Only a handful of Rebels, Elara’s mother included, managed to escape.
The vicious attack sent a shock wave through the city, and the aristocracy cried for justice.
Police descended upon the Restes in full force. People disappeared from their beds, never to be seen again. Buildings burned during searches for supposed rebel sympathizers. Entire families were slaughtered.
It was enough to causesomeonein the Restes to break.
Elara’s mother and a handful of the escaped rebels had been found laid out in The Market, throats slit. Their blood coursing through the cracks of the cobblestones was a message: Enough. Leave us alone.
It barely worked. The murders and disappearances diminished, but arrests continued to rise. The curfew never lifted, and access to quality food mysteriously vanished. The Restes was never the same. People retreated to their tenements and avoided gathering, too afraid of each other and the police.
At first, Elara hadn’t believed one of their own could’ve slit hermother’s throat. They’d eaten her food, delighted in her magie. They’dlovedher.
But the treatment Elara had endured these last four years had been enlightening. People who’d once doted on her and given her pretty ribbons now turned from her.
Fernand had crept into that absence of affection. He’d sharpened her rage into something dangerous and turned her and the other lost children who’d idolized the rebels into a new family.
Now she was jobless, and the thought of returning to those piled-up eviction notices in her apartment made her sick.
She hooked a right down a crooked bend.
The architects of Société des Arts Visuels hadn’t put any effort into the construction of the Restes. All innovation had gone into the elegant châteaus in Galerie. A neighborhood with wide-open street corners, sprawling parks filled with trees and flowers, and restaurants. Real restaurants that served decadent pastries and sumptuous meals rather than the bare necessities for survival. After that, the architects moved into the districts reserved for the wealthy, both in name and power: La Diamant and Belleplace. Elara had visited Belleplace once as a child because it was directly north of the Restes, and her mother could get quality ingredients if she wore her best Professionnelle dress and charmed the grocer well enough.
Places like the Restes and Fumée quarters were for industry—at least that’s what the Souverains had declared centuries ago. Those quarters would be the home of progress, the backbone to keep the city running.
Well, the city’s back was breaking. The Restes was cramped with deteriorating tenements. People were packed in so tight the bricks were beginning to buckle, folding in on one another like the bones of the overworked people who called them home.
Elara kept to her path despite the pain shooting up her tired legs.
It meant passing by the rubble of one of those ruined tenements. Charred beams collapsed inward like splintered bones. The smoke and ash had long since cleared, but the scorch marks up the bricks remained.
The police had set fire to it in the weeks after the attack—the family inside accused of harboring rebel fugitives.
Her mother had agreed to give herself up that night, but someone came for her first.
The next alley dead-ended at the face of an abandoned shop.
The last rain hadn’t been kind to the roof, which looked close to collapse. Elara shuffled a few fallen shingles against the cobblestones, only to freeze at the glistening rivulets in the grout.
It was rain, she knew that, but it was hard not to erase the image of blood.
Unable to find her mother, who’d been hiding for weeks, Elara had run out in search of her only to find an unusually large crowd in The Market. When they saw her, they shuffled away, treating her like the plague rather than the orphan she had just become.
The rest of the evening was a collection of images and sounds: a piercing wail, the pain of the street as she collapsed to tuck her mother close, warm blood, sickening gurgles.
It was Fernand who scooped her up and carried her away when the corpse grew cold.
No one would save her now.
Her own fault, really. If her mother’s death had taught her one thing, it was to trust no one.
The rebellion hadn’t failed by accident.
They’d been betrayed by one of their own. Someone on the inside who’d sold them out to the Counseil.
When Fernand’s last scheme ended with half their friends in prison,she knew his rebel cause would face a similar fate. She’d applied for Arts Culinaires—a way out, and an homage to her mother.
Corinne Rousseau had been the Restes’s most prized baker not only because she was kind and generous, but because she’d fought and scraped for every success. The day she’d beaten the Restes odds and become a Professionnelle? Even the neighborhoods across the Joyaux heard the Restes celebrate. It took a rigorous audition to make it into a Société—a process of bringing in several tests of your skill to a board of Directeurs.
