My obsession with writing lists finally pays off, and pretty soon word gets around that I’m good with a pen and I know how to talk like a Wileyite. Suddenly I am a resource. At first, it’s just a favor I do for parents who want to write to children who have been granted full-time enrollment in city schools. They want to talk to their children without their children being embarrassed by them. So I write their letters, translating what they want to say into something that sounds less like home. Then vendors from the bazaar come around, looking for help writing an ad to increase traffic from the city. They don’t want the full Wiley City treatment. They want it to sound enough like Ashtown to be quaint and original, but not threatening or crass.

By the time the emperor’s adviser brings me a job, I’ve accepted that this isn’t side work anymore. This is what I do. I act as an intermediary between two worlds, a traverser like I’ve always been. A vendor I write for offers me a desk in her shop to use as a base, as long as I keep an eye on her goods while she’s out, and I take it. I like having a place to work. She likes having the increased traffic of curious locals wanting to see a fallen world walker, the girl with the traverser’s skin. I’ve had the space a week when Michael comes in, marching perfect like he’s been doing it a decade. He’s got three times the marks he had last time I saw him, and most are achievements. He’s thriving. The shop owner and other customers are watching too closely, a decorated runner enough to make them nervous. He drops an unopened package on my desk.

    “Told you,” he says.

“You win,” I say, and tuck the package away. “How’s business?”

He shrugs. “Things went tense right after…Himself was in a mood.”

“I can imagine,” I say, and then, because I can’t quite resist, add: “It can’t be easy, to find out your brother left you behind.”

He snarls a little at me, showing off the runner’s tooth he always wanted. He leans forward on the weathered desk I use to write.

“You taught me how to leave, Cara. I learned to chase the edge from watching you.”

It’s not an accusation, I realize. He’s thanking me.

“You were always going to find your place. Didn’t matter what I did.”

“Maybe,” he says, and takes those careful runner’s steps away from me. “They’re making up, you know. The brothers. They’ve been talking. They’re only fighting now, but…you know.”

I do. I remember Michael and Esther fighting in the backyard, and this is no different. Fighting means there is something worth fighting over. It means you care. I enjoy the image of Adranik and Yerjanik together again, for the first time without their father’s cruelty or their mother’s apathy. It’s an odd place to find love, but I hope they do.

I have a job in Ashtown, and no plans to move. For as long as I’ve lived, my mind has been on the next thing, reaching for something higher and better. I did not think I was capable of contentment. And I did not think it would be so lonely once I found it.

    The biggest surprise is Nyame. I still see her. At night when I sleep, she shows me images of the worlds I used to know but am cut off from now. She shows me how Nik Nik and Esther are ruling 175, and that Earth 255 me had a child and named it after the mother she doesn’t remember enough to resent. In the dark she reaches out to me, because no one is lost. It is not a testament to affection for me, but a fact of her existence. She finds us in the in-between places, cradling individuals in the same way she cradles the whole world.

My dead grow quiet in my chest, content now that I’ve brought them back to a place they know. The scientists would say this is all expected, that the pressure in my chest was just the toll traversing took on my most concentrated bones, and that my dreams are the same as the hallucinations in the hatch because they are both just the mind trying to process what it doesn’t understand. And there is a world where they are right, and a world where they are wrong, and I don’t need to know which this is.

I’ve been back for a month when she finds me like a miracle. I recognize her at first sight, though she lingers near the shop’s entrance and only slowly makes her way to me. She bends over the vendor’s creations as if she’s interested in purchasing them. And maybe she is. Maybe she doesn’t even notice me. It’s not unheard of for Wileyites to get their thrills buying from downtown directly instead of waiting for a bazaar. She doesn’t seem to have seen me yet anyway.

But of course she has. Of course she knew I was in this room just as I knew the moment she walked up to the door. We are planets in orbit, pulling at each other as surely as gravity.

She picks up a knickknack, a mudcroc made of local ash and clay, carrying the colors of Ashtown as if we need reminding.

“You’re hard to find,” she says, bringing the trinket to me.

I wonder if she thought I was dead. It’s been time enough for Adam to have had me killed. There’s also the matter of my possibly dying/possibly not dying, given what Adam said about the serum. I wasn’t looking at Dell’s face when he said it, so I don’t know if she believed him or not.

    She doesn’t look worried. She looks good. She’s wearing all white, a color I’ve never seen on her. It makes her glow, and the Ashtown sun has pinkened her cheeks something lovely. She looks young, nervous.

“I may or may not have given Adam Bosch a terminal illness. I don’t think he’ll kill me, but it’s best if I lay low.”

She raises an eyebrow. “That does explain the shift. He’s taken on a team of apprentices, and switched the company’s gears from profit-making to community outreach.”

“Lot of buildings going up with his name on them, I’m guessing?”

She nods.

He’s dying, and with the time he has left he will ensure he lives forever.

“How is it working there?”

“I don’t know. Eldridge had become…unstable. I thought it best if I spent a little time focusing on family assets for now.”

Moving money around is not the kind of thing I’m sure she’d want to do, but it’s also always an option for an heir like Dell. She has a security that not even Adam Bosch could claim, wealth generations back growing fat on itself. Soon, they’ll want her to marry. Sooner still, they’ll want her to have a child.

I clear my throat and pick up the mudcroc. “Cash or barter?”

“Barter.”

Dell slides over a jewelry box and takes the mudcroc without giving me time to assess it. I don’t call her back, because I’m sure she’s covered, but when I open it I wish I had.

In the box is Dell’s jade earring, the third she had no use for, but it’s been fixed onto a necklace. Instead of a platinum chain like most of Dell’s jewelry, this chain is black as night and catches the light red like Ashtown stone.

* * *

    I FIND MYSELF standing in a garden on the eightieth floor, where other versions of her have always found me. She approved my day pass, but this means nothing until she turns the corner. And there is a world where I wait forever, because she decides not to come. Where I go home, and try to make peace with a contentment I realize will never be true joy. And there is a world where I die old and unsatisfied, and there is a world where I die young, because Adam Bosch’s rage escalates with his symptoms, or where he wasn’t lying about the serum and my heart slows to a stop in my sleep just as I’ve finally gotten everything I want.

But there is also a world, and maybe there is only one, where a Wileyite girl comes into this garden and takes my hand. Where she reminds me there’s more than one type of visa, where we buy an apartment on the edge, because I still work in Ashtown and because that is where half of our children will be from. Where I am always too rough and she is always too proper and it is a tension that keeps us interested far longer than lust.

It is only one world in infinite universes where this impossible happiness exists, but that is what makes it so valuable.

To Grandma Tree I love you. You made me. Please don’t read this book.

To You

You will always be with me, even if not in the way either of us once hoped.

There’s too much sun where I’m from, I had to give some away. And so I gave you away.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have put this off for longer than is healthy for either my or my editor’s stress level. I always put off things I do not know how to do, and I do not know how to write an acknowledgment. I know how to be grateful, but my gratitude is a sloppy, spilled-over thing, nothing elegant enough for text. So bear with me as I gush.

Who else can I thank first but you, Cameron McClure? Who, when I decided to scrap the first project I’d worked on, the one in which you’d already invested so much time, said, “I signed up for a career, not just a book.” And whose response to my every wild idea is, “I can sell that.”

I would not have written this book without Patrick Rosal, a trickster mentor for the undercommons. You taught me Amiri Baraka’s name and gave me permission to exist in a way that is unpalatable to others, and to write within the academy in a style and genre that it would only ever view as grit. More than that, you taught me what an honor it actually is to be viewed as grit, especially in a machine that’s going to eat you anyway.