I AM THE first to enter the space between worlds, because I was at the center of the pull. It feels familiar like a recurring dream is familiar—something that is not real, but you’ve been there before just the same. The handbooks explain that anything unbelievable you see is a hallucination, images pulled from the subconscious to explain the sensations and absolute void of dead space. But the searching, prodding whisper feels real. I tense, remembering how quickly that muzzle turned to teeth last time. But there is no anger, no retribution. Nyame passes me easily.

    It’s Adra’s turn, so I face him. I know it will be ugly, but it is my ugliness, so I watch. In the very back of my mind I was afraid he was just as strong and determined as I was. I was afraid he would somehow live and push through, broken but alive.

I needn’t have worried.

I can almost see the dark shadow of Nyame’s hand as she wraps it around the front of him like a child picking up a doll. There is no indecision, no trying to make him fit like there was with me. In a flick of motion, she lifts him, presses her thumb to his sternum, and breaks him in half. She squeezes the new shape of him together, and I am grateful this dark space is silent, because I never want to know what it sounds like for shoulder blades to fuse to knees, ribs to thighs. After he is bent he is pulled, stretched apart from the center out until bone and joints give and sinew and muscles are extended like red and black taffy somehow catching shine in this place with so little light.

The wet, lumpy horror that once was Adranik, brother of Yerjanik, son of emperor and empress, is flicked back into the void. He will reappear in the place we were standing immediately, no time passing between our exit and his reentry, and the people who know him will try to understand how such utter and wanton destruction could happen in the blink of an eye, how an entire body could be undone between one breath and the next. If the runners live up to their reputation of self-preservation, they’ll abandon their loyalties and choose the brother who now has the upper hand. I have accomplished what Nik Nik could not envision: a peaceful transfer of power, bought with the blood of only one.

Nelline drifts beside me like a waiting ghost. Her eyes are wide and shining, but her mouth is set in a line. She knows. She saw Adra’s death and she understands. She’s reached too far this time, and it’s the end.

    Adra’s death came first, because Adam Bosch is firmly rooted in Earth Zero, so there was no decision for Nyame, or the forces we give her name, to make. But once the pressure at my back lessened and she accepted me on my way to Earth Zero, it was over for Nelline. We can’t both make it, and she’s made her choice.

Time moves differently here, or it doesn’t move at all. So maybe Adra’s death was instantaneous, and my mind slowed it down to process. Maybe Nelline is already dead, too, but I still wish I could move, take her hands, smooth her hair down and tell her everything will be okay, the way I hope someone will do for me when my time comes. But I am caught in the tide of traversing, and I can’t break out to move toward her.

I don’t want to see her torn apart like Adra, but I bought this death too. I opened the door to every escape she’d ever wanted, we’d ever wanted, and I can’t be surprised that she tried to walk through it just like I did.

I expect Nyame’s disembodied hand, a shadowy force that our scientists have told me again and again is just pressure, a swath of dark energy meeting particles that do not belong. Instead, I see myself come up behind her, just like I wanted to. No, not like me. Younger, untouched, a version of myself that probably has the voice of a nightbird.

Caramenta.

I try to say her name, but I can only make the shape of it. She wraps her arms around Nelline. Nelline feels it. I don’t know if she sees that the pressure is coming from one of us, but she doesn’t look so scared anymore. Caramenta whispers in Nelline’s ear, though I know sound doesn’t travel here, and begins to squeeze. She hugs her tighter and tighter, until Nelline’s mouth and eyes open wide and stay that way. Finally, there’s a quick snap, and Caramenta’s arms sink further into Nelline’s body than ribs would allow. It’s still a murder, but she carries her toward me like a child, delivering her to my feet with the delicate care of a sister.

Caramenta fades into the dark. I alone survive…again. Nyame lifts me toward my destination, aided by whatever sound Dell plays to please her. She fingers at the newly healed seams along my ribs until a few sing apart. It hurts, but it’s not fatal and I never stop moving forward. I’m not dying, not yet.

    The break of Earth Zero accepts me, and suddenly the feeling of being nowhere gives way to the feeling of being home. The darkness just feels like walls blocking out light, not the deep black of a place where direct light doesn’t exist.

I’m in the hatch. I made it. And there, at my feet, eyes wide and body collapsed in, is Nelline. I thought she’d be sent back like Adra. But maybe my being in the space between rather than on Earth Zero lets her stay. Or maybe Nyame respects determination.

I crouch. The pain in my side and chest flares, but not enough to keep me from touching Nelline.

“You made it,” I say. “You did it.”

I know it’s too late, but if she can hear me I want her to know she’s not in Ash anymore. Whatever she was running from, she succeeded. She’s in Wiley City, which is all we’ve ever wanted. She’s free.

I can’t crouch anymore so I roll carefully onto my back. Amid the pain of the rough trip, I feel the ball in my chest like a rock being shimmied in. A new loss, a little more weight to carry along. I welcome Nelline’s death, and the everlasting memory of her.

I don’t know how long I lie there before the hatch opens, an angry creak that lets in too much light. My fingers are entwined with Nelline’s, but I don’t know when that happened.

Dell crouches before me.

“Stop crying,” she says. “I’m here.”

But I didn’t realize I was crying.

“I’m injured,” I say. I don’t know how I’m going to get up from the floor with these ribs, much less climb out of the hatch.

“But not dead,” she says.

I want to ask her why that’s a good thing. I want to tell her that I’m not even sure I can die anymore, that I think my destiny is this: to watch every version of myself bleed on different ground until I am all that’s left. But medical is here, and I have just enough sense to keep quiet.

PART THREE

        If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.

    —Ocean Vuong

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When the recruitment campaign began, we learned Eldridge needed a very select group of people—those who lived with enough risk to have died over and over and over again…but had somehow survived here.

And the scientists said, Interstellar travel has always belonged to the few. Of course the people we seek are a paradox.

And the spiritual said, Heaven has always belonged to the few. Of course the people we seek are a miracle.

* * *

ELDRIDGE’S PHYSICIAN HAS been clucking over my scans since they came in. Except for a few hairline fractures that reopened during my jump back home, the injuries I sustained getting to Earth 175 are just dark shadows of new healing on the projection. But the doctor can tell how bad it was, because he keeps looking from the scan to me and back like he’s being tricked.

“How did you survive?” he says, at last.

Because I don’t know how to die.

That would be a good answer, said with just enough cheek to let him know I don’t care. But when I close my eyes, I see Nelline’s broken corpse and I want to scream, I didn’t, I didn’t. I died. I’m dead. Again.

    Instead, I say, “Someone found me and thought I was worth something.”

I tell him how long I spent in the pod. I tell him about the fever. He clucks some more and presses his cuff.

“Your body is probably more acclimated to the pressures of traversing than any other human being,” he says. “Your extensive experience is likely what saved you from the dop backlash.”

Jean told me the same thing when he visited the infirmary, once my twenty-four hours of observation were up. Only, he worded it as Nyame knows you well. She was lenient. They are both saying I survived jumping to a world with a living dop because of how many times I survived jumping before. As if not dying is a skill I’ve honed, not just blind luck.

“You’re the only duality survivor we’ve ever seen. They’ll want to get a detailed account from you.”

Dell comes in as the physician is taping my ribs. Half of a watcher’s training is in medical, so I know she understands the extent of the damage on the scans, but if she’s concerned or impressed she doesn’t show it.