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has no reason to know I exist, either.” He didn’t sound convincing. “Apple?”
    “What then?” Cooper caught the green fruit as Asher tossed it in the air and spun around, continuing down the lane.
    Asher snapped, “She’s a greedy bitch who’d grind her heel into half the city if she could. Lallowë Thyu is the worst kind of aristocrat. The kind whose foreign beginnings—which ought to make her a gentler citizen—only fuel her insane hunger for status, power, and things.” His fists were clenched and he looked very much like he wanted to make a run for it. “I hate things.”
    “Not much of a materialist, are you?” Cooper teased the gray man’s back as he walked away, then crunched off a bite of apple. “Or a royalist?” It tasted just like an apple should taste, which somehow put him at ease.
    “Royalist?” Asher spat. He did not sound friendly now, not at all. “No! No, I am not.” He paused as another carriage came tumbling down down the alley, this one a windowless commercial lorry. His eyes lit up. “Bells. I’m not a lot of things, Cooper. For instance, I am not your friend.”
    “What does that mean?” Cooper asked, feeling a stab of fear and a lonely realization, but Asher only shook his head.
    “Sesstri’s right—you’re not what I’m looking for, Cooper. I’m sorry. I have other failures to fix. I hope I gave you a bit of a head start, kid, but you’re on your own. Just like everyone else.”
    Asher reached out and grabbed the corner of the lorry as it rolled by, stepping up onto the footman’s perch. Cooper just stood there, gaping as wordlessly— as he had earlier that morning on the hill above Displacement—watching the carriage speed away with the tall gray- skinned man who had been Cooper’s only hope.
    “Don’t forget all we talked about,” Asher called out. “You’ll need it.”

2
    My friend Lao-tzu says, “Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.”
    Of course Lao doesn’t mean the absence of light, you’ll see that. No, all of his friends appreciate that Lao-tzu finds freedom in that ultimate ignorance we all must face eventually: death. But I was raised to believe in a god who died for my sins. Of course I never believed in sin, and when death never came I had nothing left to pretend to believe.
    It is like that everywhere, you’ll discover. Names for gods that never existed or who lied about what they were, or disappeared ages and ages ago. Tedious ends to tedious pedagoguery, but there you have it.
    My friend Lao-tzu also says, and I think him terrifically wise for pointing it out, that names are a waste of time. “The unnamable is the eternally real,” he tells me, and I do think he’s right about that. “Naming is the origin of all particular things.” This means something a little profound, obviously, because it suggests that “things” can never be real.
    Was that ever truer than in the case of worship?
    Who is Christ on the cross to me now? I haven’t seen him at any of the parties.
    —Truman Capote, Better Birds
    Sesstri Manfrix sat at her desk, watching the ink dry on another page of another journal and holding her quill in her hand like a poisonous spider. Everything was so different here. The City Unspoken was like nowhere she’d ever lived, and as much as the filth and decay offended her senses, she knew she’d make more discoveries here than in any library she’d ever scoured. There was enough history and unspeakable age here to fill a thousand ruined cities and still have mystery to spare.
    It was an historian’s nirvana. Or her nightmare.
    And then there was Asher.
    When she met him, murdering books in a library, he’d been awkwardly formal, and Sesstri had been too keen to work out the etiology of his colorless skin to notice the intensity of Asher’s gaze. Yes, she would accept payment to help him with his research. Yes, she would be interested in knowing the subject matter. Yes, she was well versed in any