“It is magic,” I said. “I know it is. I can prove it,” I added, though I didn’t fully believe what I had said.

“Even the word magic sounds childish,” she said. “Unreal. It was a fool’s errand to come here. I don’t want to feel like a fool.”

“Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know? Why would you give up now and go home without the leverage you wanted over your parents?”

“Oh, I’m not going home quite yet.”

“Where are you going?”

She shrugged. “Somewhere else. I’m in this city on borrowed time anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“I pulled a few strings to get us out of that prison. Someone’s going to collect on that favor eventually.” She winced.

“Someone dangerous?”

“You could say that.”

“So you’re running away?”

“You make it sound like I gave you the impression that I was someone who stuck around.”

“You didn’t,” I said, exasperated. “But I thought—”

“Yes?” She straightened, and looked directly at me. “What did you think?”

I blurted, “That when you wanted something, you wouldn’t rest until you got it.”

“Only when we are talking about women, dear Nirrim.”

Her words made me hot with shame, because I realized that if she wanted me, she would have had me. It must not have been on her mind.

But it was on mine.

I said, “Aren’t you going to ask me why I want to go with you?”

She stepped closer. She looked down at me, black eyes roving over my face. I could smell her perfume. It smelled like citrus kept in a cold metal cup and then poured over burning wood. “Why,” she said, “do you want to go with me?”

“I am special.” I cringed as the words came out of my mouth. They sounded like the worst kind of lie: the kind that people laugh at.

Yet she didn’t laugh. She said, “I know.”

“I have magic.”

Her brow crinkled. “What do you mean?”

“I see things that no one else does. Things that are true. Things about the past.”

“Like what?”

“Like that dream about people in the Ward killing the god of discovery long ago.”

“How do you know that’s true?”

“I found the colored paint beneath the white. If that is true, then maybe the rest of the dream was true, too.”

“That’s not exactly sound logic. And the colored paint wasn’t there.”

“You said you believed me that it was. That it was painted over.”

Slowly, she said, “I do. But you drank a strange substance. A drug, probably. You can’t trust that everything you dreamed is true just because one part is. As for the colored paint, maybe you heard or read that the Ward had brightly colored walls. Then you forgot that you knew it, and when you slept, the dream—or drug—returned your memory to you.”