“You can’t hunt an Elysium bird.” A pet Elysium is raised from an egg stolen from a nest in the sugarcane fields outside the city. They say its shell is a glossy crimson. They say that when the shell cracks, it weeps a fluid that, if swallowed, will add a happy year to your life. “The bird can’t be caught.”

“I will be the first, then, to catch one.”

“Even if you did.” I shook my head.

“No one would take it from me. They wouldn’t dare. I’d like to see them try.” He leaned back against the table, large hands bracing its edge. He was well grown for his eighteen years. Aden had just the kind of body the High Kith would approve of in our kind: one made to work, all muscle and sinew.

“It’s your funeral,” I said. “The heliographs, please.”

He reached into a breast pocket and produced them: small, thin squares of tin, fanned out between his fingers like a miniature deck of silvery cards. There was the scent of lavender. Only the face on the top tin could be seen clearly. It was Raven’s face. I wasn’t sure why she had asked Aden to make a heliograph of herself. A Middling passport was already hers by birth. We had never tried to forge a High-Kith one. Even if we had the proper Council stamp—which we didn’t—passing as High would be impossible without a great sum of money. Even one day’s outfit of High clothes would cost more than I could imagine.

I took the tins from Aden and shuffled through them. They showed families with small children. An infant. The baby’s parents. A girl with wide, startled eyes. I made the tins disappear into a secret lining in the collar of my coat, where their stiffness, even if felt, would be taken for cardstock meant to make the collar rigid.

Aden had shown me how to capture someone’s image with light and a bitumen-coated plate of tin, to wash the tin with lavender oil to make the image appear. He was good at it. His mother had been good, too, so good that when she decided to leave this city, and abandon Aden around the time when he was no longer a child yet not quite a man, she had thought that an excellent heliograph was all she needed to make her fake passport convincing. She was caught by the militia and sentenced to death. Aden never even received her bones to bury. When the City Council took your body, they took all of it.

Aden had made a heliograph of me. “We could go beyond the wall together,” he had said, setting the small tin square in my palm, “and work in the Middling quarter.” But I couldn’t leave my home. I couldn’t leave Raven, who needed me.