But as I started to speak, I realized that I no longer believed this.
It did not matter, however, what I thought or wanted to say, because I was pulled abruptly from the dream.
A hand yanked me awake, ripping the hair from my head.
21
I CRIED OUT, REACHING UP to grab a strong wrist and firm fingers, trying to slacken the hold on my hair.
“Finally awake, are you.” Raven released me.
“I’m so sorry,” I gasped. I felt sick with guilt. I had been caught. She had seen me somehow, going through the wall’s gate. She knew—
“Where is it?”
My trembling hands tried to smooth my hair. I glanced up at the ceiling where my passport nestled in the crack alongside a beam. “I—I—” I tried to scrape together the right words to tell Raven the truth but in a way she would accept. Of course she was upset. I had betrayed her, I had touched her things without asking …
“Speak, damn the gods.” Strands of my black hair trailed from her lifted hand. “Where is the heliograph?”
All the words I had been trying to find floated away. “Do you mean … my heliograph?”
“My heliograph, you stupid girl.”
I blinked back sudden, hot tears. She had never called me that. “The picture of you? With the ones I hid in the cistern the night of the Elysium? I got them back. I gave them to you.”
“No. You gave me a stack of heliographs that I did not count and did not even look at until now, because I trusted you.”
Dread swelled inside me. “It’s lost?”
“You lost it.”
“It can be replaced.” I was shaken by her fury, unsure why this mistake was unforgivable. I wasn’t thinking straight. I couldn’t see the true problem. “We can make another one.”
“Don’t you think I know that? I’m not worried about it being lost. I’m worried about it being found.”
There was a horrible silence as we both thought about what would happen if the militia discovered a heliograph in the Ward the exact shape and size of a passport image. They would find the face that matched the image. They would ask questions. Tithes would be taken.
“I must have missed it when I searched the cistern,” I said, hoping it was true. “It must still be there.”
Raven lowered her hand, shaking it free of the strands of my hair. “Get it. Make this right.”
* * *
But it wasn’t there.
This time I didn’t even notice my fear of heights, I was already so afraid. I plunged my hands again and again into the cistern, swiping my fingers along the slimy bottom, the water up to my shoulders, splashing my chin. I had scoured the ground below, ignoring the curiosity of passersby, some of whom stopped to gape when I began to climb the gutter pipe. I had peered carefully through the greenery of indi vines as I climbed. I had paced the entire roof, staring down at its plastered surface. I had dug dead vegetation crisped by the sun out of the gutter.
Nothing.
I stared out at the vast city. At its edges twinkled the green-blue sea. Sunshine poured down on my hot head and jeweled the water dripping from me.
Maybe the heliograph had snagged somehow on the coat I had been wearing. Maybe it was still embedded its collar.
Raven’s coat.
Which had been taken from me by the militiamen.
I placed a wet palm on my face.
If I had bothered to look, really look at the heliographs when I collected them from the cistern, I would have known right away that one was missing. I would have known exactly which one.
How could I have been so careless? The heliograph was gone. Raven would be so angry.
What do you do when you can’t make something right?
When you know you won’t be forgiven?
You lie.
* * *
“This is why you’re here?” Aden’s brow wrinkled with unmistakable hurt and offense. I quickly saw the need to repair the situation, but before I could speak he stated what I should have realized before I brought my problem to him. “I was sick with worry,” he said. “You disappeared. Then I hear that you were released from prison and back at the tavern for two days. You didn’t even spare a thought for me, did you? I began to think you’d never come by.”
I felt a prickle of irritation. He could have come to me.
I wouldn’t have had such a thought even a few days ago. Instead I would have felt rightly accused. I would have felt the truth of it: I hadn’t thought about him, not at all, and he was so sincerely wounded that I would have assumed this must mean I had done something wrong. I would have rushed to apologize.
Which is in fact what I decided to do, because I would get nowhere with him otherwise.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He softened. “I shouldn’t have waited,” he said. “I should have come to the tavern. I guess I was too proud.”
This threw me off-balance. His accusation had vanished so quickly once I had said what he wanted to hear. Did that mean that my annoyance had been unfair?
“I wanted you to want to see me,” he said, “first, before anyone else. I wish that you hadn’t come only because you needed my help.” He rubbed his mouth as though he had tasted something bitter. Once, his hand on my naked shoulder, gathering me to him as I lay with my head on his loud heart, he had told me that his mother had ruffled his hair when he saw her for the last time, her voice blithe, giving no clue that she planned to abandon him. She could have said good-bye, he said. It would have meant something to me.
Maybe she didn’t want you to guess or worry, I said, and didn’t take you because she didn’t want to risk your life with hers.
Maybe, he said.
“Aden,” I said now, “I’m glad to see you.” It wasn’t even a midnight lie. It became true the moment I said it. You understand me, he had once said, like no one does.
It is a pleasure to be told you understand someone best. It is as if you are the only one in the world who matters, as though you have a power that escapes everyone else. I was special—not because I was different, but because I was like him. I, too, longed for a mother.
