“What?”

She asks the question, but her voice is laced with horror, so she must understand.

“My dop. She’s alive. I was found in time, but I spent nearly three days in that pod.”

“Over three, nearly four,” Nik Nik says. “You didn’t wake up until the second.”

That explains her anger.

“Who was that? Do you have someone in the emergency hatch with you?”

“Of course not. That’s against the rules.”

“You need to come back. Now.”

“I can’t. It’s a bright day. If I go aboveground I’ll get burnt. I’ll be home after sunset.”

    “Right at sunset?”

I look at Nik Nik. He shakes his head.

“After,” I say. “A little after.”

“People are already upset. The sooner you come back, the better it will be for you.”

“I know,” I say. “But I can’t get back just yet.”

“As soon as you can, right?” she says.

“Tell Jean I’m okay.”

I hang up before she can object and place the receiver back in the desk. Nik Nik has finally put away the books and is staring at me.

“What?”

“That was Dell?”

“What do you know about Dell?”

“Flowers she likes, clothes she wears, and doesn’t. Her favorite foods.”

“I’m not sure I’ve forgiven you for reading my journal,” I say, sitting back on the cot.

He sits beside me. “You were dying. I wanted to know who you were first. You don’t want to die unknown, do you?”

“I am unknowable. Everyone is.”

“Not to God.”

“You really have been drinking the lemonade, haven’t you?”

He ignores that. “Dell, she missed you.”

“She’s worried about her asset. She’s too classist to really care about someone like me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know her.”

“But isn’t she unknowable too?”

That, I ignore. “Is it past high noon yet?”

“Almost,” he says. “Did I throw you away? Is that why you don’t believe you could matter to her?”

Despite myself, I smile. “No, Nik. You always held on tight enough to bruise.”

And what does it mean? That the only time I’ve had value, the only time I’ve been treated as precious, was not in the arms of my mother or my upstanding Wiley City boyfriend, but in the claws of a dictator.

* * *

WHEN WE GO back outside, the car is just as hot as before, but no hotter, which means we’re on the plateau before the downside of the wave. Nik starts to drive back to the church, but I direct him to the riverbed instead.

“We’ll have to take another break if we go out that far,” he says. “But I know a place.”

At first, I don’t see her. She’s a hidden mound among the ridges at the edge of the bank, gray-brown tarp protecting her from the sun and prying eyes. But when she hears our vehicle, she stands. She thinks this choking motor is opportunity knocking.

“Might need your help if she runs.”

“Who is it?” he asks.

“Nelline.”

I open the door and pull her inside. She doesn’t fight enough, but then, she doesn’t know it’s me. Once I close the door and she pulls off her tarp—that’s when the kicking starts.

I shove her up and over the seat, where she lands in the cargo space at the back of the vehicle.

“You really are exactly the same,” Nik Nik says.

“No shit,” Nelline says in that god-awful voice.

“Didn’t you already know that?” I ask, for once more diplomatic than someone.

“At first, yes. But I talked myself out of it. It’s so impossible. And lately I only saw her when her face…when she didn’t look much like herself.”

I look back at her, but she’s not meeting our eyes. She doesn’t like hearing about her injuries, her weakness, and I don’t blame her. She’s uneasy around Nik Nik, like he’s a stranger.

“Weren’t you two around each other socially?”

    If she’s anything like me—and I’ll admit, she is—she would have sought out the emperor right when things got desperate after her mother’s death. Surely they’d been around each other enough in the past nine years to become close?

Nelline is shaking her head. “Adra’s orders. If I ever fraternized with little brother or any of his other rivals, I was out of a job.”

I can feel her desperation to keep living as if it is my own. I understand it, and wish I didn’t. I wonder if Adra knew Nik Nik was the one who took care of her after his bouts of rage.

“That’s how he’s always seen me, isn’t it? Just another rival,” Nik Nik says—to himself, I’m guessing, because we can’t possibly know. “You were romantically involved for years, but he never even mentioned you to me.”

“Romantically involved.” She snorts and looks to the right. “Nonsense words. Adra’s wife is an image. Seen by everyone. Watched. Asked for favors and done favors in return. We could never be romantically involved if I was to remain inconspicuous.”

I wonder if that’s what she’s been telling herself; it wasn’t that she wasn’t good enough or that Adra was superficial, just that her job was incompatible with being his in public. I pity her. I may hate that Nik Nik loved me, but I know he did and everyone on Earth 22 knew it too.

She moves to escape at the same second I would, but I see her tense for it the moment before, which is just enough time to grab her tarp and shove it by my feet with my own. She’s halfway to the door at the back of the vehicle before she realizes.

“You could jump out, but not sure how inconspicuous you’ll be when you’re a giant flaming blister,” I say.

And she might still do it—I’m sure suicide has never been far from her mind, just as it’s never been far from mine—but I hope she doesn’t. It’s unnerving to have someone who looks so much like me living, but it’s also comforting. The universe erases me, but it also remakes me again and again, so there must be something worthwhile in this image.

In the end, she eases away from the door.

Her head is low when she asks, “What do you want me to do?”

    The question gets at me, because it doesn’t sound like the first time she’s asked it. I have never had to kill a person, and I’m not sure that’s true of Nelline.

“Nothing. You don’t have to do anything. We just need you to prove I’m not you. You can go as soon as we’re done.”

She doesn’t look relieved. She doesn’t believe me.

When the car starts to jolt, I see where we’ll wait for it to cool down. I feel warm, warmer than a bright day, and I want to thank Nik Nik except he doesn’t know he’s given me a gift.

We’re still a block from the House when the temperature gauge starts shaking in the deep red, but I don’t mind. I suit up and get out like a Wiley kid on the first day of school.

I’m still steps away when it hits me how different this House is from the one on my world. The door, twice my height and an extravagance in a place where the fight against the world outside is constant, is peeling. It’s a light ash that looks like a wash made from local soil, and when I get close I realize it is. Back home—and even on Earth Zero, I’ve checked—the door is off-white, sheened in a wash of chemicals that makes it shine gold where light hits. Repairs haven’t been done yet here that were done six years ago on my Earth.

I wonder if Nik Nik gives them extra money when he’s in power, or if Adra is just sucking them dry. The rule that Houses are tax-exempt has been around since the same rule about churches. I wonder if he stopped honoring one, or both. It’s not a smart move. Everyone knows workers do more to keep the peace than runners and bring more civilization than the holy in the Rurals ever could.

Nik Nik knocks on the door with his free hand. In my excitement I’ve left him to drag Nelline along alone. But I abandon him again the second the door opens, and I see a sliver of Exlee’s face.

I push inside and strip off my tarp and goggles, because I’m thinking the sooner I get unencumbered, the sooner I get a hug. But all I get for my urgency is a slap to the face.

Exlee hasn’t slapped me since I was a child, but even with that distance I know this hand feels different. There is no love here, no correction, only rage. I don’t return it. Nik Nik has taken off his tarp now, sending whispers through the small portion of patrons who are actually paying attention. But Nelline is still under, content to let me take punishments meant for her.

    “Filthy spy,” Exlee says. “Going to report to your man so runners can drag more of my staff at dawn?”

“Who?” I ask. “Who did the runners take?”

“Mixxie, though I’m sure you already know.”

I turn back and yank off Nelline’s tarp. Another gasp, this time from Exlee. I’ve always wondered what it would take to shock the proprietor of the House. Now I know.

Nelline keeps her eyes down, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s looking at her hands, not the ground.

“You betrayed Mixxie and you still wear her gloves? What is wrong with you?”

I ask the question and mean it. How could she? The love I had here was always unconditional. I don’t know what it would have taken to break it.