Everyone inside wore masks, from battered iron to jade and gold, each unique in their own way. Figures lounged on beds and cushions along the sides of the room, barely visible behind diaphanous silk curtains hanging from the low walls. A quintet of flutes and violin played a haunting melody, a reminder that the nights had become long and cold. Strangely a few couples danced, holding each other, slow and solemn. The smell of lavender was cloying but failed to mask the sickly sweet smell of what I suspected was opium.

Women in yellow dresses glided around, their hair done up in intricate arrangements, long legs flashing. The closest one stepped towards us but Mara waved her off. We headed towards the back, past the dancers, up a spiral staircase to the next floor.

A guard in a bronze mask stood at the top, stout and serious, hand casually resting on the pommel of his sword. He stepped aside and gestured for us to continue along; his hand never left his weapon and I could feel his eyes boring into our backs.

The second floor of Amelie in Yellow was a gambling den, dim in the guttering light of candles spaced along the walls. Thirty or so people had come to test their luck, games of dice and card, amusement for the rich and the addicted. They made their bets in gold or tidy stacks of silver, more money than a commoner would make in a month changing hands over a pair of sixes.

“Not exactly what I was expecting,” I said. “Should we be wearing masks?”

She held up a pair of fingers and locked eyes with the nearest servant in yellow. “Not completely necessary if you don’t mind being seen. What do I care about these people? One of the philosophers owns this place, actually. Sensi’s never around in the Gardens though. She probably has a score of different places like this that she manages. Odena is the city of arts and vices after all. Poetry from the end of a pipe.”

The servant answered Mara’s summons, the heels of her calfskin boots clicking along the tiled floor. Like the others she was strikingly beautiful, lips painted black to offset her porcelain half-mask and blonde hair. She spoke in a voice like smoke. “Welcome. Lady Mara, a pleasure to see you again. And an unfamiliar face.”

“Leones. And you are?”

She raised an eyebrow. “I would be ruining the game if I told you that. One of us is Amelie, and I could not possibly deceive the two of you. Better to say nothing at all.”

“Lovely,” said Mara. “Do you know my drink?”

The servant gave no sign of noticing the younger woman’s curtness. “Of course. And for yourself, Master Leones?”

I thought of the decanter my father used to keep on his desk. “Your finest brandy.”

She waited as if expecting more. Seeing my uncertain smile, she winked conspiratorially and swished away.

“‘Your finest brandy.’” Mara’s lips twitched. She held a hand to her mouth as if trying to hold back laughter. “Bless your heart.”

I followed the servant’s lead and ignored her attitude. “What game was she talking about?”

“Forget about it,” she said. “Even Felix can’t figure it out. There are at least twenty women that work here at any given time. Sensi and all of her disciples are experts in the staccato. If you identify the real Amelie you win the game.”

“What’s the prize?”

“You get a chance to meet Sensi and possibly become one of her personal apprentices. You may even get to own a weird place like this. Can you imagine? Leones in Grey has a certain ring to it.”

“So you have a one-in-twenty chance.”

“Right.” Mara patted me on the shoulder, as if impressed at my display of mathematical prowess. “Far more than twenty people have tried and failed. Perhaps it’s just bad luck. Not everyone makes an attempt, of course. The stipulation is that you only get one guess, and if you’re wrong you owe them one favor. Anything they ask of you. You can refuse but I’m sure that path leads nowhere good.”

“Amelie is trained as a philosopher, right? You could ask her questions other people wouldn’t know.”

Mara tapped the side of her nose. “Think about it. All of the women here are highly educated. They’re some of the best paid workers in the city, often hand-selected from the graduating classes of the Academia. And forgetting that, you could be speaking with the real Amelie and she could just pretend not to know the answer.”

Alright, my question was a bit stupid. I mulled over potential ways to turn the game in my favor.

The servant returned, balancing a pair of crystal glasses on a tray. “For Lady Mara. A favorite of mine as well, an Avanchean white. Our sommelier assures me this bottle is a fine vintage, personally sampled. And for the master, a Raisso private brandy with just a touch of sugar and water.”

I accepted my glass, trying not to frown at the amber drink. The sliver of orange peel garnish did little to ease my uncertainty. I took a small sip, keeping the glass pressed against my lips to mask an involuntary spasm as the brandy burned its way down. After the initial shock it was not unpleasant, a sweet blend of oak and spice and dried fruit.

“Perfect,” I managed after taking a moment to compose myself.

The servant flashed her dazzling smile. “Consider it on the house. Is there any other way I can offer my assistance?”

“Take us to Felix,” said Mara.

She dipped her head in an obedient nod and led us through the tables. I took delicate sips of my drink as I considered the mystery game. It was a battle of wits and perception and, as always, the house had the advantage. Unfortunately for them I had my own. The most important question was, how could I shape my power to form the perfect key for this lock?

