Nik Nik swallows. “You’ll leave us here? To die in the fire?”

Adra tilts his head. “Oh, you’d like that. Leave you here to disappear into one of your hidden passages? Or to die and burn only to have your followers lie about it, turn you into a myth to use against me? No, I’ll kill you myself.”

He nods to the runner at his left, and the man punches Nik Nik in the stomach. The blow makes a sound that’s both wet and hard and Nik Nik doubles over, only to have the same runner knee him in the face. This should make me happy, seeing the man who towered over me brought low, seeing his mouth go red for every time he fed me my own blood. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t make me feel better, and I’m not sure if it’s because I know this is not my Nik Nik or if this kind of revenge never really heals.

“Thought you said you’d do it yourself,” Nik Nik says, spitting. “Are your eyes watering for me, brother?”

All our eyes are watering. We’re still in the mouth of the building, and the mixture of gasoline and smoke is overwhelming. But the comment has the effect Nik Nik wants, and Adra, who’s been covering his nose and mouth with the sleeve of his robe, nods toward the door.

“Come on,” he says.

As we walk, Nik Nik reaches over and touches my necklace. I get the hint. Outside means escape, and he must have remembered that before he manipulated Adra into it. He’s telling me to teleport. I should have thought of it first. I look over my shoulder. Esther and Mr. Cheeks hopefully knew another way out. I don’t see Nelline, but I feel watched, so she’s not far. The only person I’ll really be leaving to die is Nik Nik, and it’s not like he’s never done the same to me.

    I press my collar to warm it up.

Out from the overhang of the burning church we’re greeted by the long stretch of empty desert. Somewhere, in the darkness outside visual range, are the river and Ashtown and the concrete slums that brought me up. All I need to do is leave, and I won’t lose a piece of myself here. But if I leave everyone in this mess, am I still myself? Or am I Nelline? She could tell herself she didn’t do anything wrong, just passed on information, just survived. Will I be sitting in my apartment, telling myself all I did was go home? All I did was survive and there’s nothing more important than that?

Adra grabs Nik Nik by the hair, biting at his throat and tearing open a gash far clumsier than the thin slices Nik Nik and his father used for murder. He’s bringing up his hand, loaded with the poison rings he inherited, when I reach out and put a hand on his wrist.

“Do you want to see it?”

Adra goes stiff. “See what?”

“You know what. The dark between stars. When you were a boy you wondered what it would be like to walk inside it. I can show you. It won’t take long.”

His mouth twitches, revealing a black incisor turned brown from its new-blood sheen.

“Let me guess, all I have to do is spare him?”

“No. You have to make him an example. You’re too insecure to let him live. But let it wait until you come back. He means something to me on another Earth, and I don’t want to watch him die.”

“You think I care about your other worlds?”

“You do. I know you do. I know you used to use rocks as models of the planets and stars, used to look up at night and know that all that darkness couldn’t just be absence. If you want to see what lingers there, this is your last chance. I can slip away with or without you, and my kind won’t be coming back around here for a long time.”

    I’m counting on at least some of what Adam Bosch said about his childhood being true. Only now am I realizing that his stories of sitting surrounded by rocks he called planets were not the stories of a boy pretending to be an astronaut. It was a boy pretending to be a god.

Adra licks his lips. He is an impenetrable emperor, wearing his embroidered jacket like an ermine robe and his gilded braids like a crown. But what flickers in his eyes when he looks at me is the wonder of a child. The boyish curiosity that has survived all his cruelties, because it existed before he murdered his father, before he heard the wet screams of his people under spinning tires.

“Show me.”

* * *

“DELL?”

I haven’t done the math of how many hours have passed since I last spoke to her, but I’m expecting someone from the night shift when she answers.

“You had better be calling for a pull.”

“I am. My collar is broken, so it’s not clasping. I need a proximity retrieval.”

“How wide?”

I look at Adra. “Four-feet radius?”

“There’s too much lingering interference.”

“I told you it was a bright day.”

“Best I can do is a three.”

“That’ll work.”

“Two minutes.”

She goes quiet, and I picture her leaning forward as she perfects my frequency. I’m so newly stitched together, and I’ve stayed here so long, the journey back will be a rough one. Not, however, as rough as it will be for Adra.

    I walk up to Nik Nik. His hand is pressed against the wound in his throat, but he’s more shocked than scared. He must not have thought it would come to this, between him and his big brother. He must still love him. I take some sealing bandages from my vest and hand them over.

Adra is talking to one of his men, so I lean forward and whisper, “When you take power, promise me you’ll melt them down. Resist the temptation to keep them.”

He nods, though he still must not expect to survive this. “May your life be long and easy.”

It’s a common blessing out here, but I’ve never dissected it before. Why are we, who are so unhappy, fixated on long lives? What is the point? An easy life isn’t a blessing. Easy doesn’t mean happy. Alive doesn’t mean anything at all. Sometimes the path to an easy life makes you miserable. The only person I’ve ever heard value happiness is the former empress. She named her second son happy, hoping it would be true. She knew the cost of an easy life, and the uselessness of a long one. She had both. She wished neither for her child, only that he at some point be happy. Was he? Was anyone?

I step close to Nik Nik and inhale deeply. The scent of him, of the skin at the junction of his shoulder and neck, is instantly familiar. I never want to stop smelling it. I never want to smell it again. I take my fill, because it will be the last time.

When I step back, he’s staring at my mouth. He looks disappointed as I put more distance between us.

“Goodbye, Yerjanik.” Saying it eases an old ache in my chest, like I’d always meant to do this, to look him in the eye and tell him I was leaving.

“Goodbye…” He stops; his eyebrows furrow, then relax. “Caralee.”

I haven’t heard him say my name in so long that it uncoils me a little, and I’m not mad he read my journal anymore. The Nik Nik I knew before had a hold on me. Maybe I’ve never noticed until coming here, but my fear and ambition are both rooted in my time with him. I left, but never really stopped carrying him at my back. Knowing this Nik Nik has freed me. I always thought I’d have to kill him to feel free, but hearing him say my name kindly is the balm that I thought only seeing his blood would be. Maybe it just takes this, glimpsing him as a different person who is whole and undamaged and who would never have hurt me. My Nik Nik was not a supernatural monster, not an inescapable god. He was just a flawed person who could and should have been better. Just a pitiable boy who cut his brother once, and became so lost he could never find his way back. Seeing this version is like seeing a wish I never thought to make for him come true. It would never have been possible for me to forgive myself for staying with him so long, but it seems possible now.

    It’s close to the two-minute mark, so I move back to Adra. “You’ll need to stand close to me. Within three feet.”

He could have told his men to kill Nik Nik the moment we’ve gone, but I’m hoping he wants to do it himself. How else will he ever again taste the kind of power he felt when he killed his father?

Adra steps up to me and plants his hands on my hips just to do it, but I barely feel his touch beneath the familiar tingle of Dell calling me home. Adra gasps, feeling the electricity too. Maybe stronger, maybe it already hurts a little.

I see the flash of movement from the corner of my eye, just before we’re about to disappear. She’s bided her time, but her goal has never changed. She wants out of Ash, and she’ll take my life to do it. Nelline charges us, pushing her way into the three-foot perimeter.

“No!”

But it’s too late. We disappear.

* * *