I nod when I want to shake my head. Seventy-two hours on Earth 175. Three days in a world that murdered me. It makes sense that she’s asking about headaches now. Staying that long, the comeback will be rough. If I had a crack, I might shatter.

“You’ve been given your map of the ports you’ll need to hit. The emergency shelters were stocked during the last pull, so your route will include those as well.”

I nod. Dell’s eyes drift over to the screen with my notes.

“Homework?”

“Punishment,” I say. “From Jean.”

“He really should know better than to waste his time trying to teach you.”

He should, but her saying it out loud hurts. She must see that on my face because she tilts her head with interest, a wave of black hair petting her shoulders as she reacts to my pain like a scientist, not a friend.

“Don’t you remember? We spent a week giving you packets and books to prep for your first pull. Once you hit new ground, you forgot everything and we had to restart.”

I didn’t forget. The one she taught died, and I had to be trained all over again. But I can’t say that, so I say, “Going to a different world for the first time isn’t enough of an excuse for being a little forgetful?”

“It’s not a different world. It’s still our world, just with different paths taken.”

“Is that how you think of it?”

And if she answers, really answers, we’ll have a conversation like equals. Not like royalty bestows thoughts passingly on a commoner, but like two people seeking to understand each other.

She straightens. “It doesn’t matter what I think. You’re the one who actually goes there.”

“But you do live there. I mean, I visit, but I’m not there. You’re in all of these places, all the time. I can only go because I’m not.”

She shrugs, only half listening. I want to tell her I’ve seen her, just to see if it would make her curious enough to keep talking, but when her hair shifts my eyes snag on a missing bit of green at her ear.

    “You’ve lost an earring.” I say it half in awe, because the idea of Dell—careful, perfect Dell—losing anything is incongruous.

She touches the earring in her left ear, then her empty right. She covers it quickly but I see it in her face: despair. I know—though she’s never told me—that her grandmother gave her those earrings. This was her paternal grandmother, who never left Japan’s walled city when her parents came to this one. She loved her grandmother, because her accent made Dell’s name sound like Dare and when Dell was a child no one had ever called her daring before.

I don’t think Dell would have ever been a pilot had her grandmother not pronounced her name that way. Losing the earring must feel like losing her all over again. That’s the trouble with living eighty stories up—sometimes things fall down too far to ever reach again.

“I can help you look, if you—”

But she’s already moving away, hiding her eyes from me by looking down at her cuff. She doesn’t believe I can help her, but I’m the only one who can.

When I get off work I make the long commute down to my one-bedroom apartment. Somewhere fifty stories up Dell is entering the first floor of what can only be called a mansion this far down. But right now, I have something she needs. I head to my bedroom, my wall of stolen possessions, until I find the bag from Earth 261—the earring from the girl who let me hold her because she didn’t know who I was. I take the bag containing the carved jade teardrop off the wall and set it on my nightstand so I won’t forget to bring it to her tomorrow. Knowing I can undo the loss she felt today fills me up more than it should. I guess I’ve been waiting to have something, anything, to offer her.

* * *

IT WAS AN accident when it happened, with Dell. Two years ago I had a forty-eight-hour on Earth 261, where the border between Ash and Wiley City is just a line on a map. The city was still nicer, and the wasteland was still the wasteland, but Ashtown was actually part of the same territory. The people there could vote and get medical services. In Earth 261, a massive wall doesn’t separate the Wiles and Ashtown, it’s just a fence, and there are working streetlights on both sides.

    I went to the gardens on the eightieth floor to watch young professionals stream in and out of a bar on the corner. I didn’t go in; currency is iffy between worlds, and it’s a stupid risk to take. I just stayed in the garden, smelling fruit that had already been picked back home.

She came up to me. That’s important. And maybe I was hoping she would. And maybe I chose that garden because it was near where she lives on Earth Zero. But she was the one who approached, who said, “They’re free, you know.”

All I did was take the orange from the branch and hold it out to her. After she took it, I said, “Nothing’s free,” and let her make of that what she would.

And she did.

And the sex was good, though Dell’s apartment looked nothing like I had pictured. At first, lying in bed hearing stories about Dell’s grandmother that Dell would never tell me herself elated me. But then I got angry. She was only telling me because my Wiley City accent was near perfect, and my pull was close enough to Wiley’s sprawl that Earth Zero Dell had dressed me like one of her own. If she knew who I was, where I came from, she’d shut me out as much as my Dell did.

I feel bad, I do. It was a mistake…but every time I pull near Wiley City on another Earth, I find myself in that same garden. Just wanting to see her, to see if she’ll come up and choose to talk to me again.

Sometimes Dell walks past me.

Mostly, she doesn’t.

* * *

IF YOU BELIEVE the jokes people in Wiley tell, the not-very-funny jokes whose punch lines never contain genitalia or maiming, office meetings are boring. Harry, one of our more social watchers, recently fired, would nudge me in the elevator on our way up and say, “Once more into the theater, eh?” And I would laugh exactly as loudly as expected.

    But secretly, I find the company progress meetings exciting.

Every few months, all Eldridge employees are gathered into a room with a stage that is, yes, very much like a theater. We are given unlimited fresh fruit and baked goods—free—and coffee or juice—also free—and then we settle in and the CEO and founder speaks to us like we’re his friends. His opening is always some variation of the first opening I ever heard from the stage: When I was a boy I used to wonder what it would be like to walk in the stars. Not on them. In the space between. When I was five I’d arrange rocks as models of the solar system and sit among them, turning them over like I could find the secret. I never knew that when I finally got the chance to discover what was out there, I’d be surrounded by such talented, wonderful people.

I have spoken one-on-one with the man who made traversing possible three times, but the first time was my favorite. Adam Bosch isn’t as young as you’d think with everyone always calling him a boy wonder, but he doesn’t seem nearly old enough to have changed the world, so maybe that’s what they mean. But Wiley City is bad at age anyway. They see a fourteen-year-old runner outside the wall and say, A suspicious man spotted near the border, but when a thirty-three-year-old Wileyite murders his girlfriend it’s Good boy goes bad.

The first time I met Adam, Dell was lecturing me in the hatch room. I was fresh on Earth Zero, nervous that any second I’d be found out, and nervous that my incompetence would get me fired before I was.

“Go easy, Ikari,” he said, appearing like a ghost, an angel, a magician. “We were all new once.”

He was kind to me. He’s always been kind to me. That day he was wearing the same outfit he wears every year in the annual press releases. The white shirt and wide-legged black pants that news outlets mock, and yet he refuses to change. If he were from Ash, I’d say he wears them because the mockery is a challenge and he can’t be seen backing down. But he’s not. He’s just one of those scatterbrained geniuses who doesn’t think about appearances.

    Still, his clothes were the reason I couldn’t stop staring at him. They’re simple; no one else would find them striking, but that shirt was so white and those pants were so impractical, and there was magic in their very existence for a girl from a place with more dirt than air and as many scorpions as flies. No one could wear those clothes outside of the city, and when I laid eyes on him it was impossible to think of him as a scientist, to think of him as anything but magic.

He walked past Dell straight to me. He looked down at the apple in his fingers like he’d forgotten it was there, then he held it out to me. Another thing that means nothing in the city, but the ground in Ash is barren and the warehouses only hold fruit that can be stacked to make the most of the space—berries in rows, or grapes crawling up the wall behind them. Mostly, we just have vegetables.

When I took the apple with near lust he said, “You’re from Ashtown, aren’t you?”