“What do I do?” Dirva gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze. He let me feel his worry for me, his steadfast concern for me, without showing any of it on his face. “Be careful. Go after curfew or before curfew lifts. It’s a risk, but not as big a risk as it would be to go during the day when the borough can see you. You can count; count the curfew enforcers.”

* * *

I went to Shayma Hepzah’Brahim’s house very early. Dawn was little more than a hazy gray creeping across a black sky. The Pet was close; I relied on it to help with the count. I’m not sure I needed magic, though. The night was desolate, the streets were empty, and you could hear echoes of the Qin enforcers’ boots a street away. I crouched in the shadows of her doorway and knocked: two sharp raps loud in the night. Her student answered the door wrapped in a shawl. When she saw me, she drew the shawl tight around herself, protective, and leapt back from the door. “It is after curfew,” she hissed.

“My presence was requested.” I slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind me. The girl yelled, her eyes wide. I indulged in a shaper’s instinct that nudged her into calm again.

She blinked at me. “How did you do that?”

Shayma Hepzah’Brahim came down the hallway. “He has nothing to teach you, Biral. Go to bed.”

The girl, Biral, cut one last look at me and slipped away. Shayma Hepzah’Brahim turned down the hallway, and I followed. She wound up a lantern, and her eyes flicked up to mine. I burned. She read me deep, and she read me with no gentleness. It was suffocating. “This is not a time for visitors,” she said.

“Why am I here? What do you want?”

She laughed. It was a flat laugh, a brittle laugh.

“What is it?”

“It is not I who wants something from you.”

“Then who? Then why did you call me here?”

She smirked. She stared down at the nails of one hand, and I could breathe again. “I am a matchmaker. I have been asked to deal with you in that capacity.”

“You…what?”

“I have been asked to match you, Mr. Lirat’Mochai.”

“Is this a joke?”

“Would that it were.”

I stared at her. I confess I tried to read her, but she had walls of pure granite. “You have a match for me?” The idea of it was absurd.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. I have been asked to match you,” she said. She slid along the edges of the truth, halving it and halving it again.

“I don’t understand.”

“You will,” she said, “in time.”

“Asked by whom?”