“It’s me,” the girl broke in. “Only me, the daughter of shepherds. Tell them.” The girl turned to Alba. “Tell them I’m the one they are seeking.”

Alba’s throat was tight. She’d fibbed, she’d lied, she’d made up a prophecy of the heir—the heirs!—traveling on their own to the king, and here was the girl anyway, come true despite the lie. She’d not been able to stop the king’s desperate search… and now how could she reveal this girl, even to free the others? “I…,” she began, but she could not determine what words would keep the girl safe. “I, the oracle-app-apprentice…,” she stammered, desperate to say the right thing. She could not leave the girl to the king and his worm-mouthed advisor.

“Never mind, never mind,” said the advisor, as though kindly. A set of knobbed fingers patted her shoulder. “It’s difficult. I see. Perhaps some help?” He crooked a knuckle at a guard on the far side of the chamber.

Disappearing through a door, the guard returned moments later, a mottled mob shambling in around him. “In you go! In you go!” He herded the mottled throng into the room. It shuffled, stumbled, dispersed.

The heir let out a small cry. Alba, too, felt alarm scrabbling out of her throat. She put her hand to her mouth—Oh!

“You see, Apprentice”—soft as a worm, the advisor murmured next to her ear—“here are the ones whose birth we cannot determine.”

A faint ringing—Alba could find no words to shape thoughts.

She tried to count. Recount. Thirty? No, that was wrong. Fifty? More?

She heard the heir—a horrified whisper: “Let them go!”

Children. The children.

They did not look like children. They had the shape of children—knobby knees and elbows, too-long limbs on still-small bodies—but they had no roundness in their cheeks. No softness about their eyes. No light in their eyes. Their skin did not glow as other children’s did—warm with health and promise. They looked emptied, hollow but for their bones, no emotion, even, to fill out their gray forms.

Perhaps Alba looked the same way.

If the king felt any twinge of doubt or guilt seeing these children, his face, pudding-smooth, did not betray it.

“Alba,” came a whisper from the crowd.

Her eyes flickered over the group; she could not see who was speaking.

“She didn’t help,” came another voice. Flat. Defeated. “Just as I said.”

“No, she didn’t,” the governor-advisor tutted, his voice dripping, honey-sweet. “And she isn’t helping now.”

“I’m sorry!” Alba cried, still unable to see. “I’m sorry!”

And then she spotted them—the little boy who’d held her hand in the wagon, the older boy who’d spoken so cynically. Clothes just rags and filth, they stood near the edge, the older trying to keep the younger from running to her.

Meeting the older boy’s eyes, she saw not blame or anger as she’d expected, but sorrow… sorrow and, perhaps, pity—the mirror of her own.

Leaving Alba among the guards, the governor-advisor crossed to the children and pulled the little boy close. He squirmed, trying to get away. “Alba, Alba.” The boy repeated her name as though it were a spell to set things right. “Alba!”