I heard voices from the landing. I heard Dirva’s voice, muted by walls, quiet, and I heard Liro’s voice pierce through those walls, clear as a bell. “No, I don’t know why you sent it back!” he yelled. “It don’t make no sense! It must have cost you an arm and a leg to smuggle it back to the City. Why not just send a letter, Dirva? If you just wanted to say it was over, why not write me a cheap, easy letter?”

“It belongs with you,” said Dirva.

“It taunts me!” shouted Liro. “It dredges it all up, every single moment! I don’t want to face it every day!”

“Then sell it! Sell it and make back what you spent smuggling it and yourself all the way here.”

I told myself it was best to give them space, but my body didn’t listen. Before I knew what I was doing, I was through the door. Against the wall was The Reader. It lay on its side, upended. Dirva and Liro stood close together in the middle of the room. There was a charge in the air, a yearning. I could feel it, how much both of them wanted the other, and I could feel the steely walls Dirva had thrown up. It all happened in an instant, and it overwhelmed me. I stumbled back against the door, disoriented, and Dirva rushed to my side. The tension in the room broke. He’d called me there to give himself a distraction, an escape.

“He’s more than a bit shaper,” Liro said.

“Please get some water,” Dirva said. Liro stepped into the kitchen. Dirva took my face in his hands. “Ariah. Ariah.” The smoothness of his voice, the palpable relief he felt at seeing me, pulled me back. I took hold of his forearms. “Build a wall.”

“I can’t.”

“Take a breath, take a moment, and build a wall,” he said. He said it without urgency, without pressure. My heart slowed. I felt my mind draw into itself, the curiosity pulling back in like a turtle to its shell. The trick is to feel yourself. I tracked my own heartbeat, let it grow loud and booming in my ears, a steady, doubled rhythm of me-ness.

Liro appeared next to Dirva, glass in hand. “He’s past training, and he’s like this still?”

Dirva said nothing. He took the glass and handed it to me. I slid down the wall and sat on the floor, drinking it, intently focused on the way the water felt sliding down my throat. I listened to their conversation distantly. Dirva said he and I were cut from the same cloth.

“You’re not. Untrained shapers don’t fare well,” Liro said.

“He’s no more than I am.”

“The hell he isn’t.”