“What happens if I accuse one of you of being Amelie?” I asked the servant.

“In a week you will be summoned. If you guessed correctly, Sensi will greet you. If not, we will ask something of you, immediately or sometime in the future. Perhaps far in the future, for people with great potential.”

That answered one of my questions. With my talent it wouldn’t be difficult to accuse every woman in yellow of being Amelie; if I was wrong I could simply try again. Forcing me to wait a week removed that possibility. I also had the feeling that bending the rules of the game would make it pointless. The reward for identifying the real Amelie was the chance to catch Sensi's eye. A useless prize if I won it through obvious trickery.

What if there simply was no Amelie, so anyone destined to play the game would lose? In that case Sensi would just accumulate favors with no risk to herself.

I caught sight of Felix sitting at a table near the back, playing cards with two others. He was one of the only other people without a mask. The stack of coins in front of him dwarfed those of the other players. He caught sight of us and lifted a long wooden pipe to his lips. The opium nugget kindled and he blew plumes of smoke from his nose.

The sight of him shocked me. I knew him as a somber, eloquent young man who continued practicing the sword by himself after Avarus’ lessons. It was difficult to imagine that person playing cards in a high-class opium den.

The brandy filled my head with a pleasant warmth, for a moment quieting the constantly worried voice in the back of my head. Perhaps it was not so strange that Felix found comfort in these sorts of vices. After all, they were made for lost folk like us.

“My friends,” he said. “Can’t say I was expecting this. I thought you disapproved of this place, Mara. And you’ve brought Leones.” He nodded at the servant. “Bring them chairs, please.”

“An audience, then?” said the woman to Felix’s right. A few years older than myself, with dark hair stacked in curls and a tattoo around her neck of a serpent eating its own tail. She rested her chin in her hand, observing me with a little smile.

The other man at the table wore an owl-face mask. “New fans for you. Introductions are in order. This is the fabulous painter Lyra Incada. I am the tragically unappreciated poet known as Ontos.”

I nodded. “A pleasure.”

The servant returned with our chairs. We seated ourselves and thanked her.

Felix set his opium pipe down and glanced my way. “I didn’t expect to see you in this sort of place.”

I looked around. “I was thinking the same about you.”

“I grew up in places like this before I joined the philosophers. Not quite as opulent as this, of course. Some select places allow children to gamble as long as they have the coin. Guaranteed food in my belly and a little extra for my friends. Now they pay me back.”

He smiled and revealed his hand. The other players groaned and he scooped up his winnings.

“Still, it’s a surprise,” I said. “I’ve never been in a place like this.”

Felix stacked his new winnings in one fluid motion. “One of my favorites. Deal the next hand please, Lyra. So, Leones, what is it that you thought I did in my spare time? Stare off into space, brooding?”

I sipped my brandy and gestured for Lyra to include me in the next round. “I never thought much of it. I see you practicing with the sword by yourself in the morning. We have lessons with Avarus. Outside of that I’m not sure.”

“Is he much of a swordsman?” Lyra turned toward me, running a hand through her hair. “The way he talks himself up, you would think he’s ready to challenge the Archon of Blades.”

Mara waved away the other woman’s offer to deal her cards.“The best out of our lot, I would say.”

“I prefer a more realistic challenge.” Felix glanced at his cards, shook his head, and took up his pipe again. After a short puff he glanced my way. “Have you heard of the house game? Attempting to identify Amelie. Any insights?”

His question caught me by surprise since I was focused on the card game. We were playing Kettle, a game where you can fold your hand with no penalty. Besides that the rest of the game relied on luck: whose cards totaled up to the greatest value. I could see why Felix liked it.

“Maybe,” I said. “If Amelie is the owner of this place, you could create a situation where she would have to assume authority. A brawl or a fire could work.”

Ontos folded his cards. “Your idea is to destroy her business to make her reveal herself? Not that we have come up with better. Felix isn’t willing to take the risk of choosing at random.”

“It’s an unwinnable game to drive men like you crazy,” said Mara. “You sort think you can solve every problem. If you identify the right one, what’s to stop them from lying? It’s all a ploy to add to the mystique. They’re cultivating an atmosphere.”

“I like you already,” said Lyra.

“Thanks.” Mara nodded at her. “How did you all meet?”

Ontos and Lyra glanced at Felix. He spoke for them. “Street urchins, all of us. There used to be others but we drifted apart for different reasons. Lyra is a renowned artist now. She painted the mural on the wall there, the golden skull. That’s why we always sit here..”

Lyra frowned at her cards. “I fold. I’m not sure why I keep getting involved in these games. Charity towards Felix, maybe.”

The scoundrel smiled. “So, Leones. Fold or challenge?”

I did end up winning. It only took ten rounds.

