When I open my eyes, her face is turned away and she’s reaching down, holding out an arm as tattooed as mine used to be. I use the cell bars to lift myself up.

“I don’t know what will happen if we touch,” I say once I’m in the space beside her. “This has never happened before.”

“Jesus, is that what I sound like?” she says in a voice as low and rough as an asphalt road. “Do you gargle with bleach or something?”

“Me? My voice isn’t as bad as yours. You sound like coffee percolating.”

We quiet as we realize that we must, in fact, both sound like this. Which is a letdown. Having been raised around people with voices as inviting and seductive as a birdsong sung low, I’d always hoped a little of it had worn off on me.

We replace the roof tile, then I shimmy in the crawl space behind her. She leads me to a gap between walls and we go vertical. She doesn’t look back to ask me if I know how to climb the cinder block. I wonder if she has the same memories I do, of being exiled outside when Mom had overnight clients, of climbing up the walls to sleep on the roof, high above things that bite and sting, above ground that would suck you in at the first drop of moisture.

I think again about Earth 255 me. She couldn’t do this, and because she couldn’t climb she would never have to.

We climb until we can pull ourselves up onto the floor of a round, domed room. A portion of the wall is missing, and we slide through easily.

I look around. “The observatory…”

“The what?”

    “The observatory. It was their mother’s.”

And in my world it was cleaned every day. The only portrait in the house was in this room. It was his mother, life-size on the wall just before the clear roof began. Here, it’s all clutter and cobwebs.

“It’s just a room they never use. It’s safe enough,” she says.

I look at her, but only from the neck down. I recognize her gloves, fingerless reptile hide. Mixxie gave them to me—us—after my mother died. All of the providers gave me something in the days after I buried her, even though she hadn’t been attached to the House for almost a year at the end. They visited me one at a time, never more than a few hours apart, a suicide watch if I ever saw one. But it was Exlee who gave me the gift that saved my life: an invitation to stay at the House for a while, whether I took up the work or not. There they taught me how to seduce a man no one else had been able to keep, how to trap a predator by looking like prey.

I allow myself to look at her through a half squint. It’s still disorienting, but there’s no racing heart, no nausea, so I open my eyes fully.

Once I’m staring at her I can’t stop. It’s not at all like seeing myself. This dirt-caked girl isn’t me. But it is exactly like going back in time, seeing a portrait of myself from when I was young. She looks—

“You look like my mother,” she says. “But for those weird marks.”

“I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

“Figures.”

She perches on a dust-covered desk, one leg hanging off and the other pulled close to her chest, her arms around her knee. And I know, because she’s me, that she’s trying to look casual as she reaches for the knife on her calf.

“We don’t know what will happen if you do that either.”

Her stretching fingers relax.

“I’ve been listening in the walls,” she says. “You think you’re the real me.”

“A different you. My world just learned how to traverse before yours.”

“Why?”

    “Why what?”

“Why did you figure it out first? No, forget that. That’s just luck. Why hasn’t everyone else figured out how to traverse? Or have they?”

“No…they haven’t.”

“No one has? You’ve never seen another of these travelers—”

“Traversers.”

“Whatever. None from other worlds have come?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I open my mouth to give the company line, that we might have been visited but they just haven’t been detected, but then freeze. What if there are just too few Adam Bosches who aren’t bloodthirsty emperors? How many Nik Seniors let their eldest sons live? How many Adraniks killed their fathers and took their places?

I could tell her this, but I’m not sure why she wants to know.

“I don’t know. I never asked.”

She leans back, a little smug.

I sit on a pile of what used to be curtains. “I don’t question things. I’m just happy to have a position.”

“A real position? You citizen?”

“Almost. Resident. Four years left.”

She whistles low. “You told Nik you need to get outside to leave. But how will you get back if we don’t have that technology here?”

She’s staring at her hands when she asks, going for casual. I’m almost offended. Do I look that soft? I haven’t been out of Ashtown that long.

“They’ll pick me up the same place they dropped me off,” I say. “The riverbed on the edge of town, the deep-waste side.”

She nods. “Shift change at dawn. We’ll leave then.” She pulls out two thermoses, drinks from one, and holds the other out to me. “You’ll need hydration for the walk. Not sure how the sun is where you’re from, but here tomorrow’s a bright day.”

Only when she says it do I remember Dell warning me it was coming. A bright day, meaning don’t go outside and bring in anything you don’t want burnt or discolored. We haven’t had one of those in a while. Or maybe we have and I missed it. In the city, they pull a dark screen over the sky to keep it out. We call the days overcast, and I’ve forgotten the shadow means fire on the other side.

    I drink up, trying to remember the last time I had to face the white light.

“Thank you.”

She waves off my thanks just like I would. “I’ll head out soon. I’ve got more listening to do. Need something I can sell if I want to keep laying low.”

“You spy?”

“I listen.”

“Nelline…Why did Adra try to kill you?”

From the look on her face, the question catches her like a right hook. But she must have wondered, at least while it was happening.

When she answers me, it is, of course, a list.

“Because he wanted me and didn’t want to. Because he wanted to prove he could live without me. Because he couldn’t control me. Because…” She shrugs. “But I’ve been dosing myself with his paralytic, little bits, so it wore off quick. Took blood expanders on days when I saw him. Even if Nik hadn’t found me, I wouldn’t have even come close to dying for real.”

Her voice shakes with the lie she’s probably been telling herself. Lying there, bleeding out in the time before seeing Nik Nik’s face, she probably felt just like I did on the desert sand after landing here. I wonder if she thought of Mom, too, when the darkness was closing in.

Odd, that 175 Nik Nik had saved us both.

I’d assume her relationship with Adra was like mine and Nik’s. But no, I was never really prepared for him to kill me. I must have trusted him, at least that much. Trusted him to hurt me without killing me, to bruise me without breaking any of my most important bones. Is that still trust? Or just resignation?

Maybe Nik Nik was better than Adra so I was right to trust he’d never kill me, but more likely Nelline is just smarter than I was. That’s why she’s alive after facing Adra, and I was caught off guard by Adam: we saw the same face, and only she knew better than to trust it.

    I shake out my pile of curtains and sit in a molding armchair.

Nelline was right. I am soft. Because I lied to her about how I’ll leave, so I assumed she’d sneak out and spend her day waiting in the river for a transport that would never come. But I’ve been living easy for six years. Longer, if you count my years at Nik Nik’s side as soft, which anyone in Ash would.

As sleep comes too easily, I realize what I missed, the most basic Ashtown truth I’ve let myself forget: a wastelander with two thermoses carries water and poison.

She comes over just as my limbs go fuzzy.

“Real sorry about this. His man says he’ll pay teeth to get you back.”

She gives me the reason even though I didn’t ask. I like that. It means she respects me.

I know this death, and it’s not a total one. It’s a toxin made from plants found along the green sludge that passes for water in the deep wastes. Providers keep a bottle in their nightstands. Some even carefully cover themselves with it, an insurance policy against unruly clients. If a worker says no kissing, and you kissed anyway, you might go numb from the mouth down and learn a lesson. If a worker says their cock is off-limits, and you grab it anyway, you might find yourself unable to use that arm for a day or more.

Identifying the drug fills me with nostalgia. Being dosed with it—the easy blanket of a paralytic rather than the mind-churning panic of an opiate—feels like being close to home. I wish the paralysis hadn’t started with my mouth. Wish I could tell her that I’m not mad, because I would have done just the same if I remembered enough about home to know who I really was.

CHAPTER EIGHT