On the walk home through the Ward, I kept my hand in my pocket, my fingers on Raven’s image, tracing the sharp-edged square. Though I had rinsed my face and mouth and hands, I felt coated with something sticky. Sometimes people want things so badly you feel like it’s your obligation to give it. I knew that was wrong, yet I had gone to bed with Aden anyway, as if I had built my own trap. Now he would expect more from me. A sick, worried feeling settled in my stomach. I blamed Aden. I blamed myself. I wasn’t sure who really was to blame.

A snake spun itself out of a crack in the pavement. Viridian green, it looked as though woven from grass, it was aware of me, but it was the kind of snake that hides, not bites, and it trickled quickly away. I envied it. A snake will not stay to please you. It will do nothing it does not want to do.

I pity who I was then: a girl riven by her mistake, beholden to the needs of others, and trained to diminish her own. I was a snake that had not yet learned to strike.

Yet Raven merely nodded when I gave her the heliograph. “It’s a good thing you found it,” she said.

It worried me, how secrets were beginning to pile up. The heliograph. That I didn’t share Aden’s feelings. The dead militiaman. My passport. Going beyond the wall. Sid.

Surely, at some point, one of these secrets would slip into full view. It would be seen.

I would be seen.

But Raven barely glanced at the heliograph, and accepted without question that I had overlooked it the night I had retrieved the others from the cistern.

I touched the red Elysium feather hidden below my shirt. I was safe for now.

“Go to the kitchen,” Raven said. “You’re late for the bread. Annin had to start the rising without you and serve an early customer, an important one at that. I need to be able to rely on you, Nirrim.”

I felt ashamed that I had just tricked her and strangely grateful that she was still not pleased with me. If she had shown me kindness I would have felt worse in my deceit. I promised myself that I wouldn’t let her down again.

In the kitchen, Annin’s eyes widened into blue mirrors when she saw me. “Someone came to be served breakfast. And so early!”

“Yes, I know. I’m—”

“I have never served someone like this. I was so nervous.”

Annin was easily made nervous, especially under Raven’s watchful eye, so I didn’t think anything of this. Then Annin said, “She was High.”

“Really?” My pulse fluttered in my throat. “Who was she?”