The Violet Hour by Whitney A. Miller Page B

groaned. Even the believers thought that VisionCrest should give it a break atop the Great Wall of China. I was too preoccupied with worrying about what the hidden motive behind this outing might be—a decoy, perhaps, broadcasting to the world that everything was business as usual with VisionCrest? The Wangs were calling the shots here, that much was for sure.
    Mercy threw back her covers and rose like the Phoenix from her bed. It never ceased to amaze me how she could emerge fully formed and polished like some kind of beautiful robot.
    I looked over at Dora, who had the impression of her glasses branded into her cheek and looked like she was housing a family of sparrows in her hair. She did a little whoop-de-do twirl with her finger.
    “Go Team Inner Eye,” she deadpanned.
    The desperate urge to tell her about Mei Mei rose in my throat. I swallowed it down. Telling her any more risked endangering her further. I’d already put her at risk by telling her a tiny bit of what had happened with Madam Wackadoo.
    “Be downstairs in forty minutes, girls. Forty, and not a second more.”
    Brother Howard tried to sound authoritative, but Mercy flicked him away with her hand as if she were swatting a gnat.
    “It would be a lot easier to get ready without you here,” she said.
    Brother Howard turned puce and ducked his head. He scrambled out of the room like a whipped dog.
    Sixty minutes later, the entire entourage of Ministry offspring was standing in the entryway of Casa de Wang. Brother Howard gave us a look but thought better of chastising
us. The daughters of the Ministry elite could take a few extra minutes if they liked.
    I combed through the bleary-eyed crowd of students, still evenly divided by boys and girls, for Adam. Stubin was standing across the room doing his usual limber-up leg-shaking maneuvers. His sweater today was Colonel Mustard yellow with a custom-embroidered VisionCrest logo. Stubin seemed to have a monopoly on uniform flair—while everyone else was rocking the boring rotation of predictable grays, greens, and blues, Stubin was always out there. I was also ninety percent sure he was rocking guyliner. Somewhere between Tokyo and Beijing, I’d grown kind of fond of him.
    Stubin shifted an inch to the right and there was Adam, burning me with the intensity of his stare. His sleeves were rolled up and his tie a little askew under his navy sweater—recklessly beautiful, as always. I thought of Mercy sneaking in last night and looked away. It was time to forget him, or at least pretend to until I actually could.
    “All right, everyone!” Brother Howard’s over-enthusiastic bellow got the group’s attention. “Today is going to be a wonderful day full of history and mystery as you work in pairs to discover one of the wonders of the world.”
    I knew what “work in pairs” meant—the Patriarch’s daughter was always put with the next-highest-ranking offspring. My stomach clenched.
    “Sister Wintergreen with Brother Fitz.” Howard started yelling out names, organizing us for whatever harebrained project he’d cooked up.
    I tried to remain stoic, as if being paired with Adam didn’t send my heart into panicked palpitations. I could feel the sizzle of Mercy’s laser beams on my back. At least he would be forced to finally talk to me.
    One by one, disgruntled pairs were formed; it was like they’d designed it as a social experiment to see how quickly we would kill and eat each other at a national monument. Sacristan and Madam Wang were nowhere to be seen, nor was there any sign of Mei Mei. I wished we were sticking around so I could try to track her down for some daylight interrogation.
    Brother Howard was calling off the last few names. A nervous cloud settled over me.
    “So, are you going to call a truce or hang him by his ankles and hope a terracotta warrior reanimates and comes to finish him off?” Dora asked, reading the worry on my face.
    “I don’t know. What’s your plan for keeping that