Volume One: Queen of Westbridge
Chapter 1
If you want to know the exact second my life started falling apart, it wasn't the mirror. It wasn't even the mud. It was 8:47 on a Tuesday morning, when I stepped out of my mother's Bentley in front of Westbridge University and forty phones lifted at once like a single, glittering wave.
I let them. I always let them.
"Sienna! Over here!" someone called, and I turned my head just enough to catch the light, the way I'd practiced in front of my bathroom mirror since I was fourteen. My hair — blond, curled into loose waves that had taken my stylist ninety minutes and roughly a full can of product — caught the September sun and did exactly what it was paid to do.
Blair fell into step beside me before I'd even reached the fountain, sunglasses pushed up into her dark, flat-ironed hair even though the sky was completely white with clouds. "You're doing the thing again," she said.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you walk like there's a camera crew following you."
"There is a camera crew following me. It's called everyone's phone."
Blair laughed the way she always laughed at my jokes, a little too loud, a little too fast, like she needed me to see that she thought I was funny. I used to think that was just how Blair was. It took me a long time — longer than I'm proud of — to understand that Blair laughed like that because being my best friend was a job, and she was terrified of being fired.
By the time we reached the humanities building, our whole group had assembled around us the way it always did, like satellites finding their orbit. Someone handed me a coffee I hadn't asked for. Someone else complimented my bag, which I'd been carrying for exactly eleven minutes. I said thank you to both of them without really looking at either.
I want to tell you I didn't notice how it worked — the way people rearranged themselves around me, the way a hallway seemed to hold its breath when I walked through it. But that would be a lie, and if this year has taught me anything, it's that I'm done lying, even to myself. Especially to myself.
I noticed. I loved it.
* * *
Ethics of Innovation was our first class, a required seminar that met in a lecture hall too small for how self-important the subject sounded. I sat in my usual seat, third row, center, because front row tries too hard and back row doesn't try at all. Blair sat to my left. The seat to my right stayed empty until Noah Bennett slid into it two minutes before the bell, the way he did every single day, like he'd calculated the exact latest possible moment that wouldn't count as late.
I'd known Noah since freshman orientation, in the sense that you "know" the weather — he was just a fact of my environment, a constant, unremarkable presence in oversized sweaters that looked like they'd been rescued from a lost-and-found bin sometime during the Obama administration. He wore glasses so thick they made his eyes look permanently startled. He never spoke unless called on, and when he was called on, he spoke for what felt like several geological eras.
That morning, our professor — a sharp, tired woman named Dr. Alvarez who I don't think had ever once laughed at anything any of us said — asked the class to define the difference between innovation and exploitation. Half the room stared at their laptops like the answer might materialize in a Google Doc. Noah raised his hand.
"Exploitation happens," he said, "when a system benefits from a person's need without ever intending to meet it. Innovation happens when it does both at once. Most companies claim to be doing the second thing while actually doing the first, and the gap between the claim and the reality is where the ethics problem lives."
It was, if I'm being completely honest, a genuinely good answer. Dr. Alvarez actually nodded.
But Noah kept going. And going. He cited three separate papers. He used the word "asymmetry" four times. By the ninety-second mark, I caught Blair's eye and she was already biting back a smile, and I — because some old, ugly reflex in me needed an audience more than it needed to be kind — leaned over just loud enough for the row behind us to hear.
"Is there a word limit on this, or is Noah just trying to set a record?"
The row laughed. Blair laughed loudest. Noah's ears went red, but he finished his sentence anyway, evenly, like he hadn't heard me at all, which somehow made it worse — for him, I mean. It made it worse for him. I didn't think about that part until much later.
He didn't look at me for the rest of class. I told myself I didn't care.
* * *
The rain started around noon and hadn't let up by three, which is how I ended up cutting through the east corridor of the science building instead of walking the long way around under an umbrella I'd have had to actually carry myself. The corridor was empty except for a cleaning cart, tipped at an odd angle, one wheel clearly jammed, blocking almost the entire width of the hallway.
An older woman was crouched beside it, trying to wrench the wheel straight with both hands. Silver hair pulled back in a low knot. A gray uniform that had been washed so many times it had gone the color of a rain cloud. I didn't know her name yet. I would know it soon enough.
"Excuse me," I said, in the voice I use when I mean the opposite of excuse me. "I need to get through."
She looked up. Her eyes were an unusual color — not quite gray, not quite green, like water over stone — and there was something in them that made me feel, for one disorienting second, like she could see straight through my very expensive jacket and my very careful hair and whatever was underneath both of those things. It annoyed me more than I can explain.
"One moment," she said. "The wheel's caught."
"It's been one moment for the last ten seconds and it doesn't look any less caught."
