Chapter 31. The Garden Trial

Volamed chose its night like a tailor chooses thread—by feel more than sight. The streets were a seam of lanterns tugged just enough to hold, the canals a black fabric with a private sheen. Rell led Lora through the side ways—the ones that behaved for names the city had accepted. They avoided the red bridge because it was in an argument with itself, and she didn’t feel like being used as evidence.

“The Garden keeps its rules even when the city doesn’t,” Rell said, slowing so her footsteps could memorize the pattern of the flagstones. “It doesn’t humiliate here. It measures.”

“What does it measure?” she asked, though she suspected she was about to find out by the inconvenient method.

“What people are made of when no one pretends otherwise,” he said, and colored a little, as if he’d quoted someone older and wiser and hoped she wouldn’t ask who.

The entrance was a mouth of carved stone shaped like two crescents that almost kissed. Inside: air with a temperature