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“Who are you looking at?” Lila asks me, craning her neck.
“See that woman by the window?” I say, trying to shove my way sideways through the crowd. “Ponytail. She hired the hit on Janssen.”
“I know her. She used to work for him,” Lila says, following me.
“What?” I stop so suddenly that the man behind me slams into my back. He grunts.
“Sorry,” I tell him, but he just gives me a dirty look.
Daneca and Sam are ahead of us in the crowd. I want to call out to them to slow down, but there’s no way they’d hear.
The woman is walking away from the march. As slowly as I’m moving, I am never going to get to her.
“I thought she was his girlfriend,” I tell Lila.
“Maybe, but she was also his underling,” she says. “She lines up buyers. High rollers. People who can afford to buy regular doses of ecstatic emotion—the kind of blissed-out happiness that’ll send you spiraling into depression if you stop. Or they buy luck from half a dozen curse workers at a time. Use enough luck at once and it can change big things.”
“Did she know Philip?” I ask.
“You said she ordered the hit.”
Janssen’s mistress disappears into the throng. We’re not moving fast enough to follow. Daneca and Sam are gone too—somewhere ahead of us on Broad Street, I’m sure, but I can’t spot them anymore.
I mop my brow with the tail of my white shirt. “This sucks.”
Lila laughs and gestures to the large sign flapping in the wind above us. It’s covered in glitter and reads BARE HANDS; PURE HEARTS. “Before Wallingford, I’d never met many people who weren’t workers—I never know what to make of them.”
“Just me,” I say. “I was the nonworker you knew.”
She gives me a quick look, and I realize, of course, that she left out the most critical thing when she summarized my past in the car.
Back then I was beneath her.
Even if she never said it to me, even if she didn’t act like what she could do mattered, everyone else said it enough that there was no chance I’d forget. She was a worker; I was part of the world of marks who existed to be manipulated.
I see another sign in the crowd, POWER CORRUPTS EVERYONE.
“Lila—,” I start.
Then a girl walking just ahead of us takes off her gloves. She holds up her hands. They look pale and wrinkled from being inside leather in this heat.
I blink. In my life I haven’t seen many bare female hands. It’s hard not to stare.
“Bare hands, pure heart!” the girl yells.
Beside her I see a few other people pulling off gloves with wicked smiles. One throws a pair up into the sky.
My fingers itch for release. I imagine what it would be like to feel the breeze against my palms.
The combination of heat and rebellion spreads like a ripple through the crowd, and suddenly bare fingers are waving in the air. We are stepping over discarded gloves.
“Cassel!” someone calls, and I see Sam. He’s managed to wedge himself and Daneca between two parked cars and out of foot traffic. He’s red-faced from the heat. She’s gloveless and beckoning us over.
Her hands are pale, with long fingers.
We push our way through the crowd to them. We’re almost there when we hear the sound of a bullhorn from somewhere in front of us.
“Everyone must cover their hands immediately,” a tinny voice booms. A siren wails. “This is the police. Cover your hands immediately.”
