“You did?” he said, but as soon as he said it, another film unspooled in his head. His little song, telling him all about this woman, what she looked like, how she would sometimes brush her hair away from her forehead at night. Her imaginary friend. T, T, T. Tara, Tabitha, Tiffany—

“Trixie!” he said.

“Yes, she did call me that. She thought I was magic.”

“I thought you were a ghost,” he said, not what he meant. He tapped his temple.

“I am no ghost,” said Ava. “And I am always and forever a lady.” She took his hand. Her fingers were warm.

“A lady,” he repeated. “Yes.”

She said, “I stayed away for so long. I wanted to. But a person gets curious despite herself. And as far away as I’d gotten, word of you came to me. I heard that you had some interesting theories about the Cipher and the people who had created it. That the Morningstarrs liked to laugh.”

“The world is a funny place,” he said. The right words.

“They did like to laugh. In the beginning anyway. Your Miriam liked to laugh, too. She reminded me of them. Of Tess. So I would visit occasionally, after everyone else went to sleep. I have spent much of my life watching everyone else sleep. In beds. In graves.”

Benjamin tried to make sense of what she was saying, but the words and their meanings got tangled in his head. Everything seemed to be backward, or upside down.

“I have a question for you,” she said. “And I need you to try and answer, though I know it might be difficult.”

“Yes,” he said. Yes, it might be difficult; yes, he would try.

“Did you know?” she said. “Did you know who the children were?”

The children? The children. Far kinder tsereist men a velt. For your children you would tear the world apart. Maybe he had.

But he couldn’t answer the woman’s question because the children were the children, no more, no less. Who else could they be but themselves?

He shrugged helplessly. Her smile was so sad it almost broke his heart. He hadn’t known there was so much of it left to break.

“I thought I was too old to be angry,” Ava said. “I thought too much time had passed, too many people had come and gone. I thought I was numb. But . . .” She hesitated. Her dark eyes were filled with pain and grief and rage and loneliness and something else he was sure he wouldn’t have been able to name even before he’d lost everything, even before all the words had gotten scrambled in his head.

“I’m not numb after all,” she said, not to him, but to herself.

He wasn’t, either. He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.

“All the little songs will be here soon,” he said, both an invitation and a warning.