I released a breath I’d been holding unknowingly. The gears and cogs in my stomach must have malfunctioned because it felt like I was coming undone from the inside.
All because of colors—and half a smile.
“I’m Helen Pears,” said the girl standing by his side, dark hair cropped close to her head, revealing the near-perfect heart shape of her face. The one next to her said, “Levana,” with a dramatic wave of her thick, long hair. Definitely Hearts judging by the red of their dresses.
“Russell Gere—Russ to my friends,” said the boy at the very end of the row with a wave of his hand. His dark blond hair had a silver streak on the right side, and he wore silver and grey on his clothes, just like the girls in front of him. Diamonds.
“Erith Sanders,” said one of them.
“Anika Lowe,” said her friend, her cheeks slightly flushed.
“Arthur Cook,” the boy next to me said—the Spade who’d been in the first carriage. “Everybody calls me Cook.”
Cook.What a strange name, especially since he didn’t much look like a cook. Far too young to beanything,really.All of us were—you had to be between the ages of eighteen and twenty to apply for the Turning Trials.
“Seth Goodwill,” said the boy wearing green on the left of the girl who spoke first. He had a scar down the middle of his left brow that he tried to hide with his hair, and he didn’t even make eye contact with anyone when he spoke.
Or maybe he did—my eyes were too busy going back to the red ones of the Heart boy who had yet to look away from me.
Were my cheeks red, I wondered?
Because my cheeks feltveryred, and if I lost focus for a second, I was going to smile all the way.
“Reggor Green,” said the other Club boy, and he was big, bigger than all the others, wider shoulders, muscular arms, dark hair—but his eyes were soft. There was something about them when he grinned, skipped me, and looked at the Spade boy standing last in line behind me. “Call me Reggie.”
“Silas,” said the Spade boy, and I had to turn to look at him—his voice was unlike others I’d heard. Very rich. Deeper than most boys our age. “Silas Sear.”
Silas was the one who’d waved at me first from the carriage behind mine. He was the tallest among us. He wore black from head to toe, and his hair was on the longer side, combed behind his head. It wasn’t just his voice. Helookedolder, too, possibly twenty. Might have been his perfectly square jaw and hollow cheeks, or the expression in his light gray eyes that almost looked like smoke or mist, or something in between.
He—and everyone else—was looking right at me, now. Waiting.
Time’s Teeth, how was I going to hold back a smile when I spoke?
“Ora Reese,” I said, my voice lighter than usual, higher. Must have been the nerves.
And just like I suspected, I was smiling ear to ear.
Then again, so was everybody else—except the Heart boy.
He had but a crooked, half-smile on his face when he said, “March Ruvane.”
The name wrote itself on my bones with my own blood.
Something about this Heart boy.
Was ithim,I wondered? They said you never really knew with Hearts. They could manipulate emotions with their magic. Notcreateones from scratch, but amplify existing ones or even make them fade. Back in school kids talked about how there were no true feelings among Hearts simply because there was no guarantee that the feelingwastrue and nobody had meddled with it, whether a bad one or a good one.
Of course, none of the kids who spun these rumors had ever actuallymeta Heart, so…
But I doubted this boy was doing anything, for the simple reason that hecouldn’t.Even if he was twenty, you needed a lot of studying and practice to actually do that kind of magic.
Which meant it was just me. The flush on my cheeks, the stupid smile that was impossible to kill on my lips—all of it a genuine reaction of mine.
“Time’s Teacups, we’re really here,” said the girl who’d spoken first—Mimi. “It’s great meeting you all. And it’sso goodto be here!”
Her energy was something else. She radiated positivity, and the others felt it, too. They were all talking, nodding, shaking hands—and a hand appeared in front of me, too.
“Ora. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl,” said the Spade boy who’d been behind me—Silas was his name.
