Page 38 of The City of Stardust

Violet turns around. “Yes?”

“Don’t come here again.”

The door leads out next to the same dumpster she’d stashed her backpack behind. Violet stares at it helplessly. Back where she started.

She pulls out the faded notebook with Marianne’s handwriting scrawled across the front and flips to the last page. There are so very few names left.

She closes her eyes, willing herself not to cry or scream or do any of the things that might draw attention to her. She clenches her fists, nails digging into her skin until the pain drowns out her thoughts. When she opens her hands, pinpricks of blood dot her palms.

Socloseagain.

Even from her lowly vantage point, she can hear the noise of the auction carrying on. The people in there have been scholars their entire lives, already proficient at this game of seduction and persuasion. Caspian might not be a scholar by name, but he’s still one of them. And he’s right; no one would dare refuse a Verne—or a Matsuda, or a Hadley, or any of the other names that mark out the scholar families. Whereas even after a year, Violet is still running to catch up.

If she wasn’t an Everly, then perhaps Yulan would have kept the map for her, or at least revealed the buyer’s identity. Then again, ifshe wasn’t an Everly, there would be no curse on her shoulders, no promise of blood and cruelty awaiting her at the end of this too short road. If she wasn’t an Everly, she wouldn’t be here at all, trying not to cry next to a dumpster, of all places.

She thinks about the woman with the sword in her chest, devastation already in motion, and a sick, panicky feeling rises within her. Not for the first time, she pulls out her phone. No missed calls from Ambrose or Gabriel this time. No texts, either.

Maybe they’ve given up on her.

Frustrated, she tears the wig off her head, a dozen bobby pins scattering across the ground. Then she tugs off her painful heels and flings them over the side of the dumpster. But as she picks up her backpack, something crinkles in the front pocket—a distinctly unfamiliar sound. She rummages in the pocket and pulls out a crumpled note in choppy handwriting.

I have your map. Come find me,Everly.

An address at the bottom, in German.

Someone else recognised her at the party. Someone else knows her name, or at least recognised her well enough by her features to guess at her origins.

She glances back at the shop, sudden tension crackling through her bones. It could be yet another dead end, but she doesn’t think so. She has questions.

And somewhere out there, someone has the answer.

The New York party is over by dawn, and guests stagger out of the bookshop into the streets. Inside, weary staff start the arduous process of cleaning up the night’s excesses. Upstairs, in the room with the glass ceiling, the asteria is packing away his canopy when a blonde woman appears. He glances up, halfway through shuffling his cards back into their velvet bag. His hands glitter with reveurite dust.

“I’m sorry, readings are done for the night,” he says.

The woman doesn’t leave. “Surely you can spare one minute for me.”

“I said—”

“A reading.” The woman’s voice is steel. “If you please.”

The asteria mutters something under his breath that might, to keen ears, sound likebloody scholars think they can demand bloody anything they damn like.Nevertheless, he unfolds the table again and takes out his cards.

He gestures to the table, the deck spread out. “Choose a—”

“Oh, I know how it goes.”

She plucks three cards from the deck quickly and turns them over one by one. A man in shackles, his head bowed into his manacled hands as bloodied golden feathers circle the floor. Then another, proud and stern with his hands wrapped gracefully around a lance of pure sunlight. A woman, with a sword buried in her heart.

How much that sword must hurt.

Penelope looks up and smiles at the asteria, who flinches. “Tell me, what did you say to Violet Everly?”

The asteria blinks. “Who? I didn’t—”

With one sure motion, she reaches out and wraps a hand around his neck. He chokes, his fingers scrabbling against her hold. Beneath her feet, shadows pool and writhe.

The asteria gasps and struggles, bloodshot eyes bulging as, one by one, his veins rupture. He squeaks out a word that might behelporstop, but nothing that proves useful to her. So she waits patiently as his motion stills, his swollen tongue parting his mouth. His head lolls to one side.

---