The metal street doors squealed open. I heard someone come down the cellar steps. Panic sour in my throat, I shifted as far as I could into my corner behind the wine bottles. I heard gritty steps come closer, the scuff of light sand on the cellar floor. Heavy breathing, the pants of someone who has been running hard. Someone searching among the wine bottles.

My panicky heart ran wild. My ears roared with fear. I huddled.

The man turned down my row and saw me.

“Got you,” he said, and rushed close to clamp his hands on my arm.

“No,” I whispered in terror. “You don’t.” I spoke like a child, as though denying something would make it not true.

Surprisingly, his grip slackened. He looked at me strangely, as though uncertain.

“Please don’t,” I said, hopeful, though fear was still pouring off my skin. Did he pity me? Could he be persuaded to let me go? “You don’t have to do this.”

“Do what?” he said, clearly confused. “I know I was supposed to do something…” He looked down at me, as though I might give him an answer, then around the cellar.

I remembered how, in the Ward, I would sometimes pass the militia and think, Not me. I am unimportant. Forget me.

When I thought that, they always did.

I could make people remember. Could I also make them forget? Could I do to their minds what I could do with vinegar on inked paper, and erase what I didn’t want?

“You were supposed to leave this cellar,” I told him. “You were supposed to let go of me and walk back up the steps onto the street.” It wasn’t so much that I was making him forget, I realized as I saw his face furrow in concentration. I was giving him a false memory. “You were told to tell the Council that I was not here, that you saw me nowhere near. You will tell them that I must have gone into the park, to hide among the trees.”

“Yes,” he said. “That was it. That was what I was supposed to do.” He smiled at me gratefully, and did what I commanded.

I waited for hours in the cellar, until the rumble in my belly said dinnertime was nearing, which would mean that servants could come down into the cellar soon to fetch wine. Cautiously, I cracked open the cellar doors. The alley wasn’t totally empty. Two women in frothy candy-colored lace were giggling and eating pleasure dust from their palms. Their lips glittered with it. But they paid me no attention. I glanced above. The twilit sky was empty of the Elysium bird—which, I hoped, had lost track of me long ago.