her allegiance to the throne. I had fought a similar battle in my head, ever since seeing the story in Melu’s pool. Kirah flushed, surprised at her own outburst. “I’m supposed to be rewriting old sacred texts,” she said, retrieving her imperial summons from her pocket. “Editing away verses that could ‘threaten empire unity.’ I know it’s wrong to question the emperor. But every time I think about changing the old songs … my blood wants to boil.”
“Maybe,” I ventured, “it’s all right to be angry.”
She pressed her lips together, and we stared at the desk in silence, sharing the bond of our uncertainty. In the bittersweet moment, I realized why council members were called siblings. Kirah and I were made of different clay, but the Children’s Palace testmakers had shaped us into similar vessels. Defending the Kunleos had been the carefully crafted goal of our existence. But in these last few months, that purpose had been stripped apart, leaving a hole with no stopper.
“I’m sorry you’re in this mess with me,” I said, throat tight with guilt. “I’m sorry you had to see Dayo bleeding. I’m sorry you had to keep secrets from our council, and cross the empire with Woo In. But—” I squeezed her hand. “I’m so happy you’re in my story, Kirah.”
She squeezed back. “And I’m happy you’re in mine.” We smiled at each other, and then a flash of mischief darted across her face. “You know,” she said. “Traveling with Woo In wasn’t always that bad.”
My brow shot into my hairline. “How not that bad?”
“Mayazatyl was right,” she observed lightly. “Kissing isn’t gross after all.”
I gasped, then laughed, then gasped again. “Kirah.”
“Like you haven’t devoured Sanjeet’s face a million times by now.”
“Not a million.” My face heated. “More like … six.” We both dissolved into giggles, but when we caught our breath I asked, “Why Woo In?”
“Why not? I mean, I didn’t know he had tried to kill Dayo when I kissed him.”
“But he’s odd. And sullen. And old enough to be your …” I considered. “Older brother. All right, that could be worse, but still—”
“I know nothing can happen,” she said abruptly. “He isn’t a council member, so it wouldn’t be right.” Her voice grew uncharacteristically soft. “I just … felt we had something in common. A hunger, I guess.”
“He tried to burn down the Children’s Palace.”
“You lured a man to a cliff and stabbed him with a knife.”
“Good point,” I conceded. “When it comes to friends and lovers, you have horrible taste.”
“Mama would be appalled,” she agreed, but she didn’t sound ashamed in the slightest.
Every day, Kirah returned to the study, keeping me company at my desk while buried in studies of her own. Instead of rewriting sacred texts, she had tracked down every record in the Imperial Library about Songland. For hours she bent over the texts, scribbling notes and occasionally reading lines out loud.
“Look,” she insisted one morning, showing me an etched diagram of rice fields. “Their irrigation techniques are more advanced than ours. They grow mountains of rice, but they can’t trade it with the rest of the continent. So their villages remain poor. It’s not fair, Tar. It’s just not fair.” Minutes later, she blurted, “‘I crest at dawn with the world on my arms. Welcome: My heart rises and breaks. Come and stay awhile.’ A shepherdess wrote that. A shepherdess! People in Songland compose poems for everyday life. Not just for rituals or histories, like Arits do. Tar, isn’t it amazing?”
“I wonder if Ye Eun liked poems,” I murmured. I still dreamed of the girl often, wondering if she had survived. “Did Woo In tell you what the Underworld was like?”
Kirah turned pink, as she always did when I brought up the prince of Songland. We hadn’t heard from him or Kathleen since they’d left Bhekina House. Kirah considered my question. “Woo In said that every step was like dying. Not pain, exactly. Just the cold, gnawing emptiness that every creature feels before its last breath. It’s something you’re only supposed to feel for a moment. Then death relieves you, and you pass into the true afterlife, Core: a paradise at the center of the earth. But Redemptors aren’t really dead … so that relief never comes.”
When a living thing passed through the Breach, Kirah went on to explain, it was only a temporary form of death. If Redemptors found their way out, they could return to the land of living. The only other escape was being killed