Soon, everyone had dropped out but us. I had an enormous pile of winnings. Sid dealt the remainder of the deck.

I glanced at my cards and knew instantly what she held. I pushed my winnings forward. “I bet it all.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Sid said, and it wasn’t bad advice, since she held the god of Death.

“Match me,” I said. When she sighed and reached into her jacket for gold I said, “No. I want the pocket watch.”

She slipped a finger around its chain. Thoughtfully, she slid the watch from her pocket and weighed it on her palm. “This?” she said. “Why?”

A flush crept into my cheeks. In a way, I had already showed my hand. “Do you fold?”

She turned the watch over in her fingers, inspecting it, yet did not open it. Understanding flashed across her face. “It’s not broken, is it?” she said. “In fact”—she tossed it onto the pile—“I believe it works perfectly well.” She turned over her cards and grinned.

I turned over mine. I had mostly nothing … except the god of thieves and a blank, which was as good as two Deaths.

“Ohhh.” Sid planted her face in her hand. She groaned again into her palm. When she lifted her face I saw that she had realized what she should have known about me for the entire game. She leaned across the table to put the watch in my hand. Her soft cheek brushed mine. “You cheated,” she said in a delighted whisper.

“I won,” I corrected, and dropped the watch to the ground to crush it beneath my heel.

We had scooped my winnings into one of my damp dresses, twisting the cloth to form an impromptu sack, and were walking down the acorn hall when a fight broke out. A man drinking silver wine threw the contents of his glass in the face of his friend, who punched back, dropping his own glass. In the tussle, one shoved the other against the dirt wall, which exploded into a brown spray that completely covered a nearby woman.

The men fell through the wall. The woman, her face a mask of dirt, screamed at them. Their fight, accompanied by thumps and shouts, got farther away.

The dirt-covered woman looked down at her filthy dress and burst into tears.

“You are being silly,” a woman with wire wings told her.

“I loved this dress!”

“Who cares? No one wears the same thing twice anyway.”

All of my glee at winning Pantheon slid out of me. I looked at the High Kith in the hallway and the atrium ahead, at their colored eyelashes and heaps of hair, and realized that even I, who remembered everything, was capable of ignoring what I knew.

The hair and lashes were false. They were tithes. They had been taken from the Half Kith.

The tortoiseshell bowl filled with pleasure dust had been made by orphans.