THE PARK LED TO TERRACED stairs chiseled into the hillside, which gave way to a path. A musician in Middling blue played an instrument that I had seen in Harvers’s books, a many-stringed lute held on the man’s lap. Soap bubbles from a source I couldn’t see drifted past the man and seemed to swallow notes as he played them, their iridescent spheres suddenly silencing parts of the tune. I saw one float ahead of us to a man and woman walking arm in arm, her lace parasol as fine as spun sugar, her perfect face tipped up toward his, coral lips smiling as he reached to pop one of the silent bubbles. I could hear, faintly, as it burst into a few stolen strummed notes.

The path opened into an enormous agora. A few lavishly dressed people sat at the fountain’s edge, its colored waters tumbling and crashing. A councilman passed, his red robe trailing. I had never seen a councilman before. I had been taught about them in the orphanage, their importance in decreeing and overseeing laws and advising the Lord Protector.

Sid followed my eyes. “We should steer clear of the Council,” she said. “I don’t think they’d appreciate my plan to swindle their country out of its magical secret and run off with it for my personal profit.” Sid squinted at the glowing agora. “So flashy. Honestly, it hurts my eyes.”

Instead of stones, the agora was paved with translucent glass tiles arranged in patterns of colors, pink and red and green—the colors of the Elysium bird—most dominant. I stared at the tiles. “I know who made these,” I said. “An artisan in the Ward. I have seen them heaped in baskets in her glass-blowing workshop, but I never guessed they would be made to walk upon. It’s so impractical. Don’t people slip and fall?”

“No one here moves very quickly,” Sid said. “They take really delicate steps. Or they are carried in palanquins by Middlings.”

I stepped onto the tiles. They lit up beneath my weight. My skin was bathed in green light. Sid walked along beside me, different shades of light coloring her skin, shifting from one color to the next, her cheeks pink, her mouth green, her hands bright red. She sighed, glancing down at her crimson hands. “It’s fun the first time.”

I said, “What a surprise to learn that you are easily bored.”

She paused, her face and neck a gold-sprinkled blue. “Games bore me, eventually. They are too easy to master, which is why I constantly need new ones. People are different. People always fascinate me. Or,” she amended, “at least you do.”

“Me?”

“I always want to know what you are thinking. What do you think”—she swept her hand at the agora—“of this?”