The little house in Dongshui is dark, but I knock anyway, knowing better by now than to go barging in. Quite right too. A moment or two, and the door opens, a candle flickering in Wyn’s hand. With his other hand, he’s tucking his shirt into his trousers.
“Holy stars, what’s happened to you?” he cries when he sees me. “Your clothes! Your hair.”
“Can I come in?”
“Of course.” He pulls the door wide and steps back. Mei comes out of the bedroom, tying a robe loosely around her waist. She gives me a startled glare as she lights the lamp. I must look a fright.
“Is Dek here?”
“No. Oh, don’t look at me that way. What am I supposed to do, give him a curfew? Mrs. Och sent a pipit. We’re supposed to be leaving the city in the morning. Why are you covered in mud?”
“Things have gotten complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
“I’ve been sacked.”
“And then Mrs. Och tried to drown you in a mud puddle?”
“Not exactly. Have you got anything to eat?”
He has some cold dumplings left in the larder. I fill him in on what happened with Mrs. Och and Si Tan while I eat, every bite making me feel more rooted in my body and the world. I don’t talk about Kahge or Ragg Rock, because I’ve never told him the whole truth about vanishing to Kahge and I don’t know how to tell him now. So I tell him I got muddy going through the tunnels, and he just raises his eyebrows, like he knows I’m lying but isn’t going to push it. Mei slouches in a chair for a bit while I talk and then goes back to bed without saying anything to either of us.
“I don’t think she likes me,” I say.
“You aren’t very friendly to her,” he remarks. I consider this. I suppose I’m not.
“Does she know you’re leaving?” I ask.
“Yes. I doubt she’ll miss me. I’m not leading her on, Julia. It’s not like Ling and Dek—some great connection. Look, I’ve got something to cheer you up. It might even get you back in Mrs. Och’s good graces.”
He goes into the bedroom and returns with a bamboo basket full of letters, all closed with Gangzi’s wax seal. I rifle through them. “How did you get these?”
“I had to pull a pistol on the mail carrier. I’ll be a wanted man now, so good thing we’re leaving.”
“You shot him?” I ask faintly.
“No, of course I didn’t shoot him! Hounds, Julia. I just threatened to. Anyway, here are your letters.”
A soft tap-tap at the door. I start up, thinking it must be Dek. Wyn opens the door and manages to look relieved and annoyed at the same time. It’s Frederick.
“I’d hoped to find you here,” he says, rushing past Wyn. “Holies, what’s happened? Are you all right?”
I hesitate. I want to tell him, but I don’t want Wyn to hear. I can’t bear for Wyn to think me less than human, but Frederick knows so much already, and I need to tell somebody.
“Can we take a walk?” I ask.
“Of course,” says Frederick.
I can see the hurt on Wyn’s face. “It’s not safe around here,” he says.
“We won’t go far.”
I feel more able to speak freely out in the dark street. I don’t look at Frederick as I tell him everything. I roll up my filthy sleeve to show him the scar of red mud on my arm. It gives me a chill to see it there, this strip of mud flesh, like a part of Ragg Rock. He touches it lightly with his fingertips, but I feel nothing there at all. A blank spot on my arm, nerveless.
“You mustn’t vanish again until we know more,” he says to me. “It’s terrifying to think that they can reach you now that they’ve shed your blood.”
“I won’t,” I say. “What’s happening back at the house?”
“I’m to get supplies first thing in the morning. We’re leaving the city and meeting the others at the farm.”
“So Mrs. Och has given up on Ko Dan?”
“He is either dead or locked up, and Si Tan is set against us. The Ru are out searching the city. I shouldn’t even have come here, but I had to see you. Bianka and I have both tried to persuade Mrs. Och to reconsider, but she insists she can’t trust you.”
“I don’t trust her,” I say.
“Do you trust anyone?”
It stings to be asked that. Is that really what he thinks? That I trust nobody?
“Yes,” I say. “Quite a few people. Including you. I trust you completely, as a matter of fact.”
Silence at that. I don’t dare look at him. I carry on in a rush, the words coming out of my mouth before I’ve thought them through.
