I brought down the last boxes, and Zenza shook the locusts into their holding tank.

“You’re sure you don’t mind dropping off the reports?” she asked.

“I’m sure.”

She grinned. “I owe you one.”

It really wasn’t a big deal. I had planned to head to the dormitories afterwards, and our office was only a little out of my way. I waved goodbye to the driver as I left the warehouse. If my visions were flaring up again, I was better off on my own.

I climbed up the narrow, weed-choked stairs to Herts Street. A man dozed inside his soup kiosk, his pot of vegetables simmering gently as he snored. Dogs barked in the distance. The buildings in this district were largely residential, the people who lived here older and less affluent than the merchants of the western quadrants. Small potted plants nestled inside private window boxes: herbs and vines of tomatoes and wilted geraniums. Bird nests and feathers choked the rusted old gutters.

Finn’s grandparents had lived four blocks south of here. Back then, the contrast between their house and the rest of the street had been striking. Clean. Nothing out of place. Nothing growing. It had always smelled of lye. An iron trellis ran up the back wall of the building. I had climbed it once, in the middle of the night, but that had been a long time ago now. Millie might have taken it down.

Chester Street curved steeply upwards toward Minor West. Halfway along it, I stopped and turned around.

“I thought I told you not to follow me, Osan,” I said.

The sign for a bookshop swayed in the breeze, but everything else was still. A shiver ran down my spine. I had been so sure that I had heard footsteps.

“Osan?”

The offices were only a block away. I swallowed and hurried onwards. With everyone celebrating Moon Tide, the district felt unusually quiet.

There again.

I glanced over my shoulder, quick enough to catch the movement of a shadow at the end of the street. I reached for my lace. It could just be a stupid kid or a stray animal, but the way they were trailing me—out of sight, cautious, from a distance—felt too deliberate. Predatory.

“I know you’re there,” I called. My voice did not sound as confident as I would have liked.

No one answered.

“Fine,” I said, and kept walking. The thread of lace burned inside me.

You are a Sister, I told myself. No one can hurt you.

I walked a little quicker.

Except other Sisters.

The Food Management Offices lay ahead of me. The wide steps leading to the main doors were swallowed in shadow; the lanterns at the end of the road had not been lit tonight.

That could not be an accident. In my head, my mother repeated, not an accident, not an accident, not an accident.

Ahead, I caught sight of movement in the darkness. My heart stuttered, and I froze.

“El?”