I think back to Adam Bosch’s wide pant legs and white, white shirts. I should have known he was a wastelander. Only we know the true value of white fabric, because nothing stays white in the land of sandstorms and mudtides. And the slacks, the thin material flaring out instead of tucked into boots, an invitation to bloodmites and scorpions in Ashtown. Even I, for all my assimilation, still wear pants close and tight. He’s not eccentric; he’s just showing off. Does he feel exposed? Is it an adrenaline rush to dress the way he does? Or has he forgotten those old fears, a true Wiley City resident now?

I remember his smooth hands as he offered me fruit, knowing what produce would mean to me. We’re all rooting for you. He might have been, because we are exactly the same and only he knew it. And I had worshiped him.

This one dresses like Ash: long hair braided twice on the side, thick pants tucked into metal-tipped boots, fingernails like stilettos, and a mouth full of shine. Adam Bosch is clean-shaven. Adranik wears a low beard against the desert wind.

“I told your brother everything.”

“My brother doesn’t ask the right kinds of questions,” he says, flashing onyx teeth at me. Same voice, same easy authority as the man who signs my paychecks. The man who signed the letter of employment Caramenta gushed over like a sacred text.

He’s right about his brother asking the wrong questions. Nik Nik wanted to know if sunsets are the same color on all worlds, and if there are places that still have frogs. He’d never even thought to ask how such a power could be exploited, how it was done.

    “I’m not a threat to you. I just want to leave. I promise you’ll never see me again.”

He leans against the bars, hands and head hanging inside my cell. So at least he believes me about the first part.

“What game are you playing, Nelline?”

“I’m not whoever you think I am.”

He looks at me, all of me, from the bottom up. “You think I don’t know you? I made you. Why did you get my brother’s name on your back? To make me jealous?”

I look at his hands without making it seem like I’m looking at his hands. Three scars around his index and middle finger. The emperor is married. The emperor is married and he’s looking at me like he owns me.

She was my brother’s. That’s what Nik Nik had said. I should have focused on that. Should have asked, Your brother’s what?

“We’re not, I mean…I’m not your…You think I’m your wife?”

He laughs, loud and deep and cruel. “I’d never marry a garbage git. Much less a worker.”

The voice in the wall gives a low rumble that’s pure wasteland. I used to growl like that, before I came to the city and realized they never growled, or hissed, or spit to ward off curses.

Much less a worker. The emperor sounds like Nik Senior, full of derision for the House that keeps Ashtown running. Nik Nik wasn’t like that. Peter, his best friend growing up, took the x and had his ear for sex providers ever since.

“My wife is elegant and pure. She’s an angel,” he says.

“Poor thing. She blind?”

“Mouth like that and you expect me to believe you aren’t Nix?”

I bristle on Nelline’s behalf at his use of her old name. If she did trick in Ash, she doesn’t anymore, and his use of her working name means he still considers her open for business despite her wishes.

“I’m not.”

“Then who are you?” His dark eyes narrow until he looks near manic. “Are you with them? The people in black suits who keep trying to kill me?”

    “A rival gang squaring up on you?” I cluck my tongue. “The emperor in my world never had that problem. Neither did your old man.”

“Your world,” he says. “So you and my brother are telling the same ridiculous story. Say I buy that you are a duplicate from another world. How does it work? Can you show me?”

“Magic. And no.”

He steps back, sliding his hands out of the bars.

“Thought you would have learned your lesson about telling me no.”

He’s not disappointed; he’s not even curious. There’s glee at my refusal, so I shouldn’t be surprised by what comes next.

“The runners parade at dawn. You have until then to change your mind.”

“You still…”

Memories overwhelm me. The modified vehicles, spikes and fire, the laughing. God, the laughing. I was small enough to hide, but rarely quick enough to get to a hiding spot. If you didn’t cry, they didn’t chase as hard, they got bored. But I was a child. Children always cry.

Can I activate my collar before they crush me? Will it even have finished warming up before they’ve ground me into nothing?

