The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(8)

I thought: What harm would it do to see the High quarter beyond the wall? Just for a moment. Then I would come back down and be myself again.

I pushed myself up. My arms ached, my back ached, my right leg jittered like the needle of Annin’s pedaled sewing machine. But I climbed.

Then I heard the bird again. Its song slipped fluidly inside me.

It occurred to me that the bird wanted me as much as I wanted it. That it knew I was coming, that it was watching, tiny, its crested head cocked, its tail plumes of pink and green and scarlet. In my mind I could see its short, inky beak. Its tiny emerald eyes. It sang to me.

I was confused, because I had never seen an Elysium bird up close. How could I imagine it in such great detail?

It didn’t feel like my imagination.

It felt like memory.

I didn’t want to glance up. But the song calmed my shaking body. It floated the hair out of my eyes and ran a finger up my neck, under my jaw, tilting my head up.

The bird circled over my head, red wings wide and crenellated. A feather fell. It pivoted in the air until its shaft stuck into a joining where the horizontal length of the gutter met the roof’s edge.

Then the bird disappeared out of my line of sight, over the roof.





8


SOMETHING SEIZED MY FOOT. I jolted, and I would have come off the pipe entirely if not for my grip on the gutter’s frets.

“Out of my way.”

I glanced down. My heart got stuck in my throat. A militiaman was just below me, hand wrapped around my ankle. He shook my leg. “Please,” I said. “Stop! I’ll fall.”

“The bird is flying away!” His face shone with sweat. “Get off, damn the gods!” He yanked at me. I slid, my hands coming off the fret.

My fingers snagged the indi flower vine wrapped around the gutter. It held my weight.

“You are blocking my way,” he said, and when I glanced down into his face it was filled with grim determination and need. He would kill me, I realized.

Hands twisted in the indi vine, I begged, “Let me go.”

He didn’t release my ankle. “The bird is mine.”

His final word echoed among the buildings, but in an otherworldly voice, higher than his own. It was the bird. Mine, it sang.

The roots of the indi vine gave a little, some of them tearing free of the wall, popping out of crevices. The gutter creaked.

Mine, the bird sang again, and it seemed to be singing to me.

I kicked the man’s face.

He cried out. I felt him fall from me. The pipe, still in his grip, came off the wall.

I clung to the vine, which spun like rope from one anchored point. I heard the loud clank of the pipe and the thump of his body on the pavement.

He lay twisted below, legs splayed. I gripped the vine. Blood pooled beneath him. A veil of fear prickled over me.

The noise must have been heard. Other militiamen would come.

The alleyway rang with shocked silence. Then, in the distance, I heard cries.

Forget the bird, I told myself.

I had to hide.





9


I SCRAMBLED UP THE TWISTING vine and onto the roof. I wouldn’t be seen from below, but I had to get as far away as possible. Fear coated me like paint. I ran across the rooftop, ducking around the cistern there to collect rain. Night had almost truly fallen, and the cistern was sheeted in thin black ice. I tore at the collar of my coat—Raven’s coat.

Stitches ripped. The collar came off in my hand, the heliographs scattering at my feet. If I were caught, the heliographs could not be found. They would be traced to the people whose images they bore, even the children. The price for impersonating a member of a higher kith was death.

Shouts rose from below.

I punched through the ice in the cistern. I scooped up the heliographs and dumped them into the black water. Then I ran to the far edge of the roof.

I had always refused to consider things that could never happen. What if you were on the Council? Annin sometimes asked me in the kitchen.

I wouldn’t be.

What if you were High Kith? What would you do?

I’m not.

Don’t you wonder, she would say, why things are the way they are?

It is as it is, I’d tell her, and find comfort in that saying. It pointed toward certainty. I might not like the world as it was, but at least it wouldn’t change around me.

I didn’t want to become someone I couldn’t recognize.

Yet when I reached the edge of the rooftop, I became someone else. The reflection of that girl in the window. Another self. Someone who jumped across the narrow space.

I landed on the neighboring rooftop. I kept running, judging where best to bridge the gaps between roofs, hoping anyone below would be too distracted by the commotion in the streets to look up. The yellow moon, swollen to its full size, was rising. I might be seen, if someone thought to look.

But no one did.

When I had put enough distance between myself and the body, I slid down behind another cistern. My trousers were thin. My rear grew cold on the plastered stone and I shivered against the aged wood of the cistern, pulling the coat closer to my body. I should stay here, I thought, until the festival has ended. Maybe, soon before dawn, when everyone was asleep, I could clamber down another gutter pipe. Sweat chilled on my skin. I pushed my loose hair behind my ears. A lock of it was matted with white paint.