I don’t want to, I would say.

All I wanted was one night.

Just to see.

I will always come back.

Her eyes, however, would glisten. Her sadness would rush through me like storm rain in a gutter. Eventually, her sadness would thicken into anger. I would understand. After all, I had betrayed her. But …

One night.

She would never know.

I took the passport from the bowl, shook off the sand, and slid it into the coat pocket. It was rigid and felt heavier than it was, and somehow fragile, as though it were a pane of glass. Anxiety sizzled in my belly. I remembered Sid’s words: You’ve been in prison your whole life.

I buttoned the last button. The coat would cover some of my drab Half Kith clothes, and with any luck the guards at the gate wouldn’t discern the color of my trousers in the dark. My body was taut with fear.

I imagined saying to Sid, I bet that you are never afraid.

You left your home.

You sailed to a region marked on a map as dangerous waters.

You let yourself be sent to prison without protest.

Do you know what this feels like? What I feel like?

Come find me, she said in my mind. Ask me for real.

I blew out the lamp. Darkness doused the room. My reflection in the window vanished into black glass.

* * *

“Name?”

I kept my eyes down. The guard at the gate wore boots and crease-free trousers, the fabric crisp and red and with blue piping. “Laren.” I had chosen a name with a common ending for a Middling woman.

“Occupation?”

“Merchant.”

“Wares?”

I brought Annin’s empty embroidered bag, the one I had used to capture the Elysium, from my pocket. “It’s just a sample. I hope to interest someone in ordering more.”

“That’s a man’s coat.”

“My brother’s,” I said. “I always forget how the temperature drops at night. He loaned me his.”

“Look at me.”

I brought my gaze up. In the lamplight, the young man’s expression was hardened into irritated boredom. “Green,” he said disapprovingly.

“Excuse me?”

“This passport says your eyes are hazel. They are not. They are green.”

Nervousness bubbled in my stomach. I had never thought of my eyes as green. I had glanced at them briefly, once, in Raven’s handheld mirror. The color looked murky and unstable: not quite brown but nothing else easily named. “Hazel,” Morah said when I asked.

I touched my chest, where the Elysium feather rested beneath the coat and my shirt. “It’s just a trick of the light.”

Perhaps the myths about Elysium feathers were true, because his expression softened as he lifted the lamplight to look more deeply into my face. “Pretty eyes,” he said. “What’s this?” He touched the burn on my cheek. I flinched in pain. “It’s not on your heliograph.”

“The burn is recent. It happened the other day.”

“It is fresh.” He kept his hand beneath my chin. His face was changing as he stared at me. I resisted pulling away. He said, “How did that happen?”

My mind raced through possibilities. “I was curling my hair.” The laws stipulated that only Middling and High-Kith women could have waves or curls in their hair. Usually I straightened mine as best I could, but tonight I had run water through my hair to bring out its natural wave. “The hot tongs slipped.”

He brushed a hand through my hair. Was this normal? Did all guards at the gates do this, even to Middlings?

The back of my neck prickled.

A Half Kith would let him touch her. Would a Middling object?

Could she?

I didn’t know, so I pretended I enjoyed his touch. I smiled.

“A pity,” he said, and his hand fell. He stamped my passport, returned it, and waved me through the gate.

A night market.

A sea of tents and stands clustered together in a labyrinth just beyond the gate. I felt small and easily lost, like a bead dropped to a cluttered floor. Lamps with stained glass in Middling shades of blue swung from ropes that zigzagged overhead. Middlings cried their wares.

Tables were heaped with fruit whose names I did not know. I had never seen their shapes. A woman near me, wearing a dress with a bit of embroidery on the sleeves that marked her as Middling, touched a yellow fruit and smelled it, so I dared to do the same to one with a satiny purple surface that dented beneath my thumb. It smelled dusky and tangy.

“Mind your kith,” the fruit seller said.

I quickly set the fruit down.

“Perrins are not for the likes of you,” he said. “You know as well as I do that no Middling can eat these. Unless you work for a family in the High quarter and have a writ to prove you’re shopping for their kitchens, you have no business even touching this fruit.”

“I’m sorry. Please—”

“Ah, child.” He smiled a little. “I don’t blame you for being curious. I can’t eat a perrin, either. Now, these are perfectly ripe and just your kith.” He gestured at the pile of yellow, oblong fruits that the Middling woman in the embroidered dress had been examining, but I darted away.

There were bolts of cloth whose shades I had never seen, piles of rugs whose intricate patterns overwhelmed my sight. I felt dizzy, like I might lose my way looking at the twists and turns of the woven designs.

I recognized Ward-made wares. I was astonished to pass by a stall laden with children’s wooden toys and to see their labeled price. I knew the woman in the Ward who made those. She likely received no more than the barest fraction of the marked price.

At first I worried that someone would look closely and question the coat I wore, or would somehow be able to guess I wasn’t the right kith. But everyone was preoccupied with selling and buying. The streets here, I could tell, were newer than in the Ward. The cobblestones were not as worn as behind the wall. At the outskirts of the market square I saw a rank of buildings, higher than anything in the Ward, with diamond-paned windows, flower-twisted balconies, and peaked roofs shingled in dusty red ceramic tiles. My nerves settled somewhat as I walked, and I gave myself over to fascination. If this was how the Middling quarter looked, what would it be like where the High Kith lived?

The city rippled up over the gentle hills around me, a dense patchwork of stone and brick and green vines and, far away, in the High quarter, kaleidoscopic colored glass and the gloss of marble shining in light cast by pink lanterns.