“It was the girl with red hair and her friend. Jace stood up straight. The girl had taken her hair out of its ponytail and it spilled down over her shoulders, the color of a sunset. She was dancing with her eyes closed. And Jace felt something inside him stir at the way she moved, as if she had found her own circle of peace inside the chaos. She seemed sheltered by something he didn’t quite understand as she danced — and he had seen people dance and move with rare skill and amazing grace — with no sense of rhythm or practice.

Jace rarely thought about mundanes. They were the people he was supposed to protect, but his father had never brought him up to think about them as anything but an undifferentiated mass of needs and wants. A need to be saved. A want to be ignorant. Never to know of the darkness that surrounded them, the things that moved in the shadows.

He had never thought of them as carrying light themselves. But the girl with the red hair, there was a light around her.”