Maris Dalewood walked off a paid job last week, and she still had not opened the letter that fired her for it. She was thirty. She had spent most of those years reading other people's eyes to learn what they thought of hers — left part blue, right brown — and she had decided early that the flinch told her everything. Now she wanted something the flinch could not give her. She wanted to know where the eyes came from. No one in her family had them. The records she had found before quitting the contract said other people did, in a line, marked. She climbed to the perch she had claimed in the upper market: a sealed metal pod hung on cable, with one-way ports facing out. From inside she could watch the crowd without being watched back. She came here to study faces. Today she came to study one face in particular. A small woman with a white streak in her black curls had been seen near the spice stalls three mornings running. Maris had paid a runner to confirm it. She opened the journal she carried everywhere, the one with the clasp that caught the light in shifting colors. Inside were lists. Names of strangers with split eyes. Towns. Dates. A page for the market woman who had grabbed a child's wrist twenty-three years ago and walked away without speaking. Maris had hunted that woman once and got nothing. She did not expect more today. She expected the next name on the list. The woman with the streak stopped below the pod. She tilted her head up at the cable, then at the ports, as if she knew exactly which pod was occupied. Maris held still. The woman crossed the lane and climbed the service ladder. She knocked twice on the hatch. Maris opened it. The woman was her height almost exactly, deep brown skin, a wedge of blue in the left eye, brown in the right. She did not flinch. She looked straight at Maris and held it. "You're Dalewood," the woman said. "I'm Delaine. We share a grandmother. There are eleven of us I've found. I came because I heard you walked off a job over the bloodline records." She passed up a folded sheet. "That's where the rest of us are. Some won't talk to you. Two will." Maris took the sheet. Her hand stayed steady. She had spent thirty years deciding her eyes were not a flaw, and now a stranger with the same eyes was telling her they were a map. She climbed down after Delaine. She left the pod open behind her. The next name on her list was no longer a stranger's, and the question had changed from who am I to which of them will tell me the truth.

Maris went home that night and read Delaine's list twice. Two names were marked willing. The closer one lived a half day's ride out, in a stone pavilion she received strangers in before she let them past her door. Maris knew what that meant. A wary woman did not give up family stories to a face she had never seen. Maris would arrive with nothing but matching eyes and a journal full of other people's names. That would read as a hunter, not a relative. She sat at her kitchen table and worked the problem. She needed a token. Something a blood relative would recognize and a stranger could not fake. She thought of her mother's drawer, the one she had not opened since the funeral. She went and opened it. Under folded scarves she found a small silver locket, tarnished black at the seams. She had seen it once as a child and been told it came from her mother's mother's side, and not to touch it. Inside was a painted portrait of a girl with a ribbon in her hair. The girl's eyes were two different colors. Maris had never noticed as a child. She noticed now. She closed the case and put it in her pocket. The ride out took most of the next morning. The pavilion stood alone on a low rise, pale stone pillars open to the wind, crystal set into the walls. A heavy wooden door waited at the back. The knocker was a brass hand. Maris understood the shape. You did not knock with your knuckles here. You put your palm against the brass palm. She did. The door opened a crack and an older woman looked out. Her left eye had a wedge of blue. Her right was brown. She did not flinch from Maris's face. She also did not step aside. "I don't know you," the woman said. Maris took the locket from her pocket and held it open on her palm. The woman looked at the painted girl. She looked at Maris. Then she lifted a chain from under her collar and showed Maris a second locket, the same shape, the same tarnish, a different girl inside with the same split eyes. "Sisters," she said. "Yours and mine." She opened the door the rest of the way. "Come in. I won't tell you everything. I'll tell you what I know about the woman who took the child at the market." Maris stepped inside. She had come with a token and it had worked. But the woman had named a thing Maris had not asked about yet, a thing Delaine had not mentioned either, and now Maris understood the lineage was not only marked. It was being watched, and someone in it had been taking children. She sat down across from the woman and opened her journal to a clean page.