“You’re in a hurry.” Teo was walking fast to keep step with Kai. Kai’s leg ached, but the cane helped, and she couldn’t slow down. Jace might notice their presence at any time.

“Some people in the Order would disagree with my decision to bring you here. Better be out and gone before they get wind of us.”

“What have you roped me into?”

“Just a little unorthodox behavior.”

“Ah,” Teo said. “Should we run?”

“No. Walk quickly, and keep talking, if you don’t mind. It’ll help people think we’re supposed to be here.”

She grinned. “I’ve never seen this side of you before.”

“The sweaty side?”

“Something like that,” she said. “I get all that stuff about truth, but in the end you just sound like my girlfriend’s art critic buddies, the ones who get a bottle of wine in their systems and weasel over whether we can ever really know anything at all, and how—” Kai opened a door, grabbed Teo’s wrist, and pulled her through, into unbroken shadow. The other woman resisted for a second, by reflex, then followed. Somewhere off to the left Kai heard heavy breathing. “—And how any attempt to discuss objective fact buys into imperialist cultural narratives, and basically they’re nice people and I don’t want to piss Sam off and maybe they’re even right, but if they keep on like that for more than a few minutes I feel this urge to curl their hair around my fingers and bash them face-first into a windowsill ten or fifteen times. No offense.”

“None taken.” Thirty steps, thirty-five. Hand in front of her, eyes closed, knowing she’d find a handle there—the knowing-she’d-find being the most important part—and then yes the handle, beneath her palm, gripped, turned. Night broke open like an egg and they stood inside a mirrored dome upon a mirrored floor. “I get where you’re coming from. The same sickness shows up in poetry circles.”

“You’re a poet?”

“Filled a few notebooks when I was twelve. Even showed up at the Rest, that’s a poetry club, hoping they’d put me onstage. A friend talked me down before I made a terminally embarrassing mistake.” She turned in a circle, regarding their distorted reflections in the curved walls. Talking like this felt good—as if she’d shifted a large rock off her stomach and could breathe again. Even the pain in her leg bothered her less. “But when I say truth is constructed, I don’t mean it doesn’t exist.” Three turns to the left, and then two to the right, then move your head until you catch a flash of green in your mirrored eye …

“What do you mean, then?”

“The world’s a complicated place, and it changes, that’s all. People interpret the universe, and their interpretation alters it.” There. “This part is important. Match me step for step.”