Jacks and Queens at the Green Mill by Marie Rutkoski

 
    Pathetic.
    Zephyr cast a glance over the Green Mill Lounge’s sunken garden, at the sweat-dazzled ladies in their thin dresses leaning on men who called for more buckets of champagne. The Chicago night was fuzzy with heat.
    Not that Zephyr felt it. That would require skin. It was a good thing she didn’t have any at the moment. If she had, she would have been sweltering along with the humans. If she had a face, her expression would have shown what she thought of them.
    Their parents or grandparents had burned Chicago down in 1874. Now, five decades later, their reborn city was an ugly thing, with straight streets and right angles, full of humans who drank and laughed and had no idea that they were living their lives in a space hollowed out by the murder of a people better than them in every way, in every thought and intention.
    Namely, creatures like herself.
    Zephyr floated, invisible, into an alleyway snaking out of the club’s side entrance. She was nothing, a wisp of air.
    Then her body molded into being and she became a girl.
    Zephyr felt the weight of her flesh settle on the branch-and-twig network of bones. Her short black hair, cropped in this world’s style, swished against her bare neck. She ran fingers over the flat chest of her dress, its tiny black beads sprayed like caviar across the square neckline and dripping in fringes from her shoulders. Zephyr had dressed carefully for this mission. The humans would take her for one of their own. When she walked into the club, no one would give her a second glance.
    â€œHell- lo ,” said a voice.
    Or perhaps someone would.
    A boy blocked the club’s side entrance. He looked about her age, no more than twenty years old. His body was long, rangy, his stance somehow naturally dishonest, alive with the energy of someone who couldn’t be trusted, but also couldn’t be blamed for it, because it was easy to guess from the way he constantly shifted his weight that he couldn’t quite trust himself either.
    But it was his face that stopped Zephyr cold.
    Only for a moment. Then she came closer. She walked straight up to him.
    Once, Zephyr’s mother had tried to explain to her how an alternate world happened. She had described the sensation: a shiver along the skin of reality, then a jolt, a loss of balance. Every Shade had felt it. On October 8, 1874, the Shades of Chicago looked around at their whole city, at the sheer autumn sky, and didn’t see anything wrong. Everything seemed the same. But they felt half of themselves die. Some part of them blazed up in pain and blew away in ash. They didn’t understand, then, what had happened. They didn’t know that, in this world, their old world, the one where Zephyr faced the boy, humans had led a massacre of the Shades. They had burned Shades at stakes lit throughout the city.
    In this world, which they called the Alter, Zephyr’s mother had died along with every other Shade.
    In their new world, the one into which Zephyr had been born, her mother was alive.
    But it felt, her mother said, as if she lived with the ghost of her dead self. As if she were her own haunting.
    Zephyr stared at the boy staring at her, and thought that maybe he understood how her mother felt.
    He was hideous.
    Half of his face was a twist of scar tissue. One eye was almost hooded by a patch of skin, and his mouth dragged up to the left in a permanent sneer.
    He whistled. It must have been hard work, whistling with that mouth. But the sound pierced low and true. “You look like Louise Brooks,” he said.
    She frowned.
    â€œThe movie star,” he clarified.
    She knew what movies were. Her Chicago didn’t have them, but the Alter did. They were all the rage here, mirages of light and dark, faces flitting across the screen like shadows cast by bird wings. Zephyr had even watched one. She had not been impressed.
    And the truth was, she found the boy’s assessment a bit insulting. She