IT WAS SO HOT THE FOLLOWING DAY that the silver ants came out, zipping up and down the white walls of the Ward in glittering lines like tinsel. They bite. You don’t want to get in their path.
“So long as the windows are shuttered and we stay indoors, the heat should be tolerable,” Raven said when she walked into the kitchen. The walls of the Ward buildings are thick, slabs of stone cut from a quarry I had never seen. They hold the chill of the night.
I was kneading the morning bread, sweat dampening the hair at the nape of my neck. It felt good to work the dough. It helped me not think too much about last night.
And what might happen later, this night, after everyone in the tavern was asleep and I snuck into the Middling quarter.
I punched the bread dough back down. I rolled it under the heel of my hand. The rhythm of this kept away my nervousness.
Or was it excitement?
“By noon, not a soul will be stirring in the Ward,” Raven said. I had almost forgotten she was in the room.
Annin cut sun melon into thin, papery orange slices and dropped them into a bowl of pale wine. With a sigh, she said, “It will be so dull with no customers.”
Morah said nothing. She cracked eggs into a bowl one-handed. Each tap of an egg against the rim of the bowl was precise and surprisingly loud. She watched Raven as she did it. She watched her the way you watch the silver ants, to see which direction they want to go in, so you can get out of their way.
“Now, girls,” Raven said brightly, “it is never possible to be bored when there are things to do. There are errands to run in the Ward.”
“I thought you said we should stay indoors,” said Morah.
“And so you should! I can’t even imagine setting one foot into that sun, particularly when I have been feeling so poorly.”
“Nirrim, too,” Annin said.
I lifted my gaze from my work in surprise.
“Just look at her,” Annin said. “Those shadows under her eyes! They look like they’ve been smudged with that kohl the High ladies use.”
Two nights of lost sleep were catching up with me. I hadn’t realized that Annin had noticed.
Raven came close, tipping her head up. In the last two years, I had grown past her height. She tucked a lock of damp hair behind my ear. It was so reassuring to feel her tenderness. She could easily lose her temper, it was true, but who among us is in perfect control of our feelings all the time? And she always became kind again.
“My lamb,” she said, “have you been sleeping badly?”
“No.” From the look on her face I could tell she was remembering when I had first come to the tavern from the orphanage, and had woken, weeping, in the night, babbling about things that she assured me were not real—except Helin’s death, which sometimes I would hope was one of the lies I had believed. “It’s not like that,” I said.
She smiled in evident relief. When you see relief on the face of someone you love you also see the worry that had been hidden. Her worry made me feel beloved. I was her girl. Her lamb. “I feel fine,” I promised.
“Annin, she is fresh as a flower. Except…” She touched my hair again, but this time let her fingers slide free, and rubbed the fingertips as she grimaced. “Very hot. My dear, you are so sweaty!”
Morah cracked another egg. The yellow globe of the yolk and its slick transparent white spilled from the shell in her hand into the bowl. She gave me a hard look I didn’t understand.
“I’ll run those errands myself,” Raven said. “Now, what did I come down here for? Oh, yes. A basket.”
“I’ll go,” I said. “I don’t mind. I’m already hot.”
“We are all hot,” Morah said.
“Oh, would you?” Raven said to me. “I bet you won’t feel the heat a bit if I loan you my parasol.”
“Parasols are Middling,” Morah said. “She can’t use one.”
“That’s right. I forgot. Maybe you shouldn’t go after all, my dear.”
“I want to,” I insisted. “The dough can have its second rise while I’m gone.” I untied my apron.
“Are you sure?”
If I had a mother, would I let her go out into this heat, especially when she was feeling ill? “Of course I’m sure.”
As I left the kitchen, the basket on my arm and instructions on a slip of paper, I heard Morah say to Raven, “I don’t know why you make her do everything.”
I felt a twist of doubt.
But Raven hadn’t made me. I had offered.
I shook away my discomfort and went out into the steely sun. The Ward was bright white, the walls shining like glaze on a cake.
“That’s enough,” Rinah called from the shadow of her home.
I glanced up from my weeding. I wiped sweat from my mouth. “But I’m not finished.”
“You don’t even have a hat on your head, child. You’ll drop dead from heatstroke. What will your mistress do then? She has no use for your corpse, believe me. Come inside, drink some water, and take what you’ve come for.”
I tucked my gardening knife into my pocket and followed her inside. The sudden cool darkness felt like a plunge into a well. I felt dizzy. I was more tired than I had realized. I gratefully accepted the tin cup of water Rinah offered with one hand, the other hand resting on her pregnant belly. Then she took my basket and filled it with enormous vegetables from her garden. Anything she planted always flourished. “Here is something extra,” she said, and slid in a roll of tanned leather. “We slaughtered one of the goats.” Rinah and her family had one of the rare homes with a plot of land. She had a coop and a few goats: rewards from the Council for bearing so many children. “I know Raven needs the leather,” she added. I would dye the leather Middling blue and cut it to coded size for new passports.
“Careful in the Ward,” she said, which is what Half Kith say to warn others against the militia.
“Why?”
“A soldier died the night of the festival. He fell from the rooftops.”
I felt suddenly cold despite the heat. As nonchalantly as possible, I said, “He must have been chasing the bird.”
“Well, yes, that is what everyone thought at first, but the militia said they found strands of black hair stuck in fresh paint on the walls near where he fell. The hair didn’t match his. The militia think maybe it wasn’t an accident. Soldiers have been poking around, asking questions.”
I felt queasy but thought about how Sid would act in this situation. “Good luck to them.” I forced myself to shrug. “Lots of people in the Ward have black hair. I do.”
