Nervousness bubbled in my stomach. I had never thought of my eyes as green. I had glanced at them briefly, once, in Raven’s handheld mirror. The color looked murky and unstable: not quite brown but nothing else easily named. “Hazel,” Morah said when I asked.

I touched my chest, where the Elysium feather rested beneath the coat and my shirt. “It’s just a trick of the light.”

Perhaps the myths about Elysium feathers were true, because his expression softened as he lifted the lamplight to look more deeply into my face. “Pretty eyes,” he said. “What’s this?” He touched the burn on my cheek. I flinched in pain. “It’s not on your heliograph.”

“The burn is recent. It happened the other day.”

“It is fresh.” He kept his hand beneath my chin. His face was changing as he stared at me. I resisted pulling away. He said, “How did that happen?”

My mind raced through possibilities. “I was curling my hair.” The laws stipulated that only Middling and High-Kith women could have waves or curls in their hair. Usually I straightened mine as best I could, but tonight I had run water through my hair to bring out its natural wave. “The hot tongs slipped.”

He brushed a hand through my hair. Was this normal? Did all guards at the gates do this, even to Middlings?

The back of my neck prickled.

A Half Kith would let him touch her. Would a Middling object?

Could she?

I didn’t know, so I pretended I enjoyed his touch. I smiled.

“A pity,” he said, and his hand fell. He stamped my passport, returned it, and waved me through the gate.

A night market.

A sea of tents and stands clustered together in a labyrinth just beyond the gate. I felt small and easily lost, like a bead dropped to a cluttered floor. Lamps with stained glass in Middling shades of blue swung from ropes that zigzagged overhead. Middlings cried their wares.

Tables were heaped with fruit whose names I did not know. I had never seen their shapes. A woman near me, wearing a dress with a bit of embroidery on the sleeves that marked her as Middling, touched a yellow fruit and smelled it, so I dared to do the same to one with a satiny purple surface that dented beneath my thumb. It smelled dusky and tangy.

“Mind your kith,” the fruit seller said.

I quickly set the fruit down.

“Perrins are not for the likes of you,” he said. “You know as well as I do that no Middling can eat these. Unless you work for a family in the High quarter and have a writ to prove you’re shopping for their kitchens, you have no business even touching this fruit.”

“I’m sorry. Please—”