He shifts the material over my eyes, and at first I know it is a cold compress. But then I don’t and it’s a shroud and I’m high with a burial shroud over my face, waiting for the handfuls of dirt that will cover me. After all this time running, I have finally turned into my mother.

I start to cry. Loud, sobbing cries. Cries like I didn’t cry when she died or when I thought I was going to. I see her on her dirt floor, her mouth a wide, dead smile and her eyes open to the flies. Am I smiling? I don’t want to be smiling. I try to reach up to cover my face, but my arms are in the pod and it won’t release me.

“No more. I can’t…no more.”

I want to say I’m not like her, I don’t want it, but the words knot up at my mouth.

* * *

THE NEXT TIME I wake I am actually alert for the first time since leaving Earth Zero. Whoever has been watching me must have understood my plea, because the stronger opiate seems to be out of my system, though I’m still held in place by the pods. Pods, plural. It’s not just the one plastic dome like the last time I was podded. When I first got pulled to Wiley, I hadn’t been injected with the serum and I’d just suffered a world-class beating, so my touchdown at Eldridge was more of a crash landing. Dell sent me to an open clinic. I kept waiting for them to ask questions or demand payment, but I was Caramenta now. They put me into a scanner first, then a healing pod. Internal damage, external bruising, and a seriously sprained ankle, all fixed in fifteen minutes. In Ash the ankle alone would have cost a laborer his spot in rotation, would have choked his pay and kept food out of his mouth. But I was a resident of Wiley City, and residents, even former wastelanders who were not yet citizens, did not starve. I swore then that I would never be anything else again.

A warm rag is being dragged along my hands and shoulders, cleaning the parts of skin the pods will allow them to reach.

“I’m awake,” I say, but my mouth is heavy. “Thank you.”

    The rag is pulled away, and I hear it splash into a basin.

“You’re paralyzed, but don’t be afraid. It’s just a facet of the healing, not from your accident. Your collarbones and ribs are the last to knit. It’s keeping you still.”

There it is. The voice I heard before, only now it’s clear enough that I recognize it. Not that I could ever forget it for long.

“You overheated from the healing earlier, but I’m sure it won’t hurt to take this off while we talk,” he says, and the compress comes off of my eyes.

I blink up at Nik Nik. Only the paralyzing agents keep me from flinching away, from rebreaking every bone in my body to get away from him.

The pods beep a warning at my dangerously spiking heart rate, and his eyebrows knit.

“Is the fever back?” he says, half to himself.

Then he places one monstrous hand gently against the side of my face to test my temperature, and I get to see what the emperor of the Wastelands looks like covered in my vomit.

* * *

YOU’RE PARALYZED BUT don’t be afraid.

Don’t be afraid.

It seems impossible that he said those words to me. Don’t be afraid? It’s like a lion telling a gazelle not to run, when everyone knows that’s how he likes his prey best.

I kept my eyes closed and waited for him to retaliate for the mess I’d made of him, and myself, and the pod, but he just turned my head.

I don’t want you to choke, he said.

Then keep your hands from around my neck, I thought.

Lying there, unable to move in the den of my greatest enemy, I listen to the wash, rinse, repeat of him cleaning and think about the plastic sheet Dell let me read before I left. Dell didn’t have extensive biographical data on the Earth 175 me, but she had six entries uploaded from a pod used to heal Nelline that was kept at the palace. My injuries may be proof that Nelline is still alive, but those entries were proof she’d had cause to fake her own death. The first few were standard, bruising and a little internal bleeding from a beating. When I read those lines, I could remember the feeling of the punch that had caused them. But then the entries shifted to horrors I would never know, because I left. A miscarriage caused by trauma to the abdomen. An arm twisted to breaking. Twice, a broken jaw.

    The pod fixing my ribs is probably the same one that fixed hers. The thought makes me almost as sick as the feeling of Nik Nik wiping my mouth. Am I being treated by the same man, in the same place? The veil should hold charge for three days, but what will happen if I’m still here when it dies and Nik Nik sees the face of the woman he’s gotten so used to breaking?

