I don’t like the panic in Esther’s voice, but I like the quiet even less. It means she’s hiding her trip from those around her, which can only be her family.

I’m already opening up a new screen from my cuff to order her a quick pass as I answer.

“Of course. Always.”

And when I say that word, something that began to slide into place in Sasha’s office clicks home. I have to be alive, because there is someone who needs me.

* * *

WITH HER FAIR, uninked skin and her biblical, x-free name, my sister could probably slip through Wiley City without a pass. But that’s not Esther. Esther does things by the book, not just the Book, but any book.

    She spends the first five minutes of our visit touching my face and scolding me for not telling her I was hurt. She says she would have brought me root paste for the pain in my ribs, so I say smelly mud is precisely why I didn’t tell her. I can tell by the way she looks at them that she doesn’t understand the marks are permanent, and I don’t try very hard to convince her. Hearing her voice heals something inside of me, even if she is just nagging. To hear her speak without fear or shame, different from the last version of her I heard, is its own gift. I stare at her, looking for hints of damage or signs of abuse. But there is nothing. This is an Esther I haven’t yet failed.

Soon enough, she shifts from examining me to examining the city. We’re in a garden section near Wiley’s entrance so she doesn’t have to waste too much time going back home. We’re forty stories in the air, but plants grow from the ground like they never will in her backyard. She’s not impressed. To her the plants must seem useless. Trees and bushes and flowers—pretty things, inedible.

“Gardens like this are for aesthetics and air quality. They do have vegetable gardens and orchards here too.”

“It’s very nice,” she says, nice somehow becoming its opposite. “No flies?”

“No, but there are bees. I’ve seen them.”

“Honey?”

“…No, just bees.”

She nods. Selling honey to the city is one of the main sources of income for people in the Rurals. They can’t really harvest enough to compete with the cheaper, shipped-in supply, but some residents in the Wiles have a sweet tooth almost as big as their need for philanthropy. Overpaying for honey from the poor makes them giddy.

“Does Mom know you’re here? Does Dan?”

She shakes her head. “I’m supposed to be helping the women of inner Ash.”

“They let you go alone thinking that?”

    “Michael’s downstairs. But he doesn’t know why I’m here either.”

I sit on a bench. “Neither do I.”

“I need help.”

“I figured.”

She sits beside me, arranging her pale-blue skirt against her thigh so she doesn’t take up extra space. Her people are good at making themselves small.

“I’ve been noticing things missing during inventory,” she says.

“Like parishioners helping themselves to more food than they’re allowed?”

She waves her hand. “I would never care about that. It’s the powder. Michael’s powder.”

I have just enough time to process that she means explosives when she adds, “It’s been happening since the dedication and it’s gotten worse.”

I’ve just sat down, but I stand up again, pacing. I stop when the Wileyites start to stare at me. The others in the garden had been stealing glances at us; Esther’s long sleeves and apron draw attention in exactly the same way as a visiting monk’s orange robes. She’s so Wiley-looking but for her skin that sees the real, unfiltered sun, they want to hover close to the safe, familiar-yet-just-exotic-enough novelty of her. They are smiling in a way they’d never smile at someone from downtown or the deep wastes. It’s still patronizing, the look you give a puppy, not an equal, but it’s less fatal than the distrust the rest of us get.

“Did you tell Dan?” I ask.

“I did. He just smiled and said there must have been an error recording it before, or that Michael had been practicing and forgotten to log what he used. He told me to let it go.”

“But you didn’t.”

Because of course she didn’t. Esther is as self-reliant as a mountain. She wouldn’t come to me unless she’d exhausted all the ways she could solve this on her own.

“No, I didn’t.” She looks down, a little guilty, maybe, but not sorry. “I help some of the people in downtown Ash. I don’t preach like Mom and Dad, just help, and they like me for it. I asked one I trust if he’d heard anything about anyone trying to sell it. He said no, but his man’s a runner, and after I asked he kept an eye out for me. One night he overheard something about our building. He gave it to me directly, but I don’t know what it means and neither did he. It’s runner tongue.”

    She doesn’t ask me if I know the tongue, which I like because it means she won’t ask me how I know. It feels utterly without judgment, and I can see how the population of downtown would be seduced by her easy manner.

“Play it,” I say.

Esther has a handheld, not the pricier cuff, but it’s loud enough for me to easily hear the clipped, barking message. I listen to it twice, not because I don’t understand at first but because I want to buy time. I look out over the trees. I picture her here, safe and away from runners and sandstorms and Nik. But she wouldn’t be Esther without her flock, and I know she’d never come, even if I were allowed to sponsor someone full-time.

After a long silence in which Esther doesn’t play the message a third time because she knows I’m stalling, I say, “You know Nik Nik?”

Her faith keeps her from expressing anger verbally, but she’s got eyes that harden with hate and it’s a shift that makes her warm, frothed-ocean irises seem like they were actually blue-veined marble the whole time.

“I’m familiar.”

“He donated to your church’s building. A lot. That’s not how things usually work. Usually new builders pay him.”

She’s sheltered, not stupid, so she nods.

“You think the missing explosives are his tribute?”

“Maybe. Even if it is, you don’t have anything to worry about. Runners have stolen powder from Ruralites a dozen times. But even experts hurt themselves with that stuff. Wait for a bang and find whichever runner has some newly missing fingers, then accuse them of theft as if the emperor is innocent.”

    “What exactly did the message say?”

“They’re coming back to collect Nik Nik’s due. It’s usually a phrase used for tribute or tax money. It’s code, but they must be talking about the powder.”

“When?” she asks, and I wish she hadn’t.

“Why does it matter?”

“Because I can—”

“Stop them?”

She closes her mouth, deflated, but only a little. “It sounds unreasonable when you say it.”

“You can’t fight the emperor,” I say, but, because the decision isn’t mine to make, I add, “You have ten days before they come, according to the message.”

She looks down at her feet, smooths her hands along her apron. “Do you think my father knows?”

I want to say no. I’ve long thought of Dan as one of the only honest people in Ashtown, and it’s difficult to lose that image. But he conspired with Nik Nik on 175, so anything’s possible.

“Maybe. It might be that he made an arrangement in exchange for funding his building, or it might just be that he can deduce who would want the powder and knows enough not to get involved. Either way, he doesn’t have much choice. He keeps quiet and your congregation is left in peace. You fight back and…Nik Nik will still get what he wants.”

“That makes it worse,” she says. “Being bought, not forced.”

The words of someone who’s never been forced.

“Trust me. Ignore it. When next week comes, close your door and pretend to sleep. Don’t try to fight the thieves.”

When she goes, I hope she’ll listen. I hope she has one-tenth of the sense of self-preservation that I do. If she doesn’t, if she acts on all the righteous anger in her eyes, she’ll end up with a tiny cut and a quiet death and I’ll have to go to other worlds to see her.

* * *

    THE DAY OF my debriefing at Eldridge, I’m woken by the proximity alert on my doorcam. I shuffle forward and make it to the door just in time to see someone retreating, ducked down so I can see only a shape I first assume is a black-clad shoulder. Too tired to be cautious, but just awake enough to be curious, I open the door and find a note—an actual paper note, not a plastic vidscreen—folded and tucked into my door. It’s the kind of thing Esther might do, if she was in the city, but when I touch the paper I know it’s not her.