When Luna realized she hadn’t seen pictures of the steps before, her breath caught in her throat. It was real—the house with giant double doors and curtained windows, the illuminated courtyard, the beautiful fountain and its tinkling water and underwater lights—everything was real. She wasn’t dreaming in lucid, vivid Technicolor. Her gaze traveled up, up, up toward the roof and then to the left until she reached the edge of the house. She turned to Alex to make sure he was seeing what she was, to really make sure she wasn’t hallucinating.

“Outside? For how long?” he asked the driver. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s cold as hell out here.”

“Pretty sure hell would be hot,” the driver joked as he opened the car door. “Not long. Go on.”

Alex waited until the car rounded the fountain before asking, “Ready?”

Luna nodded. The Others, as the driver had so aptly put it, huddled together, openly staring at her and Alex. If their breath didn’t plume in front of them when they exhaled, she’d have thought they were weird statues, misplaced and mismatched with idyllic scenery.

White lights in the ground dotted the edges of the circular courtyard. The bushes had been dressed up with their own lights, evenly spaced dots shining like pearls, and the moonlight settled onto the gravel crunching under their feet as they walked. Everything reflected and refracted and beautiful.

Everything except the double doors at the top of the steps. No floodlight. No porch light. Not even the pinprick of a doorbell. The darkness there seemed unreasonable and out of place. Like a warning.

Or a message.

Alex spoke first. “Hey. I’m Alex, and this is Luna.”

Luna had to force herself to stop looking at the doors, to stop prematurely theorizing and be present. It practically hurt to turn her head toward the distraction.

“We know. Hi, Luna,” said BelleLow, a maybe-white chubby girl smiling through her shivers. Whenever someone asked her ethnicity on Golden Rule or Goldspiracy, she infamously never answered for some reason. “I don’t know if you know, but my name’s actually Harlow.”

“Oh hey. It’s nice to meet you,” Luna said.

“Oh,” Nicole said, tone light. “She speaks.”

Luna would recognize JadeTheBabe’s voice anywhere—sultry and raspy, all feeling and probably no cigarette smell. When Nicole had first hit the Golden Rule scene, Goldspiracy had spent months analyzing her videos to see if the rumors were true, to find any clues to see if she was a plant, “fated” to rise above the wasteland created by Jewel’s absence.

The results of their investigation had been inconclusive.

The Founders were going to lose their shit when she reported back that Nicole was even prettier in person. Not just photogenic—but beautiful. Talented and funny and popular and gorgeous and tall.

Life was truly devastatingly unfair.