The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(16)

“It’s strange that you don’t know.”

“It is?”

“Yes. You should know your own country’s history.”

“You know yours?”

“All too well,” he said. “Don’t you want to understand why you live the way you do?”

Did I? Sid’s questions stirred a sheer, shallow fear within me. I thought about moments when I made a passport for someone else and contemplated making mine. I thought about when I had decided to return the Elysium. Each time, it felt like I might turn into smoke. Like if I took a step that I could not take back, the person I knew myself to be would evaporate. I would no longer recognize myself.

“Never mind.” Sid sighed. “Close your eyes.”

“Wait,” I said, though I was near sleep. “What is it, that Herrath has? That travelers have come here for?”

“Magic,” he said.





13


WHEN I WOKE, I THOUGHT maybe I had dreamed the last thing he had said. “Sid?” I whispered, in case he had fallen asleep.

“Here,” he said cheerfully. “Still locked up nice and tight.”

“Have you slept at all?”

“Grumpy, Nirrim? No need to be.”

“You haven’t.” I did sound accusing.

“Not since you arrived, no.”

“How is that possible?”

“A Valorian trick.”

“Valorian?”

“Yes, from the old Empire.” When I stayed silent, he said, “The Empire used to encompass much of the known world through a series of conquests, save the eastern kingdom of Dacra. Twenty-so years ago there was a war. The Empire crumbled. Valoria still exists as a country, but it is greatly reduced.”

“Are you from there?”

“No.”

“Sid—”

“You have a pretty voice, did you know that? Soft but earnest. Warm, too. Like a steady candle flame.”

I ignored the flirtation. He would have flirted with the bars of his cell if I weren’t a slightly better option. “You said this city has magic.”

“I did.”

“Like in stories.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of magic?”

“As far as I can tell, magic that allows you to create fabulous things, like pocket watches that don’t tell the time but rather tell you the emotions of the people standing around you. Had I one now, you would be at about the midday point of my pocket watch, and the glowing color at that marking would tell me that you were experiencing a slow but serious and completely understandable attraction to my very self. Of course,” he continued over my annoyed sputter, “it is hard to know what magic here could do. The focus here is on the production of toys and giddy experiences. I love it.”

“And that’s why you’re here.”

“Yes.”

“You’re a pleasure seeker.”

“Such disdain! You make pleasure sound so wrong.”

They say that there was magic in this city when the gods still walked among us, that some people were god-touched. They had the favor of those beings, and a shadow of their power. These were vague stories, with the quality of a dream that begins to escape you the moment you describe it. I didn’t know how much to trust Sid’s words.

But if I had such power, I wouldn’t squander it on pocket watches.

It was as if he had read my mind. “Maybe magic could be harnessed to do more worthy things,” he said. “Hard to tell. Despite all my winsome sleuthing, I have as of yet been unable to tell how magic works here. Even who does it seems a carefully guarded secret.”

“And it really exists nowhere else in the world?” Though I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, magic didn’t exist behind the wall.

“It does not.” Then he paused, considering. “Well. There have been rumors.” He dismissed whatever he had been thinking. “Nothing proven. Nothing I’ve seen. What would you do, Nirrim, with a special gift?”

“I don’t know.” It can be hard to imagine things beyond your reach. It feels like you will be punished just for wanting what you’ll never have.

“You could go beyond your wall.”

I could do that already. As far as I knew, none of the documents I had forged, with Aden’s heliographs, had ever been rejected by the authorities. I could make one for myself. For years, I had turned the possibility over in my mind.

“You could leave the city,” he said. “This island. See the world. You could go to the eastern kingdom of Dacra and float down the canals that flow through its city like silver veins.”

Longing bloomed within me like a thin-petaled flower. But I was also afraid.

I told myself to ignore both the longing and the fear. Regardless of how I felt, whether I wanted to leave or feared to leave, I couldn’t. If I left, who would forge the documents? I thought of the wide-eyed child whose face was captured on one of the heliographs I had hidden in the rooftop cistern. Who would help her escape beyond the wall, and find a different kind of life where she wouldn’t be stolen from her bed in the night?

“No,” I said.

There was a silence. “You can’t tell me that you like your lot. You’ve never seen anything beyond your Ward but this prison where your blood is sapped daily because you did a careless lady a good deed by returning her lost pet.”