The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(37)

“Are you sure?”

If I had a mother, would I let her go out into this heat, especially when she was feeling ill? “Of course I’m sure.”

As I left the kitchen, the basket on my arm and instructions on a slip of paper, I heard Morah say to Raven, “I don’t know why you make her do everything.”

I felt a twist of doubt.

But Raven hadn’t made me. I had offered.

I shook away my discomfort and went out into the steely sun. The Ward was bright white, the walls shining like glaze on a cake.



* * *



“That’s enough,” Rinah called from the shadow of her home.

I glanced up from my weeding. I wiped sweat from my mouth. “But I’m not finished.”

“You don’t even have a hat on your head, child. You’ll drop dead from heatstroke. What will your mistress do then? She has no use for your corpse, believe me. Come inside, drink some water, and take what you’ve come for.”

I tucked my gardening knife into my pocket and followed her inside. The sudden cool darkness felt like a plunge into a well. I felt dizzy. I was more tired than I had realized. I gratefully accepted the tin cup of water Rinah offered with one hand, the other hand resting on her pregnant belly. Then she took my basket and filled it with enormous vegetables from her garden. Anything she planted always flourished. “Here is something extra,” she said, and slid in a roll of tanned leather. “We slaughtered one of the goats.” Rinah and her family had one of the rare homes with a plot of land. She had a coop and a few goats: rewards from the Council for bearing so many children. “I know Raven needs the leather,” she added. I would dye the leather Middling blue and cut it to coded size for new passports.

“Careful in the Ward,” she said, which is what Half Kith say to warn others against the militia.

“Why?”

“A soldier died the night of the festival. He fell from the rooftops.”

I felt suddenly cold despite the heat. As nonchalantly as possible, I said, “He must have been chasing the bird.”

“Well, yes, that is what everyone thought at first, but the militia said they found strands of black hair stuck in fresh paint on the walls near where he fell. The hair didn’t match his. The militia think maybe it wasn’t an accident. Soldiers have been poking around, asking questions.”

I felt queasy but thought about how Sid would act in this situation. “Good luck to them.” I forced myself to shrug. “Lots of people in the Ward have black hair. I do.”

“So you do,” she agreed, but absently. Her face scrunched in sudden discomfort. She rubbed a hand over her taut belly, which showed the little bulge of a kicking foot. “Another baby. My gods. And here I am with five children already. I keep having one right after the other, just like the Council wants.” It was strange, perhaps, that the City Council encouraged the Half Kith to bear many children when overcrowding in the Ward might be a concern. Then again, the Council had ways of keeping the population in check. There were the vanishings. And arrests. Since so many people who went into the prison never returned, we could only assume they were dead or had become Un-Kith.

Rinah must have been thinking of similar things. Her discomfort and frustration slipped into worry.

“Do you not want the baby?” I asked, then felt horrible for asking a question that might have no good answer.

I remembered waking up inside the ventilated box outside the orphanage for unwanted babies. It was black with pinpricks of light. The box was cold. Maybe there had been an ice wind. I think there must have been, but I can’t know for sure because I had been placed in the box while asleep and so had seen nothing of the outside world or the person who had taken me to the orphanage. I was newly born. I had known only the warmth of arms and the human-scented stillness of the indoors. The cold was new and frightening. I had been swaddled in a blanket, but my legs had kicked it undone. I wailed. I flung my hands out for the softness that I loved, the familiar scent, her voice. But there was nothing to touch. Her face was fuzzy in my mind. For years after that moment in the box I would wonder why I couldn’t remember my mother’s face well, until I learned that babies are not able to see clearly. But as I cried in the box I thought about her vague face, her floating ribbons of black hair, her thin sweet milk, a golden necklace dangling a crescent moon that swung gently when she leaned over to take me in her arms. The box smelled. Urine soaked my legs—hot, then clammily cold.

Rinah’s expression grew tender and sad. “Yes,” she said, “I want the baby.”

I wondered briefly why she didn’t ask Raven for a passport, but it was evident why: her family was large. It took a great deal of time and effort to produce even one passport made from authentic (or authentic-seeming) elements. Raven either bartered for the necessary items, like the leather, or shouldered the cost of them. And of course it was much riskier for a larger number of people to try to leave the Ward at once. “If even one of them is caught with a false document, we might be caught,” Raven had said. “And if we are caught, who will help others?”

“I must return to the tavern,” I said. “Raven might need me.”

“She’s lucky to have you.”

This compliment made me feel good as I walked through the stunning heat. If not for Raven, I might have never known a mother’s care. My own mother hadn’t wanted me.