Raven smiled and she tipped my chin up. “That burn is coming along very nicely indeed. Soon you won’t even know it was ever there.”

“Are you sure I should go to the printer’s?”

Raven’s head reared back. She stared. I had never questioned her before.

“I mean,” I said quickly, “it is so soon after my arrest. What if the militia is watching?” I didn’t think that the soldier’s death would be traced back to me, but I worried.

Her lips thinned. “Are you afraid? Remember: there are people who need our help.”

“I know.” I felt haunted by the heliographs I had dropped into the cistern the night of the Elysium and later retrieved. I had given them to Raven, but I kept seeing the faces, especially those of the children. I wanted them to have the chance to grow up beyond the wall.

“Risk is part of what we do,” Raven said.

I nodded. When I stepped outside into the breezy sunshine, however, a voice in my head whispered, She takes no risks. You are the one risking everything.

But it was not my voice. It was Sid’s.

Harvers, the printer, had an arrangement with Raven that went like this: I would exchange a few hours of simple labor for the use of his materials and press. He always praised my work. “So swift,” he would say as I assembled the tiny metal letters in the frame of the press. So long as no one had changed the organization of the letters in the type box, I could pluck each letter from the box without even looking, and needed to glance only once at whatever manuscript or typeset page Harvers asked me to print.

It was like Aden’s heliographs. The image of each page had been burned in my mind.

The workshop smelled of leather, ink, and ammonia. So did Harvers, whose back was perpetually slumped and his hands gnarled. He was not old, but a malady had taken over his body, causing his hands to shake. Still, he could make the most gorgeous books. I loved to see them lined up on shelves: jewel-toned leather bindings, golden clasps, the titles blind embossed. Inside were illuminated pages and words stamped in gold foil. He never minded me looking, or even reading, although these books were meant to be sold to Middlings, who could not keep them, either, but would sell them to the High Kith at a profit.

That day he asked me to print a book of poetry, one whose first edition was centuries old, he said, and written by a woman. Each poem was a fragment as brief as a breath. “A dirty book,” Harvers said with a wink.