“Where do I get a pass?” she asked. She couldn’t explain it, but just as she felt somehow stronger here, freer, more purposeful than she ever had, she was also being drawn up and up, pulled toward the very top of the city, as if the whole landscape were exerting on her a reverse gravitational force.

The men exchanged a look. Despite the strangeness of their faces, Dea could tell that they were bewildered. “From the king,” one of them said, turning back to Dea. “Where else would you get it?”

“But—” Dea started to protest. Then she heard footsteps behind her, and a voice, half-breathless, spoke up.

“She’s with me.”

It was the boy again: the boy from the desert, the one who’d told her to come through the mirrors.

“You’re following me,” she said, to conceal the fact that she was relieved to see him.

“You’re welcome.” He barely glanced at her, instead reaching into his shirt pocket and removing a small golden book that resembled a passport—presumably, this was the pass from the king. When he handed it to the guards, Dea sucked in a quick breath. Immediately, the pass dissolved into a hundred winged insects, glittering like gold, which arranged themselves into a complex design in midair.

“The king’s crest,” the boy said. Dea wasn’t sure if he was speaking with her or to the guards. Today he was dressed all in black, in standard trousers and a shirt with a stiff collar. He’d even made some effort to untangle his hair. She wondered whether this was his city look.

He held out his hand again and the shape collapsed, siphoning into his outstretched palm, as the insects once again flattened themselves into a paper booklet.

“All right.” The guard stepped aside. “Just keep your pass handy. You’ll need to show it again.”

“I know the rules,” the boy said. He gestured for Dea to go first. “After you.”

Here there were hardly any shops at all: just beautiful homes set behind high gates, half-concealed behind enormous trees Dea had no name for.

“Why are you following me?” she asked in a low voice, as soon as they’d left the guards behind, since the boy no longer denied that he was.

“I’m helping you,” he corrected her. “This way.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward yet another staircase, this one flanked by stone lions—that, Dea noticed, shifted position occasionally, or yawned, or blinked. Dea again felt that explosion, as if someone had set off a fire deep in her blood.

“Where are we going?” She removed her hand from his, deliberately, partly because she had suddenly wanted not to remove it—to cling to him, to beg him to stay close to her. Then she thought of Connor and felt guilty and angry with herself.

He had already started climbing. Now he stopped and turned around to face her, with that mysterious half smile that reminded her of a satisfied cat. In the sun, his eyes were honey-brown, filled with light.

“To the very top,” he said. Then he kept climbing.

TWENTY-FOUR

“What is this place?” Dea waited to speak until they had left the guards behind. She was scared, which made her angry. And the boy seemed as unconcerned as ever. He even whistled occasionally, something tuneless and vaguely sad.

“Isn’t it obvious by now?” He looked at her with that infuriating half smile of his. Today his eyes glimmered in the sun, practically yellow. “This is the king’s city. Some people call it the first city. It’s really the only city that matters. Beyond the borders are just deserts and free people.”

“Like you?” Dea asked. He put his hand briefly on her back to steer her down a narrow, cobbled street, its walls crowded with an explosion of flowers and climbing vines, and she quickly sped up.

“Like me,” he said.

The boy’s name, Dea learned, was Aeri: a strange name where she came from, but he told her it was common enough in this world. For someone who had been following her through dreams and had managed to track her down in the enormous city, he seemed largely uninterested in her company, and answered most of her questions in as few words as possible, or with circular nonresponses that left her more frustrated, not less.

“Why are we going to the tower?”

“I told you. To get answers.”

“How?”

“We’ll speak to the king.”

“Why?”

“He’ll have answers.”

Eventually she gave up, and they walked in silence. She needed to save her breath, anyway: on the city’s upper levels, the streets were steeply pitched, winding toward the tower, which she now knew to be a portion of the king’s palace. Here, the city became busy again—servants bustled between enormous stone mansions and homes built of rose-colored glass, although it was strangely silent, a peace disturbed only by the twittering of invisible birds and the rhythm of water flowing in various delicate fountains. Aeri explained briefly that these homes were, actually, property of the king, gifts to his favorite friends, military officers, and supporters. Some of them, he said, were actually connected via passageways to the palace’s lower levels.

When she peered down over the wrought-iron railing of one of the bridges to admire the city stretching out beneath her, the people at its very bottom looked hardly bigger than ants. From here she could see not just how deep and tall the city was, but how vast: buildings, bridges, streets, and market squares sprawled all the way to the horizon, so much space and so much life she couldn’t imagine how many people it contained. How had Aeri tracked her down? How would anyone be found in a place this size? It would be like trying to pinpoint an individual grain of sand on a beach. She thought of her mother and felt a sharp ache of sadness.

She hoped Aeri was right, and the king would have answers.

Aeri had shown his pass to gain access to every subsequent level of the city after level nine, and Dea had noticed that the guards grew more numerous as they’d climbed—and more monstrous, too, with deformities that ranged from multiple sets of eyes to multiple sets of heads, mounted on the same neck like flowers budding from a single stalk. She was happy, now, that she and Aeri weren’t speaking; she wasn’t sure she could have formed a sentence.

When the tower was directly above them, so that it cast them in shadow, Dea could see that her original assumption—that it seemed to have been hacked out of the mountainside, and then extended and modified with glass-and-steel additions, was correct. The palace itself was much larger than the individual tower, and sprawled across the high apex of the city like a series of smaller foothills clustered around a mountain peak: walls and battlements, exterior staircases and vaulted archways, plazas and gardens. The palace was in itself the size of a small city: probably the whole population of Fielding would fit in just one of its outbuildings.

Thinking of Fielding made Dea feel dizzy all over again. How was it possible that any of this was real? And yet . . . standing here with the sun warm on her neck and Aeri’s shoulder touching hers, she knew it was. Now, it was Fielding that seemed like a dream.

They entered the palace through a narrow passageway guarded by monsters so hideous that Dea drew back, gasping. These monsters weren’t men, not even a little: they were patchwork creatures of snout and teeth and scales, so ugly Dea couldn’t stand to look at them.

“It’s all right.” Aeri touched her lower back, and she felt a small burst of warmth there. “They won’t hurt you. We’re on the king’s business.”

“I don’t understand.” Dea was embarrassed to feel tears burning the back of her eyes. “Where does he get them? And what are they?”

Aeri shrugged. “He recruits them. Pulls them from the pits. From dreams,” he clarified, when Dea only shook her head. He was doing his best to seem casual, but Dea could tell he was just as tense as she was. She could see it in his jaw, in the way he kept withdrawing the pass from his pocket as if to verify it was still there. “They work for him as guards and soldiers. In exchange he gives them power and freedom. He gives them life.” He managed a small smile. “What else do monsters want?”