I sat up straighter and glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was half past ten.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Dom said, “and yes, little sister, it would be a very bad idea for you to go out right now, what with your image so fresh in everyone’s minds.”

My finger tapped against my thigh, and I stared at the blank wall beside the TV stand. What if I didn’t have to go out? What if I could see what happened at the meeting, from here? My sheut made it so the things I drew had power, sometimes even seeming to come to life. Sometimes becoming real, if only for a moment. If I drew a likeness of Dorman’s office on the living room wall, would it just be a pretty picture, or would it become something more—a window to what was actually happening in the Tent District? It was a long shot, but I thought, just maybe, not an impossible one.

“Kat . . .”

“What?” I reached for the deck of tarot cards and started to shuffle. “I promise not to step a single foot through that door,” I said, nodding in the direction of the condo’s front door. If I could make my own, magical window, I wouldn’t have to.

“Good.”

I shuffled again. “Now hush.” Another shuffle. “I need to concentrate.”

What’s in the cards for me today? I let the question roll around in my mind, let it saturate every cell in my body, let it flow from me into the cards. They wouldn’t tell me exactly what to do or what would happen, but they would give me an idea of what to expect. They’d help guide me in maybe not the right direction, but the necessary one. I honestly didn’t know how it worked, but somehow I would feel when the cards were ready. A little zing of power, of energy. When I felt that, I just knew.

I set the cards down on the coffee table’s black-stained surface and cut the deck. I didn’t always cut, and almost never into three piles like so many tarot readers, but today had the potential to be a big day. An important day. I wanted to make sure I heard whatever messages the universe had for me, loud and clear. So, I cut the deck once more and let my hand hover over each pile for a few seconds, first the leftmost, then the middle one, then the one on the right. I returned to the middle pile. It hummed with an almost electric charge.

“Loud and clear,” I murmured, picking up the middle pile and stacking it on top of the others. I flipped the top card and set it on the table.

Justice. I wasn’t surprised to find that the major arcana card had altered itself, as my cards so often did. The Justice card currently showed Dorman, the unofficial leader of the Tent District, standing in front of a chain-link fence topped with razor wire—the perimeter surrounding his kingdom. His expression was stern, and he held a sword in his right hand—my sword, Mercy, with her silver pommel and crystalline At blade—a set of scales in the other, weighing a dripping heart against a pristine white feather. A creature with the body of a lion and the head of a crocodile lurked at the very edge of the card, the Egyptian god Ammut, waiting to eat the heart of the judged should it prove unworthy.