My Aunt Leila had brushed my hair until it shone like spun gold, and it floated behind me as I walked through the people and under the cages. I kept my face calm, so calm. I had to look right. I could not give anybody an excuse to look away.
I took a deep breath and lifted my hands over my golden head, concentrated, and pulled the light and power out of my rings. Lucent power spilled out of the gems, out of the gold circling my fingers. I reached up to the nearest cage, and I touched the fingertips of the wreck of a woman inside it, and I pushed my power through her, soothing her pain.
I didn’t have enough magic to do any real good, not for someone hurting as badly as this caged woman was, not for more than a half a second.
But half a second was all I needed.
The woman’s sobs eased for a moment. I moved on, touching everyone in every cage. It was exhausting. If you use too much magic, your body collapses so fast; I could feel the magic being tugged out of me as if I were giving blood, but I didn’t let myself look tired any more than I let myself cry.
I moved through the blood-dark grass to my father’s cage. I reached up and touched his hand.
He had not been in there long: his face showed human pain, and not the dumb pain of an animal. But he had been there long enough.
He murmured, “Who are you?” as he touched my hair, a long ribbon of gold in his cold white hand.
“I’m Lucie Manette,” I said, making my voice not loud but clear, so that it would carry across the graveyard and ring through the swaying leaves, the still waters, and the dead. “This is my father.”
That was all I said that night. It was important to come in the evening, when there was the biggest crowd, as people went home from work and stopped to gawk at someone else’s tragedy. The next night, I returned and did the exact same thing, and that time people had questions for me. I answered a few, and the night after that I answered a few more: that my father was a Light citizen, that he was a doctor dedicated to helping people, saving people, that all I wanted to do was help and save people too. That my father was my only family, that I had never had a mother.
Instead of explaining that he’d sought my mother, I said my father had been arrested because he was looking for a neighbor he pitied but whom I hardly knew. I said it whenever I was asked why my father had been arrested. I said it again and again. I called my mother a stranger. I denied my whole family. I never spoke their names. I never asked for justice for my mother. I never said that she had been taken by the Light for doing nothing but helping people. I never spoke of her murder or how our family had been devastated. I never even said her name. I let the Light get away with her murder. I let her be forgotten, I let her be lost. I lied and lied, and it never crossed my mind for a moment to do otherwise.
After every performance, I went home and slept, for thirteen hours, fourteen, eighteen. I slept like a dead thing.
Light citizens did not usually live in the Dark city and were almost never sent to the cages. Nobody was used to seeing a Light citizen in a cage, and they were even less used to seeing an innocent girl suffering, a girl golden with rings, an image of the Light city the way the Light people liked to think of themselves. The Light did not think people like them should suffer—only people who were different.
I looked like the symbol of what all Light magic should be. I looked right, and my image was captured on dozens of cameras. The Light Council could not get rid of me, not when the world was watching.
People started to say I was an angel. There were pictures of me all over the Dark city and the Light, pictures of a golden-haired child with a sweet, sad face and hands that were always bright. There were a thousand interviews. In the end, I talked to anyone who would ask me, talked and talked and never cried too much.
They called me the angel in the park, the angel of my father’s house. They called me the Golden Thread in the Dark.
I said I just wanted to help people, to ease their suffering, but that was a lie. I didn’t do it to help anyone but myself. I wasn’t showing real compassion for strangers, I wasn’t showing what I really felt. Real grief is ugly and uncomfortable. People look away from grief the same way they look away from severed limbs or gaping wounds. What they want is pain like death on a stage: beautiful, bloodless, presented for their entertainment.
My aunt and I came up with the plan, of what needed to be done, and I did it. I didn’t care that nobody else could have done it, that nobody else had the privilege of being a Light citizen or the power of the rings. All I wanted was my father back, and I knew that I could make it happen.
My father told the truth and was punished. I told a lie and was richly rewarded.
There were riots in the streets of both cities protesting my father’s arrest and my pain. People even called for the cages to be cut down.