I hope she died trying to take a piece of something that wasn’t hers. I hope she died trying, because my mother always said that was how I was going to go, so her mother probably did too. Was her mother still alive? I poke at Nelline’s file, hoping for even a next-of-kin listing, but the information is skeletal even for the basic files I usually download. There’s an additional packet of information, but it’s earmarked “Medical,” which means it’s been sent to Dell to compare with my own data. Whether the watchers are sent our dops’ medical files for our protection—using the data to become aware of possible health concerns early—or to track the side effects of traversing against a control, none of us are sure. But I do know the files are locked down as confidential, and even logging in as Jean won’t let me access them. I need to get them from Dell, and to do that, I’d have to ask her for them, and to do that, I’d have to be the kind of person for whom asking for things isn’t exactly the same as drinking glass shards. So…I’m probably not going to get that file.

To palate cleanse from 175, I pull up 255 me. When I see her fuzzy image I exhale, like always. Earth 255 is my favorite. In the three-dimensional image that pops up, she smiles over her shoulder. It’s not posed, just some candid that appeared in their media and so was picked up by our surveillance. She lives in Wiley City, but she wears her hair long and dark and fiercely curly, like she has nothing to lose by looking like an outsider. She’s struck the perfect balance of being enough of them to belong, and enough of Ash to be seen as a novelty, a rarity. Valuable.

A Wiley City couple found her when she was four, barefoot and wandering by the main road into the city. So they took her. If my mother had any rights, it would have been a kidnapping, but she was just an independent worker struggling with addiction. If she’d still been attached to the House, the proprietor would have used their power to fight for the child to stay. But you can’t work through the House if you use like you need it, so her mother had no support when the couple the papers called saviors abducted her daughter and called it adoption. Her name is Caralee, too, and her parents let her keep it. They even supported her as she used a portion of her inheritance for outreach to other children in Ashtown.

    She got married last month on a balcony on the hundredth floor to a man who is a little rich and a lot in love with her. At least, that’s how it looked in the photos the Wiley City press ran. I want to print out her picture and keep it on a wall, like a relative I couldn’t be more proud of, but as much as I like knowing she exists, it makes me angry.

I was a climber. When my mother kicked me out as a kid, I would climb onto the roof of our house. 255 was probably just a shit climber, so she walked all the way to the road. That’s how fickle fate is. One day you wander instead of climbing, and you end up rich and happy. One day you don’t, and you’re me. Or you’re drained outside like 175. Or you’re left bloodied and naked, facedown in the dirt on a world that isn’t yours, like the girl whose bed I sleep in.

Fate breaks rough, most of the time.

* * *

MY PULL TODAY is on Earth 238. It’s another rush job, this one being funded by seismologists wanting to know if a recent earthquake was more or less severe on an Earth that hadn’t drilled in the area. By this time next month I will hopefully see the number 238 and know the population and time variances from our Earth down to a single death or tenth of a second. But right now I can only remember the practical: that the payload is in a heavy-surveillance country, so I’ll need darkness and an obscurer for the cameras, but I died here as a young child, which means I can get out of using a veil if Dell’s feeling generous.

I’m not allowed to access the building higher than my level. I have to wait for Dell to send the elevator down. When it doesn’t come, I press a button on my cuff to buzz her.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” I say into the speaker.

There’s a long moment of silence, and then “I’m not a princess” comes over the connection.

    “Could have fooled me,” I say, but she’s already closed the link and sent the elevator.

Dell’s prep room is on the eightieth floor, just to the side of the traversing room. I take a second to appreciate the all-glass view. It’s an artery floor. Artery floors happen every twenty stories from 40 on, and are as tall as cathedrals. There are walkways on every floor, each lined with trees and gardens lit from the SimuSun panels on the paths above it, but artery floors are so tall real sunlight slips in like a peeking child. Real sunlight as filtered through Wiley City’s domed artificial atmosphere, but still.

Dell doesn’t know that I know, but she lives on this floor. It’s high up for someone with a real job, the same floor Eldridge CEO Adam Bosch lives on, but Dell is an heir. Every day after work she walks out of the office exit on 80, and follows the curves around buildings for six blocks, and then she’s home.

I don’t live on an artery. Or even close to one. I exit on 40, then take one of the congested escalators down ten stories. I never see the sun, but it’s still a good neighborhood. There aren’t many bad ones in Wiley City. It was built and is still run by people who care…for other Wileyites, anyway. They save all their apathy for the world right outside their walls—for the Rurals, the wasteland, and people like me.

If I were born here, or if I were already made citizen, I wouldn’t get kicked out if I lost my job. I’d go to a career center that would give me training to fix the issue that got me fired, then give me listings for a new job. If I lost my job because I was sick or having a nervous breakdown, I’d draw a basic income until I was better. At worst, I’d have to move to a lower level where housing is free, though it’s usually reserved for retirees and students. But I’m not a citizen, so unemployment means nothing but a quick banishment.

“Do you miss it?” Dell asks, sneaking up on me the way I usually do to her.

The view isn’t even of Ashtown; it’s of a random spot in the desert on the other side of the city, but she wouldn’t know the difference.

“No,” I say. It’s the easiest question I’ve had to answer all day.

    I don’t think she even cares about the answer. She just likes reminding me where I came from, why I shouldn’t know where she lives.

“You don’t seem like the kind that thinks deeply about the past,” she says.

“Because I’m a worker bee and we only think about the job?”

She shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Rather be a drone. They get to fuck the queen.”

That, she ignores. For some reason seeing her unsettled makes me brave enough to ask a favor.

“Hey, did you get Nelline’s medical records with that last pull?”

She looks at me again, showing a slight curiosity that would probably look like pure confusion on a more open face.

“Nelline?” she asks.

“Me. I mean, the me from 175.”

Understanding, she looks away. “That’s not really your concern.”

I haven’t actually asked to see the file, but apparently that’s not a necessary step in her telling me no.

“It’s just that Jean thinks…I just want to know more about how she died, or maybe her life before that. If you could just—”

“What good can knowing serve?”

“What harm can come from me seeing the file?”

She takes a breath, then looks me in the eye. “I know you were killed there, but if you plan on seeking revenge—”

“I’m just curious,” I say, though I’m not sure that’s it, not all of it anyway. “Did I try to get revenge over my last hundred murders? I’m the best in the universe at letting bad shit happen to me.”

When the last sentence comes out of my mouth we both make a sound—her because she’s done arguing, and me because it’s one of those truths too true to ever be said out loud.

“It’s time we start prep,” she says, even though it’s early yet.

I bite back a dozen arguments. Asking for access to the file in the first place cut me. Begging would kill me dead.

Dell has laid out everything I’ll need for this pull, little stacks on the prep table as sensible and organized as her whole life.

    The clothes I have to wear today are monochromatic and androgynous. Subconsciously or deliberately, the people in this section of 238 have rebelled against their government’s surveillance by refusing to stand out. She turns away when I change, though I stay facing her. Not because I’m daring her to look at me, but because my attempts to be her equal would dissolve if she saw the tattoo on my back.

After I change, she installs the obscurer in the center of my chest, a small square that will disguise my presence from any electronic surveillance. When she reaches for a veil, a web of tape that will cross my face from chin to forehead and cheek to cheek, I stop her.

“I died here when I was four. I don’t need that.”

The numbers that could get me a permanent position I keep forgetting, but somehow I remember my death age on 373 worlds.

“But you’ve visited here before. Someone might recognize you and think your presence in the same place is suspicious.”

“It’s a remote area and the obscurer takes care of drones. No one’s seen me in person. Once I encounter someone, I’ll start using the veil here. But not before.”