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before the government withdrew into the Dome— but now whole sections of the city seethed with black-clad youths engaged in constant battle against each other and the City Unspoken. Despite the untapped trove of history she knew lay within those impossible towers, Sesstri hadn’t ventured anywhere near them, yet.
    She’d learned from her contacts in Amelia Heights, from the artists and the artisans who still clung to their homes there, about the power of the forces marshaling around those towers. The gangs, collectively called the Undertow, had acquired something since the prince’s absence, some power or leverage that allowed their influence to grow: the liches, undead spellcasters with human intelligence and ambition, had either grown in number or flocked to the City Unspoken from elsewhere, filling a power vacuum. Their thralls—well, the youths had swelled in numbers to an even greater degree, and while the Death Boys and Charnel Girls weren’t undead themselves, they’d tasted something of it, and it gave them power. The names they’d given themselves along rudimentary gender lines, Death Boys and Charnel Girls, they seemed silly names to her, but as a collective the thugs posed a real threat to the declining stability of the city.
    And yet, the Undertow were only a symptom. The Dome, which dwarfed even the flaming towers and smoldered with a different light— gold and green, full of life—it worried her far more than a little army of children and monsters. Armies were finite. The damage to the City Unspoken, decapitated from its leadership, was much harder to quantify. Anarchy during crisis yielded nothing good.
    She didn’t quite trust Asher, despite wanting to. And she wanted him, despite not trusting herself one bit.
    If only she hadn’t lied about Cooper. If only Asher had possessed the good sense not to trust her, or the kindness not to take the boy to the Guiselaine and leave her to ponder her error. She didn’t understand the pallid man—maybe that was why she felt so odd in his presence, as if she weren’t quite as brilliant as usual—more spiteful, less gracious.
    She’d told Asher everything but the crucial fact. She’d identified from the construction and branding of Cooper’s clothing alone that his entire culture was childborn. There was a certain solipsistic air about civilizations that were illiterate to their larger metaversial context—her homeworld had been no different in that regard.
    But if Asher knew that Cooper had a navel . . . He’d be furious, but she’d been certain she would think of an answer before they returned. Nobody who’d died had a navel, only the childborn, for as long as they lived in their first flesh—only they had that scar, that connection to their mother and their first, only, literal birth. Sesstri put her hand to her own belly, flat and hard and perfectly smooth. She didn’t like to think about her navel, or how she’d lost it.
    But the more Sesstri considered the question, the less certain she grew that there was an answer to Cooper’s arrival—or at least, no answer that she could uncover with mere perspicacity. No, the more she considered it, the less sense Cooper made. A navel. He was an erratum, to be sure, growing ever more erratic, and Sesstri’s conviction that Cooper was worthless faltered.
    What would she have done if Asher hadn’t left the room before she’d stripped the foundling? How could she admit to him that she had no idea how such a thing was possible? To commute between worlds without death as your oarsman was impossible for lesser beings. For a godlike being—one of the First People—or an incredibly powerful mortal, certainly, but for a childborn young man like Cooper to wake up intact in his original body, the body of his childbirth? Sesstri couldn’t explain that.
    And she had no intention of telling Asher the truth until she could.
    She walked the empty house, worried. Sesstri never worried. And she never lied to a