BORDER PATROL STOPS us the moment we cross into Ashtown proper from the ambiguous stretch of desert that separates it from Wiley City. This time, I pull far off the road and into the dirt, so they’ll know I mean to deal. I get out before he can make it to my window. He stumbles a bit, but then so do I. I’d forgotten this was his route. I look back at Esther in the center seat of the van, and wish it had been any other runner.

“Mr. Cheeks,” I say.

There’s no star on his neck, but otherwise he is indistinguishable from the version I left on Earth 175. Seeing Mr. Cheeks, plus my earlier talk with Dell, slides something into place for me: The note was left by someone wearing black. Runners always wear black.

    It’s farfetched—how would a runner know something you would need Eldridge access to know?—but the idea takes hold like catching the scent of an old enemy. Doesn’t having the note hanging over my head make me feel hunted? And who has always specialized in hunting me?

“Miss me that badly, had to come back again?” he says. “The price is still three hundred.”

I hold up the cash. “I need a guide.” I nod to his vehicle, a massive truck with tires the size of my car. “Can you take us into the deep wastes?”

He walks over and looks through the windows in the back of the van. I haven’t looked in the cargo hold since they loaded it, but I know he must see the unmoving chrysalis of Nelline, wrapped in a white, plasticized sheet that clips closed on the side.

“For a body dump you’ll need twice that to buy silence, and I don’t need you to come along. You can trust I’ll do the job.”

Esther steps out from the side of the van. Maybe she thinks he’ll take a local more seriously than a Wileyite, or maybe she thinks her being a holy woman will help him understand our purpose. Either way, I hadn’t wanted him ever seeing her at all, but now that’s ruined. As she stands tall with the early-morning sun catching her hair and an ethereal shine to her serene expression, I’m sure he’d propose to her here and now…if her eyes weren’t so hard. If she weren’t looking at him like he was less than dirt.

I should have warned her not to let on that she knows they’ve been stealing from the church, but I doubt she could hide her distaste anyway.

“It’s not a body dump. It’s a proper burial,” she says, short, clipped. “Is that a problem?”

This is more than distaste; this is a challenge. Esther wants to look a runner in the eyes for stealing from her.

Mr. Cheeks looks from her to me to the van, baffled by her irritation but more interested than offended. “No problem, but I’ve only got room for four.”

    “We’re only three,” I say.

I take his picture with my cuff, standard safety procedure for Wileyites who take a ride from Ashtowners. It’s such a tourist move, but I’ve got Dell with me in clothes that scream kidnappable. He lets me record his image without comment, which means he either isn’t planning on double-crossing us or he has no fear of Wiley City’s retribution. He presses his wrist to the vehicle door and the old locks open. Even with the parades off, runners are married to their vehicles. I’m not surprised he’s embedded a chip instead of just using a removable cuff or carrying a fob. He makes a call on his car’s radio, then motions us inside.

“You all make yourselves comfortable,” he says. “I’ll get her.”

“How do you know it’s a her?” Esther asks.

Mr. Cheeks just nods toward us like it’s obvious.

I sit in the passenger seat to keep Esther from being beside him, but she just sits behind the driver’s seat so she can glare into his rearview mirror. The cab is separated from the back storage by a shell, so the only time I have to see the body is when he transfers her out of the van. He doesn’t throw the bundle over his shoulder. He carries Nelline like a bride, and I’m grateful.

* * *

“YOU WANT WHAT?”

We’ve made it to the edge of the deep wastes, and I’ve just told Mr. Cheeks my plan.

“It’s not much farther.”

“It’s not the distance that worries me; it’s the obstacles. No one’s supposed to even go near the bogs.”

“Is that strictly true?” Dell says. “I’d always heard that was where you took all the Wiley citizens who come seeking assisted suicide.”

I turn back to her. “How do you know about Akeldama?”

    She shrugs. “I imagine most in Wiley do. It’s good advertising, since it’s a service we can’t get there.”

