Early on, the professionals on the upper stories, scientists like Bosch and watchers like Dell, told me the bruising was from the resistance of an object from one world being forced into another, like the violence of north and south magnets being shoved together. Other traversers, and they are a superstitious lot, told me the pressure we felt had a name, and it was “Nyame.” They said her kiss was the price of the journey.

Dell touches the clear screen that’s been delivered to me. It looks like a blank sheet of plastic, but once I activate it I’ll know the basics of the world that’s just been assigned to me. I learned quickly after moving here that the city loves plastic the way my town loves metal. Everything here is plastic. And it’s all the same kind. When a plastic thing stops working, they put it down a chute and turn it into another plastic thing, or the same thing but fixed. Plastic here is like water everywhere else; there’s never any more or less of it, just the same amount in an endless cycle.

“Do you know what your new world is?” she asks.

“You haven’t given it to me yet.”

“Can you guess?”

I should say no, because I resent being asked to do parlor tricks, but instead I answer, because I want to impress her.

“One Seventy-Five,” I say. “If I had to guess.”

    I know I’m right by the way she refocuses on me. Like I’m interesting. Like I’m a bug.

“Lucky guess,” she says, sliding the screen to me.

“Not really. There’s only seven options.”

I sit and pull out the drive that contains the payload from my last job. As soon as I plug it in, the dark data will upload to persons unknown and delete itself. I send the light data to the analysts who will interpret and package it for the scientists.

Eldridge thinks we traversers don’t know about the first package of intel. Like the organizations responsible for space exploration in the past, Eldridge is technically an independent company, though it’s heavily funded by the government of Wiley City. There is an industrial hatch outside the city walls, in the empty strip of desert between here and Ashtown, which brings in resources from other worlds. Taxpayers, government officials, and especially Eldridge’s lesser employees are supposed to believe that is how the company supplements the income it gets from research grants. Sure, bringing in resources from another world so we don’t have to harm ours is probably worth a mint. But that doesn’t add up to tenth-richest-man-in-the-city money, which is what our CEO and founder has.

Because no traverser has ever made a report to enforcement or asked questions, they think they’ve pulled this elaborate ruse on lower-level employees. But really, we just don’t care. A job’s a job, and people edging out other people to make money buying and selling something invisible just sounds like rich-people problems.

I look up at Dell, still standing beside me. She’s a rich person, but the kind who’s always going to be rich. Rich so far back it’d take two generations of fuckups for her family to go broke. There’s a lot of this up here in the city. Not new-money rich people, like Adam Bosch, but whole rich families where the wealth is spread out among the members so it doesn’t attract attention.

“Something else?”

“Saeed is gone,” she says.

    “Star? They fired her?” When she nods, I ask, “Did she mess up?”

I hope she did. Starla Saeed is one of the last traversers remaining from before I started. She was born in what they call a civil war but was really just a ruler systematically killing his subjects. When she was twelve she took a journey across the sea that drowned more people than it delivered. She could travel to over two hundred worlds.

If she screwed up, it’s just a firing, only interesting because we have the same job and were close once. If she was downsized, she’s a canary in the mine.

“One Seventy-Five was the last world only she had access to. When your death on that world registered…Why pay two salaries and benefits when they can just put 175 in your rotation?”

What she doesn’t say, but thinks: Why pay a decent salary at all for a glorified courier?

“One Seventy-Five won’t be scheduled for at least a week, but it wouldn’t hurt for you to familiarize yourself over your long weekend. And pay attention to the bruising. I want to make sure it’s clearing before your next pull.”

Again, I can interpret her fear over a wasted asset however I want, and I choose to pretend it’s affection. The long look she takes at my arms and chest makes me shiver, and for a second I wonder if I am just pretending. But then she sees my reaction and backs away, nearly running into Jean.

“Ms. Ikari,” he says, formally, the way she likes.

“Mr. Sanogo,” she says, also formally, the way he doesn’t like.

The famous Jean Sanogo has always just been called Jean, or Papa Jean by the papers.

“How is our best girl today?” he asks.

“Stubborn. She’s bruising more than usual, tell her to pay attention to it.” Dell glares over her shoulder. “She might actually listen to you.”

“I assure you, she ignores us both equally,” he says, and Dell walks away.

I’ve finished uploading the information packet under my username, so I log out and log back in with my superior’s credentials. I use the stolen access to send a copy of the light data packet to my cuff so I can read through it later.

    Jean has pulled over an empty traverser’s chair.

“Dell is tense. You need to stop teasing her when you’re off-world.”

“But then how will she know I like her?” I say.

“You’ve been flirting with her for five years. She knows.” He leans forward, setting down a steaming cup, and adjusts his glasses to look at my progress screen. “Am I witnessing company theft in my name? My wounded heart.”

“Come now, old man. It can’t really be theft if I’m just reading. You can’t steal something that’s still there when you’ve taken it.”

“You’ll find a large portion of the judicial system here disagrees with you.”

I wave my hand. Judicial is a Wiley City word if I’ve ever heard one, and it has no place between us.

Jean knows what I’m doing. Not only was it his idea, but it’s his credentials I use to send myself the info. He thinks if I study the figures and look for patterns the way analysts do, I’ll be valuable to the company for more than my mortality rate. He thinks I can be more than a traverser, that I can be like him. With the number of desks sitting empty around me, I am desperate to believe he’s right.

Jean was in the first group of surviving traversers. Before that, he lived through a rebel army’s ten-year border war on the Ivory Coast. As a traverser, he could visit more than 250 Earths. He used to walk the worlds with us, but now he sits in a room and makes the policies surrounding traversing. When he goes out in public, people repeat his famous quote—I have seen two worlds now and the space between. We are a wonder—from the moment he landed safely on a new world. They shake his hand and take his picture, but he is quick to remind me that he was once worthless too.

Jean is the one who told me about Nyame, just like he tells every new traverser. It’s the name of a goddess where he comes from, one who sits in the dark holding the planets in her palm. He says the first time he traveled to another world, he could feel her hand guiding him. I’ve never had much use for religion, but I respect him too much to disagree.

    “This is 197, yes?” he asks, nodding to the screen showing the info I’ve just pulled. “The sky scientists were braying over it.”

“They’re called astronomers, Jean. And yeah, they put a rush on it. They want pictures of some asteroid that’s too far away and they didn’t want to wait a week for.” I try to rotate my arm and wince at the ache.

“They paid a premium to rush a few pictures?” Jean makes a dismissive clucking sound. “Too much money, not enough purpose.”

Jean’s dislike of astronomers is an occupational hazard, and the dislike is mutual. Those working strictly in the field of space exploration haven’t been fond of interuniversal travel, the new frontier that came along and snatched up a chunk of their funding. In return, those who work at Eldridge treat space exploration the way a young male lion looks at an older, sickly male lion—no outright violence, but maybe showing too much excitement in anticipation of the death.

Jean nudges the mug I’m ignoring toward me again. Sighing, I take a sip and barely keep from spitting.

“I was really hoping for coffee,” I say, forcing myself to down the dark mixture of vitamin D, zinc, and too many other not-quite-dissolved nutrients.

“Coffee is not what you need,” he says in the accent my limited world experience first thought of as French. “Nyame kissed you hard this time.”

“With teeth.”

“So I see. Dell marked you for observation.”

Of course she did. “I’ve only been scheduling pulls close together so I can take a few days off. I told her that.”

“A vacation? I should think staying in place would have more appeal for you.”