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“Wouldn’t someone who claims truth as her domain value honesty?”
    “The human desire to pen truth up in words makes little sense to me. Truth is vast, minute, immutable, and ever-changing. It is certainly too vast to express itself through a single race—something my people at times forget.” She leaned forward and picked up one of the smooth, pale stones and studied it—then abruptly chucked it at Kai.
    Without thinking, Kai caught it.
    “What would you do with that stone?”
    Kai looked down at it and ran her thumb over the smooth surface. “Probably put it back where it was. It looks good here.”
    The Queen nodded. “There is beauty in the stone on its own, but it is especially pleasing set with others like it. Yet if I were to set it in some places—on a mosaic floor, perhaps, or among the pillows on a divan—it would look out of place, even ugly.”
    “Are you telling me that I belong with my own kind?”
    “Children are often prickly and self-conscious. It leads to false assumptions.”
    “I’m prickly about being called a child, too.” In sidhe eyes, humans were all children—young, boisterous, unpredictable. And sidhe law treated them as such.
    “If it were in your power to change your status, would you do so?”
    Kai went still. “How?”
    “Malek is adept at elfish ways, yet he is not elf. As you noted, such mimicry has a cost. This cost was one reason your realm was interdicted until recently—to allow humans to develop away from our overwhelming example, that you might express your own truths.”
    “Um,” Kai said, that being as much as she could manage while her view of human history reshuffled itself.
    “But not all humans live in your realm. There are many and many of you scattered throughout my realms as well. If we are a problem for your people, you can be a problem for mine, as well.” She turned her unearthly eyes on Kai. “I have a proposition for you, Kai Tallman Michalski.”

ONE

    San Diego, Two Months Later
    M URPHY’S Law cuts across barriers of class, creed, species, and realm, Kai reflected as she stepped out of the clinic. She reached up to adjust the glasses she’d brought with her to the appointment, which had light-adaptive lenses. It didn’t help.
    “Over here!”
    Kai squinted in the direction of the woman’s voice. The bright blue of Arjenie’s Prius was visible several yards away, but its shape was obscured by shifting blobs of pale color, as if the air were inhabited by zillions of translucent jellyfish bobbing merrily along. Kai sighed and looked down. The sidewalk was close, so there were fewer thought-remnants between it and her eyes. She could see the curb, so she aimed for it.
    She made it to the end of what she was pretty sure was a white car, then had to look up again to get a bead on the Prius. And saw the man headed for her.
    At least she thought it was a man. She only got glimpses of him. His thoughts were much more vivid than his physical form, clearer than the jelly-fish remnants. Almost solid, in fact—tawny gold laced with green and deep purple, with licks of wary pewter. It was that on-alert pewter that jacked up her heartbeat. The assassin who’d nearly killed her in Annabaka had thought in just that color. She dropped into a crouch and reached for Teacher.
    Which, of course, wasn’t there. She was in San Diego, not Annabaka, and people here tended to notice over a foot of steel sheathed at your hip. Especially cops.
    “Hey.” The man stopped. “You okay?”
    She closed her eyes briefly in embarrassment. She knew that voice. Doug was one of Arjenie’s guards. One of Kai’s first patients here, too. She should have recognized his thought patterns. She’d worked on them. “Doug. Right. I’m, uh, not seeing properly.”
    “You said you might not. Need a hand?”
    Want and need sometimes lived in different neighborhoods entirely. “Probably.” She sounded surly. Try again. “Yes, thank you.”
    Doug took her arm and steered her