I TAKE OFF my mourning dress for the second time in a month, and put it in the top of my closet. My hand glides against the cold jar, and without thinking I take it down. I’d tried fruitlessly to get Esther to take Nelline’s mourning candle back, but Esther had insisted like only the princess of the Rurals can.

I light the candle at my small kitchen table. You’re supposed to know what you want to say, or at the very least who you need to speak to, when you light it. My mind is swirling with a hundred questions and twice as many dead, most of whom wear my face.

I remember a line from one of Esther’s songs, and speak it.

    “I do not know which way to go, but my eyes are turned toward you.”

I watch the smoke for what feels like an hour, looking for an answer in the shapeless gray. The room fills with the smell of the bog at sunset, as if I’m sitting back there watching Nelline go, but there are somehow also hints of the neatly clipped grass from Jean’s ceremony. The two deaths are entwined, not separate griefs but wells digging into the same dark reservoir inside of me that is growing wider by the day.

I revisit the realization I had at the House. I am a creature that destroys all who stray too close to her.

My fingers flex on the candle and I understand the words anew.

I am a creature that destroys…and Adam Bosch has strayed too close.

Will Jean be properly avenged if you die working as a whore in the desert?

Adam thinks I hesitated because I care enough about my job to make me malleable, but really I hesitated because as he spoke I got caught on the word avenge and have been ever since.

The sound that fills my head is something between a laugh and a chant, shapeless and expanding like the smoke in my kitchen. I look down at my hands, hands that aided a coup against Adranik, hands that killed him. Not only can I destroy Adam, I already have.

My mistake was thinking that his were Wiley City crimes and that those should be handled in the Wiley City way. I went to the authorities because I thought a citizen had committed a crime. I thought he would fire me, then wait for the notoriously long Wiley City judicial process to take its course. I didn’t know that even here he was an emperor, but I do now. Adam may have forgotten what happens when you kill the wrong person in Ashtown, but he’ll remember soon enough. Blood is the only answer for blood in the desert.

Thinking this way is dangerous. Murder has a cycle just like water. In the same way water becomes a cloud, then becomes water again, when blood calls for vengeance the blood from that vengeance calls too. If you plan to give death, it will always return to you. But I’m not worried. I’ve been close enough to death to see its shadow my whole life. It always misses me, but only just, like the person who leaves the room before you get there but whose scent is still in the air.

    If this is how death finds me, at least it will be different. I have died a hundred ways, but never in defense of another. Not until now.

I make a list of what I need to accomplish, which is long. Then I make a list of people I can trust, which is short. By the time I finish planning, the candle is out, though the smoke still hangs heavy like a ghost.

* * *

I DRIVE INTO Ashtown so slowly that even the most distracted runner could have clocked me. But when the heavy boots walk up to my window, it’s not who I want to see.

“Where’s Mr. Cheeks? I need to talk to him.”

The runner tilts her head. At first I think her tight expression is suspicion, but then I realize it’s less serious and more complicated than that: jealousy. That’s when I recognize her. The mechanic. The tall one. Mr. Scales.

After letting me sit with the sun in my eyes, she finally looks away.

“He’s on the later patrol,” she says. “It’s still morning.”

Technically it’s noon, but I give her the cash without haggling and start the car.

“Don’t you want your receipt?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Won’t do me any good.”

I drive back toward the Wiley City border and wait. The city has increased perimeter patrols since Jean’s death. The conversation that should be about what Adam Bosch has done is instead about outer-city crime.

When I’m sure enough time has passed for it to no longer qualify as morning even for a group of night owls like the runners, I drive back toward Ashtown. This time I recognize the giant vehicle with a back like a winged beetle that pulls me over.

    I get out before he does, and at his first sight of me he closes his eyes, looking for all the world like Esther when she prays for patience.

“What now? First you want me to trespass on the bogs, then you want to leave a runner a care package. What career-threatening event do you have planned for me today? You want to give the emperor a lap dance and need me for access?”

I decide to spare him the knowledge that I’ve already given his boss a lap dance, and it was as subpar as all my other sex work.

“I need to talk with you about a job, but I didn’t have any contact info.”

“A job?”

“Consider it a consult.”

He looks back at his vehicle. “No time now. Tomorrow?”

“Okay. I don’t get off until five, but I can get you a day pass.”

“You want me to go into the city? Now?”

He has a point. Jean was a hero. It will take a long time for the city to stop raging at the people they think took him.

“Is there a place in Ashtown we could meet? I don’t want your colleagues to think you’re making side deals.”

He thinks for a moment and shakes his head.

“I’ll come to you,” he says.

He reaches into his pocket and hands me a piece of metal that is as wide as two fingers but paper thin, though it doesn’t bend when I press it. His name has been punched out at the top, and beneath that is his contact info.

“Next time, just message me.”

“Seems less fun when you’re expecting me.”

“Oh, it’s never fun. Don’t worry about that,” he says, and we walk back to our separate cars.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When I’m summoned to the hatch I expect to see Carrington again, but it’s Dell. Seeing her so unexpectedly, bent over a screen while light from the window turns strands of her dark hair to pure shine, is a fist in the throat. I manage to control my reaction enough to keep from running to her. I walk quietly, like I’m trying to catch a bird.

I get close enough that I can see the heading of the file she has up on her screen before she notices me. It’s information about Earth 22.

“If you want to know about me, you could just ask.”

I’m certain she didn’t know I was standing there, but she still looks up casually as if she isn’t surprised. On her face I see everything she wants to say to me. In the end she settles for the most familiar: indifference.

“I just wanted to see what went wrong, to prevent it from happening again.”

“Little late for that. If it happens a third time, I may just have to accept that someone is trying to kill me.”

It’s the truth, but I’ve gotten good at telling Dell the truth in a way that’s so obvious she can’t hear it.

    “Right…” She looks down at her reader, tapping on the desk with her index finger.

“Just ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Whatever questions have your face all corkscrewed.”

“My face is not…” She takes a breath. “Your name. It’s not Caramenta, is it?”

I shake my head. “Caralee, though, so when you abbreviate it I can still pretend you’re saying my name.”

I didn’t mean for it to sound flirtatious, but it does and we both look away.

“How did you know what to do?”

“You. You walked me through it. I saw myself as a corpse lying in the desert. I heard a tiny voice saying a name that wasn’t mine. I put the earpiece in and you told me, ‘Make sure your collar’s secure.’ So I took off her collar and put it on. And then you said, ‘Make sure the pouches on your vest are closed so you don’t lose anything on the jump.’ So I took her vest. The only things of mine that came over were my boots and tattoos. The cuff had an ID with her address and emergency contact information on it. Her front door was keyed to my face. It was…easy.”

“I should have known you weren’t serumed. When you came back you were too bruised for such a short jump.”

But she didn’t say a word, because she didn’t want Caramenta to think she’d been studying her body too closely. The rift between Dell and me is mostly my fault, sure, but I hate Caramenta for her role in it too.

“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry,” she says. “Jean was a good man.”

I don’t think he would fit her definition of good, but he does fit mine, so I say, “The very best.”

“He cared about you. I know it seemed like he cared about everyone sometimes, but the way he spoke about you to others…even I was jealous.”

The tears come fast and hot, lacing the edge of my vision. I stare at the bright outside to dry my eyes, but the regulated daylight could never be hot enough.

    “Thanks.”

“There are rumors…”

“Rumors?”

“Rumors that he wasn’t alone,” she says.

She does not say he was with me, though that must be what she is thinking. Which means she understands his death is partially my fault, even if she’s off on the details.