He smiled a little. “I can’t make a new heliograph without Raven knowing,” he said. “She would have to sit for it. You know that the images of people’s faces must be clear and are regulated. The ears must be shown. The person must look directly forward. There is no way I could secretly capture her image, and the moment I ask her to sit for a portrait, no matter what excuse I give, she will guess that it is for you. She is too clever.”
I felt a sick disappointment.
“But”—his smiled widened—“I happen to have an extra passport heliograph of her. I took two images when she asked for one a while ago. I thought it might be useful someday, though I wasn’t sure how. It felt like a bit of insurance against her.”
“Against her?”
His light eyes blinked in surprise. He spoke as if he were saying something everyone knew. “She can be ruthless.”
“But she does so much good for the Ward.”
“Yes,” he said, “in her way.”
“She is good to me.”
His gaze roamed over my face. He seemed to consider a response and then abandon it to say, “Well, she would be good to you.”
I started to ask him what exactly that meant, when he brushed loose hair out of my eyes and tucked it fondly behind my ear. “It’s easy to be good to you.” His hand trailed down my neck and brushed over my collarbone, not quite touching my breast, but almost. “But you must be careful around Raven.”
It was true: she was easily angered by me. But didn’t I deserve it? Look how careless I’d been with the heliograph.
“Ask Morah,” Aden said. “She knows better than anyone.”
“Morah has never liked her.”
“Of course she doesn’t.” Holding up a flat hand that asked me to stay where I was, Aden left the room. I heard rummaging sounds and then his heavy, approaching tread as he returned.
He offered a small tin square. “It’s not exactly the same as the one I gave you a few days ago, but she won’t know the difference, will she, since she never saw the one you lost?”
I was awash with dizzying gratitude. I took the heliograph. Its sharp edges felt like salvation.
Aden took my hand and gently pulled me close. My gaze was level with his tanned neck. I saw him swallow. His breath brushed my brow as he said, “I have missed you.”
His hands slid down my back.
I knew what he wanted, though he didn’t ask for it, and it seemed like something he deserved, so I gave it to him.
* * *
On the walk home through the Ward, I kept my hand in my pocket, my fingers on Raven’s image, tracing the sharp-edged square. Though I had rinsed my face and mouth and hands, I felt coated with something sticky. Sometimes people want things so badly you feel like it’s your obligation to give it. I knew that was wrong, yet I had gone to bed with Aden anyway, as if I had built my own trap. Now he would expect more from me. A sick, worried feeling settled in my stomach. I blamed Aden. I blamed myself. I wasn’t sure who really was to blame.
A snake spun itself out of a crack in the pavement. Viridian green, it looked as though woven from grass, it was aware of me, but it was the kind of snake that hides, not bites, and it trickled quickly away. I envied it. A snake will not stay to please you. It will do nothing it does not want to do.
I pity who I was then: a girl riven by her mistake, beholden to the needs of others, and trained to diminish her own. I was a snake that had not yet learned to strike.
* * *
Yet Raven merely nodded when I gave her the heliograph. “It’s a good thing you found it,” she said.
It worried me, how secrets were beginning to pile up. The heliograph. That I didn’t share Aden’s feelings. The dead militiaman. My passport. Going beyond the wall. Sid.
Surely, at some point, one of these secrets would slip into full view. It would be seen.
I would be seen.
But Raven barely glanced at the heliograph, and accepted without question that I had overlooked it the night I had retrieved the others from the cistern.
I touched the red Elysium feather hidden below my shirt. I was safe for now.
“Go to the kitchen,” Raven said. “You’re late for the bread. Annin had to start the rising without you and serve an early customer, an important one at that. I need to be able to rely on you, Nirrim.”
I felt ashamed that I had just tricked her and strangely grateful that she was still not pleased with me. If she had shown me kindness I would have felt worse in my deceit. I promised myself that I wouldn’t let her down again.
In the kitchen, Annin’s eyes widened into blue mirrors when she saw me. “Someone came to be served breakfast. And so early!”
“Yes, I know. I’m—”
“I have never served someone like this. I was so nervous.”
Annin was easily made nervous, especially under Raven’s watchful eye, so I didn’t think anything of this. Then Annin said, “She was High.”
“Really?” My pulse fluttered in my throat. “Who was she?”
“Raven tried to act unfazed, but even she was impressed, I could tell. High Kith almost never come into the Ward. Of course you know that. You know how they are: too good for us. But this one was nice. I spilled the tea, and she didn’t reprimand me but”—her voice dropped to an astonished whisper—“helped me clean it up. Can you believe it? Thank the gods Raven didn’t see.”
I hated to feel so hopeful, yet I was. “What did she look like?”
“You must know.” Annin’s expression turned conspiratorial and inquisitive. “She asked for you.”
“She did?”
“How do you know her? Did you sell something to her? Do you think she might hire you to be a lady’s maid? Maybe you will receive a special writ to work in the upper quarters. Is that possible? Maybe so. Maybe she is connected to someone on the Council. I wouldn’t doubt it. She was so self-assured. Her clothes were so rich! Garnet silk and jeweled sandals and a pocket watch like a little sun. Nirrim, you could leave the tavern. You could go beyond the wall! Will you leave us altogether?”
