Once, when I was a hungry little kid—before the Palace, before Radha—sleeping wherever I could find a safe place, eating only what I could scavenge—I’d had the most wonderful dream.

A table was spread before me. Covered in candles; so long it disappeared into the distance. Piled high with food; a thousand plates of weird and wonderful dishes. Some were real, like the sweet-spicy–smelling wyvern kebabs I’d never been able to afford, or the cheap roasted chestnuts that kind fellow citizens would buy for me from time to time—but some were not, like a strange giant circle of dough that had red sauce and melted cheese on top of it, or tiny, little pale pink sausages crammed into strange little loaves of bread, or pink oranges that were actually orange.

At first I’d been afraid to eat it. Clearly it was meant for someone way more fancy and wealthy than me. But I took a handful of pomegranate seeds, and no one stopped me, so I went to town. Spent hours, it felt like, eating all that food.

I ate it until I woke up.

And I lay there, in the dark warm basement where I’d been lucky enough to fall asleep, and felt how I had nothing. No food in front of me. Nothing in my stomach. Nothing but pain and hunger.

Never in my life had it been so painful, to wake up into cold, drab miserable reality. And it never was again—until that moment, when I looked around and saw that I stood in a world with no magic, no dinosaurs, no monsters. How could humans survive in a world so ugly?

“This isn’t real,” I whispered again, and shut my eyes and focused on the red light of the sun that filtered through my eyelids, praying that when I opened them I was home and safe again.

Fifty-Three

Ash

Red light turned Solomon to stone, a statue carved from a massive ruby.

“I thought light would ruin the picture,” Solomon said, looking up at the bare amber bulb. “Overexpose it.”

“It’s a safelight,” I said. “Its light comes only from parts of the visible spectrum that photographic chemicals—especially those on the paper—are almost completely insensitive to.”

“Almost,” he said, dipping a finger into the stop bath. “So something is lost.”

I swatted his finger away. “Shhh,” I said. “Let me concentrate.”

I still didn’t know why we were there. What I hoped to achieve, looking at these photos. Why we were hiding in my basement instead of finding a way to punish Mr. Barrett. The only thing I knew was that I had to expose Sheffield somehow, and for the moment these images were the only tricks up my sleeve. To fight Sheffield, I had a plan. I had hope. To fight Mr. Barrett I had neither.