I replaced Caramenta without anyone noticing. Nelline could replace me just the same. But if ever Dell wasn’t herself, I would know. She’d be dimmer, and I would know right off.

“Turn right in four steps, then go eight. I’ll drive.”

The vehicle is right where Nik Nik says it is. Even reaching out to open the door burns my fingers. I climb in, taking off the tarp and goggles only after everything is closed up again. My fingertips are still hot pink. I press them to my face. They radiate heat.

“You peeked,” I say to Nik Nik, who has taken off his goggles and is showcasing the new pinks of his eyes where the whites should be. The goggles can only protect against secondary light, not direct, so he must have looked out from behind the tarp and caught the edge of the sun.

“A little. I couldn’t remember where it was parked.”

“Are you sure you’ll be able to drive through this?”

This being thick mesh covering the windshield. I can make out shapes in the desert, but only if I strain.

“Of course,” he says, which is exactly what he said earlier when I asked if he knew where the vehicle was parked. Of course apparently being shorthand for I’ll figure it out.

“Fine, let’s go.”

The vehicle is part tank and outfitted for days like this. It crawls along with all the speed and grace of a squared-off stone. I could probably have run to the port faster…you know, if I’d ever done the weekly trainings that would enable me to run more than ten seconds without wheezing.

The port isn’t visible, but its position is logged into my cuff. It’s loud, surrounded by all that rattling metal, so I tap Nik Nik’s arm when we get close, and point when he needs to turn. He shouldn’t risk the run with already-burnt eyes, but he stands at my back as I work the port. The download is slow, and for a second I’m worried my credentials have been revoked because of my absence, but eventually the data speeds up like it always does. I move around as it downloads, releasing the heat from rising from the baked sand that’s getting caught under my tarp.

    “We have a problem,” he says. “We’re at high noon. We can’t risk driving until it passes.”

Because even anticombustion additives have their limits.

“We can wait it out in the car, but without the engine to run the fans…”

We could dehydrate before the heat shifts away, and pass out waiting.

I check the map Dell downloaded into my cuff again. “There’s an emergency shelter just ahead. We can hide there.”

I lead, keeping the tarp low and staring at the ground. Luckily the shelters are so camouflaged I couldn’t get us there by sight anyway, and the verbal directions from the cuff don’t require seeing forward.

A few times I almost stumble into cracks in the desert, a sign that mining continued here longer than on Earth Zero or Earth 22, but eventually I get to the square I need. I get on my knees, the ground reads my cuff’s signal, and a square of earth lifts up and reveals a ladder.

I climb down and hit the button to seal it as soon as Nik is clear.

Temperature control and oxygen are working, so I peel off my gear as we wait for the sun to pass over us. At least, I wait. Nik Nik is wide-eyed, scanning every inch of the space. Eventually he goes to the emergency manuals and begins flipping through them, Eldridge code no obstacle to him. And now I know why. Because his big brother taught us both.

The sight of him reading competently is still strange, and it’s a wonder my brain doesn’t make me puke, because this could just as easily be a hallucination.

“It’s just boring procedural stuff.”

“Not to me. I want to understand the magic that brought you here.”

I take the manual from him. “It’s not magic. There’s no such thing as magic. You sound like you’ve been spending too much time in the Rurals.”

    “And if I have?”

I look at him, his tunic, his helpful smile. “Fuck me. You’re one of the faithful? That’s why you had to take care of me when I landed. You had to.”

Nik Nik the believer. I’ve seen everything.

“I didn’t have to do anything. And I didn’t take care of you because of religious obligation.”

“Then why?”

“Because you are a miracle.”

“Not a miracle.” I shake the manual. “Science.”

“What do you call science when it answers a prayer?” He takes the manual back, then moves away from me, finally, and I can breathe again. “That’s what I was doing when we found you. I was in the desert, desperate, praying for an answer to the problem of my brother.”

“It really bothered you,” I say. “Finding Nelline like that.”

