Luce lays around moping in bed until Penn shows up.  Then she ignores Penn until she leaves again.

I’m sorry, even with sarcastic quotes, I can’t get over this.  Luce is in a reform school because (supposedly) everyone thinks she killed a guy and just can’t prove it.  THEY BELIEVE SHE IS A MURDERER AND NO ONE IS TRYING TO FIND HER AFTER SHE AND THE TWO BOYS SHE’S INVOLVED WITH HAVE BEEN MISSING ALL DAY.

This book has so little regard for its own setting that it simply ignores things willy-nilly.  It doesn’t care about the school, about the cameras, about the characters’ fucking ages, nothing.  If it can be used at the moment, it’s used, if it can’t, fuck that shit.  This isn’t how you write a book.  This isn’t how you write anything.

Luce dithers on about the plot for a while.  I guess I shouldn’t call it a plot.  “Being reincarnated and dying because your soul mate is cursed” is more of a gimmick than a plot. Then she finds that Watchers Squared book that was missing before, because Penn broke into her room to leave it for her.  Instead of reading it and finding out anything about the mythology of this world, Luce stops at the title page because it has a picture of Daniel from the 1800s pasted to it.  A past version of Luce is also in that picture.

So…pastey-pale white girl in Tahiti, Jerusalem, and Brazil, then?  Man, you just didn’t think that through at all, did you, book?

Luce decides to go find Penn to talk about all this and she finds Arriane and Roland instead.  They spend FAR TOO LONG TALKING ABOUT ABSOLUTELY NOTHING THAT MATTERS and then Luce asks Roland (being Daniel’s roommate) if Daniel has any mental issues.  Basically.  That ALSO amounts to nothing and gets no answer and then Luce runs off again.

780 WORDS SPEND ON A SCENE THAT WENT ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE.

GOD DAMNIT, BOOK, ARE YOU TRYING TO SMOTHER ME WITH YOUR PADDING?

She then runs into Miss Sophia, who notices the book Luce is still carrying around and seems to be up on the hinky that is going down.  She pulls Luce aside to talk to her, where Luce spills about the kiss again, and everyone continues to be all “OMGWTFBBQ YOU CAN KISS NOW?”  But without imparting any actual new information and just MOVE THE FUCK ON ALREADY.

After GOOD GOD SO MUCH MORE FUCKING PADDING and a useless meandering conversation about the book so far, the conversation ends when Luce decides to go find Daniel.  Despite the fact that Miss Sophia obviously knows what’s going on and hasn’t actually told us jack-diddly squat yet.

Sword & Cross has a reputation to uphold. You don’t think we just let students run around willy-nilly in the night, do you?”

Yes, I do think that.  Because yes, you do that.

It takes four pages for Luce to leave the library and walk to the cemetery gates.  FOUR FUCKING PAGES.

This book has all the material of a short story, but for some reason someone tried to make it novel length.

At the cemetery gate, she sees Penn, who looks all shook up and says something bad is about to happen because there’s a bunch of flickering lights in the cemetery.  Um….scary?  Does anyone really see ‘flickering lights’ and then go all ash-faced and quivering with fear? That’s almost as unimpressive as Luce’s shadow monsters.