The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(25)

I nodded. When I stepped outside into the breezy sunshine, however, a voice in my head whispered, She takes no risks. You are the one risking everything.

But it was not my voice. It was Sid’s.



* * *



Harvers, the printer, had an arrangement with Raven that went like this: I would exchange a few hours of simple labor for the use of his materials and press. He always praised my work. “So swift,” he would say as I assembled the tiny metal letters in the frame of the press. So long as no one had changed the organization of the letters in the type box, I could pluck each letter from the box without even looking, and needed to glance only once at whatever manuscript or typeset page Harvers asked me to print.

It was like Aden’s heliographs. The image of each page had been burned in my mind.

The workshop smelled of leather, ink, and ammonia. So did Harvers, whose back was perpetually slumped and his hands gnarled. He was not old, but a malady had taken over his body, causing his hands to shake. Still, he could make the most gorgeous books. I loved to see them lined up on shelves: jewel-toned leather bindings, golden clasps, the titles blind embossed. Inside were illuminated pages and words stamped in gold foil. He never minded me looking, or even reading, although these books were meant to be sold to Middlings, who could not keep them, either, but would sell them to the High Kith at a profit.

That day he asked me to print a book of poetry, one whose first edition was centuries old, he said, and written by a woman. Each poem was a fragment as brief as a breath. “A dirty book,” Harvers said with a wink.

Harvers napped in an unvarnished chair in the sun as I assembled the lines of type. I didn’t read as I worked. I arranged the words as though they were mere designs with no meaning, and stamped the pages. Dirty, Harvers had said, but I ignored the temptation to peek. That would only slow my work.

When I was done with that, I did what I had truly come here to do, and to which Harvers always turned a blind eye. He slept on—or pretended to—while I printed official-looking pages for the travel documents Raven needed me to forge. It was quickly done. I cast sand across the pages to help them dry. It would take some time before I could leave the workshop with the folded documents without fear of the ink smudging.

The poet’s book hung in pages like flags from lines strung about the workshop. The tang of ink was sharp and strong. I could tell there were no pictures. This surprised me, given the kind of book Harvers had said it was. The surprise was like a fish hook beneath my ribs, drawing me closer.

There was no harm, I thought. No one was watching me.

I had already broken so many serious laws. I had illegally forged documents. I had killed a man. Reading beyond my kith was nothing in comparison.

And I was surely immune, anyway, to whatever the poet’s words said. I had already done what there was to do with Aden.

I stepped close to the ink-wet pages.

Light from the window caught floating dust motes as I moved among the poems, which were about love. The poet’s voice was pained, raw with longing. But I couldn’t see why Harvers would say the book was dirty, unless he was joking.

Then I realized it was because the love poems were written about a woman.

In my mind I saw the poet and the woman she loved, mouths damp from kissing, limbs tangled together. A flush crept into my cheeks.

It wasn’t allowed for a woman to love a woman, at least not in the Ward. It was a shameful thing. I couldn’t even guess the tithe.

The Council encouraged Half Kith to marry. Babies are a blessing, we were told. Larger homes were allocated for growing families. Special Council-funded rations were awarded for births. I wasn’t sure what a woman did with a woman in bed, but I knew that it didn’t make children.

I started to turn from the poems, then paused before a page almost entirely white, with only a few bare black words.

Gold-sandaled dawn

Fell like a thief

Upon me



I wondered what kind of night was so precious that when morning came it felt as if you had been robbed, as if what you wanted most had been cut from you like a bloody tithe.

I had never had a night worth stealing.

I thought about how the poems would be sewn together and bound between leather and sold to a High Kith.

I saw Sid’s hand turning the pages.

I saw her coat hanging in my wardrobe.

I remembered the pattern of colored lights I had seen in the city beyond the wall, and Sid’s story about a pocket watch that could tell someone’s emotions instead of the time. If such a pocket watch could read what I felt then, it would have shown danger.

I wanted to see the rest of the city.

I wanted to see Sid.

I went back to the printing press and finally, after so many years of wondering whether I would ever dare, I began to forge a document for myself.





19


I WAITED UNTIL EVERYONE WAS long asleep. I shrugged into Sid’s coat. A reflection of me glowed in the lamplight on my bedroom window, hands moving up the coat as I buttoned it despite the heat. My heart stammered beneath my fingers. The face of my reflection was a black shadow, hair falling forward. I tucked my hair behind my ears and then untucked it, remembering the burn on my cheek.

A passport rested in the coat’s inside breast pocket. After printing pages that described false personal details, such as my name and parentage, but my true physical details, I had stitched them into a thin, small booklet using dark blue Middling thread that I had taken from Raven’s supplies, which were hidden below a floor tile in the kitchen that sprung gently open when you pressed its edge. The tile was white, but sometimes I thought I saw a shadow of something beneath the glaze, a figure or face. When I said that to Raven the first time she showed me this hiding place, she frowned and said that the tile was pure white and had always been white.