“What do you mean?”
“I’d never met Luca before, until Venera’s funeral,” she says. “When we shook the coin pot for him, I remember the fortune being foggy. The Were’s Claw felt distant, disconnected.” She grabs the coin from where it rests on her shelf and turns it over in her black-veined hand. “Once I met him, I knew there was something strange about him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there is a cloud of nothing around him. I see absolutely nothing in his fate.”
“You weren’t touching him or doing a proper reading.”
“I don’t think I would see anything then, either,” she says. “This is a nasty business, sweetbug. Terrible.” She grabs her jar of coins off the table and shakes it. A red coin pops out beside the Were’s Claw. “The Coin of Falsehoods. Something we know isn’t true. Something is wrong with what we know.”
What is she suggesting? That Luca is innocent? Our informants told us that he is the spy, that he is the killer.
I’ve already made up my mind to hate him.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. “What don’t we know?”
“I’m trying to see into your fortune, but it’s blurry.” She closes her eyes and leans her head back, almost moaning. “There’s nothing around Luca at all. There’s nothing around any of your illusions.” She opens her eyes and squeezes the Coin of Falsehoods. “What is Luca’s jynx-work?”
“Luca is a poison-worker,” I say.
“The boy who cannot die,” she says. “No one cannot die, sweetbug. No one who truly walks this earth.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that could be the missing piece. Luca could be an illusion,” she says. “A freak.”
Impossible.
“That doesn’t make any sense. I never created him.”
“You cannot always trust your mind,” she says. “Memory can be the clay of mind-workers. Memory changes each time you look back on it. Memory fades.If a worker looks into your mind, then pieces will be left behind.So the song goes.”
I consider the time with Jiafu, when he swore he paid me, yet I didn’t remember it. When I stole his coins and later found my payment from him in my bedsheets. I think about the unknown origins of the purple butterfly Agatha preserved for me, and how she insisted I was the one who gave it to her.
“I wouldn’t forget,” I say. “I wouldn’t forget making him.”
But my words falter. Could I have? What if the killer is a mind-worker, who has been peering inside my head all along? Tuyet is a mind-worker, and certainly not the only one in Gomorrah. Anyone with that ability could see inside my thoughts, my memories, and figure out how to mold them.
And if Iwerea charm-worker, they could be molding me.
“If he’san illusion—which I’m positive he’s not—then I can make him disappear,” I say, trying to sound confident, like Kahina’s words haven’t shaken me. “I can lock him in a Trunk, if I’m close enough.”
And if he is an illusion, he could be a target like the others. If he is an illusion, he isn’t safe. Poison-worker or not.
Not that I believe Kahina’s words. I don’t know any mind-workers. I couldn’t possibly forget creating an entire illusion. But her suspicions are still enough to worry me. If what she believes is true, Luca could face execution for a crime he didn’t commit.
I have to find him. And once I do, I’ll make sure he doesn’t leave my side. I’ll tell Villiam our suspicions. Luca will be set free. We will all make progress. We’ll learn the truth. Together.
My determination falters for a moment, remembering what Villiam told me. “But the informant...he said Luca was the spy,” I say.
“The Coin of Falsehoods, though vague, is a reliable fortune,” she says.
Luca could be innocent.
And I let the guards take him.
“I need to find him,” I say.
