Locked Inside

“Get out,” said Ms. Slaight.

There was something in her voice. Worse than before. Worse than ever before.

My fault, Marnie thought. My fault.

Marnie got out. She would rather walk anyway.

But Ms. Slaight got out, too. She grasped Marnie’s arm and forced her away from the car. She looked down into Marnie’s face, and her expression was like nothing Marnie had ever seen before. It hypnotized her. As if from a distance, she could hear Ms. Slaight speaking.

“I didn’t want it to be this way between us, Marnie Skyedottir. But from the very first time I met you, I think I knew that it would have to be.” And she raised her other hand. There was something in her clenched fist.

Marnie later remembered everything else, but not the actual feel of the sharp blow to her head.

OTHER BOOKS BY NANCY WERLIN

Are You Alone on Purpose?

Black Mirror

Double Helix

Impossible

The Killer’s Cousin

The Rules of Survival

speak

An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

For Maxwell Romotsky

Everyone should be lucky enough
to have an Uncle Max

What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart!

What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

—
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The House of the Seven Gables

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Prologue

A
t sixteen years of age, Marnie Skyedottir had a personal net worth of $235.27 million. That she made do on $50 a week was the work of Marnie’s guardian, Max Tomlinson, and Marnie knew that one day—on her twenty-first birthday, to be exact—she could, if she chose, have revenge.

“I’ll fire your sanctimonious butt, Max,” she told her computer screen, where a characteristically lengthy and courteous e-mail from Max lay open. (…
As you know, the regulations for Halsett Academy for Girls clearly stipulate that students on academic probation should not have access to excess personal funds.
…) Marnie could almost hear Max speaking the words in his Mississippi lawyer’s drawl that, for all its leisured pace, somehow never sounded any less than definite.

“Your years managing my life will be over”—she
jabbed at the keyboard with satisfaction and precision—“like that.”

Max’s e-mail disappeared into the Trash. Marnie blinked and only then realized her eyes hurt. Burned. And her shoulders ached. She flexed them, and shut her eyelids tightly for a few seconds. Well, no wonder she was in pain. Before the reply from Max had arrived, she’d been online for a while, chasing that clever, thieving, infuriating Elf through the dark winding virtual alleys of Upper Paliopolis. She glanced down at the clock on her computer. 5:43
A.M.
Max was up early in New York City, in that huge duplex apartment on Central Park West that Marnie was supposed to call home. Ha.

Wait. 5:43
A.M.
?

“No!” Marnie moaned instinctively, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. Dorm walls weren’t very thick. But it couldn’t be. She couldn’t have been online for over ten hours! She directed a fierce glare at the clock, as if she could will it to spin backward to, say, 10
P.M.
Early enough for her to go over her chem notes and then go to bed at midnight, like a good preppy Halsett girl—like Jenna Lowry or Tarasyn Pearce or someone like that.

Instead the clock went forward. 5:44
A.M.
And her computer beeped as words appeared in the Paliopolis chat window. A message from that pesky Elf glowed neon in the dark of Marnie’s room.

Giving up?
The sneer was implicit.

Marnie hesitated. She disliked her chemistry class with its brooding, angry teacher, and she wasn’t doing well in it. There was no chance of sleep now, but
if she at least spent an hour with the notes, maybe she could pass the test today.

Thanks for the spellbook, Sorceress
, the Elf gibed.
You’ll be a lot more helpless without it. I’m looking forward to watching your rating plummet. While mine soars!
The message was accompanied by a belching raspberry noise; Paliopolis sound effects were crude but effective.

Well, who needed sleep? The Elf had been on just as long as Marnie, and if he could keep going, so could she. Or rather, so could her alter ego, the Sorceress Llewellyne. It was not for nothing that Llewellyne had the highest player rating in all of Paliopolis.

Marnie grinned and attacked the keyboard.
Dream on, you drooling nitwit
, she typed to the Elf.

She had more than two hours before she had to be in class, anyway.

