palace, with checkered marble tiles to match the doors and numerous scalloped columns that made Enne feel as though she wandered in a forest of grandeur and stone.
As she treaded past door after door, Enne’s thoughts were muddled, as they usually were when she was dreaming. She’d visited this place before. She’d dreamed this dream before. And like always, only one clear thought took hold in her mind: she was searching for a particular door.
She paused in front of a black one and ran her fingertips over its smooth, glossy paint. She remembered this place well enough to expect one of three things behind it: a memory, a fantasy, or a nightmare.
She pushed open the door.
It was a nightmare.
A chandelier of murky glass offered meager light to the room, obscuring the features of most of its occupants. They sat, ghostly silhouettes surrounding a long table covered in black felt. Silver gleamed as each new Shadow Card was turned over and tossed into the table’s center. It was deathly quiet except for a familiartick,tick,tick.
Enne’s breath hitched as she entered. She was back. She couldn’t be back. She whipped around to flee, but the door behind her slammed closed, like the lid of a coffin. She shakily turned around, working up her courage to once more take a seat at this dreadful table. But then she realized she wasn’t the invited player.
Lourdes was.
Lourdes identified fluidly between female and as neither male nor female. Currently, she was dressed in gender-neutral clothes, her long blond hair braided behind her, a linen blazer draped over her shoulders. She smoked a cigarette with trembling fingers as she played.
Enne looked at her mother’s measly stack of Shadow Cards, then at the timer, panic lodging in her chest. Lourdes was losing. Lourdeswouldlose.
This was the night she’d died.
“You’re not trying,” Malcolm Semper told her.
“There were other ways you could’ve chosen to kill me,” Lourdes answered. They spoke as though they knew each other well. She even laughed. “I know you think the North Side corrupted me, but I’ve always been terrible at cards.”
“This was the only way.” He turned over another Card. It was Death. To Enne’s surprise, the Chancellor cringed when he saw it. When he dealt out a new hand, he did so quickly—quite the opposite from what he had done for Enne, and Enne could think of no good explanation for it. “I had to—”
Lourdes cleared her throat, and her gaze shot in Enne’s direction. Enne froze in the room’s corner. Her mother couldn’tseeher. That wasn’t possible. But she narrowed her eyes as though she sensed Enne standing there, eavesdropping on a memory where she didn’t belong.
“Go,”she murmured under her breath. Enne couldn’t tell if this was real or the dream playing tricks. But of course, none of this was real, her practical mind told her. Her mother hadn’t actuallyknownthe Chancellor. The hallway was a recurring figment of Enne’s imagination.
Then the door opened, and a force wrenched Enne out of the room. And Enne woke up feeling like, even in death, Lourdes Alfero still kept her secrets.
* * *
The Ruins District was as vacant and silent as a graveyard. It sprawled across the northeastern region of the city. Grass and beachy sand from the nearby shore coated its cobblestones, left untamed in the twenty-five years since the Revolution. The estates of noble families still stood, their belongings looted, their doorframes painted with crude, bloody words. Bits of glass cracked beneath Enne’s heels as she walked—pieces of the windows that had been shattered when the city of Reynes fell.
“I did some researching in old newspapers,” Lola said, indicating for them to stop at the street corner. “I thought this would be a good laugh.”
Enne read the sign with irritation.
MADAME FAUSTING’S FINISHING SCHOOL FOR GIRLS
“I get it!” Enne seethed. “I went to finishing school! I’m not from the North Side!”
“I think it’s funny.” Grace smirked.
“Itisfunny,” Lola said smugly. “But it’s also perfect.”
Enne’s gaze swept over the abandoned campus, with its overgrown gardens and ivy-covered white brick. It looked nothing like her own school, which was all stone and woods and baskets of flowers underneath every window. But Lola was right—it was spacious, secluded, and exactly what they were looking for.
The front doors hung on their hinges, the wood splintered and broken as though hacked with a dull axe, and cobwebs filled the missing slivers. Much like Levi’s museum, the Revolution had carved out the school like a carcass and left it to rot. The girls crept inside. Sunlight shone through the dust-coated window glass in fractured rays. The display cases in the lobby had been smashed, their contents stolen or discarded, and Enne gingerly stepped over the fallen photographs that age had yellowed and curled like dying flowers.
“This is not the glamor I was expecting,” Grace said. Enne imagined sleeping in Lola’s six hundred square feet apartment last night had left quite a lot to be desired.
“Not yet,” Enne admitted. “But with a little cleaning—”
“I don’t get it,” Grace snapped as they turned into the first classroom. The remnants of a lesson still lingered on the chalkboard, and she wrinkled her nose as she inspected the dirt coating each of the desks. “You’ve written yourself some kind of checklist for what a gang looks like. You call yourself a lord, but as far as I can tell, you’re just some tourist with almost no experience, no voltage, and no common sense. You haven’t even asked me to swear, yet you’re touring me around your future hideout.”