"You could give me a hand."
I actually laughed — a short, surprised bark of a laugh, because the idea was so absurd. My shoes cost more than she probably made in a month, and she wanted me to kneel down in a puddle of gray mop-water to fix a cart.
"I'm not touching that," I said. "You should probably move faster. Some of us have things to do."
Something shifted in her expression — not hurt, exactly. Something closer to patience running out, like watching a clock finish counting down. "Some of you," she repeated quietly, "have quite a lot to learn."
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me."
I felt my face go hot, the particular heat of being spoken to like a child by someone I'd been raised to believe didn't have the standing to speak to me at all. "Do you know who I am?"
"I know exactly who you are," she said, and there was something almost sad in it, which made me angrier than if she'd yelled. "Do you?"
I didn't have an answer for that — not one I liked, anyway — so I did what I always do when I don't have an answer. I found the meanest thing available and I said it.
"You're a cleaning lady with a broken cart blocking a hallway," I said. "That's who you are. Maybe learn to do your job so people who actually matter don't have to walk around you."
The corridor went very quiet. Even the rain outside seemed to pause. She straightened up slowly, wiping her hands on her uniform, and looked at me for a long moment — long enough that I almost took the words back, almost, before my pride caught up with my conscience and won, the way it always did that year.
"Careful, before you brag about the crown you didn't earn, that it doesn't cost more than you can pay," she said — and it wasn't loud, wasn't dramatic, just quiet and certain, the kind of thing people say right before something in the world quietly rearranges itself. "Tell me. Are you so sure that what you call beauty makes you worth more than anyone else?"
I laughed at her. I want that on the record, because I've thought about that laugh more than almost anything else in my life since. I laughed, stepped around the edge of the cart without helping, and walked away without looking back, my heels clicking a bright, satisfied rhythm against the tile.
I didn't apologize. It didn't even occur to me to.
* * *
That night I dreamed of a mirror.
Not my bathroom mirror, with its ring light and its little shelf of serums — a mirror taller than any doorway, gold-framed, standing alone in a version of my room that had gone dark and enormous, the ceiling lost somewhere in shadow. My reflection looked back at me, exactly as I always look, exactly as I'd want a stranger to see me. And then the glass rippled, like something had dropped a stone into still water, and the woman from the corridor stepped forward out of it instead of me.
Except she wasn't the woman from the corridor anymore. Not entirely. Her gray uniform had become something the color of a sunset caught mid-collapse, gold at the edges and impossibly deep at the center, and behind her shoulders — I know how this sounds, I knew how it sounded even as it was happening — there were wings. Not feathered like a bird's. Something closer to light folded into the shape of wings, flickering at the edges like a candle refusing to go out.
"You," I said, in the flat, stupid way people talk in dreams.
"Me," she agreed, and her voice was the same, unchanged, except now it seemed to come from everywhere in the room at once. "Delia Rose was never my whole name, Sienna. I imagine you've guessed that much."
"I haven't guessed anything. I'm asleep."
"You're aware you're asleep, which is close enough." She tilted her head, studying me with that same patient, ancient sadness. "You've spent your whole life being looked at. It never once occurred to you to wonder what it might mean to actually be seen."
"Is this a lecture? Because I get plenty of those from my professors."
"It's a warning," she said, and for the first time something like real weight came into her voice, something that made the shadows at the edges of the room seem to lean in and listen. "I have watched your kind for a very long time — the ones who mistake being envied for being loved. I gave you a chance in that hallway to be more than a mirror, and you chose to be exactly what everyone already expects of you."
"If this is about the cart—"
"It was never about the cart."
I woke up before she could say anything else, gasping the way you do when a dream ends too sharply, my sheets twisted around me, my heart going fast for no reason I could name in the dark. I lay there for a long moment, telling myself it was nothing — a weird dream, probably something I ate, probably stress about the Winter Ambassador shortlist coming out next month. I almost believed it.
Then I felt it. A small, tight pressure high on my left cheekbone, right along the cheekbone I'd spent actual money insuring, if you can believe that. I told myself it was nothing. I got up anyway, in the dark, and padded across my room to the mirror on my closet door, and turned on the light.
There, glowing faintly red under my skin like it had always been there and only just decided to introduce itself, was a single pimple. Perfectly round. Perfectly placed, dead center of my cheek, exactly where no amount of concealer in the world would ever fully hide it.
I stood there for a long time, just looking at it, telling myself it would be gone by morning. Behind me, in the dark glass of the mirror, for one half of one second, I thought I saw a flicker of gold.
"That," said a voice that might have only been in my head, and might not have been, "was only the first warning."
I didn't sleep again that night.