“The bird is flying away!” His face shone with sweat. “Get off, damn the gods!” He yanked at me. I slid, my hands coming off the fret.

My fingers snagged the indi flower vine wrapped around the gutter. It held my weight.

“You are blocking my way,” he said, and when I glanced down into his face it was filled with grim determination and need. He would kill me, I realized.

Hands twisted in the indi vine, I begged, “Let me go.”

He didn’t release my ankle. “The bird is mine.”

His final word echoed among the buildings, but in an otherworldly voice, higher than his own. It was the bird. Mine, it sang.

The roots of the indi vine gave a little, some of them tearing free of the wall, popping out of crevices. The gutter creaked.

Mine, the bird sang again, and it seemed to be singing to me.

I kicked the man’s face.

He cried out. I felt him fall from me. The pipe, still in his grip, came off the wall.

I clung to the vine, which spun like rope from one anchored point. I heard the loud clank of the pipe and the thump of his body on the pavement.

He lay twisted below, legs splayed. I gripped the vine. Blood pooled beneath him. A veil of fear prickled over me.

The noise must have been heard. Other militiamen would come.

The alleyway rang with shocked silence. Then, in the distance, I heard cries.

Forget the bird, I told myself.

I had to hide.

9

I SCRAMBLED UP THE TWISTING vine and onto the roof. I wouldn’t be seen from below, but I had to get as far away as possible. Fear coated me like paint. I ran across the rooftop, ducking around the cistern there to collect rain. Night had almost truly fallen, and the cistern was sheeted in thin black ice. I tore at the collar of my coat—Raven’s coat.

Stitches ripped. The collar came off in my hand, the heliographs scattering at my feet. If I were caught, the heliographs could not be found. They would be traced to the people whose images they bore, even the children. The price for impersonating a member of a higher kith was death.

Shouts rose from below.

I punched through the ice in the cistern. I scooped up the heliographs and dumped them into the black water. Then I ran to the far edge of the roof.

I had always refused to consider things that could never happen. What if you were on the Council? Annin sometimes asked me in the kitchen.

I wouldn’t be.

What if you were High Kith? What would you do?

I’m not.

Don’t you wonder, she would say, why things are the way they are?

It is as it is, I’d tell her, and find comfort in that saying. It pointed toward certainty. I might not like the world as it was, but at least it wouldn’t change around me.

I didn’t want to become someone I couldn’t recognize.

Yet when I reached the edge of the rooftop, I became someone else. The reflection of that girl in the window. Another self. Someone who jumped across the narrow space.

I landed on the neighboring rooftop. I kept running, judging where best to bridge the gaps between roofs, hoping anyone below would be too distracted by the commotion in the streets to look up. The yellow moon, swollen to its full size, was rising. I might be seen, if someone thought to look.

But no one did.

When I had put enough distance between myself and the body, I slid down behind another cistern. My trousers were thin. My rear grew cold on the plastered stone and I shivered against the aged wood of the cistern, pulling the coat closer to my body. I should stay here, I thought, until the festival has ended. Maybe, soon before dawn, when everyone was asleep, I could clamber down another gutter pipe. Sweat chilled on my skin. I pushed my loose hair behind my ears. A lock of it was matted with white paint.

I could see, now, the whole city. The thick white ribbon of the wall wrapped in a snaking circle around me. Beyond it lay the upper quarters, their spires topped with silver and golden orbs. Dark, dense, waving blankets confused me until eventually I realized they must be treetops. The upper Wards glittered with colored lights. There seemed to be a pattern: some areas of the city glowed with pink windows, and others with green, still others with blue: a code, perhaps, that differentiated one quarter from another. High up on the hill, rooftops were not flat as they were in the Ward, but sometimes shaped into pointed towers with bellied windows and the black stitching of wrought-iron balconies. One large building bore ghostly figures that ringed an enormous dome brilliant with ruby panes of glass lit from within. People, I thought at first, dipped in white paint.

Strange, impossible.

Statues, of course.

I felt suddenly tired and consumed by cold. I had killed that soldier. I had done something terrible that could never be undone, that only proved that no matter how hard I tried to be otherwise, I was someone who made mistakes. Who looked at statues and thought they were people. Who looked at a reflection and thought it was another girl instead of only the image of herself. Who saw no other way out of a situation than murder.

I could have asked him to let me climb, I thought, or I could have sworn to let him chase the bird when we reached the rooftops.

There is always another way.

My girl, I imagined Raven saying. Do you think you can keep what you have done hidden?

The militia will take you away. You will never come back.

How I would miss you.

A scrambling feeling rooted around inside me.

No one, Raven said in my mind, can know what you’ve done.

I looked at the statues. They were of the gods, surely, but no one really remembered them. Maybe that was a blessing.

My eyes closed.

Are you hungry? I remember Helin asking. She was a little younger than I was, six years old, perhaps, then, her hand soft. She held an apple, its shiny skin red and gold.

How did you get that?

She shrugged. It’s for you.

I took the apple. Why are you giving this to me?

Will you be my friend?

I bit the apple. Then I passed it to her. Your turn, I said. You take a bite.

We ate the apple like that, passing it between us, until we got to the core, which we also ate, the seeds sliding down our throats, the stem crunched between our teeth, our fingers and mouths sticky and sweet.

I huddled inside Raven’s coat. I slipped between seeing the city before me and remembering Helin. I almost wished I could forget her the way everyone had forgotten the gods.

Cold came over me, but I was warm inside with guilt. The feeling nuzzled against me. It pressed against my heart like a soft animal and slept in my lap.