The chemistry test was straight from the book; the kind that anyone who had read over her notes could have passed easily. Marnie amused herself by drawing nooses and happy faces wherever she didn’t have a clue. It only took a couple of minutes. Inspired, she then added two tiny mice in chains next to the final question regarding the nature of covalent bonds, and had difficulty suppressing a fit of exhausted giggles. A chuckle escaped anyway. Marnie didn’t need to look up to see the teacher’s sharp glance. She could feel it.

“Something funny, Ms. Skyedottir?” At Marnie’s shoulder, Ms. Slaight carefully enunciated each
absurd syllable of Marnie’s last name. Marnie could feel the sudden alert attention of the entire class. Ms. Slaight reached down and plucked up Marnie’s test to scan. “You’re not Picasso,” said Ms. Slaight finally. Not even a glimmer of amusement could be found on her face. “I assume you’re done?”

“My artistic vision is exhausted,” said Marnie blithely. “Take it away.” Then she realized her left hand was embedded in her hair, twisting nervously. She pulled the hand down. She was not going to let Ms. Slaight, of all people, rattle her. She watched as the teacher took her red pen and marked a big
F
at the top of her test.

“Back to work, people,” said Ms. Slaight. She was holding her thin shoulders tensely. “Ms. Skyedottir’s little display is over.” The class sank again into the test, and Marnie watched Ms. Slaight return to her own desk.

The chemistry teacher was thirtyish; a term substitute who had taken over the class at the beginning of the semester when the regular teacher went on maternity leave. Marnie had heard this was her first actual teaching job. That might explain her defensive jitteriness in the classroom, and possibly also the pathetic, pieced-together wardrobe. Today, for example, she was wearing scuffed black pumps, a dull brown skirt, and a lime-green bow blouse.

Discomfort with teaching might also explain the controlled, but very present, edge to Ms. Slaight’s voice whenever she spoke to Marnie. Not to mention the way Ms. Slaight always pronounced Marnie’s last name, so carefully, so distinctly. Okay, it was a ridiculous
name; embarrassing even if, by some miracle, you had never heard of Marnie’s mother. Skye had been inspired by Icelandic naming conventions, and Marnie could only be relieved she hadn’t taken things further. Cirrus Skyedottir. Thunder Skyedottir. Asteroid Skyedottir. Oh, Marnie had a long mental list of first names she might have had, if Skye—who had been cheerfully capable of anything—hadn’t exercised rare restraint.

Skye.

Even on all the legal contracts that defined her small empire of recordings, books, and financial dealings, Marnie’s mother had been simply Skye. She had cut her birth name from her life so completely that none of the media types had ever been able to discover who she really was, or where she’d come from. Marnie often wondered about these same questions, even though she knew that Skye would have said grandly that it did not matter.

The self you invent
, Skye had written,
the self you live by—that is the self who is important. You are who you choose, consciously or unconsciously, to be. It is better to be conscious. It is better to take control.
That was from her first bestseller,
Inventing Your Soul.

In fact, to Marnie’s knowledge, Skye had never talked—either to Marnie or publicly—about her life before she got her first recording contract at twenty-one. Marnie knew absolutely nothing about Skye’s parents or her childhood. She didn’t know if Skye had had brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, grandparents. For all Marnie knew, Skye had magically appeared in the world at twenty-one, fully
grown, singing solo in a church choir in … actually, Marnie didn’t even know exactly where it was that the record producer had first heard Skye. Georgia? Mississippi, where Max was originally from? Marnie knew that Max’s relationship with Skye—more than friends, less than lovers, far more complicated than employee with employer—went way back. It dated from before the time that Skye had hired Max to handle all her myriad legal affairs, from long before Marnie’s birth.

Yes, Max certainly knew more about Skye than Marnie did. Three years ago she had asked him directly about Skye’s past. It had been in the middle of her birthday dinner with him and the housekeeper, so he couldn’t escape. He had looked intently at Marnie for several seconds, his face unreadable, and Marnie had dared to hope. But then he had said with uncharacteristic brevity, “One day,” and changed the subject. Marnie had ignored his and Mrs. Shapiro’s attempts to draw her into the conversation, had put down her fork and fumed.

But from that day, her desire to know had warred with the opposite feeling. Marnie was no fool. Skye would not have concealed, not have run from, a happy past. And the lack of expression on Max’s face told its own tale.