The Midnight Lie Read online

  6

  YOU KNOW WHERE THIS IS going.

  When I still lived in the orphanage, after Helin’s death, I would spend hours at a window. One might have wondered what could keep my attention, since the view was only the brick of an opposing wall. I was looking not at the view but at my reflection. I pretended the girl I saw there was someone else. A friend. A sister. A High-Kith girl whose life I could only imagine, with silk slippers and pet foxes taken from the pink beaches and tamed, leashed with ribbons. Who could stack a castle of sugar cubes. Who slept in late. Who lived so tenderly it was as though she were housed inside a flower. This girl was afraid of nothing.

  Sometimes the reflection seemed real.

  I would grow frightened and stay away from the windows, from any mirrorlike surface, from spoons, from still water in a sink.

  And then, though you would think I had learned better, after what had happened to Helin, I would return to the window. The girl in the glass would smile.

  The wind whipped the edge of my coat as I walked home from Aden’s. My mouth still tasted like his mouth. Things had gone too far.

  I was the one who allowed that to happen.

  And I was the one who thought, This will always be my life: kissing someone I don’t love. Living in a city I will never leave.

  And I was the one who saw the crimson bird perched at a gutter’s edge.

  But it wasn’t me who stopped, sandy dirt scraping against the pavement under my sandals. It wasn’t me who glanced around and saw—strangely, impossibly—no one. It wasn’t me who felt a need grow inside my chest like a fruit and split its rind.

  Nor was it me who set my hands and feet onto the metal struts that bound the gutter pipe to the building’s wall. I didn’t begin to climb.

  It was the girl in the window’s reflection.

  So brave.

  So foolish.

  7

  I GLANCED DOWN AT THE spinning pavement. The metal gutter pipe froze my fingers. I was robbed of breath. The bird above me trilled.

  I forced myself up. I climbed past indi flowers twined around the gutter. I spied their roots in cracks that split the wall deep enough for me to dig my fingers into them. The cracks were sticky with fresh white paint. It grew colder as I climbed, the wind meaner. It tore off my cap. Hair spilled into my eyes, got into my mouth.

  When I climbed up far enough to know—to know the fact deep in my body, in my trembling legs and dry throat—that if I fell I would die, I stopped. I hugged the pipe. The wind blew dust against the wall. My mind seemed to flip upside down. My sandals skidded along the pipe. Nausea rose up my throat and I had an image of vomiting out my insides, of my stomach coming out first, then my heart, my lungs. I imagined these organs blundering from my mouth and dropping one by one to the ground with soft thuds.

  And that was stupid, so stupid. I couldn’t let my imagination feel too real.

  I forced my eyes open. I saw the pipe. I saw my bleeding fingers, tipped with white paint. I looked up into the sky. Gray lambswool clouds. It was getting dark.

  And over my shoulder: a glimpse of the wall, solid and as thick as the length of a man from toe to top. I couldn’t see beyond it.

  Raven would wonder where I was.

  There was nothing but silence above me. The bird had probably flown somewhere else.

  But I thought: I don’t know, not really, how large the Ward is compared to the rest of the city.

  I thought: What harm would it do to see the High quarter beyond the wall? Just for a moment. Then I would come back down and be myself again.

  I pushed myself up. My arms ached, my back ached, my right leg jittered like the needle of Annin’s pedaled sewing machine. But I climbed.

  Then I heard the bird again. Its song slipped fluidly inside me.

  It occurred to me that the bird wanted me as much as I wanted it. That it knew I was coming, that it was watching, tiny, its crested head cocked, its tail plumes of pink and green and scarlet. In my mind I could see its short, inky beak. Its tiny emerald eyes. It sang to me.

  I was confused, because I had never seen an Elysium bird up close. How could I imagine it in such great detail?

  It didn’t feel like my imagination.

  It felt like memory.

  I didn’t want to glance up. But the song calmed my shaking body. It floated the hair out of my eyes and ran a finger up my neck, under my jaw, tilting my head up.

  The bird circled over my head, red wings wide and crenellated. A feather fell. It pivoted in the air until its shaft stuck into a joining where the horizontal length of the gutter met the roof’s edge.

  Then the bird disappeared out of my line of sight, over the roof.

  8

  SOMETHING SEIZED MY FOOT. I jolted, and I would have come off the pipe entirely if not for my grip on the gutter’s frets.

  “Out of my way.”

  I glanced down. My heart got stuck in my throat. A militiaman was just below me, hand wrapped around my ankle. He shook my leg. “Please,” I said. “Stop! I’ll fall.”

  “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.

  10

  A LIGHT PRICKLE ON MY wrist woke me. I startled out of sleep, shaking my wrist hard, sure that I had been seen, I had been caught, a soldier was slipping a manacle onto my wrist. But the prickle disappeared, air beat against my face, and what I saw was not uniformed men but the Elysium bird launching itself from my wrist. It hovered for a moment in front of me before sweeping away.

