Inside the Shadow City by Kirsten Miller Read Free Book Online

like a pro. It’s got to be one of the scholarship girls.”
    â€œOh my God!” yelped a girl who was frantically tugging at her earlobes. “My emerald earrings are still in my locker!”
    â€œNobody’s going to steal your crappy jewelry, Courtney,” snickered the first girl. “Everyone knows it’s all fake.”
    â€œI hope they never find it,” I heard a nearby scholarship girl whisper to a friend. They shared a smile that froze in panic when they saw I’d overheard them.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I asked a girl from my algebra class. Under ordinary circumstances, she would have ignored me, but this time the gossip was too good not to share.
    â€œSomeone stole Sidonia’s ring.” She pointed in the direction of a haughty ninth grader with jet-black hair and yellow eyes who was exiting the principal’s office at the end of the hall.
    â€œThis morning?” I asked, suddenly feeling a bit queasy.
    â€œYeah,” said my classmate with a nasty grin. “There’s a dead girl walking the halls today.”
    As anyone at the Atalanta School could have told you, Sidonia Galatzina wasn’t your average crime victim. She was the last princess in the exiled royal family of the former kingdom of Pokrovia, and the ring she had so carefully concealed was no ordinary piece of jewelry. Featuring an enormous diamond in the palest shade of pink, it had graced the fingers of countless queens and was rumored to have been on Sidonia’s aunt’s right hand when she was murdered the night before her coronation.
    It wasn’t the theft itself that had the whole school talking. Everyone wanted to know who had dared to mess with Sidonia, the tyrant of the Atalanta School for Girls. Aside from being thoroughly evil, Sidonia—or the Princess, as everyone called her—was beautiful, rich, and unusually charming. Most adults found her entrancing, with her dimpled cheeks, European accent, and impeccable grooming. One heartwarming smile or girlish giggle, and they fell under her spell. Few could see that Sidonia had been born with a heart filled with venom and a natural ability for wreaking mayhem. By my count, she was personally responsible for a dozen nervous breakdowns and at least one case of hives. School legend had it that she had forced five scholarship girls to transfer to other schools in her kindergarten year alone.
    The Princess traveled with a pack of four girls who mimicked her in every way. If she arrived at school in a miniature mink coat, the others would appear the next day in identical furs, looking like a ferocious band of well-groomed squirrels. If Sidonia adopted a new hairstyle, they all scrambled to their hairdressers no matter how unflattering the results. But however ridiculous theymay have appeared, the Princess’s friends were best avoided. Like the other girls who lacked protective layers of designer clothing, I stayed out of their way. For the most part The Five, as they called themselves, left me alone. There was usually far easier prey to be had. They ate a scholarship girl for lunch every day.
    I wouldn’t have given the Princess’s ring much thought had the theft not reeked of Kiki Strike. Only a girl who was new to the school could have made such an idiotic mistake, and Kiki had been cutting class at the time of the crime. I was disturbed to discover her criminal tendencies, but I was curious to see how she had done it. Getting past two locks demanded skills most seventh graders didn’t possess. So when the classroom doors closed for second period, I slipped downstairs to the pool’s locker room and examined the front of the Princess’s locker. I found no evidence of tampering, and the combination lock looked as sturdy as any other.
    â€œForget something?” snarled a voice behind me. I felt the contents of my stomach begin to bubble as I turned to see one of The Five, a ninth grader named