Three districts away, in a part of the city the child would never see and never learn the name of, a boy a little older than the child sat on the floor of a room much like the child’s own, turning a carved wooden bird over and over in his hands.
His grandfather had bought it for him at a market stall two towns over, on a trading trip the boy had mostly slept through, and had said nothing more about it than any grandfather might say about any small gift — thought you’d like this one, look how the wings are carved — before turning back to the business of the day and forgetting, or seeming to forget, that he’d given it at all.
The boy liked it well enough as a toy. He’d set it on the shelf above his bed among a handful of other small carved things, unremarkable, ordinary, exactly like every other object a boy his age collected without particular reason. It was only that evening, turning it absently in the last light before sleep, that his thumb caught on the seam along its underside — a hairline gap he’d never noticed before, fitted so cleanly it might have passed for nothing but a trick of the light.
He worked at it for some time, more out of idle curiosity than any real expectation of finding something, the way a person picks at any small puzzle simply because it happens to be in their hands. When the plug finally came free, a small folded square of paper dropped into his palm, so worn soft at its creases that it must have been folded and unfolded, he thought, many more times than the short trip from that market stall could explain.
He unfolded it carefully, expecting nothing, expecting perhaps a maker’s mark, a price, some ordinary explanation for an ordinary object.
What he found instead was four lines, in an unsteady, careful hand, about a girl who lived at the bottom of a well.
He read it once, quickly, the way you read anything unfamiliar the first time. Then he read it again, slower, and found that the second reading left something behind in him that the first one hadn’t — a small, specific, unfamiliar itch, somewhere behind his ribs, that had nothing to do with the words themselves and everything to do with the plain fact that someone, somewhere, had made this up. Had built a girl and a well and a bird that spoke exactly once out of nothing at all, and folded her small and hidden inside a wooden bird, and sent her out into the world with no name attached and no way of knowing whose hands she might eventually land in.
The boy did not know what to do with the feeling. He had never been taught a name for it, had certainly never been taught that it was something a person was allowed to feel on purpose. He only knew, sitting there in the last grey light with the paper held carefully between two fingers, that he wanted, very badly, to know what happened to the girl next — whether she ever made it up past the third ledge, whether the bird ever came back, whether the sky, once she reached it, turned out to be everything the one impossible sentence had promised her it would be.
He read it a third time before he finally folded it back along its worn creases, small enough to fit again inside its hollow home, and sat for a long while after that simply holding the little wooden bird in his open palm, wings spread, caught forever in the exact instant of deciding to fly.
Outside, far across the districts and the towns and the tired grey miles between them, a girl on a ledge went on climbing, page by careful page, toward a sky that had not yet, in any way the Order’s careful ledgers could measure, been told about her.
They had erased the singer. They had erased the storyteller before her, and would in time, perhaps, come looking for this one too.
But somewhere in a boy’s open hand, in the last light before sleep, in a room three districts from anywhere the Order’s attention had ever thought to fall — the song, unmistakably, uncontainably, was still going.
END OF BOOK ONE