“Why aren’t you podding her for these fractures?” she asks.

“Because she fractured along pod-healed injuries. She already had the healing fever once over there. She might not come out of a second bout without lasting damage.”

She spends a bit longer staring at my face. “And these traversing bruises?”

The doctor shakes his head. “Never seen so many marks. They survived her podding on the other world, so they’re likely…”

“Permanent,” Dell says.

Her study of my face turns to actually looking at me in an instant, and I don’t know how I can tell the difference. “Who took care of you?”

I shrug. It hurts. “No one. I mean, he wasn’t a doctor or anything, but he kept me hydrated and tried to keep me cool.”

    Her face goes plastic, unreadable. “I’m sure he did,” she says.

Her attention makes me feel exposed, and as soon as the electrical tape begins to pulse I reach for the Eldridge Institute shirt Jean brought me. Trying to lift my arms makes my whole body scream. I take a sharp breath and leave the shirt in my lap.

Now they’re both looking at me.

“I can give her something for the pain, if someone can commit to seeing her home,” the physician says. He stopped addressing me directly the moment my watcher entered the room. I’d hate him for it, except hate takes focus and I’m in too much pain.

“I’ll see her home. She has no family in the city.”

“Traversers never do,” he says, not quite far enough under his breath.

The injection works quickly, and when I stand my head feels full of air and my mouth full of cotton. I turn to Dell. “I live off the fortieth floor.”

“I remember,” she says.

It’s on my tongue to tell her she’s never been to my place, but she’s already holding open the door.

* * *

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE way, Dell has learned where I live. She walks slightly ahead of me, but never looks back to ask where we’re headed. Or if we’re moving too fast. Or how I’m doing. But who’s bitter? Not I.

I realize too late that being alone with Dell while I’m this wrecked is probably a bad idea. All of the little annoyances I usually swallow seem intolerable now that my ribs are hissing and I can’t remember my last good sleep. Only when my apartment door slides open does she come up short. She studies the walls, head tilted in a way that somehow cascades her perfect haircut without ruining its shape.

“It’s…different than before.”

I haven’t decorated as much as I should have for six years, but now that I’ve spent real time back in Ashtown I realize I’ve collected images that remind me of home: rough fixtures made of imperfect metal, paintings in shades of gray with just enough shape and splatter to feel industrial.

    “Here,” she says, pointing to a distressed piece of wood I’ve hung above my couch. “You had a picture of flowers here, didn’t you?”

No, but Caramenta did. It was the only thing hung among the half-emptied boxes. It’s in my closet still, because even though it’s hideous I assume it meant something to her.

“When did you come here?”

She looks over her shoulder. Her face is no more expressive than usual, but I swear I see a glare in her dark eyes.

“Why are you pissed at me? Is this about being late? You saw the scans. I was half-dead when I got there.”

“You stayed after you were well.”

“It was a bright day!”

The yell costs me an echoing screech along my sides, but it would be worth it if it got to her. I want her to step up, come at me, yell back that she’s not stupid and she knows damn well when the sun set on 175. But she just looks slightly annoyed before turning away.

“Where is the bedroom?”

I hobble after her. “That would be the thing you can’t find. Does even knowing where my bed is break protocol?”

She’s glaring at me again.

“It’s down the hall, Dell. Obviously. I don’t have a spare.”

Her face empties, leaving no trace of anger; the indifferent night sky I’ve come to dread.

“We should get you into bed. You’re irrational.”

“I’m not irrational. I’m in pain.”

Her eyes soften. She takes my arm, about fifteen minutes and thirty floors too late.

“Come on.”

I don’t need her help to walk, but I let her lead me. I hadn’t made my bed when I left, so it’s easy to crawl into the crumpled mess while she answers her beeping cuff.

    “Not going to tuck me in?”

She looks up. “You’ve been placed on leave. I would have recommended it anyway, with your ribs, but I don’t know if this has to do with your health or your delay.”

“How long?”

“Two weeks.”

Tension constricts my chest. “Paid?”

She nods, and I relax into the pillows.

I stare up at the ceiling, bright white and high enough to make me feel like I’m floating. I feel a slight panic at the prospect of losing my job, but it’s distant, muddled by more than painkillers. I grew up fearing death, every day. Tasting that terror again mutes my reaction to unemployment.

“I killed someone,” I say without meaning to.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean you killed someone?”

“Nothing. It’s an Ashtown expression.”

It’s not, though I’m sure enough people there have said it.

She studies me for a second longer than is comfortable, then looks away.

“That girl following you into a jump…I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”

That girl. Like Nelline is some other garbage git. Like she wasn’t me.

“What will happen to her body?”

“A week for tests, then the incinerator most likely. I doubt anyone wants to bother with a burial,” she says.

“I’d like to. Bury her, I mean.”

Dell is staring at me again, and I think she’ll tell me no. But eventually she nods.

“I’ll arrange it.” She adjusts her coat. “You have my number if you need me.”

“Not going to stay and watch me sleep? What if there’s an emergency?”

    “Then you should call emergency services.”

I close my eyes. “Go if you want. Can’t stop me from dreaming about you, though.”

“Don’t be cruel.”

I don’t understand her response, but I’m tired of teasing Dell, of trying to irritate her just to make her feel something at all. I fall asleep before I hear her leave, but I’m sure she does.

* * *

ADRA VISITS ME in the night. I see him bend and break. I know I couldn’t have seen his face, not once he was snapped backward, but I’ve invented it—eyes wide as stars, a blood curtain hanging from his mouth—turned toward me in accusation. Somehow, too, I’ve added sound into the void. I replay the memory and make myself sick with it, until I know the particular hurt of dry-heaving with fractured ribs.

Do you want to see it?

Those weren’t the last words he heard, but they might as well have been, because he was dead as soon as I made the invitation.

Two days fighting nightmares in my apartment prompts me to make an appointment with Sasha, the same psychologist who helped stop the panic attacks I’d thought were normal because so many people who grew up with runners had them. In Ashtown, our therapists work out of the House. If Sasha were from Ashtown, her office would be filled with incense and we’d both be lying down when I spoke to her. She would cover me in oil made by pressing one of our few flowering plants. She would stroke my hair and rub my back and I would believe her when she told me my mind was wonderful, and that I would survive this and so much else.

I miss having a place where someone would touch you, just hold you if that was what you needed, or hold you down if you needed that more. But no one in Wiley touches—not me, not each other—and Sasha especially doesn’t.

Sasha’s office doesn’t smell like smoke, or sex, or anything but clean, and we sit feet apart as she tells me I’m exhibiting a totally normal grief response. She doesn’t believe I knew Nelline well enough to account for my grief. She thinks it’s myself I’m mourning.

    You understand you’re alive, don’t you? she says, more than once. You are alive, Caramenta. You are still whole.

She calls me a dead girl’s name, and pronounces her alive. But even if she’d gotten my name right I wouldn’t really believe her. I used to be at least 382. Now I am 7. How can I possibly be whole?

Maybe if you touch me, I want to tell her, maybe if you were stroking my hair like a sister, I would believe I was alive.

But they don’t do things like that here, and it’s embarrassing to realize after so many years in the city I still need it.

I’m just getting home from one of our sessions when my cuff beeps a call from Esther. I’m grateful it’s a voice call, rather than the standard video. My family doesn’t know about my injuries, or my new marks, and I’d like to keep it that way until I can see them in person.

“Hey you,” I say, but once she starts talking, I realize my tone is too light.

“I’m heading for the wall, can we meet? I don’t have much time, but I need to talk to you.”