Lola didn’t tell her that, in case that made her sound paranoid. More than anything, Lola hated being called paranoid, and it was that word—spoken groggily that very morning by her half-asleep girlfriend when Lola tried to explain her worries—that had prompted Lola to yank her briefcase out from the secret nook in the closet and storm her way here.
Lola liked to consider herself clever for the way she noticed details others overlooked. Like when she’d spotted bloodied handkerchiefs buried at the bottom of her family’s waste bins, and her father had succumbed to pneumonia less than a week later. Like when her eldest brother had stopped buying more paper for his typewriter, and the month afterward, Lola had discovered he’d been expelled from university. Or when her other brother’s mood swings and rages turned to silence, and then he’d abandoned their family altogether.
There were warning signs now, too, but her friends romanticized the city’s tragic legends too much to understand where their story was truly heading.
Twenty-six years after the tryannical ruling class had been slaughtered, a Mizer had been discovered alive.
A Mizer in known partnership with an orb-maker, both of whose ancestors had governed the world side by side.
Partners who’d assassinated the man who’d started the Revolution.
Partners who’d committed countless other crimes against the Republic, and who kept company of the seediest sort.
And meanwhile, an election even the public regarded as corrupt. A massacre committed by a malison who possessed the very talent the Mizer kings had once vilified. And the victims—so many, too many—dead.
A reckoning was coming for the City of Sin—and if not revolution, if not war, then it would bring violence all the same. Lola wasn’t paranoid for heeding its warning signs; she was merely clever enough to pay attention.
But there were still mysteries left unsolved, which was why Lola had wandered so deep into Olde Town for answers. Her friends dismissed her concerns now, but they might need these answers, once the reckoning arrived. They would need every weapon they could find.
Rather than telling the woman why she was here, Lola decided it would be better to show her. Lola slammed her briefcase atop her desk and unlatched it. She pulled out stacks of newspapers and clippings. Many came fromThe Crimes & The Times, including editorials comparing the most recent turmoil in New Reynes to the so-called Great Street War nineteen years ago, the golden age of North Side crime. Others datedfromthe Great Street War, historic pieces which Lola had stolen from the National Library. Scattered through were copies ofHer Forgotten Histories,the very newspaper printed in this office. Lola’s simple and neat handwriting wove between the indents and margins of everything in violently red ink.
“How...” the woman started, and Lola braced herself for that word she hated “...diligent.”
“Yes, well, I have lots of questions,” Lola said, somewhat flustered, somewhat proud. “And I think you’re the only one who can answer them.”
“Why me?” asked Zula, knotting her brow.
Because Zula Slyk wasn’t just the publisher ofHer Forgotten Histories, the only newspaper Lola had come to trust; she was the last surviving member of the Pseudonyms, a group of anonymous journalists who’d once dug up the secrets so damning that even the City of Sin had tried to keep them buried.
“Because you were Lourdes Alfero’s friend,” Lola answered. Enne’s adoptive mother used to write for Zula’s newspaper. “And I’m her daugther’s.”
That answer must have sufficed because Zula leaned forward and parsed through Lola’s feeble collection of discarded history.
“What do you already know?” Zula asked her. Her words had a grave quality to them, like a physician asking how far her symptoms had progressed.
“I know...” A lump caught in Lola’s throat. Zula might have spent her days surrounded by empty desks, suspicious of visitors, her frown and worry lines etching deeper into her face, but Lola had never wanted to impress anyone as much as she did her.
Shewould not call Lola paranoid.
Lola frantically flipped through the clippings until she came upon a page torn from a book, and her finger trembled as she jabbed a highlighted name. “Enne’s real blood name is Scordata, and I discovered that before the Revolution, the Scordatas were a lesser noble family here, in Reynes. And I know the name comes from her father, that he was the Mizer who passed down her blood talent.”
Lola was a blood gazer, someone with the ability to read another person’s talents and discern from which parent they had inherited them. Talents were a tricky business: every person was born with two. The stronger was called the blood talent, and the weaker was dubbed the split talent. Their abilities ranged from simple skills like music—Lola’s own split talent—to powers crudely described as magic.
Parents only passed down their blood talents, but it was random, which parent gave the child the stronger or weaker one. Lola had been the only powerful blood gazer of her siblings.
But she wasn’t just powerful—she was good, relying on thorough research to supply whatever information her talent could not. Otherwise Lola wouldn’t have deduced as much about Enne’s lineage as she’d managed. She just needed to prove herself to Zula.
“So I know a lot, but I still have questions,” Lola continued, attempting to sound confident. “The whole Scordata family was supposedly killed at least nine years before Enne was born. So who was her father? Some kind of bastard?” This was the only conclusion Lola had come up with, but the Mizers had been meticulous about records and registering talents. It wasn’t likely.
“A lucky find,” Zula told her flatly, “but a dead end. You won’t find anything thinking like this.”
Lola’s pale, freckled cheeks grew warm. “I also know her mother was Gabrielle Dondelair.” During the time of the Great Street War, Gabrielle had been a famous criminal and Mizer sympathizer, and she’d gotten herself killed for it.
“Well, you clearly know everything. So you don’t need me.”
Zula measured every bit as unpleasant as Enne had described her. Lola squeezed the fragile papers so hard they ripped.
“I do need you,” she said desperately. “I need to know the answers. How did Enne’s father survive the Revolution? How did Enne end up in the hands of an underground journalist, to be raised hundreds of miles from New Reynes in secret? Why would Lourdes Alfero ever send Enne back to the same city she’d kept her from? To an orb-maker, when that association looks so...damning? I feel like I’ve been circling the answers for months, but I can’t seem to—”
