My sister, Saben, was staying in an apartment near the outskirts of the city, where there was less iron in the air. It was still more iron than she could handle, and she didn’t belong there, but she pretended it didn’t matter. I didn’t know why she was doing it. Maybe so she could prove something to me, or to our father, or to herself in her mind. It was all a guess to me, and it didn’t matter much, anyway. She wasn’t really any of my business.

When I got to her apartment, the door was ajar, and I pushed it open the rest of the way, letting myself in. Saben was standing in the kitchen. She spun toward me, no surprise on her face, like she’d already known it was me before she even saw me. Her arm lifted.

“What’s this?” she asked, holding an object out to me.

I squinted at it. “A kettle.” I couldn’t blame her for not knowing. It was one of those artsy, modern types, with more angles than any kettle really needed. And the fey didn’t really deal in kettles anyway.

She set it back down on the stove and watched me while I took in her apartment. It was small, just a tiny living room and kitchen, and a bedroom I couldn’t see. I knew her rooms at our father’s house weren’t much bigger, but they felt bigger, more opulent and airy, the curtains always thrown open to catch a breeze, the puffed pillows pleasantly chilly when you lay down against them, the carpets thick and stark white. This place was cramped and dingy, gray, and a bit too warm with the afternoon sun coming in through the window. But Saben didn’t seem to notice. She considered it with me, and although she didn’t smile, her face lit up a little as if she actually liked what she saw.

“Where are the apples?” I asked. She squinted her eyes at me. I shook my head, dismissing the question. “I have the knives for your errand girl,” I said, and pulled them from my pocket to put them on the counter.

“She said you wouldn’t dance.”

I flicked my eyebrows up. “I wouldn’t.”

“Luca.”

“Saben. What do you want?”

She narrowed her eyes, her mouth clamping into a tight line, and I looked away. I remembered when she was small. I remembered when she was milk thistle fuzz I could hold in my hands. She had been soft and agreeable and I’d loved her.

“What?” I repeated.

She straightened her spine, stretching every vertebra, even though, as inadequate as my own height was, she would never quite reach it. The fact of my height didn’t stop her from pretending we were eye to eye, though. “Father wants you to do something.”

I didn’t even need to listen to what it was. “Get one of your girls to do it,” I answered right away. “Or one of your boys.”

“You have to do it.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a job.” Her voice was flat.

“What is it, then?” It hadn’t always been this way between us. I hadn’t always been forced to pry information out of her like I was pressing water from stone.

“He wants you to see someone. A witch.” She frowned. “Or maybe not a witch. A healer. A person who fixes things.”

I just kept myself from laughing. “A doctor?”

She shrugged, a short, sharp rise and fall of her shoulders. Her hand snuck out, and she touched the handle of one of the knives I’d laid on the counter. “No. Yokai.”

“What?”

“Fey. From Japan. Father thinks he knows things our healers don’t. He wants you to go.”

I should have guessed. “Why didn’t he tell me himself?”

Saben shrugged again, apparently uninterested in the question or the answer. “Busy.”

Sometimes when we talked, when we were together, I thought she would act like a human. Normal. Sometimes I thought she’d take down her walls and smile at me, or touch my hand like she’d done as a child, or complete a sentence in a way that didn’t drip with how high-class fey she was, with how different from me she was. But she never gave me an inch. She hadn’t for a long time.

I turned my head to the side and coughed into my palm, and from the corner of my eye, I almost, almost thought I saw her face flicker out of its stillness. Her hand folded into her dress and twisted the soft fabric into a knot.

It was bad timing on my part, to cough right then. It meant I couldn’t argue. Not when it was obvious that a person who fixed things was exactly what I needed.

I sighed and tried to figure out what to say to get myself out of this. “I told him I wasn’t going to do this anymore. That when I came home, I was done.” I’d been gone for years, had traveled pretty far, searching for healers, for answers. I hadn’t spent all of that time searching, that was true. A lot of it had been spent living, because there wouldn’t always be much time for me to do that. I’d spent those years getting lost, pretending I was someone else, someone whole in all the ways I was half. But I’d searched too. It was why I’d gone, and I had wanted an answer.

I hadn’t made it to Japan. But I doubted that mattered. I’d come home because there wasn’t anyone who could do what I needed. It didn’t matter where they were from or what kind of healing they did. And there wasn’t anywhere on the planet that could make me someone else, either. So I’d come back.

Saben’s lips flattened into a thin line, and she glared at me, but I was used to that too.

“He wants you to go.”

“Do you?”

She raised her eyes, too fast. I stared at her, waiting, but she didn’t say anything. Didn’t shrug or nod or shake her head. She just stared back at me.

“You want me to go,” I said, slowly, “so you can tell him you did as he wanted and made me.” Her eyes flickered away from mine at that, and I nodded. “You said it wasn’t a job. But it is. It’s a job for me. Right?”

She didn’t answer, but it didn’t matter. I would go, because she’d delivered me a message, and my job was to follow those messages, whatever they were. I wasn’t her brother. I was her errand boy. I found her pocket knives to core apples with. I touched iron when her people couldn’t. I told her about kettles. I did as she told me.