You think it is unfair that she is punished for what you did? the mistress asked me once she stopped and sent Helin back to work. She said, This is how the world is. The sooner you know it, the better.

Her eyes had a hard polish to them. She was Half Kith like the rest of us.

This is sometimes how I see Helin in my mind, I told Sid. Her left palm lifted to the level of her face, head bowed, thin shoulders twitching at the fall of the slender baton in the mistress’s hand.

It was because I let you do my work, she later said to me, wrapped hand cradled to her chest. The mistress saw me let you.

I think Helin meant to comfort me, to take blame when I believed she bore none, but I felt all the more guilty. I could tell, from her tight face and skittish eyes, that she felt guilty, too. Maybe this was what the mistress had meant: that there is no possible way to understand fairness and guilt when your world has already determined a set of rules that don’t make sense.

Helin said she liked that I saw things no one else did, but this was no great asset of mine, and I did not share the fact of them with Sid. The visions were something I had learned to ignore: a shimmer of a fountain in the orphanage’s bare brick courtyard. As a young child, I’d go to the fountain and open my mouth to taste. My tongue touched only air. I’d look again. Nothing. No fountain. No curved jets of fresh water flowing from marble fingertips, gathering in a pool at the sculpture’s marble feet, a mosaic puzzle of colored tiles below the surface.

I’d realize that all the other girls were staring. They avoided me. Of course they did. The orphanage, while plain, with whitewashed interior walls, was a vast structure amply able to hold us all, with space enough for us to avoid one another if we wished.

For Helin, though, the things I saw were a source of pleasure. Like books, I suppose. Or theater, for the High Kith. To her it was an appealing strangeness. A difference from the daily work and fatigue and bland, wholesome food. Harmless, she said, and I came to believe this because I trusted her. They are dreams, she said, except that you have them while you are awake. I will tell you what’s real.

She always did. She never laughed.