“You,” I said. It was the brown-haired boy from the Middling quarter who had stolen the dream vials. A lamp-lighting pole rested against his shoulder.

He whistled. “You are looking awfully fancy. I almost didn’t recognize you. Come up in the world, haven’t you?”

I took a wary step back. “Are you planning to turn me in?”

“Me? No. Honor among thieves and all that.”

“I’m not a thief.”

He squinted one eye shut, peering at me. “Aren’t you stealing a place in society that isn’t yours? Believe me, I’m going to do the same, given half a chance.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“To give you a message. Your foreign friend says she’ll be late, so you should meet her at the party.” He handed me a scrap of paper with a map. “She says you are to use her card with the insignia to get in.”

“It was you who told her I was looking for her in the Middling quarter.”

“You’ve got no call to act so betrayed. It’s not like you asked me not to tell her. If she gives me a bit of gold to bring her interesting tales, who am I to say no?”

Then he strolled away, carrying the pole lazily over his shoulder as if he were going fishing, the lamps glowing in the dark, the other Middling boys’ roving shadows ahead, disappearing into the night.

The map led me to a house so overgrown with ivy and fist-sized flowers that I couldn’t see the walls behind them. Hummingbirds darted in and out of the blossoms. Milling people waited in the courtyard to enter, their clothes extravagant, artfully constructed. Golden hoops around a waist trailed transparent lace that showed bare legs. Wire-and-satin petals bloomed around the green stem of a body. There was wild plumage. Slithering snake bracelets. The guests seemed inhuman, like strange creatures—part bird, part snake, part flower—or gods. Women had impossibly lush hair, left long in thick capes around their shoulders, or twisted into towering architectural wonders. A man blinked blue eyelashes fringed with lime-green petals at me.

Sid stood in the shadows of the courtyard. She was dressed in a man’s fitted black dress jacket buttoned over a paper-white collared shirt, the chain of her watch trailing from her pocket, her golden hair slicked back. The corners of her tipped-up eyes crinkled as she smiled at something a lilac-haired woman whispered, her glittered lips a mere breath away from Sid’s ear.

All my nervousness and wonder clumped into sick jealousy.