The mayor speaks about Jean as a treasure, an explorer, one of the first to return from the dark unknown that claimed so many lives before him. It doesn’t take long for her to digress into the political, saying Jean’s murder is exactly the reason Wiley City needs to “intervene with added security measures” in the land outside the wall. In the past, additional border security has always been unpopular, because the same things it is supposed to fix were supposed to be fixed by the numerous vertical wall extensions they’ve already authorized. Border security never lowered crime rates the way they said it would, and eventually Wiley accepted that they were murdering and stealing from each other. It wasn’t worth it to spend on external security, not when so many still remember what Nik Senior paid them out for trespassing last time. But Jean’s death has ignited a new hatred for runners, for Ashtown, for dirt itself, and this time people applaud.

    Eventually she remembers this is not a rally but a funeral. She tells us that we’ve lost a rare kind of hero, the kind of knight who would fight a dragon. She says it must have taken such great bravery, to traverse when before they’d only recovered bodies. I’m sure, but not nearly as much bravery as it took to accept someone else’s death, knowing no one would praise you for it.

I want you to know, after this goes bad and you’re facing whatever end you’ve engineered for yourself, that I do admire you.

Would he still mean that if he knew this was what I’d bought?

I’ve forgotten myself and worn gray, a speck of ash in a sea of black. It’s not the kind of funeral I’m used to. No one speaks to Jean, only about him. We are never invited to approach him with our secrets. I settle for whispering I’m sorry, I’m so sorry to myself and anyone who’ll listen. I say it to his family after the service, but they think it’s I’m sorry you lost your father, when I mean I’m sorry I got him killed.

Dell is here. I sense her looking at me, but I can’t look back because I don’t know how to seem like I don’t need her, and it wouldn’t be fair to use Jean’s death like that. Sita is in front, the dark-brown girl with hair the color of clay and a face just like her grandfather’s. I remember Jean holding her quickly, kissing her head as she squirmed to leave. I hope she remembers too. I hope she never forgets, because it will be all she has left now.

It’s too much. I duck behind a tree to wait for the crowd to thin. Footsteps follow me, but they aren’t the ones I want.

“Fuck off.”

His amused chuckle grates like a knife being badly sharpened. “I like your rage. It means you’re loyal.”

I turn on Adam Bosch. It hasn’t been that long since I was afraid of him, but now I feel nothing at all.

    “To him. I was loyal to him. If you wanted to make anything but an enemy of me, you should have let him go.”

He tilts his head, studying me like a puzzle.

“I don’t expect you to approve of what happened to Jean, only to learn from it.” Too casually, as if we’re discussing the weather, he takes out a vial of eyedrops and drops liquid into his enhanced left eye. “I don’t need to earn your loyalty. I just need to give you time to understand that you don’t have a choice. You Ashtowners are very good at figuring out your options.”

“Us Ashtowners, Adranik. You’ve more than earned the Blood Emperor title.”

I want to insult him, but he doesn’t get angry. Just peers closer.

“Do you know there are five worlds where we’ve been lovers?”

I know of one, but I won’t tell him that.

“Five whole worlds where I’m brain-dead? Tragic.”

“In two we’re still together, in the other three…you’ve died.”

“Suicide, I imagine.”

“No, and I think you know that.” He steps forward until he’s practically against me. His closeness is threatening but not human enough to be sexual. It’s like I’m being threatened by a rock, a robot, a weapon. “I just want you to understand that I’ve killed you in worlds where you meant something to me without a second thought. And you mean nothing to me here.”

“I told you to kill me last week. And you should have.”

“And waste such potential? After all the trouble I went through to get you?”

“Don’t you get it? I don’t care about potential. I am the one who betrayed you. You killed an innocent man.”

He laughs, just a little, just enough to piss me off. “You think Jean outsmarted me? That I didn’t know he was lying?”

I shake my head. “Then why—”

“If he had betrayed me, and I killed him, I killed the traitor. But if I killed you, whether you were the traitor or not, I would have lost him. He would have reacted irrationally. But if you were the traitor, and I killed him, you would learn the consequences your actions have on those around you. You still need Eldridge. Jean did not. I removed the element I could not control.”

