The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(49)

She gave me a slanted look. “A letter.”

“To whom?”

“No one important.”

“How will you send it? By ship?”

“I won’t send it.”

I frowned. “Why are you writing something you won’t send?”

“I was right,” she said, “when I first met you. You are persistent. Tenacious. But I suppose you would have to be, to be who you are in a place like this.” She gave me a cool, appraising look. “I am writing a letter I will not send because it helps me to write it and it would be unwise for its recipient to read it. Now I have answered your question. Go tell Annin to pack my things.”

“No.”

“No?” She lifted her brows. “You have an obligation to obey your employer.”

“You are being awful.”

“I am awful, sometimes. You just haven’t known me long enough to realize it.”

“You are my partner.”

“You mean that silly bargain we made to find magic?”

My eyes stung. “It is not silly.”

“I was born in the year of the god of games.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I like games.” Sid drew her shoulders in tight and spread her hands, as though I had accused her of something and she was ready to defend herself. “I like to wear a man’s clothes and I like that it startles people, and then even if I hate dresses I enjoy wearing one to show you that when you thought I was one thing and changed your mind you must now change it again. I like disappearing and showing up when I am least expected. I like pretending. Sometimes I forget myself, and fall for my own game.”

She began to remove her clothes from the wardrobe and pack them in the trunk herself, neatly, with perfect folds. It made me wonder if what she had just said, her confessed love for pretense, meant exactly what Aden had suggested: that she had been faking her High-Kith status. After all, would a noble lady know how to fold her own clothes, let alone do it? I said, “I don’t care what you are.”

She laughed a little. “Oh, I know.”

I said, “I don’t care if you’re pretending to be High.” She paused in the act of folding and then resumed. I wasn’t sure if her pause was because I had touched on the truth that she was not High Kith, or because she had thought I had meant something else entirely when I said I didn’t care what she was. Before I could ask, she said, “You are my game, Nirrim. This city is my game. The Ward, too.” She placed an airy scarf in the trunk. It wasn’t made for warmth—few clothes in this city were. It was a lattice of pink lace. It looked like the decoration on a cake. It was hard to imagine Sid wearing it. She glanced at it in surprise, as though she had forgotten it belonged to her. The anger that had armored her, which I realized only then was anger, sizzled down into tiredness, or the appearance of it. “There is nothing here for me,” she said. “I have just been avoiding going home.”

“But you had a plan. You believe the city is hiding something. You said so.”

“Everybody and everything is hiding something.”

“But the white wall. The paint. The compact mirror in the High quarter that changes your face.”

“Yes, yes.” She waved a dismissive hand. “But the fact that this city has a secret is not proof of magic, and what looks like magic might be nothing more than some science we don’t understand.”

“Whether it’s magic or science doesn’t matter, so long as you find out how it works.”

“And how long might that take to discover? Am I supposed to grow old and die here?”

“You’ve barely even tried. You…” I floundered for words. “You are giving up so easily.”

Her eyes flashed, but she said nothing.

“It is magic,” I said. “I know it is. I can prove it,” I added, though I didn’t fully believe what I had said.

“Even the word magic sounds childish,” she said. “Unreal. It was a fool’s errand to come here. I don’t want to feel like a fool.”

“Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know? Why would you give up now and go home without the leverage you wanted over your parents?”

“Oh, I’m not going home quite yet.”

“Where are you going?”

She shrugged. “Somewhere else. I’m in this city on borrowed time anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“I pulled a few strings to get us out of that prison. Someone’s going to collect on that favor eventually.” She winced.

“Someone dangerous?”

“You could say that.”

“So you’re running away?”

“You make it sound like I gave you the impression that I was someone who stuck around.”

“You didn’t,” I said, exasperated. “But I thought—”

“Yes?” She straightened, and looked directly at me. “What did you think?”

I blurted, “That when you wanted something, you wouldn’t rest until you got it.”

“Only when we are talking about women, dear Nirrim.”

Her words made me hot with shame, because I realized that if she wanted me, she would have had me. It must not have been on her mind.