She’d felt a jolt then, as she realized that—innocent or not—the girl she’d once been was gone. Quinn Fox had killed her.
Now Dorothy tugged her hair loose, letting her white curls fall over her shoulders. She shrugged out of her stolen police uniform, exchanging it for her familiar dark cloak. She pulled the hood over her head so that it mostly hid her face, and tugged the sleeves down low over the harnesses that held her daggers.
Lips were next. She found a small pot in her cloak pocket and unscrewed the lid, revealing a deep bloodred mixture. She dotted it on her lips without bothering to consult a mirror. It was better if it was messy.
It wasn’t real blood—it was carmine mixed with oil, like prostitutes in her time used to wear—but it looked like blood, which was the entire point.
Roman squinted at her, watching the transformation as he piloted the Black Crow over the choppy waters. They’d stopped outside the anil so they could switch places, him piloting the Black Crow while she changed in the passenger seat. He looked like he was holding something back.
“What is it?” she asked, pressing her lips together to make the red bleed onto her skin. She could see from her reflection in the window that she looked pale, almost dead. “Don’t I look okay?”
“You look great,” Roman said, and then paused, as though contemplating that. “No, I’m sorry, I meant that you look terrifying. I occasionally get those two mixed up.”
Dorothy smiled. Terrifying. He meant it as a compliment. The two of them had worked hard to make her terrifying. Dorothy had seen a year into the future, but she’d never glimpsed Quinn Fox’s face, and so she and Roman had spent weeks coming up with her disguise before deciding on her whitened skin and dark cloak and red lips. It had been the first part of their plan to take over the Black Cirkus. It was like a riddle. How do you frighten frightening people?
Easy. You become frightening yourself.
Her earliest days with the Black Cirkus were fuzzy now. She’d been badly injured, her face a mess of blood and mangled flesh. She remembered the suspicious voices that had buzzed around her when Roman first led her down the halls of the Fairmont. He’d wrapped her in his cloak, warning her to keep her injury hidden from the others.
“They can’t know that you’re hurt,” he’d said, and Dorothy had been dismayed to hear the nerves in his voice and to see that his normally vibrant eyes were dark with fear. “They don’t like weakness.”
They. He was talking about the Cirkus Freaks, the notoriously vicious members of the gang that ruled the city. Dorothy could still remember the first time she’d seen them sailing over the waters of New Seattle in their motorboat, crossbows and axes strapped to their backs, howling as they aimed their guns into the sky.
They’d been terrifying, certainly—but Roman had been the worst of them all. They’d called him the Crow, and he’d been like the king of the thieves, charming and calculating and frightened of no one.
This Roman was nothing like that. He was good-looking, still, but skittish and thin, like a street dog used to scrambling for his food. His cloak didn’t have its signature crow sketched across it yet. And then there was the matter of that sad, scraggly beard he was trying to grow . . .
Dorothy had grimaced looking at it. The beard would have to go.
“I am not weak,” she’d said, her voice knife-edge sharp. “And neither are you. I’ve seen the future and, in it, you and I do not fear the Black Cirkus. We lead it.”
The fear in Roman’s eyes had turned bright and glittering then. For the first time he reminded Dorothy of the Crow she’d known.
He’d asked only, “How?”
Grinning, she’d told him.
She should’ve realized that night that becoming the notorious Quinn Fox would not be as simple as adopting a new name. There were things she would have to do to gain the Black Cirkus’s trust. Terrible things.
“You’re too small,” Roman had often hissed at her, in those early days, when she still skittered through the Fairmont hallways with her head ducked, her shoulders clenched around her ears. “You look breakable.”
She’d flinched at that word. Breakable. It reminded her of being kidnapped as a child by a drunken man in a bar. It made her feel helpless, and she’d sworn that she would never again feel helpless.
Still, she’d had to admit that Roman had a point. She was so much smaller than anyone else in the Black Cirkus. The other Freaks looked at her like she was something to be devoured. Like she was a snack. Sometimes she imagined she heard them licking their lips as she walked past.
It wasn’t just her size. Her injury was taking longer to heal than she’d expected. It looked garish, red and raw and painful. It bled constantly. Dorothy had spent most of her time huddled in bathrooms, changing bandages and cleaning her shredded skin so it wouldn’t get infected. At Roman’s suggestion, she’d taken to covering her carved-up face with a low hood, so the other Freaks wouldn’t know how badly injured—how vulnerable—she really was. But that only made them more suspicious of what she was hiding.
Worse than that, it made them curious.
There weren’t a lot of girls in the Black Cirkus. Being female, Dorothy already drew far too much attention. The Freaks whispered about what she looked like beneath her ever-present cloak. Dorothy could feel the weight of their stares whenever she walked down the hallway, and she knew it would be only a matter of time before their curiosity got the better of them.
And then, one night, it did.
She’d been late sneaking back into the Fairmont, and some boy—a newer Cirkus Freak who she didn’t recognize—had emerged from the shadows and grabbed her. For one dizzy moment, she’d thought it had been a mistake, that he’d been expecting someone else, perhaps, or simply bumped into her in his rush to get down the hall.
But then she heard the sounds of his friends hidden around the corner, laughing and cheering him on, and she knew that it’d hadn’t been a mistake at all but an ambush.
They’d been waiting for her.
The boy was rough as he’d pinned her to the wall, one arm braced across her collarbone so that she couldn’t move, the other gripping her waist, fingers jabbing painfully into her skin.
“Look at her wriggle,” he’d said, his breath sour and too, too close. “Didn’t I tell you she’d be fun?”
Fun? He thought this was fun? Dorothy hadn’t been able to catch her breath. She knew that if she didn’t do something now, this would happen again and again and again. She was small and weak and fun. Everyone at the Fairmont would see her as an easy mark, someone to be taken advantage of. Her new reality would be running from boys like this, fighting off grabbing hands and stinking breath.
And so she’d done the only thing she could think to do.
She’d bitten him. On the face.
She’d gotten a big chunk of his skin off, too, leaving behind a deep, ugly gash. The boy had dropped her and fallen to his knees, howling, as blood dripped from her chin.
She hadn’t bothered to wipe the blood away but said only, “I don’t like to be touched.”
The boy was called Moon Face after that, in reference to the crater left in his cheek. And the whispers about Quinn Fox officially began.