The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(65)

But even if I hadn’t been plagued by illusions I didn’t understand, if I had been normal, I still could have made the same mistake. The inability to see clearly had felt like my problem, my curse. But maybe it was everyone’s.

The lamplighters lifted their long poles, each as slender and black as a heron’s leg, and touched flames to the lamps’ wicks. The lamps glowed, one by one, against the lavender sky.

I glanced around the quiet street and wondered if I could make myself see the sort of vision I had always tried to ignore. The more I considered the images I had seen in the Ward, the more I wondered whether it was not simply that I had a perfect memory.

I could also see into the city’s memory.

For years I had tried to harden myself against the illusions. It felt uncomfortable to invite them. But I imagined myself as tender and vulnerable: a downy chick out of its egg.

And for a moment, I saw not a lamplit street before me, but an empty, grassy hill, the wind shivering in the green.

I glanced behind me, toward the wall.

There was no wall. There was only the Ward—defenseless, surrounded by nothing but hills and sky.

“Hey there,” said a voice.

I turned, and the vision vanished.

“You,” I said. It was the brown-haired boy from the Middling quarter who had stolen the dream vials. A lamplighting pole rested against his shoulder.

He whistled. “You are looking awfully fancy. I almost didn’t recognize you. Come up in the world, haven’t you?”

I took a wary step back. “Are you planning to turn me in?”

“Me? No. Honor among thieves and all that.”

“I’m not a thief.”

He squinted one eye shut, peering at me. “Aren’t you stealing a place in society that isn’t yours? Believe me, I’m going to do the same, given half a chance.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“To give you a message. Your foreign friend says she’ll be late, so you should meet her at the party.” He handed me a scrap of paper with a map. “She says you are to use her card with the insignia to get in.”

“It was you who told her I was looking for her in the Middling quarter.”

“You’ve got no call to act so betrayed. It’s not like you asked me not to tell her. If she gives me a bit of gold to bring her interesting tales, who am I to say no?”

Then he strolled away, carrying the pole lazily over his shoulder as if he were going fishing, the lamps glowing in the dark, the other Middling boys’ roving shadows ahead, disappearing into the night.



* * *



The map led me to a house so overgrown with ivy and fist-sized flowers that I couldn’t see the walls behind them. Hummingbirds darted in and out of the blossoms. Milling people waited in the courtyard to enter, their clothes extravagant, artfully constructed. Golden hoops around a waist trailed transparent lace that showed bare legs. Wire-and-satin petals bloomed around the green stem of a body. There was wild plumage. Slithering snake bracelets. The guests seemed inhuman, like strange creatures—part bird, part snake, part flower—or gods. Women had impossibly lush hair, left long in thick capes around their shoulders, or twisted into towering architectural wonders. A man blinked blue eyelashes fringed with lime-green petals at me.

Sid stood in the shadows of the courtyard. She was dressed in a man’s fitted black dress jacket buttoned over a paper-white collared shirt, the chain of her watch trailing from her pocket, her golden hair slicked back. The corners of her tipped-up eyes crinkled as she smiled at something a lilac-haired woman whispered, her glittered lips a mere breath away from Sid’s ear.

All my nervousness and wonder clumped into sick jealousy.

I walked quietly up to them. Sid’s hands slipped into her trouser pockets. The woman touched Sid’s white collar, then rested her hand on Sid’s shoulder as if for balance. Sid’s mouth quirked, and she said something that looked like an easy admission. Then she glanced up and saw me. Her face went still. She murmured something to the woman, who frowned as I came close.

Sid gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Do excuse me,” Sid said to her. “My companion is here.”

The lilac-haired woman swept haughtily away, the feathered trail of her dress singing as she went, notes of birdsong rising from her dress and then fading as she went into the flowering house.

“How surprising,” I said, “that, for you, being late to a party actually means showing up on time to get a head start on luring a girl into bed.”

Sid started to protest, then stopped, staring at me. “Nirrim, what did you do to your face?” She lifted her fingers to my cheek.

I resented the pleasure of it. “Don’t touch me.”

Her hand fell. She looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. It’s just … the burn on your cheek is gone.”

I touched my cheek. Where the skin had been new and tender, it now felt perfectly smooth. “How?”

“You don’t know?”

“Madame Mere rubbed cream into my face … maybe it’s cosmetic. Or her mirror? Maybe it was magic.” I remembered how I had looked at my own reflection. This is the pain of having a perfect memory: it was impossible to ignore how I had stared at every flaw, how I had felt filled with longing. “She shouldn’t have done it.” I was angry at the dressmaker for changing me without my permission, angry at Sid, angry at myself.