I look around the room to avoid looking at him, afraid he’ll be able to see to the real me if he looks too long into my eyes. I know this room. I’m home—my home, not Caramenta’s home that I call my own the way a hermit crab wears a stolen shell. I’ve dreamt of it since leaving, so at first it’s not strange to be here, in this bed. But then I remember this is Nik Nik’s room first and foremost, and I’m a stranger who doesn’t belong.

It’s the room I shared with him, but different. From what I can see, it’s less opulent than I remember. The wall of windows is unchanged, but the long red-and-gold drapes are gone. The bed I’m on is half the size of the one I remember, and the sheets are white instead of black-and-red silks. Gone are the oversized tapestries that only a lifelong Ash dweller would think passed for class. The walls are bare but for a few photo projections. He was always against portraits before. Take the thing you love and frame it, he’d say, show your enemies right where to aim.

I can’t imagine a Nik Nik sentimental enough for pictures. I can’t imagine a Nik Nik who doesn’t show his wealth in heavy fabrics, sheets so smooth they’re uncomfortable. I don’t know if this subtlety makes him more or less dangerous.

After he finishes cleaning, he takes a seat beside the bed. He’s holding a cup of something orange and steaming.

    “Are you okay? Do you think you can drink this?”

I lick my lips and manage a nod, my head and neck the only mobile parts of my body. He holds the cup to my mouth.

“Can you talk?”

I can. I know how. I just have to remember how to speak without being afraid.

“Yes.”

His smile at that is blinding. “Good, great. I was really beginning to worry.”

There is something wrong with his smile, and it takes me a second to figure it out: it’s all white. He doesn’t have an onyx incisor. The absence of that dark flash inside his mouth is almost as disorienting as the absence of cruelty in his voice. My Nik Nik never smiled with genuine joy, and it pulls his face into a shape that I’m sure Nelline thought was charming. But if she was anything like me, she’d never be able to see his smile without thinking of its opposite, never be able to fully enjoy his good moods because of the inevitability of his bad.

This is like watching Nik Nik in costume. His hair is parted down the center, still long but not rowed on the side. He’s wearing an embellished long-sleeve tunic that reminds me of the fancier ones my stepfather only wears when presiding over births and funerals. Until this moment I’ve never seen Nik Nik in anything but tank tops and leather when in his castle. It’s hard to remember that, even when he looks like this, he’s a villain. I go through the injuries Nelline suffered—the broken jaw, the internal bleeding, the miscarriage. That all happened here, in this place, and no amount of looking like a Ruralite is going to change that. Sure, he didn’t kill her, but maybe she just used a particularly bad beating to fake her death and cover her escape. That’s what happened with me. Earth 22 Nik was violent enough that I’m sure everyone assumed he’d gone blood crazy in my punishment, or that he’d left me too injured to defend myself and a water-mad deepwaster picked me off.

“Who are you?” he asks, and the softness of his voice can’t stop me from thinking of this as an interrogation.

    “No one. I’m no one.”

“Why does ‘no one’ have my name on her back?”

“It’s nothing. It was a joke.”

“A joke?”

Shit. He’s so easily offended, and I’ve forgotten the dance I used to do to avoid it. My jaw hurts from talking and there’s a sharp buzzing growing louder in my ears.

“A dare. It’s nothing,” I say. “Do you hear buzzing?”

“No. Does your head hurt?”

“A little…”

“Open your eyes.”

“They are open,” I say, but they’re not. I must have passed out again, or been close to it.

He holds more of what tastes like lukewarm lemonade against my mouth and I drink it, then he replaces the cold compress on my forehead.

“Get some sleep. You’re not out of the woods yet.”

“Don’t kill me,” I say, though I don’t mean to.

“I won’t,” he says on a laugh, like this is a joke we’re sharing.

“I—”

“Hate me. I know. Rest now.”

* * *