They escort me all the way home. Once I close the door in their faces, I call Jean on his cuff. He doesn’t answer. My next call is to enforcement. I tell them a man’s being hurt in the back of Bosch Garden. The automated voice on the other end records coordinates and issues me a file number in case I want to follow up, then disconnects. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever missed the runners, because I’d give anything for the call bot to be a violent human looking for an excuse to let their blood boil over.

I call Jean back, and when he still doesn’t answer I try again every fifteen minutes. Thirty-two calls and eight hours later, someone picks up. But it’s not Jean. It’s his wife, Sopia. She gets out two words, but then she can’t speak. I hear rustling.

    “Cara?” The voice is clear and strong, the emotion in it subdued.

“Aya?” I say, and it must be. Jean’s level-headed oldest daughter, who went into business school when the rest of his children chose art or cooking or agriculture. But he loves her just as much despite her differences from the rest of the family. He loves them all. He loves me.

“Yes, it’s me,” she says. “We’ve just gotten Dad’s cuff working again and…there was an attack. They say he was checking on the industrial hatch just outside the city. Runners found him. He must have tried to fight…”

“Is he okay? Aya, is he going to be okay?”

There’s a moment of silence, and I wonder if she’s had to answer this question yet.

“He’s dead, Cara. They killed him.”

PART FOUR

              Dear brother from another

     time, today some stars gave in

     to the black around them

     & i knew it was you.

     —Danez Smith

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

When asked what this discovery could teach us about what mattered, about death, and human nature, and how to make the world a gentler place, both parties were silent.

But we were right, the scientists said.

And so were we, the spiritual said.

* * *

WE USED TO believe the universe was stable. We saw its cycles, the reliable circles it traced, and called the pattern static, meaning unmoving. Then we learned its wildness—asteroids that leave their own clusters and impact with planets that’ve also abandoned their orbits, everything dancing off track to the music of chaos.

I believed I was stable. I thought my ability to go to work, to visit my family, to eat and sleep, meant that I was. I confused routine for reliability and reliability for safety. I had no idea the chaos I was capable of holding inside of me. Now the only thing “static” about me is the buzzing rush in my ears when I try to think, a hiss like the sound that comes through the speakers when Dell tries to contact Earths that are lost.

    I am lost.

I spend my days in bed, leaving only to eat and go to the bathroom, staring up at a ceiling that calls me murderer.

The day after Jean’s death, I’m guessing the second the news reaches the desert, Esther petitions for a day pass. I deny it. She petitions every morning for the next week, but I deny those too. I don’t deserve her. I didn’t deserve Jean. They both loved and encouraged me and I can’t figure out why. Have I done anything for Esther? Had I ever done anything for Jean? Sure, little presents here and there. Bringing him lunch occasionally. But I’d never done anything to earn the way he always tried to lift me up. Just as I’ve never done anything equal to Esther’s kindness, her acceptance of someone she knew all along to be a stranger.

I am a rot to the people I love, and the world keeps giving me gifts I don’t deserve. This apartment, this life, the sound of Jean’s laugh, the smell of Dell’s hair—all memories of things I never deserved to experience in the first place. And how do I repay the world for my luck? By infecting everything with my darkness. By taking the light out of Dell’s eyes and taking Jean away from his children.

Eldridge closes until the weekend in honor of Jean. I spend the days wandering around my apartment forgetting to eat. Sasha sends out a department-wide message encouraging anyone struggling with his loss to make an appointment with her or one of the other grief counselors. I delete it. She can’t help me. This isn’t a Wiley City kind of grief, grief at the unknown, a twist of fate taking a life. This is grief because a powerful man killed someone I love but will never see consequences and it’s Ashtown all over.

For the first week of work after Jean’s murder, I don’t go in. I don’t do anything. Finally, on the third day of my second week out of work, something moves me. I shower and dress and drive the hell out of Wiley City. When a runner I don’t know pulls me over I throw the money at them without even turning off my car. I don’t go toward my family’s place. I drive into the heart of Ash and get out at the House.

Exlee must be surprised at my appearance, but nothing shows on that painted face.

    “What do you need, child?”

This, precisely this. I need someone to call me a child.

“I don’t know.” My eyes are suddenly too wet, and I wipe at them. “But I have money.”

“Of course you do.”

Exlee motions me forward and takes my hand. I’ve seen Exlee lead others back, usually with an arm around their waist or draped over their shoulder. But I am led like a cousin, an intimacy that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with safety.

I think I’m being taken to one of the other providers’ rooms. But I’m led down the enby wing and eventually into Exlee’s own work suite.

Exlee rarely sees clients. At first, I’m afraid. What if they’ve forgotten me? What if Exlee doesn’t recognize me as a daughter, and tries to give me something I’ve never wanted here. But then they pull out the duvet I used to curl up on as a toddler. But I’m not a toddler anymore, so they push it against a long couch draped in warm, red velvet.

“Lay down. Tell me what breaks your heart.”

I’m crying before I even make contact with the couch. Exlee lies beside me, and I curl around a body broader than mine but just as short without the advantage of shoes. I cry into the chest, arms, and hair of a person who feels more like home than this world’s version of my mother ever could.

I’m not even sure if I’m talking, if I’m coherent, but I feel Exlee saying, I know. We all know. We understand. As they stroke my back and gently massage my neck, I realize it is touch I want, touch that is making me feel a little bit whole again, and it is touch from a person who is part castle, someone I cannot destroy and who will always be safe.

Maybe that was Nik Nik’s appeal. Not that he was powerful enough to keep me safe, but that he was too powerful for my curse to touch him. I can destroy almost anyone. My mother, Jean, even myself over three hundred times. Death hangs over me like too-fine dust settles on the skin—weightless but impossible to remove, no matter how hard you try.

    I sleep through the night for the first time since Jean’s death. In the morning Exlee brings me breakfast. I say I’m not hungry.

“You will eat because I’m charging you for the food, and you’re still too much Ashtown to waste that.”

I eat a meal of stringy meat, the eggs of a ground-lying bird, and a tough grain loaf. There are better meals at the House, they have access to even Wiley City’s ingredients, but Exlee has given me flavors I would not even find in the farming-centric Rurals. Food that tastes like blood, and gives me a little piece of downtown Ash’s strength to take with me.

I am fed twice more before I go. I’m never given a proper bill, so I take what I remember from the menu back at my world’s House, and triple it. As I leave Exlee reminds me to say Jean’s name each morning and each night until the burial, because our dead are only weights on our backs when we won’t let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead.

When I get home, I am still sad. I am still distraught and full of guilt. But I have taken a step back from the edge of true despair, or something even more dangerous.

* * *

JEAN’S FUNERAL IS a Wiley City event. His family is there, down to the smallest member, eight rows of love with their arms entwined like a net to carry the heaviest burden. And that is what they will have to do now, because Jean’s absence is exactly that.