WE WERE AT A HOUSE called the Inverse, which was entirely underground. We entered via a trapdoor in the grass and found ourselves inside a slick marble-walled hall where everything was upside down. The chandelier was brightly lit prickles of crystal shaped like a tiara growing out of the floor. Its candles burned, the flames giving light to the delicate shoes everyone wore. The wax dripped upward, rising in tiny blobs toward the ceiling, where furniture was fastened near a fireplace that crackled in the upper corner, blazing green and purple despite the night’s heat. Downstairs—which looked like an upstairs, complete with balconies that jutted out into cleared pockets of earth eerily lit with green glowworms—a Middling servant offered us crystal glasses of what looked exactly like Madame Mere’s pink tea. I hesitated to drink it, fresh from my experience with pleasure dust and mindful of the dressmaker’s warning not to drink the elixir if I didn’t know what it had been brewed to do.

“You would think,” I murmured, looking at the glass in my hand, “that different versions of the elixir would look different.” We watched as the guests around us sipped their drinks. Then one of them gasped, floating lightly to the ceiling, which had been tiled like a ballroom’s dance floor. She dropped her glass in surprise, and it followed her, careening toward the ceiling, where it broke and scattered above like rain that never fell.

“Do you want to drink?” Sid glanced at me over the rim of her glass, which was raised to her lips.

“People are flying,” I said in wonder.

“Are they really? Or have we taken a drug that alters our perception? Maybe we have already sipped from the elixir, and it has changed us, and we believe the glasses to be completely full.”

I eyed my pink-filled glass with mistrust. I tipped a little of it out. It flowed upward, where dancers had begun to find partners.

Sid said, “I suppose you don’t want to risk a repeat of the pleasure dust incident.”

“Definitely not.”

A man with icy-blue hair in braids floated past us. His hair had changed, but I instantly recognized him.

“That man,” I said to Sid. “He tasted my blood in the night market. He acted so strangely afterward.”

“He did what to you?”

I drank the glass to its bottom.

“Nirrim, wait.”

But I was already floating up toward the ceiling and its swirling dancers.

43

I FELT SICK WITH VERTIGO when I glanced below my dangling feet, Sid growing smaller below. I saw her hurriedly drink from her glass and knew she wouldn’t be far behind, and then I had to stop looking, because as I neared the ceiling my body turned, my dance slippers pulled toward the ceiling, my head toward the ground where I had been standing with Sid.