“Not a vacation. It’s…it’s a family thing.”

At the mention of family he smiles, which just goes to show what he knows. In the worlds where he survived—where he wasn’t a child soldier, where he didn’t die trying to stow away into Europe—he did so because of the strength of his father and the bravery of his mother. From the worlds I’ve studied, his deaths are usually despite their best efforts.

    Most of my deaths can be linked directly to my mother.

“Enjoy this time off. Don’t do too much studying.”

“I’ll try.”

But not very hard.

I’ve been staying up too late studying world stats and the company’s internal textbooks since he first mentioned the possibility of a promotion to analyst. My mother used to say I was born reaching, which is true. She also used to say it would get me killed, which it hasn’t. Not yet, anyway. Not here.

* * *

BEFORE I HEAD home, I swing by Starla Saeed’s place. I’m nearly too late, and I approach her apartment among a stream of people in uniforms moving out boxes of her stuff.

She’s standing in the yard, flanked on either side by immigration enforcement. Her eyes are glassy, but clear. She might have been crying earlier, but she’s done with it now. She looks strong, defiant, head held high like she hasn’t lost everything in the world. I hope I look like that when they come for me.

“Star…”

When she turns to me she looks neither surprised nor particularly pleased, but when she looks down at the basket of apples in my hand, she gives a little smirk.

“We’re not all Ashtowners, Caramenta,” she says. “Some of us have tree fruit in our homelands.”

I look down. Most traversers come from the encampments outside of walled cities; I just assumed the other towns were like my wasteland. Starla comes from outside of Ira City in the Middle East, one of the biggest and oldest walled structures nestled in the space between what used to be Iraq and Iran. Maybe the settlements outside of Ira are full of fruit and white bread and everything else Ashtown doesn’t have.

    A man carrying a box walks too fast, and the sound of glass clinking against glass rings out between us. She watches him like he’s dragging her baby by the foot. She looks like she might yell—she’s known around the office for her quick temper—but her eyes flick to the enforcement agent standing closest to her and she swallows it down. She’s furious, but helpless.

“I just thought you’d like something. I know it’s a long flight.” I hold out the basket. “You can still resent me, even if you take them.”

She smiles again, her mouth wide and full. “I intend to.”

She takes the basket, but it’s more out of pity than wanting the fruit.

“I’ll miss you,” I say.

“So look for me,” she says. “I’m only missing on a few hundred worlds, and this is just one more. I recommend Earth 83 me. She’s my favorite.”

A woman in a jumpsuit tells the agents they’re done, and the men push Star along. She looks at me over her shoulder.

“Don’t waste your time feeling guilty,” she says. “It’ll be you soon enough.”

Over my dead body…but that’s not what she needs to hear. She needs my absence more than anything. A witness to the shame makes it worse, even if it’s a friend. So I nod goodbye, and turn away.

* * *

THERE ARE INFINITE worlds. Worlds upon worlds into absurdity, which means there are probably worlds where I am a plant or a dolphin or where I never drew breath at all. But we can’t see those. Eldridge’s machine can read and mimic only frequencies similar to ours, each atom on the planet contributing to the symphony. They say that’s why objects like minerals and oil can be brought in easily, but people have to be gone from the world first—their structure is so influenced by their world’s unique frequency there’s no possibility of a dop. Before we lost 382, there were rumblings of war. I’m not sure how many nuclear bombs it would take to change the song of a place until we can’t hear it anymore, but we lost 382 over the course of an hour: a drastic shift making the signal weak, then another, then nothing.

    It should scare us more than it does, but they were already an alien territory anyway. That’s why the number was the highest. Each number indicates a degree of difference, a slight frequency shift from our own. Earths One through Ten are so similar they are hardly worth visiting. When I pull from there, no more than twice a year, it’s just to make sure the intel is still exactly like ours. Three of the worlds in which I still live are in the first ten Earths.

There is something gratifying about going places where I’m dead and touching things I was never even meant to see. In my apartment I keep a collection of things from those places in sealed bags on the wall. I’ve never catalogued them, but I can identify each item on sight: dirt from the lot where my childhood home would have been in a world where the slums never made it that far; smooth rocks from a river that’s been dead on my world for centuries; a jade earring given to me by a girl on another Earth who wanted me to remember her, but who only let me love her at all because she didn’t know where I came from. There are hundreds, and when I get back from Earth 175, there will be one more.

The worlds we can reach are similar to ours in atmosphere, flora, and fauna, so most of their viruses already exist here. But just in case, I seal my souvenirs in the bags Eldridge used to use for specimen collection, before they got bored playing biologists and shifted hard to mining and data collection.

I’m staring at my clothes, trying to figure out which to bring. It’s hard, living in Wiley while visiting Ashtown. Not a lot of people go between. Sure, Wileyites will visit Ashtown like tourists, and Ashtown kids sometimes get scholarships to Wiley schools, but no one ever tries to fit in both places. Wiley City is like the sun, and Ashtown a black hole; it’s impossible to hover in between without being torn apart. I’ve spent my time in the city accumulating the kind of clothes that will make me look like I’ve never been to Ashtown at all. If I were smart, I’d keep a set of Ashtown clothes for these trips instead of standing out like a mirror in the desert every time I go. But deep down, I don’t want to fit in. I don’t want to look like I belong there, because one day I want to pretend I never did.

    I’m fingering a blouse I can’t bring—true black synthetic silk, nothing a former Ruralite holy girl would wear—when my sister calls.

Instead of a greeting, she answers with a grunt of frustration.

“Preparations going that well, huh?” I say, sitting on the bed. Esther is still just a teenager, but the amount of responsibility she’s inherited makes her seem older.

“It’s fine,” she says, voice primly forced. Ruralites aren’t allowed to be angry, not at other people, because it would violate their code of endless compassion and understanding.

“Michael still being useless?”

No one tests Esther’s faith, or her temper, like her twin brother.

“Cara, you know all people have value and use in the eyes of God. Michael would be a valuable contribution to the dedication…if he’d shown up at any of the preparations.”

Ah, there it is, Esther’s rage—the venom no less potent for all its masking.

“And now we have Cousin Joriah saying he might drop in and—”

I roll off the bed. “Joriah?”

“Yes, you remember. Tall, red hair? He moved out here for a little while when we were young, but then left for the deep wastes as a missionary.”

Of course I don’t remember. I can’t.

“He’s based in some small town on the other side of the dead lands now, but Dad thinks he might make the pilgrimage.”

She goes on, but I’m not really listening. I reach under my bed, pulling out my box of journals. Esther said when we were young, so I pick a journal from not long after Esther’s father married my mother. Caramenta, age 13 is written on its cover. Esther would have been five.

“Hey, I gotta go, but I’ll see you soon.”