It must have been the final straw that made his brother’s cruelty impossible to deny. Nik Nik is obviously upset, clutching the manual like a man used to finding solace in texts. Because, here at least, he is.

“In your world…do they ever tell stories of the time we fought?”

Fighting is one word for it. Child abuse is another.

“Your father forced you and Adra to fight. He should have won. He was older, and Senior was testing his cruelty not his ability, but you found something to use as a weapon and…”

I shrug rather than finish. It doesn’t matter if Adra surrendered before or after his little brother knifed him, the stories could never agree, it only matters that he did. Senior had already planned to get rid of Adra, most likely, but the fight primed Nik Nik for the loss.

Nik Nik is quiet. “It was a shard of metal. Sharp. Valuable. By the time I was old enough to realize my father left it there on purpose, he was long dead.” He stares down at the cover of the Eldridge manual like it holds an entirely different set of answers. “When I held it, I felt the thrill. The same thrill I felt when I hunted. I almost turned on Adra, but I stopped. I knew. I was young but I knew that if I gave in, turned what I’d been trained to do to animals to a person, to my own brother…there would be no coming back from it. I dropped the shard, forfeited, and have tried never to hurt a living thing since.”

    That’s definitely not how things went on my world. Or Earth Zero. Nik Nik had only stepped up his hunting game after the fight, and he had no qualms about using men as prey.

Nik Nik is still staring at his hands, so what he says next isn’t a total surprise.

“But I still remember the thrill. After seeing what he’d done to that girl. Hearing what he’s been doing…I began to think there was only one way out. That’s why I was in the desert. I was praying for a way to stop the suffering that didn’t end with me killing my brother. Then Mr. Cheeks found you on patrol. An angel fallen from the sky, with my name on her back so I would know the gift was meant for me.”

“A fallen angel is a demon.”

“A being who can enact great change, either way.”

There is nothing left to say. He goes back to reading nonsense. I sit on the cot. He’s gracious enough to pretend not to notice that I’m staring at him.

CHAPTER NINE

Time is flat. We process it linearly, but everything is happening at once, always. Right now I am kissing Nik Nik. I am leaving him. I am killing him, because surely I’ve done that before or will somewhere in the infinite. I am home with Dell. We are happy. We are not. We used to be happy and now she resents my lower status and I resent her resentment and we stay together because we’ve given up too much to do anything else.

I’ve always believed, like all rational people, that my selves are separate. That they—we—exist independently. But sometimes when life is too still, when I lie in bed in the quiet, I can feel it all happening. Not just my selves collapsing, but time collapsing, because past and future are other selves just as surely as those on different worlds. My mother is dying right now, and I feel it. But she also recovered, woke up, got clean, and I feel that too. I feel that somewhere I am not alone. And I feel that sometime, soon or not long ago, I will accomplish something great.

It’s the latter I feel most strongly. The certainty that I am on the cusp of being worth something. But maybe that’s just my justification for reaching, for disobeying my mother’s last warning. Maybe she felt the flattened universe too, all things at once, there near the end. Maybe she saw how I would die, have died, will die again, and tried to tell me.

    I feel those, too, when I’m not careful. I feel 372 deaths in my chest, hanging over my head like a heavenly host of guillotines. I should have known Nelline wasn’t among them, because there was no tightness behind my ribs, no new death making room for itself among the others.

Right now, I’m trying to ignore the hum telling me number 373 is coming, for real this time, and soon.

“There’s a voice,” Nik Nik says. “In the desk.”

“What?” I walk over. In the top drawer is an old-school receiver, whispering my name. I pull out the large earpiece Eldridge hasn’t used in years.

“…Cara? Cara, answer me.”

“Yes! Dell?”

There’s a silence where I can hear her breathing out, or holding something in.

“You’re late.”

“Miss me?”

“Don’t joke. You missed check-in. Your cuff is still on your obnoxious away message. Do you have any idea the—”

“She’s not dead.”