I spent most of my relationship with Nik Nik wondering if he knew what everyone else did. Or if his brother’s murder was kept from him even after his father’s death.

It was a long time before I finally felt secure enough to mention the boy who’d taught Nik Nik to write his name but died before he could teach him much else. When I did, he didn’t answer directly. He told me a story. He said his grandfather’s people came from a place across the ocean. A small country, but resourceful. Once, a larger country came in and massacred nearly everyone. But that, that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that afterward, swords and sickles still drenched in innocent blood, they turned and said they’d done nothing. If the massacre was mentioned, they denied it, and no one was brave enough to argue. Nik Senior said that was true power. Not to kill a man, but to kill a man in front of his family and force them to agree you did not.

I asked him if his father was right, if that was true power.

No, he said. It was just blood magic.

* * *

NIK NIK HAS programmed the pods, and I intend to get into them as soon as he leaves, but he doesn’t. He sits in the bedside chair, still in his tunic and glasses, looking every bit the holy man instead of the hunter he has always been. I should rush him out. I can feel the warning pulse of my veil losing charge, but I’m not as concerned as I should be. Half of me is wondering if having this version of him see me and not hurt me will heal all those broken pieces inside that therapy has blunted but not reassembled. The other half is wondering how many more pieces there will be if I’m wrong about him.

    “Going to read me a story?” I ask.

“I was hoping you would tell me one.”

“You don’t want a garbage git’s tale. All ours end in being eaten by a mudcroc.”

“Important tales, those,” he says. “You’re not from the deep wastes?”

Dammit. I’m acting as if the veil is already gone. “Not originally. What story did you want?”

“How old was I when my father died in your delusion?”

“World,” I say. “Just…pretend I come from a different world than you do, a world where things are mostly the same, but slightly different.”

“How old was I?”

I stall, because he’s asking like the answer could save his life, and I don’t understand why.

“What makes you think it was different than here?”

“Here he died when I was six, but you were afraid of my father like you’d seen his rule firsthand. You’re easily more than six years younger than me.”

Can I still get fired for violating every traverser policy if no one ever finds out?

“I don’t know. I was fourteen. Someone slit his throat while he was sitting at his desk.”

I remember that day like it was the best birthday I’d ever had. I was so happy he was dead, runners showed up in my neighborhood to check my alibi. It didn’t help that someone saw a small girl running from his office. I didn’t kill him, but a girl that young alone with a man like him? I’d sharpen the blade and hand it to her myself.

“How old are you now?” he asks.

“Twenty-six. You do the math.”

“And I took his place?”

“Yes, because Adra was already dead. He died when you were—”

    Seven.

The dots start to connect. In the other worlds, Adra died when Nik Nik was six. Here, it was the father who died at that same time. But I’d bet a man and a teenage boy went out into the desert in all of them.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Why are you stalling?”

“Because you might kill me for telling the truth.”

“I don’t kill.”

There’s a shakiness in the proclamation that makes it easy to believe. It’s different, and so much more true, than I could never kill.

“You were six,” I say.

“The same age my father died here….How did my brother die in your world?”

“I think you already know. Which means you already know your brother killed your father in this one. That’s the question you want to ask, isn’t it? In my world, in most worlds, your father killed your brother when you were six. In this one…Adra must have gotten the upper hand.”

He stands, but doesn’t approach me.

“Treason, every word.”

“You said you wouldn’t imprison me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“It was implied.”

“Your injuries when you were found, did someone beat you for wearing my name? Was it my brother?”

There’s real heat behind the question. I don’t know where the protective rage comes from, I just know it should scare me and it doesn’t.

“It was a…miscalculated landing.”

This seems to amuse him. “You do this a lot?”

“It’s kind of my special gift.”

“World hopping?”

I swallow. “Dying.”

Unsurprisingly, this gives rise to a dozen new questions. Mostly, I answer. I tell him more than I intend to about myself and where I’ve traveled. I realize too late that I have never gotten to talk to someone like this. Talk about world walking with someone who doesn’t think it’s a sin like my family or just a job like Jean and Dell. I like talking with him, and hate that I do.

    I don’t realize how many years I’ve been alone until I warm under a gift as simple as someone’s undivided attention. I could say Wiley City has made me weak, but it’s always been this way. Even my Nik Nik knew exactly how, when he wanted, to make me feel special. Just as he knew exactly how to make me feel like dirt. And I reveled in that tainted affection, like a plant settles for drinking dew because it knows it’s never going to get real rain.

“You still haven’t told me why my name is tattooed on your back.”

“Not your name.”

“Right. Another me.”

“Now you’re getting it.”

“And what was I to you?”

He doesn’t think I’m someone I’m not, so this is the longest stretch of conversation I’ve had without lying in a long, long time.

“A warm place to land.”

“That’s all?”

“Spoken like someone who’s never been without a warm place. You should value them more.”

“You’re still talking like it’s me you know. It isn’t,” he says. “I would never…hurt someone like that.”

But he says it like it’s something he wants to believe, not something he knows is true.

“Can I ask you a question?” When he nods, I continue. “Have you ever broken someone’s jaw?”

He recoils.

“No,” he says without a moment’s hesitation.

The pulse of the veil is a steady countdown now. I could let it fizzle out on its own, pretend this wasn’t a decision. If I just let the veil fall off, I am still committed to deceiving him. If I take it off, I am giving the man who looks like the monster that gave me every scar a gift. I turn the idea over and wonder how long I’ve been letting my most wounded self make all of my decisions.

    I reach up and press the edges of the mask to release it.

It doesn’t take long to see I’ve made a mistake. When he sees my real face, his eyes light with recognition.

Nik Nik lunges for me, and I scream.

* * *

“I TOLD YOU to go. You weren’t supposed to come back. He’s going to find you.”

I blink up at him, surprised at the lecture.

“Did you really come back to him? He’s going to kill you. He tried to kill you.” He looks confused, but also tired. “I can’t find you like that again.”

We lock eyes, me not understanding him, and him not understanding why I don’t understand him.

His eyebrows knit.

“Nelline?” he says, finally, actually looking at me. “What happened to your face?”

“You haven’t been listening. I’m not Nelline.” I push away from him, toward the tall mirror in the corner. “And what’s wrong with my face?”

At my first glance I nearly scream again. I’ve had striations before, the tiger stripes of bruising that accompany traversing, but never like this. Even darker than my dark skin, they begin beneath my eyes and carry down as far as I can see. I lift my shirt, and see the marks across my torso. I lift the legs of my pants and find them there too. They might lighten with time, they’ve always disappeared before, but these survived the pod. Are they permanent? I press the marks that frame my cheekbones, but there is no pain. They usually act like bruises, but these feel like scars.

He touches my arm, and my whole body tenses. I turn away from the mirror.

    “It was your brother, right? Adranik hurt Nelline.”

“She was…his.” He’s still studying me. “You’re really not the same?”

I shake my head. “Adranik was never the one to hurt me.”

“In the times when he’s not there…it’s me?”

I don’t know if he means when his brother’s not in the picture, we are together, or, when his brother’s not in the picture he is the one to hurt me. Either way, the answer’s the same. I nod, and feel bad for being the one to tell him.

I can’t find you like that again. There was real anguish when he said it. I picture Nyame punishing Nik Nik this way, forcing him to see and clean up exactly the kind of damage he inflicts on every other world.

“You can’t stay here. He’s gotten worse thinking she’s dead. He’ll want blood for the trick.”