I RAN.
I heard Sid call, but I outran her, too, because if I was caught I didn’t want her to be caught with me. I ducked under the screen of vines and dodged down narrow streets, weaving around startled people, thinking of the city as a labyrinth like the one I had conquered at the party. My feet clapped against stone and clattered the occasional metal cellar doors set into the streets. I knew, by now, almost all the twists and turns of the High quarter, but as soon as I found an alleyway the councilmen rushed past, a dark shadow fell over me. I glanced up. The Elysium wheeled above and sang in triumph.
Mine.
I flung myself into a cellar door outside a towering home. I hid among bottles of wine, sweat oozing down my back, my heart hard against my chest. I heard shouts from the alleyway above. The thin slice of light that fell from the crack between the cellar’s double street doors broke and wavered as people ran past. Their footfalls pummeled the metal cellar doors.
As my breath eased, I wiped sweat from my mouth and considered going up into the house’s kitchen, but it would be staffed by Middlings. I would alarm them, and they would have no reason not to alert the owners of the house, who would call to councilmen careening through the city streets in search of the girl the Elysium bird claimed.
But why? Why was the bird so interested in me, and the Lord Protector so interested in its interest?
I thought of my dream, of the murder of the god of discovery, and how a simple duskwing drank the god’s blood and unfurled like a silk scarf into crimson and pink and green. If my dream was a vision of the city’s true past, what did that make the bird? Could it, by drinking the god’s blood, have absorbed some of the god’s powers? Could it be that every Elysium bird that ever hatched thereafter had the gift of discovery?
Maybe the bird could sense magic in me.
I thought of all the different kinds of magic I had seen: the elixir that could make you float; the house grown entirely from plants; the fortune-telling tree; the visions of butterflies and birds; the tea that lent beauty. I thought of the blood that turned the elixir pink, the severed finger that fell from the red blossom.
The tithe wasn’t only a punishment, and wasn’t only a means to provide the High Kith with mounds of fake hair or organs for surgeries. It was also a way to collect magic from the Half Kith. I remembered how the blue-haired man who had tasted my blood had revealed that his brother, a councilman, hadn’t expected Middling blood to have an effect, or High-Kith blood.
I thought of how the man I forced to give me a memory of the city’s history had said that the festival and parade was a way to give thanks for the building of the wall.
What if it wasn’t the case that the Half Kith were unimportant, lowly?
What if they were in fact the only source of magic in the city, and they were kept behind a wall to be harvested?
What if the gifted people I knew, like Sirah, who could predict rain, or Rinah, who could make anything grow, possessed magic but simply didn’t know it?
What if, should the councilmen catch me, they took my whole body, and made my blood into tea, and found uses for every part and the magic it would give them?
The metal street doors squealed open. I heard someone come down the cellar steps. Panic sour in my throat, I shifted as far as I could into my corner behind the wine bottles. I heard gritty steps come closer, the scuff of light sand on the cellar floor. Heavy breathing, the pants of someone who has been running hard. Someone searching among the wine bottles.
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.”