“Those are different. Special,” Mr. Cheeks says, though the correct word is cursed. Either way, I’m glad we’re in agreement that Nelline won’t be sleeping with the nameless.

He’s not happy, but so far he’s doing a fantastic job of watching his language around Esther, an effort I appreciate only half as much as I resent it. He’s even muted his callbox so we can’t hear the types of calls runners typically exchange.

Dell is tired of our arguing. She sits forward. “How much? How much more to take us to the un-special ponds?”

“Bogs,” the runner and I both say at once.

“Whatever. Twice what she gave you?”

Mr. Cheeks is biting his lip and doing the math. He was already making out for half a day’s work. A runner on border patrol can go a week without a shakedown, and even if he’d reported the six hundred honestly, no one would ever expect him to pull double. Right now there isn’t a mudcroc in all the wastes big enough to deter him from that kind of payday. Still, he looks in his mirror, at Esther.

“I know you runners are becoming a greedy lot, but surely that is enough money for you,” Esther says.

I’m sure when they were deciding to skim from the Rurals, the runners considered Dan retaliating, or even Michael. But it’s Esther’s temper they should have thought of first.

“Mouthy princess,” he says, which means he recognizes her. Still, he folds and starts the engine again.

Despite the absence of a marker, he turns left and begins cutting through the desert at a diagonal from the river. He played scared with the bogs, but he’s been there before. If his actions on 175 are any indication, he’s the type of runner who obeys only the rules he respects, and will turn his back on an emperor who stops acting with honor. He’s the type of runner I didn’t think existed, one I certainly never saw as a child.

    We encounter no animals, predator or prey, which makes sense given how heavy and loud the runner’s truck is. Even the laziest grazing animal would have felt us coming far enough off to move, and the predators here are too well fed to be concerned with taking down what must look like a very difficult meal.

We reach the bogs in the midafternoon, and I’m just beginning to think that everything is going too well when Esther speaks up.

“I’ll need to open the wrapping on the body to prepare her.”

I exchange a panicked look with Dell. I’d known we’d have to take Nelline out of the burial shroud if I wanted the bog to preserve her, but I hadn’t realized Esther would be with me when I did. I don’t know how to explain Nelline’s identity, even if there was time. But Esther knows what I do for a living, knows there are other worlds with other versions of ourselves. I’ll just have to trust her to process it and understand without being too traumatized by the sight of something that looks an awful lot like her sister’s dead body.

Mr. Cheeks carries the shroud-wrapped form to the edge of the bog, where the dark sand is cooler than it should be, covered in a green-black sheen unlike anything else in the area.

When he moves to undo the clasp for Esther, I stop him.

“I’ll do it,” I say.

He shrugs and moves back to his truck, far enough away that he won’t be able to see her as Esther performs the ritual. I undo each clasp slowly, leaving the latch by her face for last. Finally, I open the shroud.

Whoever held the body must have been paid something, because she’s been prepared. The blood that trickled down her face in the hatch is gone. Her sunken chest is now propped up. Her open eyes, closed.

I am better prepared for horror than this, this sleeping girl, this untouched face. When I feel the hand on my shoulder, I think it is Esther, but when I place my fingers over it, I know it’s Dell. Too cool, too large, to belong to my sister.

“You need to let Esther work now, so we can send her off while it is still light.”

Burial by the sun is a custom that remains the same on both sides of the wall. I stand, making way for Esther. I assume Dell will move away then, but she puts an arm around my waist.

    “Is this all right?” she asks.

I nod.

“Did you pay the deathkeepers to make her up like this?”

“Morticians,” she says. “They’re called morticians in the city.”

I knew that. It’s another word from my list. Viet would be called a mortician in the city. But also a midwife. Keeper sits easier than either. Odd, after all this time it’s getting harder, not easier, to pretend.

“You didn’t answer my question.”