“Yes, she is.”

“She insulted you.”

“I left the door open.”

“So what?”

“She was anxious to impress you.”

“Why are you defending her?” Her eyes got narrow. “Wait. Is this the woman you mentioned in prison? The one you said was something like a mother?”

I didn’t like the disgust in her voice. I felt like a child caught pretending that a rag doll was a princess. I hated even more the way Sid’s expression was shifting into pity.

“There is no excuse for how she behaved toward you,” Sid said. “I don’t think you see things clearly.”

Which had always been exactly my problem, although after finding streaks of color beneath the white paint on the walls of the Ward, I was starting to wonder whether my judgment was really as bad as I’d always thought. “My life is none of your concern,” I said stiffly. “You and I have a bargain. I will help you, and when you have what you want you will leave. You won’t even remember this conversation.”

“Of course I will.”

I shook my head. How many times had someone forgotten a conversation that I remembered perfectly?

“I will take you anywhere in the Ward you want to go,” I said. “But there’s something important I want to show you.” I told her about the colored paint beneath the whitewashed walls. “I dreamed about it, after I drank a dream sold in the night market.”

“Tell me about this dream,” she said, so I did. I wanted to pull us away from the fact that she would leave here and go back to her old life. I didn’t want to hear her insist again that somehow, in the midst of a life that I couldn’t imagine, one far away from here, she would remember me. I told her everything about the dream, except that I had had a conversation with my younger self in it. That felt too personal—and too strange—to share.

She stood and reached for a gorgeously pink damask purse. Its lining was a shocking blue. When she reached inside the purse it looked like her hand was disappearing into a midday summer sky. She withdrew the prayer book of the gods and gave it to me. “Can you find the murdered creature from your dream?”

I sat at the edge of her bed and paged through the book. I’d had no idea that people had once believed in so many gods. The god of echoes. Of tunnels. Of unspoken words. Of lies. Of games. The wind. The lost.

There were illustrations, and when I found what I was looking for I paused, then continued through the book, glancing at each page only long enough to record the image of it in my mind.