Chapter 12: The Tell

Ming separated them. It was the first thing you did with two witnesses who disagreed; it was in the Code, under Testimony, and she had done it a hundred times with the dead. She put the sister with the hairpin in the study, with the door closed and the charm on the outside of it. She put the smiling sister on the bench in the courtyard, under the moon, with Nine to watch her. Then she went back and forth between them with her writing box for most of the first watch, asking the same questions in the same order, and writing down every answer in two columns. When did you first come over this wall? "The eighth month," said the sister on the bench. "The night of the twelfth. It was clear." "The twelfth of the eighth month," said the sister in the study. "There was no cloud." What…