She and I were similar in one way that Annin was different. Morah and I were good at managing expectations—I by not having any and she by imagining the prize to be more attainable than it really was. Morah had probably decided that a dead Elysium bird would not be such a miracle as a living one. Therefore, it would not be impossible that she would be the one to have its valuable corpse.

“There are its feathers,” she said. “Its meat.”

And its hollow bones, which play a lilting melody when you blow through them.

I cut butter into flour. “The bird is out there. We are in here.”

Annin opened the one slender window. Cold came in like water. Morah muttered in annoyance, but I said nothing. It hurt to look at Annin, at her hope. The shape of her stubborn chin reminded me of Helin.

Annin swept crumbs from the worktable into her palm. I didn’t watch her go to the window. I couldn’t. There was an ache in my throat. I saw things that weren’t there. Things I wanted to forget.

She sprinkled the crumbs on the open window’s sill.

“Just in case,” she said.

3

THEY SAY THAT THE SONG of the Elysium bird makes you dream.

They say that these dreams remedy the past, take the sting out of memories, dust them up along the edges, blur them with soft pencils, the kind of pencils whose color you can smudge with a finger. The dreams make what’s missing in your life seem unimportant, because what is there suddenly entices.

Imagine the stars hung closer: spikes of ice. Imagine the simple comfort of an ordinary blanket gone gorgeously soft. How could you ever slip the blanket off, when it feels like the fur of a mythical creature that can read your mind, and knew who you were before you were born?

Its song holds the grace of a mother’s first smile.

A kind stranger brushing rain from your shoulder.

A kite flown on the Islim shore, sky peeking through its vented slits: little slices of blue so solid in color that you feel you could catch them and carry them home.

Feeling someone’s arms around you grow heavy with sleep.

They say the bird was blessed by a god, though we can’t remember which one.

That the sight of its red feathers will charm people.

In the Ward, where we must live the whole of our lives, never leaving, never allowed to leave, the promise of anything different was enough to bring everyone out into the streets. Turn them into hunters. Demolish friendships. I wanted to tell Annin to shut the window. Don’t go outside. This is the sort of thing people will kill for.

But I wanted that bird, too.

4