It shouldn’t have mattered. They were only earrings. But they weren’t only earrings. They were scarlets.
Scarlet stones for Scarlett, her mother had said. A final present before she had left. Scarlett had known there was no such thing as a scarlet stone, that they were really just colored bits of glass, but that had never mattered.
They were a piece of her mother, and a reminder that Governor Dragna had once been a different man. Your father gave me these, she said, because scarlet was my favorite color.
Julian's words rushed back. Her sister's name was Scarlett's first clue. And other people had been given the same exact clue.
'It's all a game.' Scarlett remembered the warning from the girl on the unicycle. This wasn't real.
But it felt that way.
Scarlett loved her nana, but she thought of her as one of those women who never quite got over growing old. She’d spent the last years of her life boasting about the grandness of her youth. How she’d been beautiful. How she’d been adored by men. How she’d once worn a purple dress during Caraval that was the envy of every girl.