I thought about how the poems would be sewn together and bound between leather and sold to a High Kith.

I saw Sid’s hand turning the pages.

I saw her coat hanging in my wardrobe.

I remembered the pattern of colored lights I had seen in the city beyond the wall, and Sid’s story about a pocket watch that could tell someone’s emotions instead of the time. If such a pocket watch could read what I felt then, it would have shown danger.

I wanted to see the rest of the city.

I wanted to see Sid.

I went back to the printing press and finally, after so many years of wondering whether I would ever dare, I began to forge a document for myself.

19

I WAITED UNTIL EVERYONE WAS long asleep. I shrugged into Sid’s coat. A reflection of me glowed in the lamplight on my bedroom window, hands moving up the coat as I buttoned it despite the heat. My heart stammered beneath my fingers. The face of my reflection was a black shadow, hair falling forward. I tucked my hair behind my ears and then untucked it, remembering the burn on my cheek.

A passport rested in the coat’s inside breast pocket. After printing pages that described false personal details, such as my name and parentage, but my true physical details, I had stitched them into a thin, small booklet using dark blue Middling thread that I had taken from Raven’s supplies, which were hidden below a floor tile in the kitchen that sprung gently open when you pressed its edge. The tile was white, but sometimes I thought I saw a shadow of something beneath the glaze, a figure or face. When I said that to Raven the first time she showed me this hiding place, she frowned and said that the tile was pure white and had always been white.

Using a finely pointed pen, I signed the name of a clerk for the Council, slanting his Ls and dotting his lowercase double Is with short, punctuated flecks that were more dashes than dots. He liked to sweep a complicated filigree below his name, and I remembered perfectly the true signature Raven had shown me, which I had replicated many times for other documents. I traced it on the paper. I glued the heliograph that Aden had made for me into a cardstock frame, which prefaced the pages that would show when and how many times I had passed through the wall’s gate, or had left the city. I stamped a handful of dates on those pages for over the past few years, using watered-down blue ink for the older dates, and strong blue for the newer ones. The stamp had been obtained by Raven, as were all the others among her supplies. I didn’t know how she managed to get them, whether through theft, money under the table, or favors owed.