Ace of Shades (The Shadow Game #1)(87)

The girl who’d hit her had scars covering her palms. She ran out of sight, swallowed by the crowds.

In the stall across from them, a man cleared away his food cart. A pile of cabbages dropped and rolled on the floor, and a woman tripped on one as she hurried past. Everywhere, people packed. People ran.

A gun fired on the other side of the factory, and Enne’s heart jolted so fast she almost retched.

“Whiteboots. It’s a raid on the Scarhands,” Lola said, anxiously reaching for Enne’s arm. “We need to get out of here.”

Hordes of people rushed toward the exit of the factory, trampling each other and clogging the only escape route. Enne and Lola followed, but it was soon clear that the crowd wasn’t moving.

Even on her tiptoes, Enne couldn’t see ahead. “What’s happening?”

“The door must be closed.”

Behind them, whiteboots charged into the crowd, their guns and batons raised. They looked like wolves herding sheep to slaughter.

A man turned and smacked Enne’s side with his bag. She staggered as the heavy bundle knocked the wind out of her, and her heart slammed into her throat. Beside her, another person cursed when Enne knocked whatever they were carrying out of their hands. They were packed in here. Trapped.

Enne fearfully reached for the revolver in her pocket, but Lola grabbed her wrist and shook her head. “Don’t bother,” she said, her eyes downcast. “That first night, when I took your gun... I unloaded it. I never gave the bullets back.”

Enne’s eyes widened. She glanced down and opened the revolver’s compartment, and sure enough, it was empty.

She resisted the urge to snap at Lola. Of all the times to be out of bullets... Enne might’ve been able to escape any real punishment from the whiteboots—though any encounter with them was a risk of exposure—but Lola had the Doves’ white in her hair. It didn’t matter what she had or hadn’t done—she’d be marked as guilty. If anyone was feeling the pain of their lack of ammo, it was Lola.

“We need to find a way out,” Lola squeaked.

Enne searched for another exit or a place to hide, but with the crowd, she could see nowhere but up. Above their heads, the kids on the rafters climbed toward a window. A boy pulled himself through it onto the roof. To safety.

Her eyes fell on a huge piece of machinery, some sort of retired generator. Not far from that was a column with two bars that branched out like a Y.

“Come on,” Enne said. Their hands still clasped, she pulled Lola through the crowd and toward the generator. Stepping on a lever, Enne climbed onto the huge mechanical cylinder and hoisted herself up.

“You’re shatz,” Lola breathed once she realized Enne’s plan. She stared at the kids near the ceiling with wide eyes.

But then she reached up and grasped Enne’s hand, and Enne pulled her up. After a few moments of hesitation, Lola jumped to the column. She landed awkwardly on one foot but managed to steady herself.

Enne leaped and landed behind her. Lola scrambled up with her arms wrapped around the pole so tightly that her shirt bunched around her neck, exposing part of her stomach.

“You need to climb faster,” Enne urged. “Before they notice us.”

The whiteboots had reached the crowd. One of them grabbed a girl by her hair and pulled her down to her knees. Others pointed their clubs at the wide-eyed customers, who raised their arms in surrender. In the front, a group of men pounded against the closed door and screamed.

Enne swung herself around the angled pole, her back facing down, and climbed the opposite column with her legs wrapped around the beam. Now she wouldn’t need to wait for Lola to move faster. The bolts on the side of the column were large enough to grasp.

Enne made it to one of the metal rafters near the ceiling. It wasn’t until she’d seized it and swung her legs over that she looked down. The climb hadn’t appeared quite so high from the ground. Lola, on the other hand, seemed all too aware of this. She climbed to the steady rhythm of, “Muck, muck, muck.”

At least a dozen children huddled on the rafters, some as young as seven. They watched Enne in fascination and nervousness as she stood—she probably looked rather intimidating in her black mask. Below, a few people pointed at her, saw her. Enne was reminded once again that she was no longer invisible. She was powerful—but she was also vulnerable.

Lola appeared several feet away, dripping sweat. She hauled herself up with all the gracefulness of a walrus. “Shatz. You’re shatz.”

Enne ignored her and calculated the route to the window that she’d seen the boy escape from earlier. Then she realized why the other children hadn’t moved: there was a twelve-foot gap between their beam and the one near the window. A huge black cord spanned across the distance, pulled taut. Several kids on either side worked to knot it to the closest beams.

A tightrope.

Lola blanched. “There’s no mucking way.”

“How did they already get over there?” Enne asked the kids.

“They came in from there. From the roof,” answered a girl with waist-length black hair. She looked to be about eleven. “We took the stairs.” She nodded to the opposite end of the factory, where a stairwell climbed most of the way up a corner wall to reach an office level. Enne hadn’t seen it, being so far away, with all the whiteboots between here and there. She and Lola had taken a more strenuous route. No wonder the kids had looked at them with such amazement.