to unite her with her shadow far below.
Her muscles flexed, she bent her knees, the moment passed, and then there was only her and the wire. She was already halfway across when she realized she was being watched. She let her vision expand, but kept her focus. Inej would never forget the look on her father’s face as he returned from the river with her uncle and cousins, his head tilted up at her, mouth a startled black O, her mother emerging from the wagon and pressing a hand over her heart. They had stayed silent, afraid to break her concentration—her first audience on the wire, mute with terror that felt to her like adulation.
Once she’d climbed down, her mother had spent the better part of an hour alternating between hugging her and shrieking at her. Her father had been stern, but she hadn’t missed the pride in his gaze or the grudging admiration in her cousins’ eyes.
When one of them had taken her aside later and said, “How do you walk so fearlessly?” she’d simply shrugged and said, “It’s just walking.”
But that wasn’t true. It was better than walking. When others walked the wire, they fought it—the wind, the height, the distance. When Inej was on the high wire, it became her world. She could feel its tilt and pull. It was a planet and she was its moon. There was a simplicity to it that she never felt on the swings, where she was carried away by momentum. She loved the stillness she could find on the wire, and it was something no one else understood.
She had fallen only once, and she still blamed it on the net. They’d strung it up because Hanzi was adding a unicycle to his act. One moment Inej was walking and the next she was falling. She barely had time to register it before she hit the net—and bounced right out of it onto the ground. Inej felt somewhat startled to discover how very hard the earth was, that it would not soften or bend for her. She broke two ribs and had a lump on her head the size of a fat goose egg.
“It’s good that it’s so large,” her father murmured over it. “That means the blood is not inside her brain.”
As soon as Inej’s bandages came off, she was back on the wire. She never worked with a net again. She knew it had made her careless. But looking down now, she could admit she wouldn’t have minded a little insurance. Far below, the moonlight caught the curves of the cobblestones, making them look like the black seeds of some exotic fruit. But the net stashed behind the guardhouse was useless with only Nina there to hold it, and regardless of what Kaz had originally intended, the new plan hadn’t been built around someone in plain sight holding a net. So Inej would walk as she had always done, with nothing to catch her, borne aloft by her invisible wings.
Inej slid the balance pole from its loop on her vest and, with a flick, extended it to its full length. She tested its weight in her hands, flexed her toes in her slippers. They were leather, stolen from the Cirkus Zirkoa at her request. Their smooth soles lacked the firm, tactile grip of her beloved rubber shoes, but the slippers allowed her to release more easily.
At last the signal came from Nina, a brief flash of green light.
Inej stepped out onto the wire. Instantly, the wind snatched at her and she released a long breath, feeling its per sis tent tug, using the flexible pole to pull her center of gravity lower.
She let her knees bounce once. Thankfully, the wire had almost no give. She walked, feeling the hard press of it beneath the arches of her feet. With each step, it bowed slightly, eager to twist away from her gripping toes.
The air felt warm against her skin. It smelled of sugar and molasses. Her hood was down and she could feel the hairs from her braid escaping to tickle her face. She focused on the wire, feeling the familiar kinship she’d experienced as a child, as if the wire were clinging to her as closely as she clung to it, welcoming her into that mirror world, a secret place occupied by her alone. In moments, she’d reached the rooftop of the second silo.
She stepped onto it, retracting the balance pole and returning it to its sling. She took