She didn’t sound like it was fine. I said, “You don’t like it.”

She shrugged. “It’s what people expect. But it reminds me of my old life. It makes me look…”

I thought of Annin’s word: beautiful. “Like a prize to be won?”

“Let’s be honest, I am. Tomorrow will you show me the Ward?”

I thought about how it would be for the two of us to walk through the Ward. Everyone’s eyes would be drawn to her. I would look drab by her side.

“What’s wrong?” Though her back was still to me as she sat in her chair, her body had curved toward mine, her face tipped up, studying me. “Are you worried about your employer? She’ll let you go. I paid her well.” Sid’s mouth curled in distaste. “She will do anything for money.”

Defensively, I said, “Of course. She doesn’t have much of it.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Sid said slowly, maybe seeing my anger. She couldn’t possibly understand Raven’s life—or my own.

I said, “I don’t have money.”

“That has nothing to do with what I think about you. That’s not why I don’t like Raven. It’s because she is not kind.”

“Yes, she is.”

“She insulted you.”

“I left the door open.”

“So what?”

“She was anxious to impress you.”

“Why are you defending her?” Her eyes got narrow. “Wait. Is this the woman you mentioned in prison? The one you said was something like a mother?”

I didn’t like the disgust in her voice. I felt like a child caught pretending that a rag doll was a princess. I hated even more the way Sid’s expression was shifting into pity.

“There is no excuse for how she behaved toward you,” Sid said. “I don’t think you see things clearly.”

Which had always been exactly my problem, although after finding streaks of color beneath the white paint on the walls of the Ward, I was starting to wonder whether my judgment was really as bad as I’d always thought. “My life is none of your concern,” I said stiffly. “You and I have a bargain. I will help you, and when you have what you want you will leave. You won’t even remember this conversation.”

“Of course I will.”

I shook my head. How many times had someone forgotten a conversation that I remembered perfectly?

“I will take you anywhere in the Ward you want to go,” I said. “But there’s something important I want to show you.” I told her about the colored paint beneath the whitewashed walls. “I dreamed about it, after I drank a dream sold in the night market.”

“Tell me about this dream,” she said, so I did. I wanted to pull us away from the fact that she would leave here and go back to her old life. I didn’t want to hear her insist again that somehow, in the midst of a life that I couldn’t imagine, one far away from here, she would remember me. I told her everything about the dream, except that I had had a conversation with my younger self in it. That felt too personal—and too strange—to share.

She stood and reached for a gorgeously pink damask purse. Its lining was a shocking blue. When she reached inside the purse it looked like her hand was disappearing into a midday summer sky. She withdrew the prayer book of the gods and gave it to me. “Can you find the murdered creature from your dream?”

I sat at the edge of her bed and paged through the book. I’d had no idea that people had once believed in so many gods. The god of echoes. Of tunnels. Of unspoken words. Of lies. Of games. The wind. The lost.

There were illustrations, and when I found what I was looking for I paused, then continued through the book, glancing at each page only long enough to record the image of it in my mind.

“You read quickly.” Sid came to join me at the edge of the bed. The bell of her sleeve brushed my bare arm. A shiver traveled up the back of my neck.

I edged away. “I’m not really reading.” I returned the book to her. “It was the god of discovery.”

If she was bothered by my shifting away from her, she didn’t show it. She said, “I wonder what it takes to kill a god.”

“There are no gods.”

“What if there were, and they were all killed? Or what if there were, and they all fled?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in them, either.”

“I was raised to consider all possibilities.”

“Because your parents believe in gods?”

Now she looked uncomfortable. “It has more to do with strategy.”

“What do you mean?”

“People can refuse to see a possibility. Maybe they don’t want it. Maybe it never occurs to them, or is even awful to them. But people make bad choices when they don’t know the full range of choices. People come to wrong conclusions if they don’t understand all the possible questions.”

“Are your parents scholars?” I asked. Sid’s eyes widened in amusement, so I tried again. “Merchants?”

“Well, they certainly wanted to sell me.” Sid rubbed the back of her neck and tugged absently at the fastening at the back of her dress. “Don’t take what I said about strategy too close to heart. Being open to all possibilities has a flaw, too.”

“What flaw?”

“It can make you doubt what you know.” Then she imitated someone else’s voice, someone who spoke in a too-elegant way. “But how can you be sure, Sidarine, if you’ve never so much as looked at a man? How can you know, when you’ve never even kissed one?”

She said it steadily. Her face was unchanging, her expression perfectly even. Her long hands lay folded across her knee, the lines of her arms so poised, so ladylike, that I could see a different version of Sid than the one who had rummaged through the piano and made me jump off a balcony.

I said, “Sidarine is a pretty name.”

She pinched her silk sleeve. “It’s like this dress.” Then she cut a mock-menacing look in my direction. “Don’t ever use that name, or our friendship is over.”

Friendship? Was that what this was? I felt a sudden, hard determination to be unfazed by Sid, who so clearly enjoyed fazing everyone. I want to see your face, she had said in the prison, the next time that I shock you.

“Turn around,” I said.