After that night the others treated me more warmly. The three of us agreed to try to meet at least once a week for what she called bonding sessions. Caedius occasionally stopped by the Garden; he still didn’t seem impressed but acted more to appease Mara than anything. On the third meeting he joined us and after a couple drinks I found him to be surprisingly easygoing. Sometimes his laughter seemed forced but he generally was content to sit back and observe.

I did discover he loved the art of combat. Despite his confidence he realized he was no prodigy blademaster. He instead worshiped martial figures from the past and devoured tales of their exploits. If someone wanted him to speak up they would only have to mention Champion Jokul or Brys Three-Eyes. He never struck me as charming or interesting but Mara insisted there was more to him than he showed.

We visited other establishments though none held the same appeal as Amelie in Yellow. I would lay awake in our little barracks some nights and wonder about the riddle of the real Amelie, worrying at the problem like a loose tooth. All the obvious solutions seemed unnecessarily morbid. This birthed a new moral predicament for me: if I tortured someone and reversed time so that it never happened, would I have committed any lasting sin?

I had no intention of torturing anyone, but sometimes those dark thoughts crept through.

After a month people began to discuss how curious the snow was. It continued the whole time in a light little flurry. There were some breaks where the sun would shine warm but the snow would always return. A layer of white powder settled over the world and began to accumulate, slow but endless.

I attempted to visit Augur but he had disappeared. According to the others, that was nothing out of the ordinary. Sometimes he would just leave and one day return, unannounced and uninterested in discussing where he had been.

Avarus continued to teach in the same simple outfit, immune to the cold. One day he led our dwindling group of acolytes to some hills outside of the city. He thought it great fun to have us race down the slopes until we fell, sputtering, then scramble back up to try again. I began to look forward to his classes. His methods were brutal but I loved watching my development each day. A couple more seconds of footwork, a bit more progress in the first form of the legato. Sometimes I did worse than the previous day due to exhaustion or simply an off day, but in the end there was always progress.

All the while I honed my magic. Gambling proved to be excellent practice in exploring my limits. My control improved and I began to record my capabilities within a journal. I was careful to write in ways that would be inscrutable to others, like a row of numbers tracking how many instances of time reversal I could tolerate. I liked the others but I could not let them discover my power.

To my disappointment I was never able to go back further than one hour from the initial activation of my power. I tested myself against the most reliable clocks I could find. Always the same result.

I discovered that I was able to reduce the amount of fatigue each use of my powers caused so that I could repeat events within the same hour more frequently. It took three months of exhausting experiments to be able to reverse an entire hour four times instead of three. Likewise I could go back a half-hour eight times. It was easier to track my progress with large amounts of smaller increments.

It took around a week to fully replenish my magic. I tried to work out how long it would take to be able to repeat the same hour infinitely, assuming there was a point where I would recharge faster than I expended my magic. Eventually I decided to stop torturing myself with my inadequacy at math, especially since it seemed unlikely my growth would be linear.

Days began to blur together. Routines are easy to fall into. There were small variations, like the night I visited an art show hosted by Lyra in some rich patron’s manor. I had to admit she had talent, and the other viewers murmured appreciatively amongst themselves. Great understanding of lighting and contrast, a stranger mentioned to me. Clearly a student of Tarrare’s pupil Iserus, who really emphasized the use of chiaroscuro in her works. I nodded and kept silent, feeling rather uncultured.

Fiery nightmares and fantasies about revenge no longer haunted me as much. Still, there was always that contradictory voice in the back of my mind, the unabashed critic, who pestered me about how a little comfort proved enough to erode my resolve.

One night Felix and I headed towards one of the local taverns. Just us. He hoped to find a group of gamblers willing to let us join but he had developed enough of a reputation to usually encounter polite refusal. On occasion people mentioned I seemed rather fortunate myself. I made sure not to win too much, at least compared to Felix. The earnings were beginning to overfill my coinpurse and I was exploring ways to spend my newfound wealth.

“I think Lyra has taken a fancy to you,” Felix told me.

“You think so? Because I noticed nothing of the sort.”

“This snow is becoming annoying.” On his next step he kicked up enough snow to reveal the flagstones. “At least three inches. Terrible for footwork. Anyways, women are a game we will never win. They keep the rules a secret then act frustrated when we aren’t sure how to play. I do know she talks about you more than she should and that is an opportunity for you. Don’t laugh, it’s the truth. You always laugh when you feel awkward.”

The idea of anyone discussing me behind my back seemed odd. I thought of myself as shadow, drifting around unnoticed.

“You know me that well already?” I said. “You’re a true master of the staccato.”

“I know enough.”

We stopped to allow a funeral procession to pass. The deceased was one of the gentry, judging from the fine clothing and garish jewelry of the mourners. A pair of little girls threw rose petals over their shoulders as they marched along. To my surprise Felix watched them with a look of disdain.

