“You don’t want to say?” Sid said. “Keep your secrets then, dear Nirrim.” She closed the pocket watch with a quick clasp of one hand, but not before I glimpsed that the watch’s face looked bizarre, containing no numbers, but rather words. Though she closed the watch too quickly for me to read the words in that very moment, I could see the watch’s face in my mind, and realized with wonder—and then, quickly, extreme embarrassment—that she had not lied in the prison. There was a watch that could read someone else’s heart. Words for different emotions ringed the dial. The word that had glowed as the watch’s hand pointed to me was desire.

“He must be very special to you,” Sid said, and I didn’t know how to correct her mistake without telling her the truth.

What if she guessed that what I felt for her grew stronger every day? That my desire was for her, not Aden?

She might laugh at me, like she did at everything else.

I strode ahead of her toward the gate. She tagged along at my heels, strolling with deliberate ease.

“Do you know the way?” she asked.

“To the gate right in front of our faces? Yes, I think so.” I reached into my dress pocket for my passport.

“Hmm,” she said. “Well, the gate would work, if you wanted to go to the Middling quarter.”

I stopped midstride. “Don’t you have to go through the Middling quarter to reach the High quarter?”

“Some people do.”

“And other people?”

“Other people—let us say, very important people—get to take the shortcut. Why don’t you let me go through the gate first?”

I swept an exaggerated hand in front of me to indicate that she should go ahead. When she did, she approached the guard and showed him a tiny gold key on the palm of her hand. He barely even glanced at my passport after that, but stepped aside and gestured at the blank stone wall behind him, the thick spine of the wall. As I watched in wonder, a glowing outline of a door appeared. The stone door slid aside, revealing a tunnel.

The wall, which looked so thick on the outside, was hollow inside.

The gate to the Middling quarter disguised another gate. There was the gate through the wall, and then the gate into the wall.

Sid looked over her shoulder at me and grinned.

“You’re going to have to stop that,” I said.

She made innocent eyes. “Stop what?”

“Being so smug.”

“Why would I,” she said, “when you love it?”

She disappeared into the tunnel, and I followed.

33

THOUGH AT FIRST THE TUNNEL appeared almost entirely dark, a greenish-blue fluid ahead of us glowed from the tunnel’s floor, flowing like lovely sewage into the darkness.