He liked it, too. “You could try it on me first,” he said.

“But you’re awake.”

“I could fix that.” He strove for lightness, but Sarai could see what it meant to him—what it had meant to him from the first—to open his mind for her, and be her place of safety. Oh, sweet. There was nowhere she would rather go than Dreamer’s Weep with Lazlo Strange.

“All right,” she said. Her voice was soft. His smile was sweet. They went inside, past Isagol’s bed, to the nook in the back, and he lay down. Sarai sat beside him, on the edge of the bed. It would have been so easy to fall back into their wildfire ways. But she only kissed him once, moth-soft, on the safe side of his swollen mouth, and stroked his hair while he fell asleep.

And as she felt him relax by degrees, and saw his breathing slow and deepen, she was overcome by a feeling so powerful she thought surely her ghost couldn’t contain it. It wanted to spill out of her in waves of music and silver light. It would, if she’d let it, she thought. Literal music, actual light. But she didn’t want to wake him, so she kept it inside and felt that the whole of her being was just a fragile skin wrapped around tenderness and aching love, and the kind of surprise you feel when...oh, for example, when you wake up after dying, and get another chance. And when she was sure he was asleep, she did as he’d suggested. She willed forth another moth, and, lifting it carefully from her lips, reached it out toward Lazlo’s brow.

She meant to put her fingers down and maneuver the moth so it was touching them both, to make a bridge for their minds to cross. And...she already knew it wasn’t going to work, even as she reached, because this moth, too, was a mute thing like the ones out on the terrace, not a sentinel for her senses the way it should have been. So a sob was already rising in her throat when her fingers came to rest on his skin.

It was hot. She felt that first, but only for an instant because then...she wasn’t there.

She wasn’t in the nook, sitting by Lazlo’s side, and his brow wasn’t under her hand.

She was...she was in the marketplace of Dreamer’s Weep, encircled by amphitheater walls and colored tents and hawkers’ cries, while, overhead, children in feather cloaks raced over wires strung taut between domes of hammered gold. And Lazlo was standing before her.

Chapter 20

Plenty of Feelings

In her surprise, Sarai jerked her hand back, and the moth, perched on her finger, dislodged and vanished as Lazlo awakened and sat up. “It worked,” he said, sleepy. He was grinning broadly. “Sarai, you did it.”

She was looking at her fingers. The sob was still stuck in her throat. She swallowed it, bewildered. Had it worked? How? “The moth never touched you,” she said. She was sure.

But Lazlo knew he’d seen her, if only for an instant. “Then how. .. ?”

“I touched you,” she said. She was still studying her fingers. She curled them against her palm and looked up to meet his eyes. “I wonder...” she said, and trailed off.

Everything had changed. She’d lost her physical body. The rules were different in this state. Was it outlandish to think her gift might have different rules now, too? What if her moths were gone? What if...she didn’t need them? If there was no more bridge, but only her?

“Lazlo,” she said, her thoughts spinning. “Earlier, in the gallery when I couldn’t speak, and you pressed your cheek against mine... did you feel anything?”

He flushed with shame. He knew the moment she meant. “You were right when you said she’d break me,” he told her, horrified by how close he’d come. “I was ready to do whatever she wanted.”

“But you didn’t.” She was intense. “Why didn’t you?”

He searched for an answer. “All of a sudden...I couldn’t.” His gaze sharpened as he understood. “It was you.”

“What was me? What did you feel?”

“I felt... no,” he said. How else to put it? He could still feel the way it had carved through his mind, pushing everything out of its way. “All of a sudden, it was all there was.” His eyes were on hers, searching for confirmation that it had come from her. “The word no. It was everything. It stopped me.”

She nodded. He had felt it. She’d done something like it in the moment before the blast shook the city, sank the anchor, tipped the citadel, and killed her. She’d seen the explosionist light the fuse, watched the flame race toward the charge, and known Lazlo was walking right toward it. Her moth had been perched on his wrist, and through it she’d assailed him with a fry of feeling that stopped him in his tracks. She’d done it through her moth that time. But today, in the gallery, she’d done it skin to skin. And she had, by touching Lazlo, just now slipped into his dream.

Her gift wasn’t gone. It had changed, as had she. She’d lost her sentinels. She couldn’t fly out into the night anymore and spy on sleepers and creep into their minds. But she could touch someone and slip inside their dreams. “It works directly now,” she said. “Skin to skin.” At those words, both she and Lazlo flushed, imagining how it would be.

