“Not really. I dressed like you, so they mistook me for a real Wiley City resident, thought I had value.” I throw a smile on it to make it a joke, even though it isn’t.

“You shouldn’t. Multigenerational citizens dress more like you do,” she says. “The way I dress is too traditional. It marks me as a child of immigrants.”

“You dress like an Ashtowner’s dream of Wiley. It’s the first thing I noticed about you.”

Her brow furrows, uncertain as she so rarely is. “Why do you pay so much attention to the way I dress?”

“Why are you at my desk when you live and work on eighty?”

Her eyes widen and I realize she’s just remembered why she was at my desk, which is not actually what I wanted to know.

“You missed the announcement yesterday. Adam Bosch called a special assembly for this afternoon.”

My stomach drops, not just at the mention of the murderer I used to admire. “You think they’ve reached remote capabilities?”

I’ve been preparing for this, I even have a career path for the day I can no longer traverse, but my heart will break just the same to never walk the worlds again.

    “I can’t think of what else it could be,” she says. “I’m sorry, Caramenta.”

I almost believe her.

* * *

SOMEONE POKES MY side while I’m loading up on free food before the assembly. I turn with a scowl that instantly melts.

“Dresden, Dresden, Dresden, look what the sandcat ralphed up.”

“I do so miss your idioms,” he says, reaching over me to load up his plate on the company dime. His eyes settle on my face. “I’d heard surviving a dop left its mark on you. Those permanent?”

I touch my face. I’d forgotten, again, that I’m branded.

“They’re permanent.”

His smile never dips into pity, and I’m grateful.

“I like it. Goes with your whole hard-ass brand. Probably have rebellious teens tattooing their faces before the year’s out.”

“Thanks. You back on rotation?”

“In a way. They brought me in when you were out, and I fill in since they’re letting you get away with a low rotation. I’m just on call now, like the rest of us who aren’t you.”

He doesn’t say it with any kind of malice, but then, he doesn’t need this job so much as it amuses him. Dresden is the rare traverser who was worth something before taking the job. He’s pure Wiley City, from his ice-light eyes to his nearly white hair. He’d burn up like paper where I come from. He’s even paler than the others, because he was confined to his room until mid-adolescence. He suffered from a genetic immune disorder when he was a child. He shouldn’t have survived, but on this Earth he did and on one hundred others he didn’t.

“I’m sorry about Turner.”

Dresden’s partner was let go last year when my dop on 245 died. It was the last world he had keys to that I didn’t. They fired him, and increased my rotation.

    Dresden waves away my apology. “Better him than anyone else. I can keep him here.”

“For what it’s worth, it looks like we’re all going to be in the same boat pretty soon anyway,” I say, motioning toward the stage.

He nods. “You see the front row? It’s not the board this time. All reporters.” He grabs a handful of grapes. “Might as well eat the bastards out of house and home on our way out.”

Pretty soon I see two other traversers present for the assembly. They’ve never greeted me with the friendliness of Dresden, but my existence doesn’t threaten his way of life like it does theirs. Still, whatever bitterness they harbored must seem irrelevant now, because they sit with us as the assembly begins. Others in the audience take piteous glances at the four of us, but we keep our heads high, a quartet playing proudly as the ship sinks.

In the corner I spot a pack of black jumpsuits that used to mean nothing to me. I look in their eyes for some mark of the things they’ve done, but workers in Maintenance just look like people, younger than you’d expect and laughing too loud at one another’s jokes. Someone else might be surprised that so many are Wiley City stock—assuming, against all evidence, that cold-blooded murder is a desert trait—but I know better. I’m only surprised at how many of them are still employed. I’ve taken more comfort than I deserve from the idea that they’re mostly inactive, but there are nearly twenty in attendance. Even if I didn’t know what they really did, I’d hate them. They’re too excited, making jokes on the morning the only other world walkers in the company will be getting unemployment notices.

The lights dim, and a hush falls over us. A woman I don’t recognize talks about Eldridge’s legacy, something that doesn’t usually happen. This recitation must be for the reporters’ benefit, because she’s only telling stories we’ve heard a dozen times. Eventually she introduces Adam Bosch, and the applause is so much louder than usual I look for the speaker playing the track.

Once Adam takes the stage I assume the announcement will come quickly, but he’s in a storytelling mood. I used to relish this part, the human side of the genius letting us in and, in his awkward way, begging us to understand him. Now I just see a tyrant establishing a legacy. He wants his journey recorded, not in the universal desire to be remembered, but because he pictures every word he says going on a plaque somewhere. He doesn’t want us to feel closer to him; he wants us to worship him.

    I feel Nelline’s long hiss building in my chest. It’s probably just my own dislike, but it feels like a warning.

I know, I think at her. Fuck him. I know.

I bite into what I can already tell will be the first of many danishes.

Eventually he starts revving up for the kill. He’s made his voice louder but clearer and more careful, like this is the clip he wants news outlets to replay.

“And so I struggled with how to share this amazing experience. I believed there must be a way to open it up to others. Now, I am proud to say that I have found that way.”

“Here it comes…” Dresden says.

“I am thrilled to announce the first ever commercial traversing trip, made possible by our new inoculation against the backlash of duplicates.”

“What the shit?” I say, the words half pastry.

The reporters are shouting questions, too many at once to differentiate. Adam holds up his hands.

“This is by no means the beginning of a commercial wave. This inoculation is made from limited resources, and incredibly tedious to distill. For our initial trip we will only have five doses available. We’ll begin auctioning those seats for a traversing trip to leave early next year. I want to stress that we have no intention of taking more passengers than we consider absolutely safe.”

The rarity will increase the trip’s value for buyers, I know better than anyone.

My mouth is dry. The cheering continues even as he starts taking questions.

    Dresden starts clapping. “Looks like we get to live another day,” he says.

* * *

“YOU KNOW DAMN well there is no inoculation. You have felt Nyame. You can’t inoculate against her.”

Jean sits down behind his desk. I didn’t have an appointment, so after the meeting I just went to the elevator and started bleating into my cuff like a goat. Eventually he sent the elevator down. Unlike Dell—and, really, anyone under forty-five—Jean doesn’t have his security clearance integrated with his cuff. He carries a manual fob, which means he had to get up and come to the elevator to keep me from making a scene.

He tosses his fob on his desk before sitting with a loud sigh. He looks distressed, and I want to believe the press conference turned his stomach just the same as mine, and the prospect of the commercial traversing trip is weighing on him.

“I’ll admit, it is…sudden,” he says. “But I’m not in the loop on R&D, and neither are you. Maybe he developed something.”

“Something of this scope? How? You’re the one who told me business was becoming less lucrative. And then he magically finds a way to milk five of the super-rich for capital? That’s fifteen hundred people dying.”

“No, it’s five. Only five on each Earth. No one will experience more than five deaths. And that’s only if he plans to kill the dops. As much as you hate him, don’t forget he is a genius. He may very well have found a way around the backlash. Maybe it was because you survived. Maybe there was something in your blood that helped them figure it out.”

I’d already thought of that. That’s why I’d spent time since the press conference scouring Eldridge’s network for proof that the work had been done. But no one had accessed my blood sample since the day I came back. No one but the doctor had accessed my medical file at all—except Dell, probably looking for an excuse to put me on yet another period of limited rotation.

    “If he’d found a way around it, a scientist would have done my pull today.”

“We don’t know that.”

I lean forward, putting my arms across his desk and maintaining eye contact so he doesn’t look down. Is this what I look like when I make excuses for my own comfort? Weak and ashamed? It must be.