MIDDLING BOYS WERE LIGHTING THE streetlamps as I walked back to Sid’s house, carrying a long pink box that held my party dress. The rest of my wardrobe would be sent later, Madame Mere said, though she insisted that I put on a vivid cyan crepe dress with short, ribboned sleeves before I left her shop, and had smoothed and curled my wild hair while I sipped her surprisingly tasteless pink tea. She tucked my hair into patterns, using pins the shimmery green of a scarab beetle. She rubbed cream into my cheeks. “I don’t like for someone to leave my shop looking anything less than glamorous.”

She did not like that I would be carrying my own dress box. “You are taking the Half-Kith act too far, my dear,” she said. I was amazed at how people’s assumptions overrode the obvious, though I was not one to cast judgment on anyone for not seeing things as they really were.

As I walked up the hilly street, the dress box beneath my arm, I thought about Helin and her gentle effort to shield me from my strangeness. How she had promised to be my guide, to tell me what was real and what wasn’t. I still missed her. I still felt sad, but it was a softer sadness, because the crippling guilt had lessened. I hadn’t understood how sick Helin was the night she died. I had believed her when she said she was fine, because I had trained myself to believe her and to mistrust myself.

But even if I hadn’t been plagued by illusions I didn’t understand, if I had been normal, I still could have made the same mistake. The inability to see clearly had felt like my problem, my curse. But maybe it was everyone’s.

The lamplighters lifted their long poles, each as slender and black as a heron’s leg, and touched flames to the lamps’ wicks. The lamps glowed, one by one, against the lavender sky.

I glanced around the quiet street and wondered if I could make myself see the sort of vision I had always tried to ignore. The more I considered the images I had seen in the Ward, the more I wondered whether it was not simply that I had a perfect memory.

I could also see into the city’s memory.

For years I had tried to harden myself against the illusions. It felt uncomfortable to invite them. But I imagined myself as tender and vulnerable: a downy chick out of its egg.

And for a moment, I saw not a lamplit street before me, but an empty, grassy hill, the wind shivering in the green.

I glanced behind me, toward the wall.

There was no wall. There was only the Ward—defenseless, surrounded by nothing but hills and sky.

“Hey there,” said a voice.

I turned, and the vision vanished.