The sound of her setting a plate—loudly—in front of me calls me an ungrateful asshole more pointedly than words ever could.

“Sorry…I just wasn’t sure what I would be waking up to.”

She nods, acknowledging my apology and letting it go. At first, I think she’s being extremely cool under the circumstances. But once I’m finished eating she slides something across the table. It’s a jade teardrop earring in a plastic bag.

I look back up at her. She’s wearing the pair.

“Fuck.”

“Indeed.” She leans forward. “It and its mate are one of a kind. But I now have three. I saw the otherworld menagerie on your wall, all in Eldridge specimen bags…with one empty space. Care to elaborate?”

I finger the edge of the bag. “This is what you want to ask me? You find me half electrocuted on a restricted floor, and this is what you want to know?”

“I’ve wanted to ask you for a while, but you were so upset when you first returned I thought it best to wait. I’m done waiting.”

I can justify hiding my reasons for breaking into that floor, because she might report me to Bosch. I can’t justify lying to her about this anymore. I never could, really.

“It was part of my collection. When you lost yours, and I had an extra, I gave you mine.”

“And what is that collection? Half of it just looks like dirt, or water. And did I see a sample of Lot’s Wife in there? What are you thinking?”

“It’s perfectly contained. It all is. I just save things that don’t exist in my world. Or”—I look down at the earring—“things I can’t touch here, but was allowed to touch somewhere else.”

    It takes a second, but her entire face contorts when she understands. I expect disgust, but there’s only confusion. Like this is an impossibility.

I’m afraid of what she’ll say next, so I jump ahead.

“You approached me. I tried to slow things down, but in the end spending a night with you was a gift and I took it. We drank and we talked and you treated me like an equal because, in worlds where you don’t know where I came from, you actually let yourself be attracted to me. I was going to leave before things went too far, but you were charming and open and lonely and you wanted me. I know it wasn’t real. But you wanted me before I said a word. I’ll say I’m sorry it happened if you want me to, but I won’t mean it.”

I take the bag and shove it in my pocket, angry for no reason. I’m more sure now than ever that this memento is the closest I’ll ever come to holding her.

Dell’s made a temple of her hands and pressed her face into it. Her eyes are closed as she slowly shakes her head.

“Stupid girl.”

At first, I’m sure I’ve misheard the whisper, but she says it again, and then once more. When she finally opens her eyes, they are wet and raging.

“Do you not have a single memory from before your first jump?”

“Not…really.”

“I kissed you! After our training, before I knew you’d be assigned to me. You invited me to your apartment and I kissed you and you kissed me back and the next morning I had a long message in my cuff saying I was the devil sent to tempt you. You called me a sinner and said if I ever so much as looked at you for too long again you would file a harassment suit.”

My mouth is dry. “No, that’s not…no.”

“Yes. After we were matched for our first jump, you said you would request a transfer when you returned. But you never did. It was worse than that. You flirted, pushing at me, teasing me with what you knew I wanted, when I already knew you would destroy me for acting on it.”

“I wasn’t…That’s not what I was doing.”

    But it was exactly what I was doing, from where she sits. In her universe. The multiverse isn’t just parallel universes accessible through science. They are in each of us, a kaleidoscope made of varying perceptions. Dell and I were in different universes this whole time, and I should have known. I thought she was ignoring her attraction to me, but I was torturing her with it.

Isn’t Dell unknowable too?

A warning from Nik Nik, but even that had already come too late. I broke Dell’s heart before I even knew I had it, and I’ve been breaking it and breaking it again ever since, thinking I was the victim the whole time.

“I thought you were just classist. That’s why you pretended you weren’t attracted to me when there were times…times I could tell. I thought you were telling me I was beneath you every time you pulled away. I didn’t know what she’d done.”

“She?”

“Me, I mean I didn’t remember that I’d—”

“You said ‘she.’?”

“I know what I said!”

I stand up. Dell stays sitting. I see it now, every ounce of hurt I’d missed before, that I’d caused. Or Caramenta had. What must she have thought? Me flirting with her after threatening her like that. All that subtle anger I’d harbored against her, thinking she thought she was better than me, did she feel it? Did she think it was Caramenta’s Ruralite hate? I owe her so much. I owe her the truth.

“Imagine, just pretend, that I came back from that first pull six years ago…different. Pretend that I was a girl who’d never set foot in the Rurals, and wasn’t properly trained to work for Eldridge, and when I was called to this Earth yours was the first face I saw and I wanted you. And I didn’t know anything about what happened before, because that was Caramenta and not me, but I knew you were holding yourself back. I assumed the worst.”

Because I always assume the worst of Wileyites. Because I have a chip on my shoulder as big as a mountain and twice as sharp. Because at the end of the day, I was the one who couldn’t look past class, not Dell.

    Dell shakes her head, stops, then shakes it again. “That’s not possible. Bosch himself programmed first pulls. It’s just…not possible.”

It is, and if I leave her alone with it long enough she’ll put it all together. Leaving her alone is the least I can do, but it’s also all I can do. I take the bag out of my pocket and slide it across the table to her.

I replay the moment I gave it to her, the way her eyes lit up—had it been hope?—and then darkened. And I read that shift all wrong, punishing her when I should have been comforting her.

“What am I supposed to do with three earrings?” she says, picking up the bag.

“Whatever you want,” I say. “I really didn’t know. I’m a con and a liar and a garbage git and anything else you ever thought of me, but I really didn’t know what had happened between us. You’ve got to believe that.”

She doesn’t stop me with more questions as I go, though I’m sure she has them. She’s probably weighing whether or not they are worth asking, now that it’s too late to change anything. We’ve wasted six years looking at each other and thinking we knew what we were seeing. Now it can’t be anything but too late.

Walking home hurts, and takes longer than it ever has. I spend the rest of my weekend woozily recovering from my run-in with high voltages and the truth about Caramenta and Dell. It doesn’t help that every news projection is rehashing the details of Eldridge’s announcement, which feels so long ago but was only yesterday. In a later press conference Adam Bosch confirmed plans to repeat the journey every two years.

Because you can’t have a mass murder every year. That would be too much.

He’s had to be a little bitter; being subsidized by the government means he has to be overseen by them. It must feel just like having a father again. He wants enough money to be independent. The industrial hatch makes money, but not enough for the truly ambitious. And I know he is, because I am, because all of us who were told we were nothing will never stop trying to be everything.

* * *

WHEN I’M SUMMONED to the hatch for my first pull on Monday, a man is waiting for me.

“Oh sorry,” I say. “Must have double-booked.”

“Wait. Caramenta, right? I’m really excited to meet with you. I’ve never seen a traverser who’s done a three-hundred-pull year.”

His smile is almost blue-bright, standing out against his gold-toned skin. Gold, not an ordinary brown or beige. Providers at the House sometimes use dust to get the same effect, but they start out with skin ranging from tan to dark brown to a black so rich customers line up to rub against it, so it makes them all look like earthbound gods. On his Wiley-descendant skin, the gold tones make him look like a pearl. There is a line of white at the base of his dark reddish-brown hair where the roots are beginning to grow in. He’s a Wileyite trying to pass as something else, and I can’t quite figure out why. Doesn’t he know we still die for not being what he is?

“Three hundred and two,” I say when I’m done sizing him up.

He takes my response as a good sign and holds out his hand. His palms are undyed, and they seem flat and pale and almost blue compared to the rest of him. I take his hand, my skin suddenly looking darker than it has since coming here. I’ve gotten paler without Ashtown’s real and untamed sun, but I’ll never catch up to those whose blood has been in the city for as long as mine has been in the desert.