Let’s gooo, here's part two of my analysis of Grace and Rebecca (part one can be found here): the Queen of Volts scene in the Mole tunnels where Enne, Grace, and Roy take some Scarhands with them in search of the Dove hideout. This got away from me, but I have so many thoughts about these characters and I am incapable of shutting up about them.
When this scene opens, everyone involved is already stressed and upset. Jac and Jonas are dead, Enne is essentially on the run, and Lola just got shot trying to warn them of the Dove trap. Everything is going to hell in a handbasket, then everything gets worse when Ivory shows up.
Ivory obviously isn’t there for any good reason, but she also visibly isn’t doing great (wonder why). She’s coughing a lot, to the point where Enne and every person there except for Grace winces in sympathy. I’m not counting this as part of the Thing, because no one other than Lola knew Ivory’s identity yet, but it’s an interesting detail that sets the tone of the scene.
When Lola announces that Ivory is actually Rebecca, Grace is the first person to respond. She doesn’t scoff or get snarky or even say something like “What do you mean, she’s obviously not.” She asks “What do you mean?” and I know this is a tiny thing to nitpick, but it seems to imply a lot more belief (or at least a willingness to believe) than I would have expected Grace to have in response to that statement.
This next bit is me reading symbolism into an innocuous detail (so par for the course lol): Grace brought a flashlight into the tunnels and it stops working. She’s shaking it to try to get the battery to work again, but everything is still dark. Then someone who appears to be the Dove Lord arrives, picks up the flashlight, and shakes it—this time, it works, and everyone can see Ivory’s face as it’s revealed that the face isn’t her own. To me, there’s definitely something symbolic to be found there between the fake identity and the fact that the flashlight was Grace’s to begin with. I strongly believe that Rebecca wanted her to join the Doves eventually, and may have already been laying the groundwork while she was at the Guild. She clearly encourages her being an assassin, but I think it goes deeper. I think she sees Grace as a project, someone she can shape into her Dove after freeing her from the One-Way House and earning a debt.
After this it goes into the confrontation over Grace’s card, but I’m gonna go on a quick tangent to say that the whole “the targets are random!!!” thing is such bullshit. They clearly aren’t. Bryce insists that “the shade devised it,” but who fucking devised the shade, Bryce...he just bound it to the people and the cards, Rebecca’s the shade-maker. I believe that he thinks she had nothing to do with it, especially when his literal fatal flaw is his rose-colored glasses, but you can’t expect me to think Rebecca is being 100% forthcoming about her involvement when the Bryce’s and Enne’s targets just happen to be Harvey and Levi. Because that happens by chance.
In case you want a refresher of that funny twist of fate, Lola’s target is Tock and Levi’s was Jac, as well. Also random obviously. Also sure is a coincidence that the most powerful, dangerous people in the city are targeted by the people who are least equipped to deal with them. Bryce’s card is being hunted by the whiteboot captain who admits in book one that he’s stupid and incompetent, Scythe’s by a prima ballerina, and you cannot convince me it’s a twist of fate for a relatively unimportant nightclub owner to have the Chancellor as his target. Just no.
My rant about the “randomization” is done for now, but my point stands. Rebecca carefully chose the cards’ recipients and targets. She could have picked an easier target for herself, like Zula or Narinder or really anyone other than an assassin that she spent over a paragraph talking up in book two. But she wanted Grace.
Then the whole exchange when Rebecca takes the High Priestess card is weirdly personal for what that scene really is. All she had to do was threaten Grace and Roy and demand that she hand it over freely. Instead, Rebecca takes the card out of Grace’s pocket herself and makes her retroactively give permission—which, like her display in the Guild, is subtle but a slightly terrifying power play when you think about it. Grace obviously would have given it to her, because they were threatening to hurt Roy, but she didn’t get the illusion of a choice. Rebecca physically took the card away from her and then told her to give her consent, plainly saying, I call the shots here. Don’t forget it. And Grace doesn’t; she keeps up eye contact with Rebecca the whole time, and this is after Lola has shared her identity, so she knows exactly who she’s looking at.
My final point here doesn’t actually happen during the scene I’m dissecting. It actually happens afterwards, when they’re back in the Spirits hideout and Enne is talking to Grace in her room, and it shows a lot about how that encounter affected Grace. Her voice trembles as she says, “I didn’t stop you then. Or help you. I could’ve, but I was shaken.”
Grace Watson admits here that she was shaken by what happened. Grace, the assassin who has killed numerous people in probably unpleasant ways and survived a childhood in a One-Way House. Grace, who seemed completely unaffected when Enne offered her work immediately after the attack on the Guild, and presumably handled the massacre of her coworkers with not much more than indifference. Grace was shaken. The deaths of the Scarhands, however sudden, cannot have rattled her that badly.
There’s an argument to be made that her reaction is partly because the Doves also threatened Enne and Roy, people that she cares about. But we see what Grace gets like when her loved ones are in danger, and she gets terrifying, but specifically angry. Not shaken, not frozen to the point where she can’t stop Enne from doing something or help her from doing it.
Grace was angry in the Mole tunnels, and even more so after the fact, but it was the realization that the Dove Lord (somehow) was actually Rebecca that made her freeze up. And from what we’ve seen of their interactions, I really don’t blame her. As I said in my first analysis post, Grace might seem nonchalant but she jumps at the chance to leave the Guild as soon as it’s offered. I don’t think it was the Chainer or the living skeleton that made the thought of staying so unbearable; it was the woman who (probably) brought her in and now (likely) saw her as the perfect candidate for her to shape, show off, and indoctrinate.
Rebecca is a lot of things, but she isn’t subtle. Even as Ivory, Enne remarks that she has no poker face. As she tells Harvey later on in the Catacombs, she became Ivory so she could become powerful and take what she wants. And given the opportunity to torment a runaway whiteboot or do any number of things to the most wanted streetlord in the North Side, she all but ignores Roy and Enne and shows, again, that she wants Grace.
This got super long and I can’t bring myself to mind. The third post in this series will be as well, because I’ll be diving into the final fight scene between Rebecca and Grace and my god there are a lot of things to think about there. Hope you liked my overthinking and rambles!
