good children get nothing
The Scarab lost novelty for Apolonia long ago. She has no interest in the noblemen, their strange, leery smiles, the way their eyes follow her, coarse and unselfconscious; she has no interest in the girls that hang off their arms, less than half their age, who twirl their hair and bat their eyelashes and fake their laughter, the sound of which makes O grimace. She has no interest in the trysts of married wives who think they go unseen, dragging their little boyfriends upstairs without bothering to don a mask. She has no interest in the merchants, the servants, the barkeepers, the cardsdealers…She wants the bones. The dark and gritty, all the deals that go unseen, the things that she can use. She wants to know:
What this girl thinks she is doing, being seen in broad light with the man all of Novus has agreed to hate. And why she thinks no one will take note of it.
Oh, but perhaps Manon is like her mother—capricious to the point of ridiculousness, somehow squeezing the last dregs of a life of success from her beauty, her charm, her connections. All her life, O has wondered if that is a talent or a stroke of luck.
She is still not sure.
In her blue silk, in her slick, dark mask, O sets a drink down at the table next to Manon. The light plays strange tricks on her skin. Every moment she is a new color: copper, gunmetal, rich, dark dirt. Of course she is beautiful. Of course her eyes are gold, green, blue, silver. Of course all the men want her. How else would she get anything done?
The man whose name she will not say is sitting across from this girl, laughing and drinking and grinning, as if he does not have the blood of both a nation and its queen on his hands. O’s chest burns and scrapes; she grits her teeth, feels acid flood the back of her mouth; oh, how she’d love to take Tuchulcha from the place it trembles against her hip and—
She watches from a window on the second floor. Manon is coming down the dark-cold alley, weight held awkwardly off one foot, and a ghost is following her.
No, just a boy. He trudges diligently behind, a silvery thing with broad shoulders and two big, snowy wings folded against his short back. He looks… concerned. His brows are knitted. His eyes glint wide, almost scared. Manon does not seem particularly worried, except for her limp, which O thinks this man would be wise to at least partially suspect. She frowns, watching as the door opens and they disappear into the halls.
Silent, catlike, she steps swiftly down to follow.
It is the very earliest hours of the morning, and through the windows comes a cold, faint, blue light. She sticks carefully to the edges of the hall, where the shadows are deepest, and slinks to the landing of the stairs; now Manon and her ghost are walking down the hall to the door with the rose painted on it, which O has passed tens of times but never thought to knock on. They are only silhouettes, gold in the lamplight, cast in wax.
A step. Another. O drops her sooty head over the edge of the railing, cranes her neck to watch more closely. The door is opening, now, and the boy is following Manon into her dark room so willingly, so naive; her heart almost aches about it, a sensation which hasn’t come to her in months.
When Manon exits, she is alone, and for days afterward there is the sound of movement, banging around behind the door.
There is noise that Seraphina is alive. When O hears it, her heart trills in her chest like the beating of wings. But it is only that—noise—and she spends most of her days trying not to think of the possibility that Solterra’s queen is out there somewhere, turning her attention, instead, to selling wares from the lobby of the Scarab and discussing the rental of a real room from Aghavni.
But it is hard to ignore; the Scarab’s patrons discuss it constantly, most of them being at the forefront of Novus’ gossip, and the more time O spends in her servant disguise, the more snatches of conversation she picks up from the noblemen and barflies who eye her like a piece of meat. And Manon, well—she offers her fair share of information, whether she knows it or not.
Novus’ politicians might find it interesting, O thinks, that their advisor has gotten so bold, and so foolish.
So that night, when she sees the copper-skinned girl making her usual rounds in the lounge, she is more inflamed than usual by the smugness of Manon’s smirk, the canned quality of her laugh, the air of confidence she carries (which O is not sure she has any right to). Tonight is the night, she thinks.
Tonight she will learn real power.
Nimble, confident, she steps forward; already Manon’s strange, swirling eyes are cast on hers, and O meets them steadily as she takes a seat on a thick velvet cushion. With exaggerated casualty, she stretches out lazily over the seat, rolls her head back, flashes a crooked smile.
“Manon,” she says. “You’re losing your edge.”
