She doesn’t make excuses, just like she didn’t ask before giving my lunch away. When Dan steps down it will be Esther, not Michael, to replace him, and at times like this it’s obvious why.

We get home late for dinner, but Michael comes home even later. He plops down loud with his eyes raised. I wonder how long it took him to make noise again, to learn how to lift his eyes. In Caramenta’s journals he’s a pious boy, as reluctant to be noticed as the rest of his people.

His fingertips are clay red, like all the edgiest Ruralite teens. They dig their fingers into blood-colored rivets in the ground and leave them for as long as they can. The brownish stain on the nails is the closest thing to the black nail polish of downtowners they can get away with.

I’m admiring the ingenuity of his rebellion when he turns it on me.

“Is it true you kill people?”

“Michael!”

He flinches, but doesn’t look at my mother. “Jeremiah says traversers actually go to other places to kill people. They laserblast their heads right off.”

    “You know we don’t discuss that…business in this house,” Daniel says.

That “business” is my job. Or my company, I’m not exactly sure which, but I know it’s living, breathing, blasphemy to them. People who don’t believe in taking up more space, air, or attention than strictly necessary are unsurprisingly opposed to claiming whole new worlds. They see it as new colonialism, and they’re not wrong.

I turn to Michael.

“That’s a ridiculous urban legend. Laserblasters don’t exist, and even one of Wiley City’s stunners would probably get fried if I tried to bring it over.” I flex my fingers at him. “I have to use my bare hands.”

My mother rolls her eyes, which is close enough to raising her head that I feel accomplished. Esther clears her throat to hide her laugh, and that feels like a victory too.

Michael looks down, considering what I’ve said. “But do you kill people here? They say that’s why we’ve never seen traversers from other planets. You kill them all.”

The company line is we probably have been visited by traversers, and just don’t know it. Our traversers have never been caught by another world’s surveillance, and other traveling worlds would take all the same precautions. But I don’t tell my edgy stepbrother this. I just take a sip from my lemonade, maintaining eye contact long enough to make him shift in his seat.

I heard this theory—that every time a traverser is found on our Earth there’s an employee waiting to garrote them and dump their body in a hole—my first week at Eldridge. Other traversers, and there were a lot back then, told the stories whenever we had a second without a watcher present. I was still new, newer even than they thought I was, so I didn’t offer an opinion. It wasn’t until later, when half of those eager gossips had dropped off and Starla and I were bonded beneath the idea that we’d be the last two standing, that I brought it up.

I asked her if she thought the company killed traversers from other worlds.

    She just tilted her head at me.

Eldridge says they’ve never caught traversers from other worlds, remember?

She was always smart, savvier than me, so her procedural answer was a hint to drop it. It was a company function, after all, but we were alone outside while she smoked something from a green glass pipe that filled my lungs and mouth with the taste of figs each time she exhaled deliberately toward me. It made me bold.

Sure, they say that, but what if…

She rolled eyes larger and darker than any I’d seen outside of Ashtown.

What if, what if. So what? A handful of people are killed for trespassing when they’re found. And? You still have an apartment. I’m still neck-deep in imported smoke. Maybe they kill people. Maybe they don’t. Do you care?

That was when I realized…I didn’t. I was curious, that was all, but not morally affronted. There might have been people dying, but they seemed inconsequential, against the mention of my city apartment and the promise of citizenship that seemed so close even back then.

Starla wasn’t just telling me these hypothetical murdered traversers didn’t matter. She was telling me nothing mattered. When I went, she wouldn’t riot, wouldn’t turn down my pulls to keep me in a job. I wonder if she would have kept inviting me out onto balconies for free smoke if she knew how things would actually shake out—that her selves would keep surviving and mine would die off more and more each year.

After dinner, when my family goes to sleep, I’ll pack my things and slip out. Tomorrow is Sunday. They will spend the morning in silent prayer preparing for services I don’t even know how to attend. And they will think I’m rusty because I’ve been gone so long, but soon they’ll see I haven’t forgotten…I just never knew.

Outside of the city the land is cut with a muddy scar that’s still a low river in some worlds. This is the place where the dirt on my wall comes from, the place where, under another sun, I watched Caramenta die. I should stop, get out, and acknowledge the loss that no one else ever will. I should, at some point in the last six years, have brought a candle. But I won’t.

    There’s a saying in Ash, mostly downtown, that’s been applied to everything from thrones to land to spouses: It doesn’t matter how you got it, if you have it, it’s yours. So I don’t mourn the dead girl whose life I live. Just like I don’t spare another thought for Starla, whose absence means a bump in my paycheck and nothing else. I just begin the long drive back to the apartment, the city, and everything else I stole. Because it doesn’t matter who it used to belong to. It’s mine now.

CHAPTER THREE

“You’re late,” Dell says as I run past her down the hall.

“Obviously,” I say back.

I’d love to stay. Forcing Dell into small talk is fun because she’s so bad at it with me. It’s like she’s being asked to communicate with a child or snake—something that is either boring or dangerous, with no in-between. But I’m not just late, I’m late for Jean, so I keep moving.

Every traverser has a more experienced mentor. Because I traverse more than any other employee, I get the honor of having Jean Sanogo himself. No one’s ever questioned why my meetings with Jean are weekly while everyone else only checks in monthly. Only Dell ever looks suspicious, but she’s classist to the bone so she thinks I need it to survive the pressure of a real job. Jean knows better. He knows growing up under the threat of starvation and homelessness means nothing will ever quite feel like pressure again. He knows even better than I do.

I dated a man a few years back who had never worn an untailored suit or cut his own hair, and who fell fast in love with my durability. He liked the way nothing shook me, not a house fire, not an approaching storm. The way he could count on me to never be afraid was its own aphrodisiac to an only son who’d been raised sheltered and fragile. I liked his fragility, how easily shocked he was, how he never thought to hide it.

    His name was Marius and I miss him. But when his family met me, they saw cold where he saw strength. His mother warned him that people who come from Ash have seen so many bodies in the street they don’t have feelings anymore, only a survival instinct. He told her I wasn’t from that Ash. I was from the good, clean, farm-working Rurals. Still, she convinced him he was just a means to an end, a shortcut to security. I thought I cared about him, but I had done precisely that with Nik Nik on my old world, so maybe she was right. I do miss Marius, but like I would miss a pet bird—something fragile that trusted me to hold it in my hand, heartbeat against my palm, ribs vulnerable to the whims of fingertips. Maybe it’s just the power I miss.

Jean is staring at his screen when I come in.

“Are you just now going over my report?”

“The summary. I’ve already gone over your analysis.” He looks up at me. “Despite the late notice. Three A.M.? This morning?”

“I haven’t pulled from that mountain port in a while. I didn’t realize we had so much surveillance in that area and I didn’t get back from the wasteland until Sunday.”

He turns away from his screen. “You forgot to note the discrepancy in population change. Their population loss was holding steady with ours, now it’s accelerated.”

Four hundred lines of analysis and he would find the one mistake.

“By less than one percent.”

“It still goes in the report.”

“Analysts neglect significant findings in their reports all the time. I found discrepancies in all of the examples you had me study.”

He leans forward, which means he’s going to use his dad voice on me even though we’ve long since established I’m immune.

“Yes, they do, but when the company looks at applying analysts they don’t see their skill. They see their credentials, background, and education. The people Eldridge hires have to prove they’re unfit despite their background. You’ll have to do the opposite, and to do that you need to be infallible where they are flawed.”

    It takes all the venom out of me, because arguing with him is just arguing against the voice in my head.