“You want to know what I know?”

He’d been walking to the door, but now he turns back, mistaking my rage for cooperation.

“I know that you are just like your father. Worse, even. You didn’t grow up during the wars; you have no excuse for cruelty. You just like it. Your father was right. You are weak. A weak and useless ruler. Do you want to know where I come from? I come from a place where your brother is emperor and the wasteland rejoices. Everyone loves him. I don’t have his name on my back to make you jealous, because not one person even remembers you. I have his name on my back because he is the best thing to happen to Ashtown. And you, you are the worst. The inadequate son, turning his father’s legacy to shame.”

    It’s a little lie sharpened to a knife, and it slices true. He closes his eyes, holds himself back from reacting. When he opens them again he’s calm, focused. He looks more like Adam Bosch than I would have thought possible.

“You tricked me before, got me to kill you before the runners could have their way. It won’t work again. This time, you’ll go like the trash you are.”

* * *

I’VE THOUGHT A lot about how I could die. Most gits do. There are ways that are acceptable, and ways that are not. Of course, sometimes we fantasize about not dying at all…but it’s best to be practical.

My mother knew I would die in a palace.

One night, toward the end, she said, You’ll never keep your place, always reaching up.

She was too out of it to remember the story of the man who flew too high and crashed to the ground, but she’d told me it enough times before that I’m sure, if she were capable, she would have reminded me again.

It was when she was sick for the last time, and everyone on the block knew it was the last time. Half because they thought this withdrawal would kill her, and half because they were sure if she made it through this time, she would never use again. I was in the latter half. But we were both wrong.

She was lying on towels, having sweated through her bedroll and blankets the day before, the last time she told me to keep my place. She said the first things to come out of her were my hands—fingers straight, not curled—because I was born reaching.

And that’s how you’ll die, she said. High up in a tower where you have no business.

I leaned in then, and said it. The last words she was coherent enough to hear from me: Rather die in a tower than the dirt floor of a shack.

I still believe it. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could say that she didn’t deserve to die like that. I wish I could call her death a tragedy or even unexpected. But you get the death you accept. Lying on that dirt floor, spinning one last time on a free dose from Nik, her favorite nightgown full of holes she never seemed to see, that was exactly how my mother was meant to go.

    And if Adranik had put his hands around my neck and choked me to oblivion, it’d feel about right for me. Dying in a palace because I brushed too close to too powerful a man? It’s been written in my stars on more than one Earth.

But death by runners? As an adult? No. The parades were the specter of my childhood. In the arc of my life, the time for them to kill me ended when I outlived Senior. It’s a child’s death, and I won’t be made a little girl in the end. I’d kill myself before I’d face the parade.

* * *

I’M MAKING A list of options with too few entries when I hear the scratching travel up the wall and across the ceiling. It’s the sound of a sandcat—a fanged rodent whose name makes no sense, except that they do eat other rodents, as a cat would, if there were any left small enough to fit the title. The scratching is a trick. It must fool the guards into thinking the sounds in the walls are made by the creature, but I remember the litter that invaded our house when I was a girl and this sound is off. The ceiling creaks too much for the weight of a single animal and the scratching is too precise to be a pack. I follow the noise to the corner of my cell, and watch as one of the ceiling tiles is pulled away.

The person who’s come to my rescue is exactly who I expect: me.

I take a moment and stare fully at her. With Caramenta, half of the cheek was destroyed, the eyes discolored. I didn’t so much feel it was me as I deduced it. But this is me and I know it in my chest. I am standing here in the cell but I am also staring out from the darkness of the space in the ceiling.

First, I go a little dizzy. Then, my heart beats quickly, a panic without reason. Finally, I vomit. In the space above she does the same. This time when I straighten, I keep my eyes closed. She doesn’t, and starts vomiting again.

    “You have to stop looking at me directly,” I say. “Your brain thinks you’re hallucinating. It’s trying to make you throw up whatever toxic thing you drank.”

“Got it,” she says between retches.