The Midnight Lie (The Midnight Lie #1)(88)

My panicky heart ran wild. My ears roared with fear. I huddled.

The man turned down my row and saw me.

“Got you,” he said, and rushed close to clamp his hands on my arm.

“No,” I whispered in terror. “You don’t.” I spoke like a child, as though denying something would make it not true.

Surprisingly, his grip slackened. He looked at me strangely, as though uncertain.

“Please don’t,” I said, hopeful, though fear was still pouring off my skin. Did he pity me? Could he be persuaded to let me go? “You don’t have to do this.”

“Do what?” he said, clearly confused. “I know I was supposed to do something…” He looked down at me, as though I might give him an answer, then around the cellar.

I remembered how, in the Ward, I would sometimes pass the militia and think, Not me. I am unimportant. Forget me.

When I thought that, they always did.

I could make people remember. Could I also make them forget? Could I do to their minds what I could do with vinegar on inked paper, and erase what I didn’t want?

“You were supposed to leave this cellar,” I told him. “You were supposed to let go of me and walk back up the steps onto the street.” It wasn’t so much that I was making him forget, I realized as I saw his face furrow in concentration. I was giving him a false memory. “You were told to tell the Council that I was not here, that you saw me nowhere near. You will tell them that I must have gone into the park, to hide among the trees.”

“Yes,” he said. “That was it. That was what I was supposed to do.” He smiled at me gratefully, and did what I commanded.



* * *



I waited for hours in the cellar, until the rumble in my belly said dinnertime was nearing, which would mean that servants could come down into the cellar soon to fetch wine. Cautiously, I cracked open the cellar doors. The alley wasn’t totally empty. Two women in frothy candy-colored lace were giggling and eating pleasure dust from their palms. Their lips glittered with it. But they paid me no attention. I glanced above. The twilit sky was empty of the Elysium bird—which, I hoped, had lost track of me long ago.

The thoroughfare was strewn with trash. The blue ivy had sagged into a heap, its blossoms blown wide-open and gone as brown as butcher paper. A few people stumbled through the street, drunk or foxed, but most people were probably sleeping until the parties began.

I turned to head back to Sid’s house in the hope of finding her there, but before I took more than a few steps, I heard someone call my name.

It was the Middling boy, Sid’s little spy.

He ran up to me. “You have to help,” he said breathlessly. “I have been looking everywhere for you. Sid’s in trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

“I saw a man come up to her after you disappeared. He pulled her away from the crowd.”

“A councilman?”

The boy shook his head. “No.” His eyes were wide. “I’ve never seen a man like this before.”

“Describe him. What did he look like?”

“A monster.”





49


THE BOY SAID THE MAN had taken Sid in the direction of her house, so I rushed there, blaming myself for having brought the Lord Protector’s attention to her. I assumed she had been seen beside me, that even if I wasn’t easily identifiable in the crowd and the haste of the chase, someone had noticed Sid standing close to me and easily recognized the foreigner by her short blond hair, her large dark eyes, the way she dressed, and the reputation she relished. Home didn’t seem like a good place for her to hide.

Unless it was a trap set for me, and she had been forced to set it.

The smart thing would have been to stay away, but my heart raged with fear at the thought of her in any danger. I couldn’t leave her alone, captured by someone who sought me.

I remember clearly how I felt: my pulse quivering like a dragonfly over water, a glassy insect with a vivid green body. Easy prey, easily seen, its wings as transparent as how frightened I was for Sid—and for myself, should harm come to her.

When I flung open the door, I heard an argument in another language: Sid’s voice anxious in a way that pierced through me, and the man’s voice alternately insinuating and forceful. It wasn’t a language I recognized. It didn’t sound like Herrani, with its rounded vowels and similarity to my own tongue. It had clusters of hard and harsh sounds. Sid said something that ended with a hiss.

I strode into the sitting room, where I expected to see Sid bound, or with her dagger drawn, threatened by the man who had stolen her. Instead, I found her impeccably dressed, drinking a green liqueur, and gazing up in worried affection at a tall man with no face.

At least, that was my instant impression of him. I immediately recoiled, sucking in my breath. His face had been mutilated. He had no nose and no ears. He looked like he had been made to pay a horrific tithe. He turned and took my measure, black eyes raking me caustically from head to toe with the gaze of someone who makes short work of assessing people. I felt summarized and quickly dismissed. He was old enough to be Sid’s father, with gray in his closely cut black hair. His skin was far darker than mine, a rich brown. If Sid looked foreign, he looked more so: his cheekbones broad, his mouth very full, his liquid black eyes rimmed with green paint.