The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(32)

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.