OVERTURE
For as long as I can remember, we have feared the Players. I know of only three ways to survive an encounter with one.
“Never look a Player in the eye,” I recite as we shuffle a few steps forward in line. My older brother’s hand clutches my gloved fingers a little too tight, and I wonder if he’s nervous, too. Last night, I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep. But the longer we wait, the more I wonder if being marked will hurt.
“That’s right,” Galen says. “Remember, thatdoesn’tmean ignoring them, Riv.”
I nod eagerly. If you’re going to bruise a Player’s ego, you might as well throw yourself off a cliff while you’re at it. It would be less painful.
“What’s the second rule?” Galen quizzes as another newly marked boy, somewhere between my eight years of age and my brother’s twelve, passes us on his way out of the enormous courthouse ahead.
There’s a bandage pressed just below the boy’s throat like a necklace, gold bleeding through the layers. He’s crying.
“Just ten minutes,”Aunt Cassia told us before we left this morning.“Ten minutes of discomfort for a lifetime of protection against the Players. Against the lure of the Playhouse.”
I touch the tips of my fingers to the dip between my collarbones, trying to imagine the mark that will go there soon.
“The Three Compliments Rule,” I finally answer, mentally reading the memory cards I made in class last week. “Pay a Player three compliments and you might satisfy their ego long enough to get away.”
“Good!” My brother offers an encouraging smile while I throw another searching look over my shoulder, trying to spot where we left our mother at the gates in the distance. “And the third way to escape a Player?”
I press my lips together, my thoughts stalling back to that crying boy. The bandage. My heart begins to pound in my chest. How badlywillit hurt?
Galen squeezes my hand, and I realize I haven’t answered his question. “Oh, um—give them a gift?” I guess, my memory cards momentarily fleeing my mind.
He shakes his head while a voice somewhere ahead shouts out, “Keep it moving!”
They call us next, and we’re ushered into a bare, circular atrium, interrupted by a single stone hallway. My brother herds me up to a half-moon granite desk beside a gurgling fountain, our steps echoing.
“Fill these out,” instructs a sour-faced woman from behind the desk, extending several pages of parchment to Galen. I snatch the forms indignantly, and the woman startles.
“I can read. I’meight,” I announce, plucking a pen from the jar on the desk while Galen apologizes for my brash behavior.
“Eight, is she? Tall for her age, I think.” I feel the woman’s gaze linger on my pen as I spell out my name:Riven Hesper. She inhales sharply.
I peer up to deal the woman a venomous look. It’s easy to tell when people are mentally comparing me to my father; they always stare like I’ve risen from the dirt of his grave. My father’s face is nearly as infamous as the Players who murdered him.
I go back to ignoring her and concentrate on filling out today’s date.
Until my pen freezes at the sound of a scream.
It all happens at once. The desk woman jumps to her feet as the shriek ricochets off the vaulted ceilings, followed by a second scream—this one, in the shape of the wordhelp.Then another scream, and another. At the frantic pounding of feet, my attention startles toward the cavernous hall. Somewhere, a man’s voice yells out a warning that makes my blood run cold.
Player.
The word scorches my mind, fear wiping it blank of everything I have been taught. Instinctively, my eyes search for the closest grown-up, but the woman behind the desk has dropped to the ground, covering her eyes.
Before I can move, a tall, angelic figure flutters into the atrium, layers of purple rippling behind her. The Player whips around, a curtain of dark curls toppling over her shoulder. As if she senses an audience.
Her eyes glimmer like live embers, and I think she must be the most dreadful and beautiful thing I have ever seen. Catching my eye, the Player smiles—it’s a wrong smile, though. It stretches wider and wider until each side reaches the blood rubies that dangle from her earlobes.
Aunt Cassia warned me of their unnatural faces—exaggerated so patrons in even the worst seats of the Playhouse can still make out a Player’s expressions. Up close, it’s as breathtaking as it is grotesque. She looks like a god.
But we don’t have gods anymore.
We only have Players.
Sentries uniformed in black and silver fill the room, encircling the woman and barking orders at one another as she extends her palms out. Broken, golden shackles dangle at her wrists.