“I’ve just found out that before I was born…I mean, just before I was born, my mother went to Ragg Rock and made some kind of deal, or I think she did, with Lidari. To bring him into the world using the Ankh-nu. And since she went to try to kill Casimir right after, I suppose she got some power or magic from him in return. I think…I’m afraid that is what I am—just some monster from Kahge. What if that’s true, and everything I think I am is false, and being Julia is a…a disguise?” He tries to stop me, but I can’t stop now, my worst nightmares fully taking shape in words for the first time and pouring out of me. “What if the thing inside me decides to shrug off this disguise, and everything I think I am is gone, just sloughed off, and I’m something else, something horrible? Maybe that would explain it—why I kidnapped Theo, why I have to try so hard—I mean, it feels like such hard work just to be decent and to do what is right, and perhaps I’m wrong anyway, about what is right….”
“All of that sounds very human indeed,” says Frederick, gripping my hands. “I don’t know the truth of it, Julia. But suppose you discovered for certain that your origins were not what you thought? That, in fact, you are somehow from Kahge?” Seeing my face, he holds up a hand. “I don’t believe that is true. But I am asking you, if it were—what would change? Would you stop caring about Theo? Abandon your attempt to help him?”
“You don’t understand,” I cry. “I’m afraid I might not be in control of my feelings. That they could change, if I’m so changeable. That I could be…I don’t know, overthrown from within.”
“You have crossed over to somewhere—whether it is Kahge or not, I can’t say. You have been something else and yet still who you are, unchanged within, and you have returned. Whatever your powers, whatever else may be inside you, you are and have been Julia, with Julia’s feelings and hopes and tremendous courage, with Julia’s goodness, all along.”
“My goodness and a couple of pennies would buy you a cup of coffee,” I say—a feeble old joke of my father’s. Funny I remember it now.
Frederick shakes his head. “That’s not true. You need to forgive yourself.”
“I’m trying to earn it.”
“Saving Theo won’t change what you did,” he says. “You have earned Bianka’s friendship, and mine, in spite of what you did, by being the brave and selfless person you’ve chosen to be, minute after minute and day after day.”
I feel something collapse inside me, and I practically fall into his arms. He holds me close against his chest, so I can hear his steady heartbeat against my ear. Standing here in the dark road, terrified and exhausted and caked with dried mud, I want so badly to believe that he’s right. How could I feel so much, if I am not Julia? Then it occurs to me that I’m getting him very muddy, and I pull away, suddenly awkward.
“I should get back,” I say. “I need to speak to Dek when he comes home.”
“I’ll take up your case again with Mrs. Och,” he says. “But she is not easy to sway once she’s made up her mind.”
We go back to the house, where Wyn is dozing in his chair, and I give Frederick the basket of letters.
“Take these to Mrs. Och,” I say. “Maybe there will be a clue about the Ankh-nu, if we’re lucky.”
“I’ll go through them all tonight,” he promises.
We say our goodbyes, and I close the door behind him.
Wyn’s head jerks up. “Frederick gone home?” he asks. “Is all forgiven?”
What a question.
“I don’t think Mrs. Och is going to change her mind,” I say.
A pause, and then he says, looking at the ceiling, “I wouldn’t have guessed he was your type.”
If I were not quite so wrung out, I might have laughed. “I don’t think I’ve got a type,” I say, and leave it at that. I’m hardly going to tell Wyn about Jun. And anyway, Jun thinks I’m a monster now.
“Look, I don’t even know if Dek’s coming back tonight,” says Wyn. “I’d offer you my bed, but Mei’s in it right now. You could take Dek’s, or we could lay a blanket on the floor. I wish we could put you up in better style.”
“I can’t go to sleep,” I say. “I’ve got to find Ko Dan before Mrs. Och leaves the city.”
“What, tonight? How?”
“I don’t know.”
Another knock at the door, but it isn’t Dek this time either. It is a ragged scamp with a message for me, written in Fraynish, a fast scrawl: Help me please. Come to Old Thien’s. Jun.