Adam traced his fingers softly along the collar—and then lower, to where the curve of her breast pressed against the fabric.
The gesture wasn’t strictly appropriate—but then, the balcony was dark.Ellie wasn’t sure how much Mr.Mahjoud could see if he looked outside.
Perhaps he found the rail timetables particularly engrossing… though Ellie doubted they were engrossing enough for the dragoman to fail to notice if she grabbed the front of Adam’s shirt and dragged him down to her for a kiss.
Never mind that kissing was rarely where such things ended these days.
“Wanna tell me about what happened during the parade today?”Adam asked.
Engrossed in her wicked thoughts, Ellie was momentarily thrownby the question.
“When you stopped by that play,” Adam clarified.
Ellie recalled standing amid the shifting crowd of happy devotees at the Jagannath festival as the air danced with the scents of sweat, incense, and fried pastries.Painted actors in elaborate costumes and masks had stepped out onto their makeshift stage, garlanded with flowers and singing stylized recitations… and Ellie had been picked up and thrown somewhere else.
Somewhere older.
Costumes lined with the feathers of tropical birds.Drums and rattles sounding in the shadow of a towering white temple.
A spray of blood.A cheer.The moon rising over the ceiba trees.
“It reminded me of Tulan,” Ellie admitted.
The answer was true… but not entirely honest.Ellie found herself compelled to share more.
“‘Reminded’ isn’t precisely the right word,” she confessed.“It felt more like someone ripped me out of where I was and threw me back there again.”
Adam watched her patiently through the gloom.“Thought it might’ve been something like that.”
Ellie had told him before about what had happened when she had made contact with the Smoking Mirror—how in that impossible conversation with a scarred, gold-eyed ghost, the knowledge of an entire civilization had been poured into her brain.
You want to know who we were.
In that moment, Ellie had wanted it with all the compulsion of a lifelong student of history confronted with a place that had been lost to the mists of time.
The mirror had fulfilled that desire in a manner that still made her feel queasy and breathless when she thought about it.The knowledge now haunted her mind like a ghost itself.Ellie couldn’t call it up at will.If she tried, it only slipped away from her, teasing along the edge of her consciousness.
The memories came to her on their own terms.Something would spark that distant sense of recognition, and suddenly Tulan would flood her awareness, thrusting her back into a place that had disappeared over two hundred years before she was born.
Once it passed, only fragments remained—a melody on a flute carved from bone.The way the wind moved through the feathers on a headdress.The glitter of jade and gold.
The words burst out of her on a wave of guilt and frustration.“It’s like it’s all right there inside my mind, only I can’tdoanything about it.I am the last living repository of the knowledge of an entire world, and I can’t bloody remember it!”
“What would you do if you could remember it?”Adam pressed softly.
Ellie threw up her hands.“I don’t know!It isn’t as though anyone would believe me if I ever did manage to write it all down.But I feel like I ought to be doingsomethingto try to preserve it.I must owe the people of that place at least that much.”
Oweherthat much,Ellie silently corrected, thinking of the scarred, solemn face of the woman who still occasionally haunted her dreams.
Adam’s hand clasped her shoulder.“You’ll figure it out.”
The steady faith in his voice warmed her—but doubt lingered.“Will I?It’s not as though there’s a guidebook for this sort of thing.I just feel souseless.”
“The last thing you are is ‘useless,’” Adam firmly corrected.
The words comforted her, even if the guilt still lingered.
“At the club tonight,” she said carefully.“You suspected what it might be like for Constance, didn’t you?Before we’d gone inside.”