“So you do,” she agreed, but absently. Her face scrunched in sudden discomfort. She rubbed a hand over her taut belly, which showed the little bulge of a kicking foot. “Another baby. My gods. And here I am with five children already. I keep having one right after the other, just like the Council wants.” It was strange, perhaps, that the City Council encouraged the Half Kith to bear many children when overcrowding in the Ward might be a concern. Then again, the Council had ways of keeping the population in check. There were the vanishings. And arrests. Since so many people who went into the prison never returned, we could only assume they were dead or had become Un-Kith.
Rinah must have been thinking of similar things. Her discomfort and frustration slipped into worry.
“Do you not want the baby?” I asked, then felt horrible for asking a question that might have no good answer.
I remembered waking up inside the ventilated box outside the orphanage for unwanted babies. It was black with pinpricks of light. The box was cold. Maybe there had been an ice wind. I think there must have been, but I can’t know for sure because I had been placed in the box while asleep and so had seen nothing of the outside world or the person who had taken me to the orphanage. I was newly born. I had known only the warmth of arms and the human-scented stillness of the indoors. The cold was new and frightening. I had been swaddled in a blanket, but my legs had kicked it undone. I wailed. I flung my hands out for the softness that I loved, the familiar scent, her voice. But there was nothing to touch. Her face was fuzzy in my mind. For years after that moment in the box I would wonder why I couldn’t remember my mother’s face well, until I learned that babies are not able to see clearly. But as I cried in the box I thought about her vague face, her floating ribbons of black hair, her thin sweet milk, a golden necklace dangling a crescent moon that swung gently when she leaned over to take me in her arms. The box smelled. Urine soaked my legs—hot, then clammily cold.
Rinah’s expression grew tender and sad. “Yes,” she said, “I want the baby.”
I wondered briefly why she didn’t ask Raven for a passport, but it was evident why: her family was large. It took a great deal of time and effort to produce even one passport made from authentic (or authentic-seeming) elements. Raven either bartered for the necessary items, like the leather, or shouldered the cost of them. And of course it was much riskier for a larger number of people to try to leave the Ward at once. “If even one of them is caught with a false document, we might be caught,” Raven had said. “And if we are caught, who will help others?”
“I must return to the tavern,” I said. “Raven might need me.”
“She’s lucky to have you.”
This compliment made me feel good as I walked through the stunning heat. If not for Raven, I might have never known a mother’s care. My own mother hadn’t wanted me.
The Ward’s walls were sunny mirrors with no reflections. I wondered what Sid was doing. Was she sleeping through the heat? I pictured her curled up like a cat. I felt a rush of eagerness. I couldn’t wait for night to fall. I couldn’t wait to see the cool dark pool into the sky.
You mean you can’t wait to see me, Sid’s voice said slyly.
But there was nothing wrong with that. It made sense, didn’t it? Everything about her was new. New things are exciting. Everyone knows that.
The word new clung to my mind. I thought about the dream of new I had drunk from the vial.
My pace slowed.
I thought about Rinah, who wanted her baby.
I thought about my newborn self, squalling inside the orphanage box.
I glanced around the quiet, white, deserted streets, remembering in my dream, the walls were lushly painted with colors.
It was just a dream, of course. But as my steps slowed to a halt and sweat oozed down my back, I considered how Sid made me question what I believed I knew.
It occurred to me that although for years I had believed my mother didn’t want me, I couldn’t know that for certain. Maybe something—or someone—had made her abandon me.
It occurred to me that I had never questioned why, every year for the moon festival, the men painted the walls freshly white.
How many coats of paint lay thick on the walls?
Had the walls always been white?
What if my dream had been somehow real?
Normally this last thought would have sent me scurrying home, shoving the idea away, because it was the sort of thought that had always meant confusion and grief. It had been so hard when I was younger to tell illusion from truth. I should have grown out of it by now.
I needed Helin to tell me what was real. I needed Raven.
Or, Sid said, you could always find out for yourself what is real.
I looked around me. The air was heavy with heat. There was no one. Nothing moved except the marching silver ants.
I slid the gardening knife from my pocket and opened it. I approached the nearest wall and its smooth expanse of white limewash.
I scraped at the paint with the knife. White flakes peeled away, sticking to my knife, my sweaty skin. Silver ants came to see what I was doing. They walked up my knife and over my wrist, biting me as I swatted them off.
I’m not sure how long I carved away at the years of paint until finally, just when I thought I had gone crazy again, like when I was little, when I was seduced into believing impossible things no one else saw, my knife stripped away one last layer. Beneath the white lay a bloody red paint.
I can only imagine how I must have looked when I walked into the tavern. Garden dirt smeared on my face. Sleepless hollows beneath my eyes. Sweaty clothes, sweaty hair. Ant bites in a lurid string of red bumps up my arm, even some on my neck and face. Dirt and white paint under my nails. A startled expression on my face that probably grew even more bewildered when I saw who was waiting at a table inside the tavern.
Sid looked up from her plate of sun melon slices. She saw me and laughed. Her skin was clean and pure, her thin, pomegranate-colored silk dress falling in elegant folds.
Annin, who had frozen in the act of pouring Sid iced lemon water, stared at me. “Nirrim! You look awful!”
“You really do,” Sid said. “What have you been doing? Rolling around in a rosebush? What are all those red marks? Tell me.”
A blush burned in my cheeks. “No, I don’t think I will.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You said I look awful.”
“No, she did.” Sid unfurled a lazy hand in the direction of Annin, who was glancing between us. “I merely agreed. Did you … tussle with squirrels? Dirty squirrels? Vengeful ones?”
“Shut up.”
Annin gasped. “Nirrim! She is High.”
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
Sid’s laughter melted into a slow smile. “I got tired of waiting for you.”