“This isn’t her,” grunts someone in surprise.

“What?” A head wearing an ornate full mask blocks the light. “What’s your name, girl?”

“Cehrazad,” she manages, “of House Loong.”

Silence. Then: “You were wearing your sister’s face.”

This time Cehrazad is the silent one.

“Get her an underface,” grumbles her captor, and when he turns in profile his mask is like a great and cruel bird.

Shimmering. Curtain. Fire. She wakes in a choking cough. Her sisters are screaming, but they’re moving: she gets them outside and barely remembers to throw on Dunyazad’s mask.

Guards in black move grimly through the bucket-line. Cehrazad needs no help composing her face in terror, but even keeping her eyes on the blaze she can see them converging. No. No. How?

Idiot, she thinks, you’re wearing the only sootless face, and then their hands are on her.

“Pity,” murmurs the King, handing it to an attendant. “There’s some resemblance. Have you other daughters, Lord Loong?”

“To be honest, Your Majesty, I’ve never bothered counting the children,” says Cehrazad’s father. “I have wives for that. But no one in my house would hide from you; feel free to search.”

Cehrazad is holding her sister’s face hard, but it flickers there. When the King glances back for a sharp moment, she feels she must be shimmering, like a hot summer road.

“You’ve lost face?” she says, not unkindly.

“It broke,” Cehrazad stammers. “The mask–I had to leave, I couldn’t… without…” She flaps one hand at her underface, barely veiled by a strip torn from her dress.

“They’re searching for you already. The girl who disappeared at midnight?”

Cehrazad stares.

“There is one great secret, in our city of masks,” says First Mother sadly. “The only face to hide behind is your own.”

They’re alone in the starlit garden. “I’m only just sixteen,” says Cehrazad shakily.

“I’m only just sixteen, Your Majesty.”

“Yes,” she says.

“Old enough,” he purrs, “to tell me a story tonight,” and touches her arm.

Cehrazad is running, scrambling, wild over fantastic hedges. She stumbles down a vast stairway; the unnamed mask shatters on stone.