Folding the Sky

-12-

"Could you have picked a louder place, Liesel? I can barely hear myself think."

Liesel rolled her eyes, sitting up straighter in her chair. She and Sorin were seated at a small, well-populated outdoor café that smelled like pepper and whose food had too much pepper in it and was owned, inexplicably, by an old woman named Pepper. The only reason Sorin had agreed to this location at all was because he was too hungry to care.

"May I remind you," Liesel began, pushing her glasses further up her nose, "that I was planning to cook, until someone had to come in through the window and scare me so terribly that I dropped all my rice."

"I don't like doors. Doors make me uncomfortable," said Sorin automatically. He scowled, looking away. "You know you would have burnt it all, anyway."

"Probably, but I'm still making you clean it when we get home," Liesel said. Before Sorin could argue, she went on: "So are you going to tell me what's so urgent now?"

Sorin huffed, still trying to tune out the clamor of voices from the café's patrons. The café was just a block away from the main street, where he'd seen them ambling through the merchant stalls and the boutiques, some of them even bright-eyed as tourists, as if they were here for purely innocent reasons.

He'd known something was wrong the second he saw them. That they were heading right for Vernon's old shop only confirmed his suspicions.

"Sorin," Liesel said again, waving a hand in front of his face. "Are you thinking in there? I thought you couldn't hear yourself think."

He flicked her hand away. "We're not the only ones looking for Vernon."

Sorin watched Liesel's face fall, the color blanching out of her childishly ruddy cheeks. She asked, very softly, "What?"

"Five envoys from Naino," Sorin said, leaning forward and dropping his voice to a whisper. Liesel just blinked at him in disbelief. "I saw them get off the train just an hour ago. They went straight to Vernon's old shop—the one he owned just before he disappeared."

Sorin hesitated a beat before he added, "Also...they're like me."

"Like you?" Liesel said. "In what way?"

Casually, Sorin tapped the silver band on his right index finger that hid a certain star-shaped scar beneath it. Though it took a second, Liesel's eyes flashed with realization. "Oh, dear," she murmured. "Are you sure?"

"Quite sure—about two of them, anyway. One of them has unnaturally good eyesight, and another froze the doorknob off," Sorin explained. He still shuddered when he thought about it. "It must be the meteor. What other explanation is there?"

Liesel shook her head gently, fussing at the two braids into which she'd twisted her thick, autumn-colored hair. Finally, a waiter swung by and dropped off their meals—a bowl of split pea soup for Liesel, which Sorin would never understand why anyone would willingly order, and steamed chicken for Sorin. Neither of them touched their dishes.

"So tell me, then," Liesel said.

Sorin blinked. "Tell you—what? I just told you."

"I know you. I know you listened in on what they were saying. So tell me what it is these people said."

"Oh. That," Sorin said, tapping his fingers across the table. "There wasn't much in the shop, obviously—I've looked it over thousands of times by now. They said something about Vernon moving fast, that he knows people are looking for him. Then they left because they realized someone had run off. I saw him, too. He split off towards Artisan's Row, but I figured it was best to follow the group."