I could see, now, the whole city. The thick white ribbon of the wall wrapped in a snaking circle around me. Beyond it lay the upper quarters, their spires topped with silver and golden orbs. Dark, dense, waving blankets confused me until eventually I realized they must be treetops. The upper Wards glittered with colored lights. There seemed to be a pattern: some areas of the city glowed with pink windows, and others with green, still others with blue: a code, perhaps, that differentiated one quarter from another. High up on the hill, rooftops were not flat as they were in the Ward, but sometimes shaped into pointed towers with bellied windows and the black stitching of wrought-iron balconies. One large building bore ghostly figures that ringed an enormous dome brilliant with ruby panes of glass lit from within. People, I thought at first, dipped in white paint.

Strange, impossible.

Statues, of course.

I felt suddenly tired and consumed by cold. I had killed that soldier. I had done something terrible that could never be undone, that only proved that no matter how hard I tried to be otherwise, I was someone who made mistakes. Who looked at statues and thought they were people. Who looked at a reflection and thought it was another girl instead of only the image of herself. Who saw no other way out of a situation than murder.

I could have asked him to let me climb, I thought, or I could have sworn to let him chase the bird when we reached the rooftops.

There is always another way.

My girl, I imagined Raven saying. Do you think you can keep what you have done hidden?

The militia will take you away. You will never come back.

How I would miss you.

A scrambling feeling rooted around inside me.

No one, Raven said in my mind, can know what you’ve done.

I looked at the statues. They were of the gods, surely, but no one really remembered them. Maybe that was a blessing.

My eyes closed.

Are you hungry? I remember Helin asking. She was a little younger than I was, six years old, perhaps, then, her hand soft. She held an apple, its shiny skin red and gold.

How did you get that?

She shrugged. It’s for you.

I took the apple. Why are you giving this to me?

Will you be my friend?

I bit the apple. Then I passed it to her. Your turn, I said. You take a bite.

We ate the apple like that, passing it between us, until we got to the core, which we also ate, the seeds sliding down our throats, the stem crunched between our teeth, our fingers and mouths sticky and sweet.

I huddled inside Raven’s coat. I slipped between seeing the city before me and remembering Helin. I almost wished I could forget her the way everyone had forgotten the gods.