The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(50)

But it was on mine.

I said, “Aren’t you going to ask me why I want to go with you?”

She stepped closer. She looked down at me, black eyes roving over my face. I could smell her perfume. It smelled like citrus kept in a cold metal cup and then poured over burning wood. “Why,” she said, “do you want to go with me?”

“I am special.” I cringed as the words came out of my mouth. They sounded like the worst kind of lie: the kind that people laugh at.

Yet she didn’t laugh. She said, “I know.”

“I have magic.”

Her brow crinkled. “What do you mean?”

“I see things that no one else does. Things that are true. Things about the past.”

“Like what?”

“Like that dream about people in the Ward killing the god of discovery long ago.”

“How do you know that’s true?”

“I found the colored paint beneath the white. If that is true, then maybe the rest of the dream was true, too.”

“That’s not exactly sound logic. And the colored paint wasn’t there.”

“You said you believed me that it was. That it was painted over.”

Slowly, she said, “I do. But you drank a strange substance. A drug, probably. You can’t trust that everything you dreamed is true just because one part is. As for the colored paint, maybe you heard or read that the Ward had brightly colored walls. Then you forgot that you knew it, and when you slept, the dream—or drug—returned your memory to you.”

“But Morah.” I described what I had learned in the kitchen.

Sid hesitated, but said, “Again, you might have heard a rumor years ago. Maybe even just the fragment of a rumor. Part of you understood it, and you imagined the vision of a baby, and forgot the source that made you think it. Memory works in peculiar ways.”

“I never forget anything.”

“Everybody forgets things.”

“No,” I said. “Not me. I remember the day I was born. I remember the pressure. My whole body was squeezed. My head felt like it would burst. The world tore open. It was so cold. Air scraped my lungs. I didn’t even know what it was, then: air.”

“Have you seen a baby being born?”

“Yes, but—”

She opened her hand, the gesture smooth, her hand moving as if scooping something invisible and then turning upward, unfurled, to release it to the sky. “There you go. You saw a birth. You imagined your own. The imagination now acts as ‘memory.’”

Sid was talking the way Helin had in the orphanage, finding reasonable explanations that made me seem ordinary, but while Helin’s words had comforted me, Sid’s unleashed desperation. I did feel that I was inventing something. I felt as though I was begging her to believe what I didn’t fully believe myself.

Who was I, to claim that my strangeness was magic?

An orphan.

A baker.

A criminal.

No one.

But I looked up into Sid’s dark eyes, black like ink, the sunburn from earlier that day pink on her cheeks, as if she were blushing, though I couldn’t imagine her ever blushing. I couldn’t imagine her embarrassed, or afraid to claim what was hers—or even what wasn’t.

I knew that if she left the tavern I would never see her again. “My memory is perfect,” I said. “I can prove it. Where is that stolen prayer book?”

Wordlessly, she drew it from her trouser pocket and held it aloft between two fingers.

“You saw me read it,” I said.

“I saw you look at each page,” she corrected.

“Ask me about any god.”

“All right.” She flipped the book open to a page only she could see. “Tell me about the god of sloth.”

So I told her about how ivy grew on the god of sloth, so loath was he to move; the only way to anger him was to wake him, and he would swallow whoever did, too lazy to chew. She asked me about the god of desire, and I recited the page I had read, the prayer to the god, and kept my gaze fixed on Sid’s collarbone, unable to look at her face, my blood hot in my cheeks. I almost hated Sid for choosing that one. She must have known. She must have been toying with me, amused to hear words on my tongue that I would never dare say on my own.

“The god of games,” Sid said.

The god of games: never spiteful, never faithful, slippery and cunning and sweet, with a liar’s heart and a knack for knowing exactly what you want and are willing to lose, so that she can take it all from you. The god who never loses a wager, who as good as steals, who won the moon from the sky and the god of ghosts’ mirror and the god of war’s heart.

Sid closed the book. I stopped reciting. “I can recite the whole book,” I said, “from beginning to end.”

“I believe you can,” Sid said. “Had you read this book before I took it from the piano?”

“No.”

“Maybe you already knew about the gods, far more than you pretended.”

“No.”

“Maybe you are lying to me.”

“No,” I said. “Give me your letter.”

“My letter?”

“The one you just wrote.”

“It is in my language. You won’t be able to understand it.”