“I didn’t have a choice,” she says.

“I bet you did. I bet it was a choice between betraying them or poverty. And that is still a choice.”

She looks up at me, sharp. “You would have done the same.”

“No.”

But there’s just enough doubt in my voice that she smiles.

She flexes her hands. “I bet you threw these away years ago. Or hid them deep so no one would know where you came from.”

“Explain,” Exlee says, an admission of confusion that is the closest to a concession of weakness I’ve ever heard from them. Their head is still high, though, so it’s more an impatient demand for an explanation.

“I’m not Nelline,” I say as the curtain to the main room opens and Pax enters the lobby.

Pax focuses on me like an underfed dog. His hand is in the air before I can say I’m not Nelline; luckily Exlee is there first, towering over Pax in shoes as tall as my forearm is long.

    “That’s not Lorix’s girl,” Exlee says, then turns Pax toward Nelline. “That is.”

“What? How?”

Exlee shrugs. The confusion only dims Pax’s rage for a second, and in the next there is fire in his eyes again.

“Should’ve known,” Pax says, moving toward Nelline. He spits at the ground between them. “Your teeth are rotting, Nellie Girl.”

Cara Girl. Pax has called me that a hundred times since I was small, and hearing him say it now drives home that he cared for her just like he cared for me. It makes me hate her all over again.

Pax leads her away to the House’s holding area, but she looks back at me over her shoulder. Her eyes are full of rage and injustice. She still doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong. She probably thinks even betrayal is fair play in the game of survival. Looking at her is like looking at a worse version of myself, but not far off enough for me to feel superior. I could have been her, still could be.

Exlee turns back to me, then looks past me to Nik. “I’ve heard you’ve been making moves, Second Son.”

Nik Nik manages not to flinch at the name. “What you heard before were rumors. I’ve only recently decided.”

“You should have been on my doorstep the moment you did.”

He should have, and my Nik Nik would have. I wonder if this Nik’s time in the Rurals has blinded him to the value of Exlee and the House. A war can’t be started, fought, or won without them.

“It was an oversight, but I’m here now.”

Exlee gives a rare smile, a sure sign the offense is forgiven. “So you are. My office is this way.”

Exlee begins to walk to the back of the House, then looks at me. I realize I’m waiting for permission before following, like the girl I used to be. Somehow, Exlee understands and nods.

That’s not Lorix’s girl.

But I am, and I always will be.

* * *

    IN EXLEE’S OFFICE, Nik Nik suffers through an interrogation about what kind of ruler he would be and why the providers should show up at his meeting. It may not have been planned, but it’s good we came. News spreads from the House faster than a yell, and before the meeting even starts everyone will be talking about Nelline’s doppelg?nger, and wondering who she is. They might just believe Esther when she tells them.

I, still half listening, wander around the office, touching the same shelves I touched as a child but that I haven’t seen since I was a teenager.

We didn’t live on-site often. I don’t know if Exlee had a rule about Mom staying here while she was bingeing, or if Mom was too ashamed to let her friends see her like that, but generally she stayed in the House when she was doing well, and moved to the concrete units when she wasn’t. And when she wasn’t, when she tried to see clients on her own without the protection of the other workers behind her, things got bad. In worlds where clients forgot their place and killed her—or me, or both—it was always away from here. I’ve died all over the desert, but never in the House. The House has always been a sanctuary for me.

Exlee’s office was a constant for me. Even when we lived on the edges, I was allowed to pass time here during the day while I waited for my mom to be free. I imagine it’s like having a grandparent’s house, if there were any of those around. The generation before my mother’s didn’t fare well; anyone over a certain age was forced to fight and patrol during the wars. Those who survived the violence had a short life-span thanks to food, water, and whole areas of air we didn’t yet know had become toxic. That is the quagmire that made Nik Senior. That is the mix of fear and blood and death that made having a warlord for an emperor attractive. There hasn’t been another civil war since him, but there hasn’t been much of anything else either.

I watch the stages through the window. I don’t know the man on the left stage, or the enby dancing center, but the woman on the right is familiar. Her name used to be Helene X, but we teased her about it so much I’m sure by now she’s changed it. We all knew she’d been born in the Wiles, but there was no need to advertise it with a name like that. I never understood how a Wiley girl got to Ash. It couldn’t be simple poverty—they have systems for that—and whenever I asked her about it she seemed more scared than desperate. When my mother died, Helene gave me a useless little pin, dark and wrinkled like a sea creature. Only after I came to Wiley City did I see my first real carnation and learn people there called them the flower of mothers. The black carnation was appropriate, and I wish I still had it.

    Staring at Helene X like this without paying is stealing, so I move back to the wall of bookshelves. On a small silk cloth is a glass orb. I pick it up and hold it loosely in my palms so the light hitting it reflects stars onto my hands. I am holding the universe. I am Nyame.

“Nelline used to do that too,” Exlee says. “She’d hold it just like that when she was a girl.”

So did I, of course. We are cut from the very same cloth, but I have to believe I would never betray them. I have to believe there are limits to my ambition…but then I think about Starla. I called her friend, and sent her away with a basket full of apples and not one drop of remorse.

I put the orb back. I haven’t actually been given permission to touch it here.

“Sorry,” I say.

Exlee places a hand, painted gold up to the wrists, over the glass orb, caging it in black nails each as long as a pinky.

“You’re better kept than she is.”

“I live in the Wiles.”

“Oh? The runners didn’t mention a day-tripper.”

“I…came round the back.”

Exlee raises an eyebrow that means another question is coming, but Nik Nik intervenes.

“We need to be going. I hope to see you all tonight,” he says.

Exlee ignores him and turns back to me. “Do you think he’s worthy of being emperor? Or are we buying trouble for nothing?”

I look down at my cuff. “I don’t know yet. But I’ll know by tonight. If you come, I’ll tell you the truth.”

    The sound Exlee makes isn’t commitment, but it isn’t dismissal, so I take that as a good sign.

When we get to the front of the House, Nelline has her hands tied behind her back and a fresh stinging slap on her cheek. She’s looking at me like it’s all my fault. She earned that mark in the shape of someone’s—I’m guessing Pax, since he and Mixxie were so close—palm, but I feel it on my own skin. We cover her with a tarp before we go out into the light, but I’m afraid it will slide off and she won’t be able to cover herself, so I spend the walk back to the car hovering close to her.

When we get back into the vehicle I look her over for new burns. There are a few hot-pink patches, unavoidable on a day like this, but I feel guilty anyway. It doesn’t feel like she’s a version of me at all. It feels like she’s a sister, or a daughter, or a mother. Someone I was supposed to take care of and failed.

* * *

I THOUGHT THE House would fill me up, but it’s just left me raw. My heart hurts, and for the first time I’m actually feeling the loss of 22, my first Earth. I did keep Mixxie’s gloves, and Helene X’s pin. I preserved every gift and lesson the workers ever gave me. But I didn’t have them with me when I came over. I might have had the gloves, but everything I was wearing became an offering to Caramenta’s corpse. I won’t find them in any keepsake boxes in my apartment on Earth Zero, because Caramenta’s mother never died, and so there were no grief offerings to receive.

Coming to this world has derailed me. How long would I have been content to move forward, never thinking about the past? Forever, probably, as long as there was one more goal in front of me, one more pull, one more test, one more promotion.

“You look upset,” Nik Nik says in a quiet pause before the last leg of our trip.

    “I’m fine. Tired.”