“Leave my shop,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp. “Leave the Ward and don’t come back. You don’t belong here. You never did.”

“No one belongs here,” I said. “No one deserves to be trapped behind a wall.”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand. You don’t even know.”

“Know what?”

He rubbed an old, gnarled thumb over the glistening path of softened skin on the back of his hand. “Everyone in the Ward knows you had something to do with that soldier’s death.”

I sucked in a hurt breath. “Aden told?”

“Child, you were running along the rooftops under a full moon during a festival. You were seen by several people. Everyone knows you caught the Elysium bird and surrendered it. The gossip is that a soldier tried to drag you to your death, and you kicked him to his.”

I rested a hand against a printing press to steady myself, gazing at the ink-darkened woodblocks of frontispieces, the collections of little letters collected like pulled teeth in the compositor’s tray, and wondered what else I had been blind to, what else should have been so obvious, such as that any secret in the Ward spreads like a giddy fire, so hungry the Half Kith are for anything that is not ordinary.

“No harm will come to you,” said the printer. “Not if the Ward can help it. We will protect you.”

The lowering sun carved through the workshop and illuminated the ink-wet pages hanging to dry.

“You’ve helped so many people escape,” he said, “and never sought anything for yourself.”

“Of course. No one here has anything to give. It helped me to help. It made me feel good to forge passports. Special.”

“You are. Anyone can see it. It’s in your face. Your kindness. I have wanted to say this to you before. The Ward is grateful, and we won’t forget it.”

I shook my head. “You should be grateful to Raven. I would be nothing without her.”

His expression tightened. “I suppose it is true that she raised you to be selfless,” he said carefully. “But you need to demand something for yourself. Everyone in the Ward will miss you if you go, but it’s nice to think of you somewhere else, beyond the wall. Comforting.”

I had had no idea that people in the Ward were watching me, that they knew so much about me and they would miss me if I never returned. That they could even want me never to return.

It was a new thought to me: that you could take heart when someone escapes the trap that trapped you.

And yet it shouldn’t have been a new thought, since I had already felt this whenever I forged a passport. I had simply not realized that this was what I had felt.