She sets the mug down. There’s a scar across her lips that pulls at her mouth when she speaks, so she usually sits quiet. When she does speak, she keeps her mouth small to minimize the effect. But I still notice, because I know what that mouth is supposed to look like. The wide gap of it when it smiles perfectly.

“I’m not some rabid Ruralite. But you come, you bring food. I tried to follow you once and you just disappeared.”

“You followed me?”

“Tried. If you’re leaving, can’t you tell me?”

“I’m not an angel. Nowhere near.”

She’s waiting. Of course she’s waiting. No one in Ash does anything for free and I’ve been bringing her food and clothes since I found her, but I’ve never asked for more than this ass-tasting water. I have never touched this version of Dell, would never. Not because she wouldn’t let me, but because she might. It would reek of gratitude. And maybe she’d be insecure, think she was less than me. I don’t want to make Dell feel like that, don’t want to make her feel the way she makes me feel.

“You just remind me of someone.”

“She dead?”

“No. Face like a night sky, though.”

She nods, understanding. We’ve got half a dozen phrases out here for the same thing: something beautiful and perfect that you can’t ever reach. Except I’ve traveled through the stars hundreds of times, and I’ve still never gotten close to touching Dell’s cheek.

“Face ain’t like that,” she says. She doesn’t touch the scar on her mouth, but she might as well. “Not anymore.”

She begins counting out the rations I’ve brought before I’ve finished my water. After a while she looks at me, not at me but at my shoes.

    “If you’re going for good, just go.”

I go. Out her door I get a view of Wiley City, the only way I used to see it. She’s picked a house right on the edge of Ashtown, so nothing impedes her view. She must sense all her other selves inside the city, living secure eighty stories up. She must know she’s been cheated.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING, Dell is quiet as she readies me for my long stay on 175. Just before getting the serum, she hands me a plastic sheet. I turn it on and see the space fill with information about Nelline.

I look up from the text to her. “You came through.”

She goes cold in the face of my gratitude.

“You knew I would,” she says, but not like she’s proud of being consistent. More like she’s ashamed she couldn’t stop herself from helping me.

I scroll through the text and swallow hard. I was right to avoid this. It’s harder than I thought it would be, and the buzzing in my head doesn’t stop until I’ve shut down the screen. I hand it back to Dell like one hands an empty cup of bad medicine back to the doctor. I needed it, but I hated it.

She doesn’t respond to my reaction until I’m heading into the hatch.

“Are you scared now?” she asks.

“Have you been talking to Jean? It’s just a pull, like any other.”

“It’s a new place. That hasn’t happened in a while.”

“They’re all the same place,” I say, and begin climbing the ladder.

“But this one just killed you. Might have a taste for it now.”

I look back at her from the top of the hatch.

“Why, Dell, you sound exactly like an Ashtowner.”

She takes it as an insult, which I take as an insult. We can’t ever really talk. I want to take her hands and tell her that, yes, she is better than me but that is because she is better than me. Not because Wileyites are better than Ashtowners, but because she is driven without being manipulative, she is ambitious but only until it edges over into cruelty.

    Until we have that common understanding, we can never really speak, and that’s something I’m just coming to terms with. Not pursuing Dell and being rejected, which I’ve always accepted as an inevitability, but never getting her to see me enough to even speak to me.

“Miss me,” I say, from the top of the ladder.

She doesn’t look up or respond. She just slides her headphones in. I climb into the dark.

In a few seconds, when the door is sealed and the vibrations hit just wrong enough for me to know it’s a killing frequency, I will wish she had. I will wish her eyes, and not her downturned face, were the last thing I’d ever see.

PART TWO

A rotating black hole does not collapse to a dot. That’s the old-fashioned thinking. It collapses to a ring, a ring of neutrons. And if you fall through the ring of neutrons vertically, you wind up in Wonderland. You wind up on the other side of forever.

—Michio Kaku

CHAPTER FIVE

When the bodies of the first traversers were recalled, there was shock at the thoroughness of the devastation. Twisted in and out, glistening with fresh blood and something else.

The scientists said, We did not test it enough. We should have expected a backlash.

And the spiritual said, We did not petition enough. We should have expected a sacrifice.

* * *

I’M NOT SURPRISED to die in the darkness between. Die exactly how I lived: belonging nowhere.

I know something is wrong the instant tuning begins, which means it’s too late to do anything about it. Did Dell feel the resistance as she began the transfer? Did it come across like static, or a scream? It wouldn’t stop her. Her job is to send me through, so she will. But this time, it will kill me.

The playful lick that usually just raises the hairs on my arms shifts dark, turns into a burn as it transforms from passive pressure to primordial rage. I’ve never really believed in Nyame. I carried her name, but only the way even atheist runners will wear Nicholas medallions before a tricky job. I wrapped myself in the pragmatism of Wiley City, a place so full of science and progress there is no room for superstition.

    But now Nyame is as real as a backhand. I don’t just feel her breath, I see her. She’s staring down at a collection of universes like an old woman with a puzzle. She holds me up like a missing piece, but when there’s already one where I belong she gets confused, frustrated, and tears me in half. It’s a hallucination, I know, but I swear I hear her voice as my first bone breaks. But it does break, and it’s my collar, so I don’t think much after that.

Just before the blackout, one thought comes clearly: Nelline’s not dead. Earth 175 me is alive and well. Eldridge was wrong, just like they were wrong once before.

* * *

THE HAPPIEST DAYS of my life were the first in Wiley City six years ago. It was my first taste of guilt-free joy. I’d made my way to the address on my cuff’s digital ID, the apartment that was mine now. I found the house still packed up, Caramenta’s things just waiting for me to put them where I would want them. And the box of journals detailing her life, sitting open on the rug like an instruction manual? It was fate smiling, I was sure.

But then the worry started. What they don’t tell you about getting everything you ever wanted is the cold-sweat panic when you think about losing it. For someone who’d never had anything to lose, it’s like drowning, all the time.

I set about the problem like I set about all problems. I made lists. I read Caramenta’s journals and made a list of her traits, her phrases. She was faithful and pure and more than a pinch judgmental. But I didn’t just want to be her, I wanted to be a better her, so I began reading the autobiographies of people who were born in Wiley City, and I made a list of their phrases too. They never called Wiley City The Wiles, so I wouldn’t either. And they always referred to Ashtown by its proper name or simply Ash, never Ashytown or Big Ash like I used to.

    I guess what I mean to say is this: I’ve been so consumed with keeping my job, with maintaining my stolen life, I’d forgotten the most basic fact I learned as a child. I was so concerned about getting fired, I’d forgotten that anyone can die, at any time.

You’d think someone who’d seen her own corpse would be smarter than that.

* * *

MY RIBS CRUSH in, then expand out with the suddenness of the new world. I made it through. I may still die, but my broken body won’t be rejected and sent back like the others. Not quite a victory, but something.

I land on packed earth that used to be a river, and recognize it instantly. I’m in the wastelands. When I try to sit up, everything hurts. When I lie back, blood fills my mouth. I reach into the pocket of my vest and pull out the Misery Syringe. This is when I’m supposed to use it. It will block out the pain, give me time to contact Dell for a recall. The recall will kill me, but at least they’ll know what happened. But I can’t. I can’t die here, in the dirt. Not like the last Caramenta, and all the others before her. Not like my mother.