“Of course I remember you from the last Market,” Sin said, restoring her knife to her pocket. “Who could forget you?”
“Actually,” Alan said, earnest and clear-eyed, “this is my first time playing poker.”
Sin laughed, delighted, loving the sunlight shining on the Thames and playing a part with someone who understood she was playing.
“What are you doing here?” she asked softly. “Were you following me?”
A few guys had followed her before and it had been shocking, frightening: They had wanted to own a bit of her without her knowledge or her permission. She had been furious.
If Alan had followed her, he’d wanted to help. She wasn’t furious.
She was glad, she thought, and stranger than that, uncertain and blossoming, she was hopeful in a way that was new to her.
Sin had had very few actual crushes, seldom felt interest that survived from one meeting to the next. It was hard to take boys seriously when they were at best diversions and at worst easy marks.
She was taking this one seriously. Alan was looking down at her, grave and attentive, his steady gaze seeing a lot more than people usually did. She wanted him to see more, and to like what he saw.
“I was following someone else,” Alan told her.
Sin said, “I see.”
“Then I saw you, and I thought you could maybe use a hand. Though I’m sure you could have dealt with it yourself.”
“Thank you.” Sin made an effort, painful in a way acting usually wasn’t for her, and tried to smile a casual smile. “Really, I appreciate it. If you need to go find someone, feel free. Thanks again. Unless you’d like my help?”
“No,” said Alan. “I’m all right.”
He took her at her word and began to limp up the slope to the cathedral. Sin looked away automatically, across the water at the magicians’ boat.
Then she knew who Alan had been following, and knew she had no head start on Mae at all.
There on the shining white deck stood Celeste Drake. Beside her and even shorter than Celeste, looking utterly at her ease, was Mae.
Sin realized that she hadn’t believed Matthias when he’d warned her about Mae. Beneath all her jealousy, she’d still thought of Mae as her friend, someone who could ultimately be trusted. These days there wasn’t much for Sin to rely on.
The clouds above the river were parting, sunlight rippling along the surface of the water. Mae’s pink hair shone, and against her hair gleamed a knife in a circle.
The sign of a messenger. Of someone sworn to the service of the magicians.
Sin called her father as she was walking toward the Tube station and offered to come and see him. He sounded tired and abstracted on the phone—he worked too hard—and she said quickly, “I don’t have to. Just thought it might be an idea. I don’t want to be a bother.”
“Please come,” he said, as he always did. “It’s no trouble at all, Thea. It’s always good to see you.”
Sin got back on the Tube, changing for the Circle Line to get to Brixton. It was a long walk from the Tube station to her father’s house, but she had turned down lifts from him so many times that he’d stopped offering.
Usually she liked the walk all right, a time to be alone as she seldom was and think, but today she felt numb. It was all too much: Merris corrupt and almost lost, Mae a traitor, the constant threat that Lydie would betray her magic to someone else, and the whole Market like a beloved but heavy weight placed around Sin’s neck by someone who was trying to drown her. These days she felt like she was never able to break the surface often enough to draw proper breaths.
She walked by the shabby brown library and up the long road past a park and many blocks of flats, taking a left until she reached the residential area with fancy houses and very few shops. There were trees along the street where her father lived, their roots cracking and disrupting the pavement but their leaves forming a soft gold roof above Sin’s head and carpeting the cement they had disturbed with layers of green, brown, yellow and the occasional spot of scarlet.
It was a nice house, she’d always thought, its windows huge rectangles of glass, the roof pointed. It looked like a house belonging to people who were nice and had no secrets. It was a bit ridiculous that there was a room in it that Dad called her room.
It wasn’t her room, not really. She hadn’t slept a night in it since she was a kid, before Mama and Dad split up.
Dad had kept trying to make them settle here, when Mama had never wanted to settle anywhere. Sin had always liked the house, liked her cousins on her dad’s side who had taken her to the Notting Hill carnival and out dancing when she and Dad had reconciled and she was older. She hadn’t been against settling down, but she had been against the idea of settling for less than a dance every month at the Market.
In the end, Dad had settled here without them.
Sin knocked on the blue-painted door, and her dad answered on the first knock as he always did, as if he was afraid she would give up and go away if he wasn’t fast enough.
“Thea,” he said, and put his arms around her. They were about the same height now: He wasn’t very tall. “It’s good to see you. You look beautiful.”
“Yeah, not much has changed,” Sin said, and summoned up a smile for him.
He had lived with Mama for years, so he was a bit too accustomed to playacting. When he released her, he reached out and touched the side of her face with his hand.
