Easy. You become frightening yourself.

Her earliest days with the Black Cirkus were fuzzy now. She’d been badly injured, her face a mess of blood and mangled flesh. She remembered the suspicious voices that had buzzed around her when Roman first led her down the halls of the Fairmont. He’d wrapped her in his cloak, warning her to keep her injury hidden from the others.

“They can’t know that you’re hurt,” he’d said, and Dorothy had been dismayed to hear the nerves in his voice and to see that his normally vibrant eyes were dark with fear. “They don’t like weakness.”

They. He was talking about the Cirkus Freaks, the notoriously vicious members of the gang that ruled the city. Dorothy could still remember the first time she’d seen them sailing over the waters of New Seattle in their motorboat, crossbows and axes strapped to their backs, howling as they aimed their guns into the sky.

They’d been terrifying, certainly—but Roman had been the worst of them all. They’d called him the Crow, and he’d been like the king of the thieves, charming and calculating and frightened of no one.

This Roman was nothing like that. He was good-looking, still, but skittish and thin, like a street dog used to scrambling for his food. His cloak didn’t have its signature crow sketched across it yet. And then there was the matter of that sad, scraggly beard he was trying to grow . . .

Dorothy had grimaced looking at it. The beard would have to go.

“I am not weak,” she’d said, her voice knife-edge sharp. “And neither are you. I’ve seen the future and, in it, you and I do not fear the Black Cirkus. We lead it.”

The fear in Roman’s eyes had turned bright and glittering then. For the first time he reminded Dorothy of the Crow she’d known.

He’d asked only, “How?”

Grinning, she’d told him.

She should’ve realized that night that becoming the notorious Quinn Fox would not be as simple as adopting a new name. There were things she would have to do to gain the Black Cirkus’s trust. Terrible things.

“You’re too small,” Roman had often hissed at her, in those early days, when she still skittered through the Fairmont hallways with her head ducked, her shoulders clenched around her ears. “You look breakable.”

She’d flinched at that word. Breakable. It reminded her of being kidnapped as a child by a drunken man in a bar. It made her feel helpless, and she’d sworn that she would never again feel helpless.

Still, she’d had to admit that Roman had a point. She was so much smaller than anyone else in the Black Cirkus. The other Freaks looked at her like she was something to be devoured. Like she was a snack. Sometimes she imagined she heard them licking their lips as she walked past.

It wasn’t just her size. Her injury was taking longer to heal than she’d expected. It looked garish, red and raw and painful. It bled constantly. Dorothy had spent most of her time huddled in bathrooms, changing bandages and cleaning her shredded skin so it wouldn’t get infected. At Roman’s suggestion, she’d taken to covering her carved-up face with a low hood, so the other Freaks wouldn’t know how badly injured—how vulnerable—she really was. But that only made them more suspicious of what she was hiding.