  It landed a few feet from me. It scratched the plastered roof, oddly chickenlike for such a glamorous bird, wings tucked close to its body. Now that I was so close, I could see streaks of green on its belly, speckles of pink on its breast, the black thorn of its beak, the tips of white on its red wings. It sang.

  “Shh,” I said, which was foolish—what bird obeyed a person?—but it stopped midsong. I reached into my pocket for the seeds—Aden’s seeds. Mine, I remembered the bird singing. It felt not like it belonged to me, but that it was telling me that I belonged to it.

  I scattered the seeds across the roof.

  It pecked its way toward me, head tipping left and right, tail dipping, luxuriant feathers drifting behind it like the train of an iridescent dress. It ate the seeds, husks splitting beneath its beak and dropping to the roof. The moon was high and bright. I wanted desperately for this bird to be mine no matter what it could do for me, no matter if the stories were real, if only so that I could see it in full light and know its patterns and colors, to know it so intimately that I would see its details even when I closed my eyes.

  It flitted closer, then landed on my knee.

  You can’t catch an Elysium bird, I had told Aden. Had anyone ever heard of an Elysium behaving like this?

  Maybe it was because it was trained and had been raised from its shell.

  Maybe hunger had overwhelmed it.

  Whatever reason it had decided not to fear me, I couldn’t question the peace that spread from where it perched upon my knee, drifting down my leg and up into my stomach, stealing over my chest. I dipped my fist into the coat pocket again and offered an open handful of seed. It jumped to the heel of my hand, feathers curling over my wrist, caressing my upper arm. It ate. The beak gently jabbed the palm of my hand, a tender little needle.

  What are you? I wondered as I studied it. What are you, really?

  What am I, that you chose to come to me?

  Its body was only slightly larger than my hand but its tail floated long, the tip of it almost to my elbow. It warbled: a bubbling sound. I stroked its head and it allowed this, leaning into my touch. When it burbled its low music again, I stroked its throat. Beneath its feathers was a light vibration, like a purr.

  I realized then what anybody in the Ward should have realized.

  I couldn’t keep this bird.

  It wasn’t possible to hide such a secret. Everyone in the tavern would learn, and then it would be only a matter of time before the Ward did, and before people began to wonder whether the death of a soldier on the day the bird flew into the Ward had something to do with me. It would be only a matter of time before the militia learned who had the bird. Then they would come for me, if not for the crime of murder, then for the crime of stealing a High-Kith pet. When the Council could sentence you to years in prison for dressing like a High-Kith lady, what would it do to someone from the Ward who had kept an Elysium?

  The bird nosed among the seeds, looking for its favorites, which were slender black ovals.

  The only way to keep it, I thought, was to kill it.

  If I were to wring its neck, I could sell the feathers. I could see whether the stories about its meat were true. Its hollow bones.

  A dead Elysium bird held so much value. It could be parceled out secretly and slowly. That, perhaps, could be kept hidden when a living thing—with its song, its rustlings, its need for food and water, its excretions—could not.

  The bird looked at me. Mine, it sang, and I was so startled that my hand sagged and the bird floated up, wings stuttering. But it settled back into my palm.

  It would be easy to snap its fragile neck. I had just killed someone. The murder of a bird would be nothing by comparison. And there was so much to gain.

  A treasure, Raven would say when I showed her the limp corpse, its feathers as bright as a bouquet. My treasure, she would ca
ll me.

  Who knew what comforts we could bring into our home through the sale of the birds’ parts?

  Who knew how many Half Kith we could save, with extra money to buy what we needed to make passports?

  But the bird nestled into my palm, its feathers a warm cloud, its happiness thrumming into my skin. I had never felt or seen anything so beautiful, and it was only then that I realized how starved I had been for beauty. Its liquid green eyes studied me.

  A thought came so slowly that it reminded me of Annin building a tower out of playing cards: the precision and care, the light touch, the slight shake of her hand lowering a card into place.

  The Elysium closed its eyes and sighed. It grew heavy with sleep.

  I could keep the bird, I thought, if I left the Ward. If I forged a passport for myself. If I went beyond the wall, beyond the city.

  Fear flooded me. I couldn’t kill the bird. But I also couldn’t leave behind everything I knew.

  I slipped the embroidered bread bag from my pocket.

  I clamped the sleeping bird’s wings to its body, and thrust it into the sack.

  * * *

  When I was certain that no one was passing in the alley below, I climbed down a gutter pipe, the jerking, squawking bag swaying from my wrist by its drawstring.

  Moonlight painted the street. The alley was a quiet, bright river.

  I walked until I spotted a pair of soldiers. Dread pulsed inside me, but I couldn’t keep the bird and I couldn’t kill it. It must be returned. I had to hope that the militia would be so distracted by the Elysium that they wouldn’t think to link me to the soldier’s broken body—which, after all, would surely look like a mere accident, especially with the fallen gutter pipe.

  “Here,” I said to the soldiers, holding out the bag. I remembered Helin holding out the apple and asking to be my friend.

  One of them, staring, took the jolting bag. “Is that the Elysium?”