We continued on after they passed. Felix’s good humor had vanished.

Silence stretched between us until I felt compelled to speak. “Bad memory?”

“Do you know,” he asked, “the reason you never see dead birds? They sense the end coming and hide away. They don’t want to be a bother. How strange is it that we make these grand shows out of our deaths? All the rites and ceremonies. We’re too arrogant to hide and let ourselves be forgotten.”

The venom in his voice shocked me. I smiled, unsure how to respond.

“Mankind, mankind.” He had the bitter voice of someone discussing a former lover. “I find it hard to connect with most people. I have a conversation with them and look into their eyes and it feels like I’m speaking with a puppet. You look and only see yourself reflected back. I know you must see it too, how strange and unnatural all of this is. There is something fundamentally wrong with our world.”

“Sometimes I think like that.” I swallowed, thinking carefully about my next words. “What if there is nothing wrong with those other people? What if you and I are the ones with something fundamentally wrong?”

A muscle in his cheek twitched. We walked in silence until it became unbearable. I reversed time to a minute before we stopped at the funeral procession.

“Why don’t we go this way?” I pointed in a direction that would avoid the mourners.

“If you insist.” Felix grinned. “You know, I wasn’t sure if I was going to mention it, but I think Lyra has taken a fancy to you…”

**

I sat on the edge of Lyra’s bed, naked.

We had seen each other around a few times in the past month. Eventually she took the initiative to have me walk her home after a night out. It had been a week since then and we had spent several nights together. I had lain with another woman before, a servant's daughter who decided it was best to end our impropriety sooner rather than later, but being with Lyra felt easy. Natural.

I had to admit Felix knew a bit more about women than me. It wasn’t some storybook romance but any teenage boy can appreciate the company of a lovely girl.

“What are you thinking about?” Lyra laid on her stomach behind me, legs bent, feet curled. She was dissecting a pomegranate with her hands, a cloth spread beneath to protect her sheets. She slipped individual arils between her full lips. Their juice stained her fingers purple.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You are focusing very intently on nothing.” She rolled onto her back and stretched. The moonlight through the window illuminated her body in fascinating ways. Chiaroscuro. “Most men would take more interest in a pretty girl laying next to them. Naked.”

How to explain this to her? One benefit of experimenting with my power over time is that I had developed a precise mental clock. I knew that Philosopher Jonos’ lecture that day on free will had lasted twenty seven minutes and eighteen seconds. Despite this talent I still felt disoriented from exploring my power so often. Time would overlap as my consciousness experienced the same moment over again. There must be an objective time, what the rest of the world experiences, and then for me a subjective time, separate but still real…

“I was thinking about time. Do you think you and I experience it the same way?

“That is a question for your philosopher friends.” She flipped back onto her stomach and continued her work on the pomegranate. “Ask me something I know.”

I ran a finger along her tattooed neck. “Why the ouroboros?”

“Oh, you recognize it. Maybe it’s a symbol of fertility. Silly girls like me only think about babies and romance.”

“Seriously.”

She touched her neck and looked away. “I like the idea of the infinite, alright? The idea that our lives repeat in a cycle. That death isn’t the end. That’s one of the great human fears, isn’t it?”

I pushed lank hair back out of my eyes. “Good answer. You had me worried. I doubt anyone would call me romantic.”

She shrugged. “Any asshole can be romantic. Not all men are capable of love.”

Silence settled between us. I looked around her room---slightly disheveled, random paintbrush marks on the walls, a half-finished canvas of a skeletal face in profile. Morbid.

“Do you think Felix is capable of love?”

She set her fruit down on the cloth and rested her chin on her hands. “Bringing Felix up right now is very awkward. I brought up love and babies first so I can forgive you. I love Felix like a brother, and I think he loves me like a sister. He has done a lot for me and Ontos. But true love? The act of baring your soul to another person? Being vulnerable? No, I don’t think he’s capable of that type of love.”

“Why not?”

Lyra heaved a sigh. “Why don’t you ask him? Felix is different from other people. It has gotten him into trouble his whole life and it has also worked in his favor. I’ve only seen him truly angry one time and it was the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.”

“What happened?”

“I really hate talking about Felix like this,” she said. “I’m telling you as a warning. Do not bring up his father. We were thirteen and walking down the street when we spotted a man coming out of a bakery. He never noticed us.”

“Felix’s dad.”

“Right. I never realized anything had happened until we turned down an empty alley. Felix absolutely lost his mind. Like an animal. After a while he started punching these stone walls until his hands were mangled. That old blademaster nearly threw a tantrum himself when he learned his favorite pupil couldn’t hold a sword for months.”

I pushed a strand of hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “For someone who keeps saying they don’t want to talk about Felix you certainly gave me his life story.”

She tried to push me off the bed playfully. “Get out of here.”

“Relax, pomegranate-fingers.”