It was as if he had read my mind. “Maybe magic could be harnessed to do more worthy things,” he said. “Hard to tell. Despite all my winsome sleuthing, I have as of yet been unable to tell how magic works here. Even who does it seems a carefully guarded secret.”

“And it really exists nowhere else in the world?” Though I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, magic didn’t exist behind the wall.

“It does not.” Then he paused, considering. “Well. There have been rumors.” He dismissed whatever he had been thinking. “Nothing proven. Nothing I’ve seen. What would you do, Nirrim, with a special gift?”

“I don’t know.” It can be hard to imagine things beyond your reach. It feels like you will be punished just for wanting what you’ll never have.

“You could go beyond your wall.”

I could do that already. As far as I knew, none of the documents I had forged, with Aden’s heliographs, had ever been rejected by the authorities. I could make one for myself. For years, I had turned the possibility over in my mind.

“You could leave the city,” he said. “This island. See the world. You could go to the eastern kingdom of Dacra and float down the canals that flow through its city like silver veins.”

Longing bloomed within me like a thin-petaled flower. But I was also afraid.

I told myself to ignore both the longing and the fear. Regardless of how I felt, whether I wanted to leave or feared to leave, I couldn’t. If I left, who would forge the documents? I thought of the wide-eyed child whose face was captured on one of the heliographs I had hidden in the rooftop cistern. Who would help her escape beyond the wall, and find a different kind of life where she wouldn’t be stolen from her bed in the night?

“No,” I said.

There was a silence. “You can’t tell me that you like your lot. You’ve never seen anything beyond your Ward but this prison where your blood is sapped daily because you did a careless lady a good deed by returning her lost pet.”

“I just want to go home.”

“You mean the Ward.”

“Yes.”

“The Ward is as large as a small city,” he said.

“Yes.” I didn’t see what its size had to do with anything.

“Is home a home if you can never leave it? You think you’re in prison now, but you have been in prison your whole life. It’s just big enough that you’re able to forget what it really is. Don’t you want to see more?”

“I don’t want to leave.”

This time his silence sounded disappointed. I got the sense that he had thought better of me, and now had no choice but to consider me a coward.

But what did it matter what he thought?