    I run through his words twice before I truly understand them. He didn’t even kill Jean because he hated him, or because he felt betrayed. He killed Jean because it made the most sense. Murdering Jean was just the answer to a riddle.

He’s still studying me like he’s trying to see beneath my skin and behind my eyes.

“You hate me, don’t you?” he says.

“More than anything in this world.”

This seems to surprise him. If I’d killed you…he would have acted irrationally. Adam Bosch doesn’t understand hate.

“But you’ll still report for work when your personal leave is up, just like everyone else. I could tell you all the ways I’ll kill your family if you talk, how many pieces your sister can be severed into, but I don’t think it matters, does it?” he says. “In every world, you are ruled by blind ambition, not familial love or loyalty. You’re not going to throw your chance at Wiley City away over this.”

Something’s been bothering me, but I couldn’t quite figure out what until he says this last part.

“What trouble?”

His smile drops. He tilts his head at me.

“You said you went through so much trouble to get me. But you didn’t. It was just a recruitment letter.”

When his eyes settle on me, I can’t find a trace of Adam. All I see is Nik Senior.

“I think we both know that’s not true, Caralee.”

Hearing my real name from his mouth pitches me close to vomiting. Dell told me he programmed the pull himself, but I was so distracted by our fight I hadn’t listened.

“You killed Caramenta? But why…why bother?”

    “Before her first pull Caramenta came to me, her conscience bruised because of some heavy petting with Ikari. I knew then she’d be useless to me.”

“Because she wouldn’t kill for you?”

He lets out a bark of a laugh. “Kill? The little Ruralite would have gone to the authorities over insider trading her second day. Too self-righteous. But even then it would have taken two dozen people to access her worlds. Your worlds.”

So he sent her body into my path, and hoped I would do what Ashtowners always do: take what wasn’t mine. And I did because, in his words, I’ve always been blindly ambitious, or, in my mother’s, I was born reaching. But I wasn’t exactly what he wanted. In the garden he said Jean had told him I wasn’t cut out for murder. Jean had kept him from recruiting me to Maintenance. What if he hadn’t? Would there be as many traversers as there are Maintenance workers now, while I put all of the black jumpsuits out of work instead? Would I have taken the job when I was just a broken bit of a girl from Earth 22? Before I learned generosity from Jean, or compassion from Esther?

My memory of our first meeting, once my favorite, turns rotten. The way Adam came down to see me, and told Dell to be patient. It was because he knew I never went through training. He knew who I was the whole time.

Nelline was a killer and a spy, exactly what Bosch wanted. Did he plug her death into the system without full evidence, hoping she’d faked it and history would repeat itself if she found out about my body? He said he’d come to my meeting to see if I was her, but did he hope I was? Did he start planning to kill me as soon as he found out I’d been studying for the analyst test? Or did he just get bored with the version of me that wouldn’t kill, when he was about to need so many more people dead?

“How does it feel?” I ask, finally. “To turn out just like your father?”

For a moment, the space between one heartbeat and the next, I am sure he will hit me. What he threatens instead is worse.

“Do you want me to fire you? Will Jean be properly avenged if you die working as a whore in the desert? Will that sate your righteous fury?”

    I hesitate, not for long, but long enough for Adam’s smile to turn real.

“Of course not. Because for all your words, you don’t know how to go backward, Cara.”

I’d wondered why he didn’t kill me, too, and here it is. He couldn’t control Jean, didn’t have anything he needed anymore, but he can control me. He sees me like a toothless dog on a leash, not really a threat despite all my growling.

He takes a step away and puts his hand in his pocket. A half smile creeps onto his face. He looks like the Adam Bosch the papers show.

“I meant to tell you congratulations on your perfect score. I understand you landed in the first round of interviews. I’m sure you’re concerned about getting another mentor with as much experience as Jean Sanogo, so I want you to know that I’ve had you assigned to me personally as protégée.”

“Eat a whole dick, Bosch.”

He chuckles, actually chuckles with Jean’s body not yet fully buried. “You do so remind me of Ashtown.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” I say. “You never left.”

* * *