She had said that. She tried to put herself back into that skin, only a few weeks ago, tried to feel what she had felt before her heart had changed.
“I wasn’t offering love then,” she said, and he flinched at the word. “I don’t offer that as payment for anything. But that doesn’t matter. You’ve already made up your mind about me. What you want is someone like Mae to love you, someone normal and white and perfect. You see me as something the real people come and watch as if they’re at the zoo, and the idea of me having feelings is ridiculous!”
“Yes,” said Alan. “The idea of you having feelings for me is ridiculous.”
They stood staring at each other across a moonlit foot of space, both of them standing in shadows and the square of light under the skylight between them.
So there it was, the truth laid out between two liars at last. He thought she was too shallow to love anyone. He’d kissed her because he thought so little of her, thought she was a toy. He was just like everyone else: He believed the role.
“Something else you always thought about me was that I was stupid,” Sin said at last, her voice shaking. “Well, you were right. I can’t believe how stupid I’ve just been.”
It was cowardly to use the kids as a shield, but just for that moment she didn’t care. She ran into the room where they were sleeping and curled up by their bed, burying her face in the sofa cushion she’d slept on the night before so she could cry into it and be sure no-one would hear.
In the morning Alan was gone. Sin couldn’t spend time worrying whether he had just gone to work early or if this meant she should clear out before he came back. She had to get Toby to his new day care, and Lydie and herself to school.
The Tube had delays on the Northern Line, and that meant once she had delivered the kids she was late for school. She got off at her station hurrying, her hair floating in a static mass around her head from the shoving fight she’d had through the crowded carriage.
She was really not in the mood to meet Mae outside.
Mae’s hair was shining and straight. Her T-shirt reading I’M NO MODEL LADY—I’M THE REAL THING, unlike Sin’s charity shop uniform, fit her perfectly. And Sin was tired of trying to be above all that.
“What do you want now?”
Mae recoiled at her tone. “I was just wondering when you were coming back to the Market,” she said frostily.
“What?” Sin asked. “Are you graciously inclined to allow me back in? Might want to deal with being a tourist leading the Market before you make any rash decisions.”
“What?” Mae asked. “Wait.”
Sin didn’t have time to wait, but she stopped in the middle of the street all the same, the early-morning traffic of London buzzing all around them, and watched Mae’s brown eyes go wide.
“Sin,” Mae asked carefully, “do you have Celeste’s pearl? Because I don’t.”
“I saw you—,” Sin began, and remembered how dark it had been, in the storm. She’d seen Mae so close, and seen Celeste’s throat bare. She’d just assumed.
Mae nodded. “I thought you had it. And obviously, you thought I did.”
Mae’s subdued manner the night before suddenly made more sense.
She still looked subdued, actually, and hurt on top of that.
“Would you hate me?” she asked suddenly. “If I had it?”
Sin looked her over, shining hair to expensive sneakers, and back to her eyes. “Yeah,” she said, and then smiled. “But not for that long.”
Mae’s dimple flashed out in return. “Good to know. Not that either of us is likely to get the pearl anytime soon.”
“You sound like you think you know where it is,” Sin said slowly.
“Who was the one person on that deck we can’t trust?” Mae asked. “I don’t want to think it—but it would make sense for Seb to take the pearl. He could use it as proof he’s on the magicians’ side if his loyalty is called into question. He’d be able to show he kept the pearl safe.”
Sin thought about Jamie the magician, who had put Nick in the Circle’s hands, who looked as if he had pearls for eyes. She thought of Nick the demon, and Alan the liar. Alan who worked for his own agenda, and did not care how cruel he might be.
She wasn’t sure it was that simple. But Mae’s argument did make sense.
“Could be,” she said finally. “I’m late for school.”
If Mae was right, even if she wasn’t, the pearl was as far out of their reach as it had ever been. Exactly as far, if it was with a magician, aboard a boat.
Neither of them had an invitation there now. Mae becoming a messenger, consorting with the magicians, firing that gun—it hadn’t got her the pearl. Sin could be sorry for her.
She wasn’t sorry that Mae wasn’t leader yet.
Sin didn’t have a terribly convincing cover story worked out. She mumbled about a family emergency and wished she’d thought to call the school earlier. The headmistress had given both her hair and her baggy uniform a look that nicely combined disapproval, distaste, and disbelief.
It was Sin’s own fault. She was all off balance, and her performance was substandard at best. She got through it somehow and went to class.
They were studying a book about a woman who was all angsty about her husband’s dead wife. So far Sin liked
