Chapter 8: Birdie's Rule

I must tell you something I am not proud of. I can be invisible. I can feel what living things feel. I have carried both of these capabilities for my entire existence, and for most of that existence, the combination did not trouble me. I drifted. I observed. I felt the weather of a world I did not participate in, and the feeling was impersonal, the way a cloud might feel the landscape beneath it: present, aware, uninvested. I watched mortals grieve and celebrate and betray and love, and I absorbed the texture of their interiors the way I absorbed dust and moisture, as material that passed through me and left traces but did not change my shape. It did not occur to me that watching could be a violation. Not until I began to care about what I found. That is the distinction I had missed, across centuries of what I now understand was a kind of carelessness. Observing someone you do not care about is merely seeing. Observing someone you care about, without their knowledge, without their consent, is something else entirely. It is taking. You are taking the private weight of a person who has not offered it to you, and you are holding it as though you earned it, and you did not. You found it because you were invisible and they were unguarded and the combination gave you access to something you had no right to carry. I did this to Hul. Once. And then I made a rule. * * * She found him at the far edge of the settlement, past the wall where he usually sat, past the last of the low structures, where the packed earth gave way to grass and the grass gave way to the dark plain stretching south…