Lili St Crow - Nameless

What else were friends for?

The hall was awash with white blouses, rounded turndown collars, the traditional ugly Juno blazers with their itchy blue wool and embroidered crests, the blue and green tartan skirts swinging. This autumn the white wool socks were all the way up to the knee, and little silver luckcharms were attached to maryjane buckles, chiming sometimes. They didn’t work inside, but you still had to wear them if you wanted to be in . Headbands were in , too—the thin ones, you could only find them in certain stores. Ruby, of course, knew exactly where. And Cami would make sure to buy far too many, and Ellie would later find them in her bag and might as well wear them because well, they were there, right?

That was the way the cookie crumbled, so to speak. The way it always had, the way it always would. Or if not always, then as long as the three of them lasted.

“ So .” Ruby found her stride again. The doors were choked, as usual, but their last class of the day was High Charm Calculus, math and charm working together, and Ruby had declared that if she had to stay inside one more minute she would die . So instead of their usual stop at their lockers near the main stairwell to preen, they were heading for the front door when everyone else was, even the bobs and the ghoulgirls. “Hunt says, ‘I was here first’ and Thorne says, ‘It’s a free country’ and I say, ‘You two are soooo immature,’ and I ended up leaving with a guy from Berch Prep—”

“Who had sweaty hands,” Ellie mock-whispered. “They all do.”

“ And a hip flask!” Ruby crowed triumphantly. “I didn’t get slammed, though. You’d be proud of me, Miss Stick-In-The-Mud.”

“Oh, she only got a little bit hazy.” Ellie’s eyeroll was a wonder of nature. “Why aren’t we skipping to get a charm to keep you from spawning?”

“Because, and this is what I’m trying to tell you, prepboy lost his starch.”

Breathless silence. Then Ellie and Cami both exploded into bright bird-laughter, and Ruby grinned, white teeth behind crimson-glossed lips.

“Get out! ” Ellie crowed, and manhandled the door open. They tumbled out into rich golden fall sunshine, the sudden slice of a crisp breeze against bare knees, lifting Ellie’s sleek blonde hair and wringing hot water from Cami’s furiously-blinking eyes.

“ Seriously !” Rube had the bit in her teeth now. Cami checked the stairs.

They were still there. Still granite, still with sharp edges, and still too steep.

St. Juno’s was a pure-human charmschool; it only took in girls with rich families and unTwisted Potential. The Family sent all their daughters to Martinfield, but Cami wasn’t pureblood. So it was St. Juno’s for her, along with the young girls of New Haven’s aristocracy of money, magic, and social standing.

The stairs were . . . troubling. Sometimes she thought the hedge of defenses that kept anything non-human or Twisted out of the buildings would smell the Family on her and rise, veils of flickering Potential ready to rip her into bits. And then there were the dreams, of stairs and a tall draped figure shimmering-pale.

Don’t think about that. The dreams didn’t belong in the daylight, so she just shivered. They left quietly, this time. “N-no w-way!” she managed, very carefully.

“ Way! ” Ruby almost wriggled with delight. “So things are looking good, right? Things are looking flat out great in the front seat of the Cimarro—did I tell you? He had a Cimarro, positively antique , cherry too.”

Considering Cimarros had been popular when Papa was a boy—there was a yellow one in the capacious Vultusino garage, lovingly tended by Chauncey—it gave new meaning to the word “antique.”

The first few steps went by in a rush, and Cami let out a half-whistle of relief. Ruby knew she hated the stairs, but she was always of the opinion that if you hated something, you just had to run right through it. Ellie was more of the sneak-up-and-hit-it-with-a-shovel persuasion.

Cami didn’t want to take the time to stammer through an explanation of her own philosophy, which was more “live to fight another day” than Charge of the Twist Brigade. But that was a Personal Choice, and her Personal Choices not to speak were okay, or so the speech therapist she’d seen for four years—before the woman’s Potential Twisted—had said. Your choice to speak or not is your own. Let’s try it very slowly, if you feel like it.

Cami had liked Miss Amanda. But once the Twisting had struck, there was no way Papa would let her go back. The risk of the Twist spreading was just too high, and plus, Twists sometimes . . . snapped. Miss Amanda’s hands had trembled, the bones sprouting claw-spurs through the skin, her Potential eaten up either by an anger she had never given voice to or just plain ill-luck, or maybe a bad charming. She’d had just enough Potential to qualify as a charmer, not good as a Sigiled or anything but able to heat a kettle of water to boiling with a snapped word or two, or make colored light dance in the air to form letter-shapes her struggling students could read. When the proper sound was made, the letters would glow and change to other shapes.

It was dangerous to have a lot of Potential, but it was less likely to Twist you than just a little was. Still, Cami’d gotten more from four years of weekly meetings with Miss Amanda than she had from plenty of other teachers.

But that was in the past, and the past was never helpful. So she just nodded as Ruby plunged into the story again and dragged them all down the steps, her hair a bright copper flame.

They arrived at the bottom breathless, in a wider crush of girls waiting for buses and cars crowding the curb. This year bigger utility vehicles from overseas and overWaste were popular, hunkering on shiny black tires with charm-spinning, gleaming hubcaps, the glass darkened and crawling with Potential. Watchwards, defense-charms, charms to keep dust and rain from smearing the glass—pickup time at St. Juno’s was like an exercise in conspicuous charm-viewing.

“And so Berch Prep Boy says, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna make it,’” Ruby confided. “And sploosh , there it goes. All over the seat.” The giggles were shaking all three of them now, and hard. Cami’s midriff ached.

Fortunately, laughing didn’t stutter.

Ruby jolted to a halt between one word and the next. “Hel- lo . Cami, sweetheart, why didn’t you tell me?”

“T-T-Tell you wha—” But as soon as she followed the line of Ruby’s glance, she figured it out.

The sleek black ’70 Ivrielle—another antique, though not as old as a Cimarro—crouched, in lazy defiance of the yellow Bus Zone paint. And leaning against its front was a tall, rangy young man with slicked dark hair and the indefinable stamp of other on him all the Family displayed. Their cheekbones were arched oddly, their eyes spaced just a fraction differently, the line of the jaw too sharp and the musculature visible in shoulders or arms or legs, even the girls’, was . . . unusual.

“ Nico! ” Cami shrieked, and the fact that she didn’t stutter over his name was lost in the wave of muttering schoolgirl envy. Ellie caught Cami’s dropped schoolbag, Ruby rolled her eyes, but Cami pounded across the pavement and flung herself into Nico’s arms.

“Mithrus Christ ,” he managed, “watch it! Break my ribs, kid!”

“You d-d-didn’t—”

“Tell you I was coming.” He smelled of fresh air, a faint breath of cigarette smoke, and bay rum—Papa Vultusino’s aftershave. Though Nico would probably just get That Look if she tried asking him about it. “Wanted to surprise you. Hey, Rube. Ellen.”