And as much as she wanted to test it with him right now—all of him and all of her, in this bed, dozing and waking, blurring back and forth between dream and real, taking what was best from each and loving every second of it—Sarai knew now wasn’t the time. Urgency pricked her. Down the corridor, a little girl was asleep on the floor, locked in unguessable dreams, while a ghost army stood frozen and a city stood empty, and all their fates teetered on such ephemeral things as a green glass bottle tucked between the knees of a flighty fifteen-year-old girl who’d fallen asleep on watch.

. . .

Sarai took the bottle before waking Ruby. She didn’t want her to startle and send it smashing to the floor. And she did startle, and did what anyone does when caught sleeping on watch: She denied it. “I am awake,” she said, instantly argumentative, though no one had suggested otherwise...unless waking someone up automatically constitutes an accusation of sleep.

“Why don’t you go to bed,” said Sarai.

Bleary-eyed, Ruby peered at her. “You’re talking,” she said, because for most of her life, Sarai had been mute after dark. “Your gift.” Even mostly asleep, she knew what this meant. If Sarai still had her voice, then her moths had not come. The two were mutually exclusive.

“It might be different now,” Sarai said, still hesitant to speak with certainty. “You go on. I’ll tell you how it goes.”

Ruby let herself be ushered off to bed, and Sarai sank down on the floor next to Minya, her back against the bed. Lazlo took the chair and the green glass bottle. Minya lay between them.

“Look at her,” said Sarai, and maybe it was just the leftover music and silver light that had filled her, but the sight of the little girl pierced her, and it felt something like tenderness. “Can you believe so much depends on this tiny little thing?”

“Why has she never grown up?” Lazlo asked.

Sarai shook her head. “Stubbornness?” A smile played at the corners of her mouth. “If anyone could dig in and refuse to grow, it’s her.” The smile faded. “But I think it’s more than that. I think she can’t?” She asked it like a question, as though Lazlo might have an answer. “Is there anything like it in any of your stories?”

It wasn’t strange to Lazlo that she would ask that. It seemed to him that fairy tales were full of coded answers. “There is one story,” he said, more to amuse her than anything, “about a princess who decreed that it would remain her birthday until she got the present she wanted. Everyone fussed over her, how they always did, and months passed, and then years, and gifts were brought and rejected, and all the while she stayed just the same.”

“What happened?”

“It’s not helpful, if that’s what you’re hoping. Her parents grew old and died, and nobody cared anymore what she wanted for her birthday, so they put the princess in a cave and left her there and forgot her, and years later, some travelers, seeking refuge from the rain, found an old woman living in the cave, and it was her. She’d grown up.”

“How?”

“All she’d wanted for her birthday was a little peace and quiet.”

Sarai shook her head. “You’re right. It isn’t helpful.”

“I know. But it’s the right answer for somebody’s problem, somewhere in the world.”

“And does some stranger out there have the answer to ours? Can we meet them at a crossroads and swap?”

“Do you think,” Lazlo asked, “that the answer is in there?” He nodded to Minya. Her mind, he meant, knowing in a way that few people do that a mind is a place—a landscape, a wilderness, a city, a world. And that Sarai could go there. It filled him with awe and extraordinary pride.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I know she’s there, and I have to talk to her. I have to change her mind.”

She spoke bravely, but he could see she was afraid. “I wish I could go with you.”

“I wish you could, too.”

“Can I do anything? Get you anything? You see, I’m the one who’s useless.”

“Just be here,” said Sarai.

“Always.”

She knew he would be, no matter what. And with that, fingers trembling, Sarai reached for Minya’s hand, and plunged into her mind.

. . .

Feral did not like his new mattresses. In all fairness, it wasn’t entirely the mattresses’ fault. They could have been perfectly comfortable and he would still have tossed and turned on them, grumbling about the blistering irrationality of Ruby.

Ruby.

Angry he’d never spied on her naked?! And what was all that about “nothing” being the opposite of “something”? Anyway, it wasn’t, if you wanted to be accurate. The opposite of “nothing” was “everything.” And Sparrow! What had she meant by him being bad—spectacularly bad—at noticing feelings? He was not. You didn’t grow up with four girls without noticing plenty of feelings. And embarrassing him in front of Lazlo, that was what really annoyed him. He hoped at least that Lazlo saw how foolish it all was. Sarai wasn’t like that. Lazlo was lucky. Well, Sarai was dead, so maybe not lucky lucky.