“I already tried leaving once today. It wasn’t a roaring success.”

“Daybreak will be safer. There’s a runner I trust who’s on watch in the morning, but he moves out to border patrol by the afternoon.” He crosses his arms behind his back. “I can escort you out at sunrise.”

I nod, and he walks to the door. Standing in the threshold, he hesitates.

“When you go don’t leave a trace.”

“I never do.”

I’m so good at not making an impression it’s a wonder I even leave footprints. Not once in my whole life have I been missed. I’ve collected marks from others all over, but I’ve never made one on someone else. As I close the door behind Nik Nik, I wonder how long it will be before I am less to him than a ghost.

* * *

THERE ARE SLIGHT advantages to being so often treated as prey. For instance, you tend to watch others more than others watch you. You tend, also, to only ever be minimally disoriented by a sudden loss of safety. But the most important benefit to being so often hunted is that you always know when it’s happening.

    So when the men come into the room somewhere after midnight, I am sitting in a chair facing them. I’d heard the footsteps gathering about half an hour after the pod had beeped to tell me I was as healed as I was going to be, and I thought briefly of escaping. But the boots had gathered at each end of the hall, and I’d rather be dragged out than give them the satisfaction by stepping into a trap. Eventually my patience outlasted theirs, and four runners entered my room.

“Can I help you?” I ask, like they’re visitors to my sitting room, not soldiers who’ve cornered me.

Michael and the child runner are there, but they must be outranked by the one who speaks. Both look surprised to find me, sans veil, in the room, but neither says anything.

“Emperor heard his brother had company. Wants to meet you.”

“Sounds like fun,” I say, standing. I can be remarkably compliant when I don’t have a choice.

They don’t lead me down the way I expect. My Nik Nik kept his office on the right side of the palace. His father’s had been on the left, but Nik Nik respected his memory too much to take it over. He left it as a sitting room, and he would meet those who had been friends with his father there. Adra must not care much for sentiment, which makes sense, if he’s as smart as the stories say.

Taking a deep breath won’t actually help, but as we near the office I do it anyway. The double doors I’m led to have only ever held Nik Senior in my memory, but I try to keep calm. It can’t be as bad as that. No one could ever be as bad as Nik Senior.

I’m wrong.

I’ve been to worlds where plants kill, where people don’t wear color, where the sun sets too soon. I’ve seen the impossible, but nothing so impossible as this. When the runners open the doors, I see him: Adam Bosch, father of interdimensional traversing and director of the Eldridge Institute, standing behind the desk, just in front of the chair where Nik Senior bled to death.

I see a man who has always been brilliant and kind to me, but with teeth covered in onyx and rows in his hair. I want to call him sir. I want to apologize for coming into his office.

    The code. Of course, the code. If I’d questioned how Nik Nik and I both knew it, I might have expected this. But I didn’t, so I panic and step backward. I lick at the sweat collecting on my upper lip and feel more like my mother lying in the dirt than I ever have. I know I’m facing death, because all of the shock and confusion and anger I expected to see on Nik Nik’s face when my veil came off, I am seeing now on his brother’s. Adam, Adranik, whoever he is, he killed me on this Earth. Or tried to. I should have known. Nik Nik isn’t the only one who would have killed like his father.

The emperor steps back. He’s afraid because his first thought isn’t resurrection or twin, it’s ghost. But then comes rage, the curling upper lip I remember from Nik Senior. It’s impossible. Impossible. I know Adam…but then, you can’t ever know another person. Which is why you should never admire anyone.

It’s too late for me to learn that lesson.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was her?” he says to Michael.

“She didn’t look like that before,” says the boy runner. He’s defensive of my stepbrother, but there’s too much apology in his protest. He wasn’t cut out for this.

I won’t get to see how they’re punished for failing to recognize me, because Adam orders the other two to drag me to the dungeon. The hands grabbing my arms have fingers the size of my widest bones and no aversion to digging in as they drag me back.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the dungeon, I add up the hours I’ve been gone and wonder if Dell has started to miss me. If she ever will. It’s too early for her to be really worried. I’ve missed check-ins before, so she won’t think anything’s wrong tomorrow either. She’ll go to Jean, probably, who will remind her I have history in the area. He’ll tell her I have just let my curiosity get the better of me like I did that one time on Earth 68, and that other time on Earth 214, and that other time…maybe if I’d ever been reliable, they’d have the cavalry out.

Or maybe not.

Everything I knew about Eldridge is skewed now that I know the son of the Blood Emperor is running it. I’ve always believed Nik Senior killed his eldest, but apparently his narcissism was too great for that. He had wanted his second child to inherit, but he must have only sent Adam away to learn. On Earth Zero, anyway. Nik Senior probably tried to banish his son here, too, but this Adranik killed him for it.

The fact that Adam Bosch is my ex-lover’s older brother is almost harder to process than him being a warlord. I roll the idea around as if tumbling the knowledge will wear the edges off. It doesn’t work. It still seems impossible. I think about them, comparing their appearances in my mind, but there is nothing in my boss’s face to remind me of the man I lived with for years. Even Nik Senior seems absent from Bosch. But then, when I think of the empress…yes, there he is. Adam has his mother’s face.

    All this thinking is just a distraction from the trap I’m caught in. The dirt is too hard to dig into on the hill the emperor chose for his palace, but the aboveground dungeons still feel subterranean. The walls are concrete, the door metal. The ceiling is made of puffy squares that keep sound from traveling to the floor above, a concession to Nik Senior’s delicate wife. When I was a kid, I thought the empress was beautiful—and terrible. I hated her for standing next to a monster, for sleeping next to him and never clamping a pillow over his face. When I was a teenager, I thought I understood. She didn’t like it, but she was secure the only way a pretty girl with no stomach for a hard life could be in Ash. But then, when I got older still, my understanding turned again, darker. Once I was with Nik Nik I began to wonder if the empress didn’t mind the bloodshed at all, because for all the hell he bought the rest of us, Nik Senior could never do anything but love her. It is possible to love a monster, even if you spend every day reminding yourself that they are a monster.

I’m staring up at that ceiling when I hear the steps. How, how is it possible his footsteps sound the same in a wasteland dungeon as they do echoing off the high halls of Eldridge?

When I stand up, the voice comes from behind me. Quiet, but too forceful to be called a whisper.

“Don’t stand. If you’re not sitting when he comes in, he’ll make you.”

I turn around, but it’s just me and the wall. I hold my hand up. The wall looks like solidly stacked cinder blocks, but enough of the mortar has been pushed away that I can feel air coming from the other side. I put my palm at mouth height and feel the warm breath of the intruder. Not a ghost, then.

I’m full of questions, but I hate to waste good advice, so I sit.

“Took you longer than I thought,” I say when Adranik comes in.

“How did you know I’d come? I could have let you rot.”

    “You didn’t order me dead. Means you want information. You don’t strike me as the type who’s patient when he wants something.”

He walks up to the cell doors slowly, not caution but nonchalance. He doesn’t open them. Wouldn’t matter if he did. I could fight him in my world, where he has thin, delicate hands and a face that never quite meets another person’s. But this Adam, callous and even-eyed, this one could kill me.