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black lace.
    Is this it?
    Panicked, she dug through the paper, searching for clues, tearing faster and faster through the sheets until paper cuts crossed her fingertips and whorls of blood smeared the corners. Until at last she realized that no matter how far she flipped, she never reached the beginning or the end. There was always more beneath her frantic fingers.
    She slammed the box shut and thrust it away. Her hands stung.
    Paper. That’s all they’d wanted. An infinite supply of paper, to be sure, but nothing more than paper, strewn with marks like debris from an explosion.
    Tentatively, she lifted the lid again. With the tip of her finger she traced the strange markings: straight lines like beetle tracks through a dead log, or birds swarming in a white sky. Each tiny sign was perfectly formed, with little flags and short tails at the ends of each stroke, resting on invisible horizontal strings like pins perched on a clothesline. But they weren’t guild signs or crests, and they didn’t make pictures, like tiles in a mosaic.
    They did repeat. She spotted individual marks recurring again and again on a single page, and found entire clusters replicated, sometimes ten or thirty times in perfect patterns.
    But some figures stood alone, isolated by blank space like tents pitched on winter slopes or lampposts on white roads.
    Sefia stiffened.
    She’d seen these signs before.
    They had been carved onto some of her toys, brightly painted wooden blocks, their sides engraved with symbols and simple pictures. There had been a whole set of them.
    A mongoose.
    An artichoke.
    A ring.
    She used to sit in the kitchen for hours, building caravans on the table while her mother sliced up garden vegetables or butchered hens at the counter, her knife quick and confident on the cutting board, her brown hands flecked with pale scars. Every so often she’d look out the window for Sefia’s father, then turn back to Sefia and slide the blocks across the table—the snake, the elk, the feather—singing in her soft voice, “Ess-ee-eff-aye-ay.”
    â€œEssie effai yay,” Sefia repeated, laughing.
    â€œYes.” Her mother brushed her cheek with the curve of her finger. “Sefia, my little Sefia.”
    Sefia blinked tears out of her eyes and touched the mark, like she could impress it onto her skin.
    â€œEss,” she whispered.
    The symbol had a meaning, and a
sound
, as if it had beenplucked from the real world and pressed flat, like some strange dark flower, between the pieces of paper. And that sound was a hiss, like a sting or the sizzle of water on coals.
    She scrubbed at her face. Her mother had been teaching her to decipher the symbols, before the fevers, the awful hacking and coughing and the blood-spattered handkerchiefs, the way her mother wasted away to almost nothing.
    Her father had burned the blocks the day after her mother died. She remembered him crouched in front of the stone hearth, feeding her toys into the flames.
    â€œDaddy, no!” She tried to stop him, but he caught her, drawing her flailing body into his arms.
    â€œIt’s not safe. You weren’t supposed to know,” he said, murmuring into her dark hair. “It’s not safe.”
    Sefia let out a wail, crying for her mother.
    â€œMommy’s gone.” Her father stroked her hair as the firelight flickered over the scar at his temple. “She’s gone, Sefia. It’s just you and me now.”
    She buried her cheek in the extra folds of his sweater and watched the paint curl as the fire consumed the blocks.
    â€œWe’re a team, you and me,” he said. “We’re in this together, no matter what.”
    The sound of his weeping blended with hers, and she squeezed him tighter, like she’d never let go.
    Sefia was crying again, her tears smudging the ink. She dabbed at the smears with the cuff of her shirt.
    The strange symbols were
words
. The paper was filled with them.