The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(6)

He pulled away. He was a full head taller. I didn’t raise my eyes but kept my gaze on his tanned throat. His playfulness soured. If I looked up, I’d see his broad mouth thinned, light eyes narrowed. A notch always formed between his brows when he frowned. That would be there, too. He said, “As if you’ve never done it before.”

It was true. We had kissed, and more, but I had put an end to that.

Sometimes I didn’t understand things and felt stupid later. Like how his lovers’ game to protect us from curious eyes hadn’t been a game to him.

“Come inside,” he said.

Normally, during an ice wind, it would be nearly as cold inside a Ward house as outside. Our houses weren’t built for the cold, since it came so rarely. Aden dealt on the black market, which meant that his home had a few comforts others didn’t. A brazier glowed with live coals. Orange light flared against the white, limewashed walls of the first room. Half Kith must keep the walls of their home white, just like they must always wear muted colors. Although some people in the Ward could carve sinuous chairs, shape exquisite sofas, craft tables with minute patterns of inlaid bone, such furnishings were sold to the upper kiths beyond the wall. Everything we owned must be plain.

I handed Aden the bread. He made a pleased sound to see its design: a raptor with talons outstretched. “You made this for me?”

Raven had chosen this masculine image, likely for the same reason I told Aden yes. We wanted to please him. We needed his skills.

It is important to make people feel appreciated, Raven said, and made certain to slip Aden a few coppers every now and then. She set money aside from the tavern’s profits. We must do our part, she told me.

Maybe I should apprentice myself to the printer, I told her. I am good with paper and ink. I could earn a little.

But I give you everything you need, Raven said. I will always take care of you.

It was true. I was grateful. Although Morah, Annin, and I didn’t earn money working for Raven, we never needed to.

I just wish I had money to contribute, too, I told her. For the documents. You shouldn’t have to pay for everything.

She touched my cheek. Don’t you worry your dear heart, she said.

“Do you have the heliographs?” I asked Aden.

“All business, I see. Little Nirrim, made of stone.” He brought the bread close to his face and inhaled its fresh, sugared scent. My printed breads were soft inside, with an airy, melting texture.

The bread was a risky thing. Too sweet for people like us.

Aden set the loaf on a table that bore a bowl filled to its brim with seed. “Not you, too,” I said. The seed was stolen, probably, from the upper Wards of the city, where ladies kept pet songbirds of all kinds. Aden had a Middling passport that allowed him outside the Ward’s wall. The document had been forged by me.

But it would be a lie, I had said to Raven when she had suggested that I forge passports, which she would give to those who needed them most. I was anxious about the risk—to her as well as to me. And I didn’t like lying. It was hard for me to tell what was real. Lies made it worse.

It is a midnight lie, she said.

A kind of lie told for someone else’s sake, a lie that sits between goodness and wrong, just as midnight is the moment between night and morning.

Or a lie that is not technically false, like a misleading truth.

“I saw the bird fly away,” I told Aden, which was true enough, but which I hoped would make him think the bird was gone.

“It’s somewhere in the Ward, I know it.” Aden’s smile was back. He was—as Annin had reminded me many times—even more handsome when he smiled. He made a room warmer. When the day dimmed, sunshine always seemed to linger around him like bright vapor. Lucky, women in the Ward called me. “Don’t be so disapproving,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I hunt the bird as well as anyone else?”

“You can’t hunt an Elysium bird.” A pet Elysium is raised from an egg stolen from a nest in the sugarcane fields outside the city. They say its shell is a glossy crimson. They say that when the shell cracks, it weeps a fluid that, if swallowed, will add a happy year to your life. “The bird can’t be caught.”

“I will be the first, then, to catch one.”

“Even if you did.” I shook my head.

“No one would take it from me. They wouldn’t dare. I’d like to see them try.” He leaned back against the table, large hands bracing its edge. He was well grown for his eighteen years. Aden had just the kind of body the High Kith would approve of in our kind: one made to work, all muscle and sinew.

“It’s your funeral,” I said. “The heliographs, please.”

He reached into a breast pocket and produced them: small, thin squares of tin, fanned out between his fingers like a miniature deck of silvery cards. There was the scent of lavender. Only the face on the top tin could be seen clearly. It was Raven’s face. I wasn’t sure why she had asked Aden to make a heliograph of herself. A Middling passport was already hers by birth. We had never tried to forge a High-Kith one. Even if we had the proper Council stamp—which we didn’t—passing as High would be impossible without a great sum of money. Even one day’s outfit of High clothes would cost more than I could imagine.

I took the tins from Aden and shuffled through them. They showed families with small children. An infant. The baby’s parents. A girl with wide, startled eyes. I made the tins disappear into a secret lining in the collar of my coat, where their stiffness, even if felt, would be taken for cardstock meant to make the collar rigid.