“What do you mean?”
“Jessica Morton has carnal interests. She has random flings. She has girls and boys and two-night stands.” Faraday shook her head. “But she does not. Have.Somebodies.”
“My precise words weremight be. I’ve only met her once.”
“And yet smitten? Even more astonishing!”
Smitten. A typical Faraday overstatement. Bringing her into my business—into Garrett’s business—was perhaps unwise.
“Let’s drop this, dear,” I said. “It could be nothing, and we don’t want to jinx it.”
“Jinx it. Hah,” Faraday said. “You will crush this poor girl’s heart.”
She picked up her fork again.
A moment later, we were back on the subject of the Victorian share house, and Salinger, and whether Sebastian would ever deign to live off campus. My crush was forgotten.
But my smile kept coming back. A city to learn, an assignment at the heart of our empire, Hiromi to seduce. All of it simmered at the bottom of my stomach, at the ends of my fingertips, on my skin. It was time to get back to my bone arranging—my art would soon have an audience.
I had a new bow to draw.
19
The next afternoon, a new set of theater kids arrived in Non-Dramatic Improv: ordinaries, to put us in touch with the rest of the world.
They were freshman, confused about being dropped into an advanced class for two weeks. Uncle Wolfie’s command to make the improvs boring perplexed them even more.
As they were introduced, I heard a familiar name—Jayden Ryeo, one of the signatures on the memorial poster at Peter’s shrine.
I hadn’t talked to any of my dead cousin’s ordinary friends. They wouldn’t know anything about his Hefnd. But then I found myself onstage with Jayden, in a classic Uncle Wolfie improv: a mixer for employees of a tech firm.
Information is the key to any kill.
Jayden was in the corner of the stage, trying to escape the rest of us. I crossed to him, offering my hand.
“Anastasia.”
“Um, hi,” Jayden said. “I’m Joe.”
“You’re in Anderson’s group, yeah?”
“Yep,” he said. The first rule of No Drama was to say as little as possible. In-depth conversations were risky.
Which is why I kept going. “Do you code?”
“Sure. Um, you?”
“Of course. Python, Lisp, mostly.”
“Same, pretty much,” he managed. The ordinaries never did anyresearch until their first humiliation at Uncle Wolfie’s hands. “Have you tried the dip? It’s awesome.”
We crossed to the table at the edge of the stage, where Divya Seth was flirting with another nervous freshman.
Jayden reached for an imaginary corn chip. That’s when I threw him to Uncle Wolfie.
“Is that a bomb?” I said under my breath.
He looked down at the imaginary bowl of dip, his eyes lighting up. At last, some drama.
