Because what else would you name a runner you poached from the Rurals?

I think back to our last dinner, his red-stained hands as he tried to be something he wasn’t. Or, at least, something I thought he wasn’t.

“She’s from the Rurals,” says a voice behind me, and Nik Nik steps between us.

He’s put his hand on my arm to help guide me back down the hall, but Michael calls after us.

“Bringing your aid work home?” he says, with more sneer in his voice than a runner should dare.

The hand around my arm goes tight, and Nik Nik rises to his full height as his spine straightens. He looks over his shoulder slowly, slowly. His eyes narrow, like a carnivorous bird spotting movement in the dirt.

    Michael takes a step back, but it’s too late.

“Your name. You said it was Cross?”

It’s part threat, part statement, and not at all a question, but the runner answers anyway.

“Yes, sir,” Michael says. The “sir” is as proper as he can make it, but he’s trembling. It’s fear, but also uncertainty. He doesn’t know what the man before him is capable of. But I do. I tear my arm out of his grasp. Better to trust the wall.

The movement turns Nik Nik’s head away from Michael, breaking the spell of his rage.

“Have a good night, Mr. Cross,” he says, and resumes leading me down the hall. He does not reach for my arm again.

Walking through the palace with him is a strange déjà vu, something I’ve done a hundred times, but I’ve never done, and that I will never do again. When we get to the room I make no pretense before heading to the pod. The short walk has forced me to see how loosely my seams are held together. Every breath now is a dull ache, and there’s no guarantee that I would have ever survived to the other side. I need another night in the pod. Tomorrow, I can contact Dell. I go into the bathroom to change back into the pod gown, keeping my clothes clutched to my chest.

Nik Nik is in the bedside chair reading my journal. Again. I don’t write everything about my life like Caramenta did. I haven’t written enough for him to still be reading. Either he reads slowly or this isn’t the first time. He’s still focusing on the first part. He’s reading—over and over again—about himself. He takes his time before looking over at me. Once he does, once his eyes flick from the pages to me, I want to run. I have the heart of a coyote but he has the eyes of a mountain lion, a creature who doesn’t need tricks because his teeth are real.

But the monster I saw in the hallway was different from the one I’ve known. This is a creature who knows what he is, maybe even regrets it. A monster who’s seen a mirror. That must be what the journal is for him, another mirror to see himself.

    “What would you have done to that boy?”

“You should know better than to call a runner a boy,” he says. He lifts the journal. “You used to.”

“That runner is barely eighteen. He’s a boy. You’re twice his age and size.”

I don’t know why it feels like I can do this, correct him. It’s never felt possible before. I was never one of the women who believed she could change her abusive partner. I was just one who believed she could survive it. I bet Nelline thought so too. And she did survive, she must have, or I wouldn’t be shaking as my pieces refuse to knit back into place.

“I want to believe I would never have hurt him,” he says, answering my first question.

“But you don’t like it when your men get mouthy?”

He looks up, his head tilted. “You’re quick to treason.”

I walk over to the pods, lifting them up. He comes to my side to help ease me into the bed.

“That’s not what it means,” I say, the machines beginning their high-pitched whir.

Nik Nik is reading my vitals on the glass of the main pod.

“Hmmm?”

“?‘Treason.’ You used it wrong. Whoever taught you to read mixed up a few things.”

“You called them my men. It’s treason to wish a ruler dead or overthrown, which is what you do when you assume I rule.”

In the hot room the air around me goes suddenly cold, and the pod feels unbelievably like a restraint.

“No…”

I should have realized. His hair isn’t braided. I messed up. I’ve acted like a coward avoiding information about the emperor, and now I’m in a trap far worse than Nik Nik’s.

“He’s not dead here. The Blood Emperor’s still alive? Your father is still alive?”

    I pull one arm out of the pod and begin hitting the buttons to shut it down so I can open it. At least, I hope I’m hitting buttons. I might just be hitting it.

“You have to let me go. I need to go now.”

I take deep breaths, try to clear my mind the way my office’s psychiatrist taught me, but nothing will help the flashbacks from my childhood. A place where heads were displayed in windows to send messages, but not the tongues, because those were nailed to the doors of the surviving family members. A place where runners got their name using homemade monstrosities to mulch people down in the streets. It was a game. They kept score in tally marks on their doors. Another reason there are so few of me left alive: I was not a fast child.

I don’t realize I’m still attacking the machine until Nik Nik grabs my hand.

“It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right. Your father—”

“Died. When I was six.”

The news calms me more than breathing exercises ever could. He notices, and releases me.

“How old was I when he died in your delusion?”

“My what?”

“In your journal, you think you know me. You’ve made an elaborate account of things that never happened.”

“Right, I’m just a sun-crazed wastelander. I’ve spent too long drinking bad water. Once I’m healed up, turn me loose. We’ll forget this ever happened.”

“Why is my name on your back? How did you learn the code you use?”

“I made it up,” I say, ignoring the first question.

“You’re not a very good liar.”

“Who taught you the code?” I ask back.

“The same person who taught me to read. My brother. Which is how I know there are no gaps in my education.”

    “…Your older brother?”

“You’ve heard of him? He’s absent in your journal.”

“I have. He was a prodigy. Crazy smart, right?”

Smart and curious and as weak as a baby bird. Which is why Nik Senior killed him when he was fourteen.

“He’s dead though,” I say.

“Treason again,” he says.

* * *

BACK ON MY home Earth, and I’m guessing every Earth where Nik Nik rules, the story is always the same. Everyone stopped speaking of the boy after he was killed; he was taken out of the records as if he’d never existed. Only I know, because his younger brother loved me and mourned him, that his real name was Adranik, firstborn. He was smart. Too smart. He understood numbers and stars but not how to please his father. He’d gotten sick when he was young, and never fully recovered. But even worse than being weak of body, he was weak of heart. He cried when his father took him hunting. He cried when the runners went on parade. When the boy was seven, Nik Nik was born. His mother named him Yerjanik, which means happy. An empty prayer. She must have known that wasn’t in the cards for either of Nik Senior’s boys.

By the time Nik Nik was five, he was already the biggest child in the wasteland. He hunted with Nik Senior’s men in the deep wastes, where humans barely live and grazing animals get fat off plants and water too toxic for most of us. But the second-born son of the emperor didn’t hunt the slower, lumbering prey. He speared predators with the glee of his father’s worst soldiers. I was never sure if Nik Nik was born cruel, or just obedient.

The story from the emperor’s men was that Adra’s persistent illness flared up, killing him kindly in his sleep. And that was what you said happened if any of Nik Senior’s men were in the room. But the real story, the one the workers who raised me heard from clients and passed around, was that the boy was taken into the black swamps. His throat was slit and his body shoved under.

    They say the dead in the bogs don’t decay. That they’re perfectly preserved in a grave of black moss. I’ve always wondered, if anyone dared brave the runners and predators that far out, if they would find him still—a small boy with a huge brain and a perfectly serene face.