The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(7)

Aden had shown me how to capture someone’s image with light and a bitumen-coated plate of tin, to wash the tin with lavender oil to make the image appear. He was good at it. His mother had been good, too, so good that when she decided to leave this city, and abandon Aden around the time when he was no longer a child yet not quite a man, she had thought that an excellent heliograph was all she needed to make her fake passport convincing. She was caught by the militia and sentenced to death. Aden never even received her bones to bury. When the City Council took your body, they took all of it.

Aden had made a heliograph of me. “We could go beyond the wall together,” he had said, setting the small tin square in my palm, “and work in the Middling quarter.” But I couldn’t leave my home. I couldn’t leave Raven, who needed me.

If I left the Ward, who would forge documents for others who wanted to leave? The ones who had seen the blank mother questing the Ward for her night-snatched son, and decided, Not me. Not my child.

“If I caught the bird,” Aden said, “I would share it with you.” His fingers brushed my cheek. They smelled of lavender. They touched my mouth.

A loneliness opened inside my chest. It was a kind of song that always sang the same thing.

He kissed me and I let him. Sometimes it can feel so good to give someone what they want that it is the next best thing to getting what you want. His hard body was warm as I leaned into him. His mouth was hungry at my neck, beneath the fringe of my chin-length hair. I pretended that his hunger was my hunger. I kissed him back, and the quiet inside me didn’t feel so large anymore, so heavy.

I thought, This is not so bad.

I thought, I could be with him again.

I thought, He loves me.

But what I did surprised me. My hand reached around him and dipped into the bowl of seeds. I closed my fingers around a handful. Tiny and hard. I could feel their shine.

I kissed Aden back, and slipped the seeds into my coat pocket. For good measure, I took the embroidered bag, too.





6


YOU KNOW WHERE THIS IS going.

When I still lived in the orphanage, after Helin’s death, I would spend hours at a window. One might have wondered what could keep my attention, since the view was only the brick of an opposing wall. I was looking not at the view but at my reflection. I pretended the girl I saw there was someone else. A friend. A sister. A High-Kith girl whose life I could only imagine, with silk slippers and pet foxes taken from the pink beaches and tamed, leashed with ribbons. Who could stack a castle of sugar cubes. Who slept in late. Who lived so tenderly it was as though she were housed inside a flower. This girl was afraid of nothing.

Sometimes the reflection seemed real.

I would grow frightened and stay away from the windows, from any mirrorlike surface, from spoons, from still water in a sink.

And then, though you would think I had learned better, after what had happened to Helin, I would return to the window. The girl in the glass would smile.

The wind whipped the edge of my coat as I walked home from Aden’s. My mouth still tasted like his mouth. Things had gone too far.

I was the one who allowed that to happen.

And I was the one who thought, This will always be my life: kissing someone I don’t love. Living in a city I will never leave.

And I was the one who saw the crimson bird perched at a gutter’s edge.

But it wasn’t me who stopped, sandy dirt scraping against the pavement under my sandals. It wasn’t me who glanced around and saw—strangely, impossibly—no one. It wasn’t me who felt a need grow inside my chest like a fruit and split its rind.

Nor was it me who set my hands and feet onto the metal struts that bound the gutter pipe to the building’s wall. I didn’t begin to climb.

It was the girl in the window’s reflection.

So brave.

So foolish.





7


I GLANCED DOWN AT THE spinning pavement. The metal gutter pipe froze my fingers. I was robbed of breath. The bird above me trilled.

I forced myself up. I climbed past indi flowers twined around the gutter. I spied their roots in cracks that split the wall deep enough for me to dig my fingers into them. The cracks were sticky with fresh white paint. It grew colder as I climbed, the wind meaner. It tore off my cap. Hair spilled into my eyes, got into my mouth.

When I climbed up far enough to know—to know the fact deep in my body, in my trembling legs and dry throat—that if I fell I would die, I stopped. I hugged the pipe. The wind blew dust against the wall. My mind seemed to flip upside down. My sandals skidded along the pipe. Nausea rose up my throat and I had an image of vomiting out my insides, of my stomach coming out first, then my heart, my lungs. I imagined these organs blundering from my mouth and dropping one by one to the ground with soft thuds.

And that was stupid, so stupid. I couldn’t let my imagination feel too real.

I forced my eyes open. I saw the pipe. I saw my bleeding fingers, tipped with white paint. I looked up into the sky. Gray lambswool clouds. It was getting dark.

And over my shoulder: a glimpse of the wall, solid and as thick as the length of a man from toe to top. I couldn’t see beyond it.

Raven would wonder where I was.

There was nothing but silence above me. The bird had probably flown somewhere else.

But I thought: I don’t know, not really, how large the Ward is compared to the rest of the city.