When the gate to his garden opens I exhale and head down to 70, where Jean lives. It’s an area mostly populated by new-money-rich immigrants. The houses are still expensive and it has just as many parks as 80, but people from higher floors travel here like it’s a novelty. I don’t bother going to Jean’s house, because I know he’ll be at his wife’s restaurant. She advertises it as authentic Ivorian cuisine, but Jean has confided in me that she doesn’t make it right for the public. I believe him, because the leftovers he brings me from their house have twice the smell and spice as what she serves for pay.

When I walk in I clock four of Jean’s grandchildren serving customers while two of his children shout in the kitchen. Jean is occupying his usual booth in the back, though he often wanders around and talks to patrons about his homeland or his old job, depending on whether or not they recognize him. They usually recognize him.

He’s sitting now, and as I slide into the booth across from him I wish I’d spent the walk planning what to say. As it is, only one word comes out: Murderer.

    I want to say it angrily, but it comes out like a plea. Like I break my own heart by saying it when I wanted to break his.

He folds his hands.

“I told you not to go to that meeting.”

I open my mouth again, but he holds up a finger and looks over my shoulder.

“Sita,” he says, and moments later a granddaughter, or great-granddaughter now that I think of it, appears at his arm. Her hair is buzzed short and it’s a redder brown than the other children’s, but she has Jean’s round cheekbones and his wide, bright smile.

She pulls out a paper pad and a marker. She can’t be more than five, and the pad is covered in stickers.

“Two juices please. Ginger and tomi,” he says.

She pretends to write our order by drawing stars and what looks like a fat tree with skinny arms, all while nodding seriously. Jean kisses her on the head and lets her go.

I’m silent until she comes back with the drinks, spilling a third of each before setting them down and walking away.

“Did you call her over because you thought it would soften me?”

“I called her over because I was thirsty,” he says, and then has the audacity to smile. “And because I knew it would soften you.”

I keep my face dead. He doesn’t need to know that the child has utterly spoiled my rage, leaving only hurt.

“I’m right, aren’t I? You know what Adam is doing? You knew he was the one I was meeting?”

Jean takes his time, sipping deep from his ginger juice, though I leave my tamarind untouched. I’d never had it before him, and I don’t want the taste to remind me that it is the least of things he’s done for me.

“I knew he’s been wanting to recruit you to wetwork since you were hired. When I saw the note…I assumed it was him,” he says.

“And you’ve just been letting him get away with this the whole time?”

    He takes another sip, then looks at me. “Do you remember where I came from? What I was?”

Somehow I am the one who feels ashamed. I can’t look at him when I answer. “I know what some of your other selves were.”

“Say it.”

“A child soldier. That’s why you were a traverser candidate. You…you died a lot.”

He twists his glass along the table. “By the time Eldridge found me I was already old enough to think I knew how my life would go. Too many children and too little money, living in a desert not unlike your Ashtown. Mr. Bosch brought me here, showed me the world, and yes I was valuable because I was rare, but I was also valuable because I was willing to make others even rarer.”

“You killed the other Adams for him?”

“Hardly. Mostly his father did, or he killed himself as a teenager. So few made it out to Wiley City, he was never his own greatest challenger. There were others. Competition.”

“Competition? He just killed any scientist who could do what he did? And you let him?”

He opens his hands. “There were not so many.”

“If there’s one, there’s three hundred and eighty. If there’s five there’s…a fuckload. Jesus, Jean.”

I set my hand down on the table hard enough that it lights up with menu selections. I slide them away because I want to do the same with him, with this information, with everything I’d ever wished was true about him.

“I’ve killed more for worse men, with far less reason. But this was all years ago. After I’d shown my loyalty, he decided I had more value as a traverser and face. By the time the scope of what we would need to do became clear, there was a department devoted to the…unpleasantness of maintaining a technological monopoly.”

“There’s a whole department? How…” But then it hits me: “Maintenance.”

It’s almost always code for something else, you know?

    Adam told me himself, but he wasn’t the first. Adra had raved about people in black trying to kill him, men who had disappeared before anyone else could see them.

“That’s why you lost it when I said I wanted to join Maintenance. They’re a kill squad.”

“Were, Cara. You’re years late to this. Occasionally some young upstart will make Mr. Bosch nervous, but for the most part Maintenance sits back and collects a check. I wasn’t lying about them being obsolete. The only job I’ve heard of this year was another Maintenance worker who couldn’t keep quiet. Which is why I didn’t tell you. You have nothing to do with this. Your hands are as clean as my baby granddaughter’s. You shouldn’t die for these sins. And dying is all you will do if you try to expose Adam Bosch. I will tell him you’re declining his offer. Take the analyst test. Spend the next four years doing an honest job and sending money back home and then when you get your citizenship you can go work somewhere else. It’s too late for all of this.”

“Just pretend Eldridge hasn’t killed thousands of people?”

“Tens of thousands, and yes. Extend Eldridge the same courtesy you extended your other government. I don’t know much about the history here, but I would guess the blood runners in your past saw as much judgment as the juntas in mine. Once they’re in power, no one cares how they got there.”

It doesn’t matter how you got it. If you have it, it’s yours.

Nothing says Ashtown like accepting mass murder without protest. Because that’s what you do to survive. That’s all Jean’s asking me to do, to shut up and survive. I should be grateful he talked me down. I should have been able to talk myself down without coming here at all. I should have known to let the powerful man kill whomever he wants, just like I always have.

“When you came to Wiley City, didn’t you want it to be better?”

“Warlord, emperor, CEO…” Jean shrugs. “No difference. You can’t save the people he killed. You can only damn yourself. Unless you think some trial, some murder sentence, will please the dead?”

No, the dead won’t thank me for trying to get Adam Bosch arrested. And if Adam Bosch mostly killed himself and people on other planets, the families of the victims wouldn’t even know if he did go to trial.

    I rub my face. “You’re right.”

“I know this is hard to accept, but you will see it is best. If you are still upset when you get promoted, just use some of your new salary to save lives back in your hometown. It all washes out.”

He pushes my cup toward me, like he’s offered everything from coffee to healing tonics hundreds of times in the last six years. If I accept it, it will mean nothing has changed. That I’m falling back into routine and looking past the bodies it took to pay my checks.

I drink every drop.

I won’t act against Adam Bosch. Jean is right. This isn’t the first time I’ve been kept by a man ruining other people’s lives to hold on to power. What Jean doesn’t know is that even when I intend to do nothing, I have to know the exact shape of the thing I am allowing to happen. Now, high up in Wiley City, I’ll do the same thing Nik Nik drowned me for doing in Ashtown. I’ll sit at my desk, and begin a list of names.

* * *

MY LIST GROWS and spreads in the days after my meeting. It started out small, a handful of scientists who expressed regret about Bosch’s breakthrough because they’d been so close. Three names, all Wileyites, with a mortality rate that rivals mine. Those three represented just over a thousand murders, but rivals have continued dying off ever since.

My list now has fifty names, all dead across the majority of worlds, but none dead here. Killing on Earth Zero must be too real for Bosch, because while he dispatches his merry band of murderers to every other world, here he just buys the institutions of his rivals and runs them into the ground. He’s aggressive in Wiley, but utterly ruthless in shutting down competition in every other walled city with even a half-functioning tech center. He doesn’t even recruit the scientists, just leaves them to find work in another field. They must learn their lesson, because none have remained in interuniversal travel.