“Please, you’re going too fast. You’re not answering my question.”
She withdrew a folded note from her gray skirts. It had a black seal stamped with an insignia I didn’t recognize: a pair of closed eyes with a little round mark where its forehead would be.
“I said, why don’t you give this to my mistress to give to Nirrim, but she seemed not to like that idea. She said she trusted me, and that it was our secret.”
With eager fingers, I cracked the note open along its seal. My darting eyes fell upon the first line of writing.
I hear you are looking for me, it said.
22
THE HONEY-STRIPED WOOD of the railing glided smoothly beneath my cold hand. Sconces lit my way up the winding stone stairs, and I could see parts of the Middling quarter through the diamond-paned windows that appeared at every floor.
The patched-quilt colors of the night-market tents.
A garden behind the wall of someone’s home, bushes and trees blurred together in the darkness, warped by a defect in the window’s glass.
The nearly uniform shapes of houses, the same rust-colored ceramic tiles, doors painted the same sage green as the door at the address Sid had given me.
It had taken me forever to find the house. She had included no map and no instructions. I had spent much of the night wandering, looking for street signs, not daring to ask anyone the way. I assume that if you were able to get into the Middling quarter once you can do so again, the note read. No one had answered my knock at the door of the tall Middling house, which even in the dark looked intimidating in its newness—rich red brick with an undertone of blue, shiny-painted shutters, carefully groomed flowers waving from their window boxes, petals sulfur yellow and soapy white. Flickering light from the oil-lit street lantern behind me wavered over the door. I knocked again. When no one answered, I tried opening the door, my pulse thudding. It unlatched easily, opening with the soft sigh of well-oiled hinges.
A warm breeze pushed me from behind, tunneling into the house, stirring my brown skirts. The empty room I entered glowed with the light of small lanterns that showed powder-blue painted walls, a soapstone mantelpiece that bore a brass bell fit for one’s hand. Old ashes lay in the grate, a sign that whoever lived here—was it Sid?—had had the comfort of a fire during the ice wind. A window was open. I could hear the muted cry of far-off seagulls. An uncorked bottle of wine and two delicate glasses sat at a little oval table. One glass was stained red at its bottom. A pink-striped chair looked dented in its upholstery, as if someone had recently sat there. I touched the silk. It was faintly warm.
A muffled thump, weirdly musical, came through the door at the other end of the room. I followed the sound.
Sid was lying on the floor under the belly of a piano, prying with a small knife at something I couldn’t see.
The floorboard creaked beneath my step, so she must have known I was there, but she continued at her task. I saw her face only in profile, brows furrowed, chin tipped up, lips bitten in concentration.
“You’re late,” she said.
“You’re rude. You didn’t even answer the door.”
“I was busy.”
“What are you doing?”
“Getting started without you.” She slid out from under the piano and stood, brushing herself off. She was dressed in Middling clothes, though without regard for how she would dress if she were in fact a Middling woman. The trousers were a tight fit, made for a man, and although the dark blue tunic had a feminine cut that nipped in at the waist, it was free of the simple embroidery that a Middling would normally flaunt as a sign of minor status. In the buttery yellow lamplight, I could see details that I hadn’t in the moonlight outside the prison: the fullness of her mouth; a freckle beneath her eye; her proud posture; the skin that was a few
shades lighter than mine; the eyelashes surprisingly thick and black, a contrast to her fair hair. I could see that even in good light, it would have been easy to make the same mistake I had in the darkness. It would be easy to think she were a boy, if I only glanced once. But I couldn’t believe that anyone would glance at her only once.
She smirked. “You’re staring.”
This was different from her friendly arrogance in the prison. There was an anger to her that seemed directed at me even though I had done nothing to deserve it.
She slid her long hand inside the open mouth of the piano, feeling around inside. The strings hummed and twanged.
“Do you play?” I asked. In the Ward we were allowed only little wooden flutes that played simple melodies. I knew what a piano was only because I had read about them in books at Harvers’s printing shop.
Sid shuddered. “Not on your life.” She roughed up her short golden hair, frowning into the instrument.
“I suppose you’re no good at it,” I said, “and don’t enjoy something where you have no opportunity to show off.”
Her gaze snapped up. Her black eyes narrowed.
“I didn’t come here to be ignored.” I wasn’t sure what allowed me to give voice to the resentment brewing in my chest. Normally I wouldn’t, to anyone. “I risked punishment going through the wall to meet you. I wandered for hours trying to find this place because you left no directions. So tell me why I’m here and what you’re doing or I will leave.”
Her expression changed, screwing up with rue. She scrunched her eyes shut and covered her face with her hand. “Directions,” she groaned. “I didn’t give you directions?”
“None.”
“I thought you would recognize the address. I thought you must come to the Middling quarter all the time.”
“The last time was my first time.”
“I am such an idiot.”
“You are,” I agreed.
Her hand slid away from her face. “I’m sorry. I waited for a long time. I assumed you weren’t coming. It bothered me.” She said her last words slowly, seeming to consider them as she said them.
The Midnight Lie Page 10