“You obviously don’t know me, sir,” I shout, pushing my sweaty hair off my eyes again. “I need at least three ‘pleases’ and one grovel before I do anything at all!”

Pivoting to face the pipe, I breathe. In and out.

Of the silence, in the silence.

Standing on a rusty pipe, fleeing a guard while running toward a boy I cannot possibly have is an awfully strange place to get a revelation, but I’ve never been one for normality. This is what it means to be silent, what Reginall, who taught me to Weep, meant—in the middle of cacophony, in the midst of the chaos of living, to find that moment where the only thing that matters is what one does next. The past doesn’t matter. The future doesn’t matter. All that has meaning is the moment.

This is what silence means—to live only for the next moment.

I brace my legs and shoot forward. My thighs pump with all my condensed might and the world falls away as I leap off the edge of the pipe.

The river churns and peaks white below me in what feels like slowed time, my arms and legs flailing as if they were submerged in sugar syrup, and then all at once my palm bashes into hard metal, my fingers giving off faint cracks as they break. My momentum swings me forward, into the curve of another metal pipe level with my chest, all the wind knocking out of me as my ribs shatter. The Laughing Daughter’s magic gets to work instantly, but pulling myself up with broken fingers and a fractured palm…the pain is blinding tridents of lightning pulsing up my arm, into my spine and back again. I inhale wetly and pull up blood from my punctured lung, but that breath is just enough energy for me to throw my other hand forward and pull myself up the rest of the way.

By the time I struggle to my feet, I’m healed. The smell of smoke burns my nose, the shouts and screams of Vetrisians ringing between every building in the common quarter. I get my bearings quickly—the Crimson Lady to the east of me means South Gate is down the next road.

My earlier hunch was right—the roads moving away from South Gate are entirely congested, men shouting as they elbow people out of the way, wide-eyed celeon with their ears flat on their heads and their hackles raised, babies bleating cries as terrified parents shuffle them farther from harm’s way, and lawguards trying to keep all the chaos from erupting into full-blown panic. I’m the only one moving toward the gate, and thankfully the lawguards are too preoccupied with preventing the imminent stampede to stop me.