The room shares a lighthearted laugh. Except Jean, because he wouldn’t laugh at a joke that hurts me, and Dell, because she never laughs.

It’s not my fight. It’s not. Even though my time spent on Earth 175 makes it feel like I am fresh from the ash. I bite my tongue when I want to call them out. Like Ashtown has the resources to even have an intravenous drug problem? When Wiley City has such a lockdown on plastic and glass? No. Ashtown junkies smoke rock shards as black as their emperor’s hair in pipes they make themselves from clay they dig out of the ground. My mother would trek for miles because she swore red clay left a better taste than gray. And even an Ashtown user is too smart to take drugs from a dead body. They know what tainted looks like, and they can smell a trap better than any sandcat.

    Dell taps her pen on the table, once, hard, which snaps me to attention. I’ve been glaring down, fingers gripping the desk. If the investigators had bothered to look at me, they’d know I was angry. And then they’d remember I was a traverser, and traversers don’t come from the same places as the rest of them.

I sit up straight. I start to smile, then remember Nelline and what a smile actually looks like on my face. I settle for not grimacing in a way I hope looks neutral.

Next they want to know what it felt like to see my dop. The scientists sit up for this part. They must have petitioned for a chance to interview me and been denied. I wonder if Dell or Sasha made that call. I tell them the manuals were right about the vomiting. They ask me how long it took the brain to adjust. I don’t know if my mind ever adjusted—I still don’t know what to do with Nelline—but I tell them it took about twenty minutes for the nausea to wear off.

“And what was phase two? What replaced the nausea?”

This from the quieter investigator.

“After the nausea it didn’t feel like looking at myself. It felt like looking at a relative, a sister or a cousin. And I felt…inexplicably protective of her. I know it was just my mind extending its own self-preservation to a being it saw as also me. But it felt like…”

“Affection,” Dell says.

I nod. The tapping on the screens to my left grows frantic.

“Did this protective instinct drive you to bring her here?” the chief investigator asks.

“No! I mean, no. I knew what would happen.”

“But you called for a proximity pull. Why?”

    “My collar was broken,” I say.

“Was it?” the lead investigator asks, and in the silence that follows I realize my mistake.

I messed up. I called for a proximity pull, then showed up wearing a perfectly functioning collar. Do they think I was trying to smuggle Nelline in and forgot about the dop backlash? Or do they think killing Nelline is exactly what I was trying to do? It doesn’t matter. They know I lied; they just won’t know why.

I know what happened on 175.

Well, apparently everyone else does too.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Right, this mysteriously broken collar that seems to have disappeared from our inventory,” says the second investigator.

“It what?”

I touch my neck, half expecting the collar to be in the last place I remember it. I look at Jean, but he seems as confused as I am.

Dell leans forward, looking straight at me even though she’s giving testimony to the investigator.

“I inspected the collar when she arrived,” she says. I’m sure she sees my panic before she looks away. “It was crushed. I had already suspected as much when the frequency was too weak to find her. The cleaners must have seen it and assumed it was a piece of damaged tech to be recycled.”

She’s lying, but I can’t figure out why.

“This is where I have difficulty. The collars are made to sustain any trauma, to keep our people from being trapped. Even a pressure strong enough to break bones shouldn’t have damaged it to that extent,” he says. “You say it was crushed?”

He leans back, shaking his head. I drag a finger on the side of my glass.

    “Have you ever heard of the Ashtown runners? Not the errand boys, the old runners. They still ride on Earth 175. And their cars aren’t like Wiley City cars. They aren’t lightweight, or solar. They are made of the heaviest metals and ornamented in stone. They are meant to run into people and buildings and each other. And they get twice as heavy on a bright day, when they add more metal panels coated in a cheap reflector. They don’t just break bones. They liquefy bodies.”

I hadn’t meant to go that far. I’d just meant to offer up an alternate explanation so he’d stop looking at me and Dell like we were hiding something. I’d never meant for her to get wrapped up in this.

It takes a second, but he turns to the galley. “Would that compromise the structure of the collar?”

The scientists murmur, and then one stands. He looks nervously at me, then back at the investigator. “If the day was hot enough that the collar’s structure was already taxed…possibly. If such a vehicle does exist.”

“They exist.”

The voice comes from behind me and everyone stands. I stand and turn, even though looking at Adam Bosch is like stabbing myself in the chest. He smiles and nods at me, kind like always, and the guilt could crush me to dust. I want to tell him I’m sorry, but he won’t even know what I’m sorry for.

“Mr. Bosch, we weren’t expecting you,” says the chief investigator.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt. I thought you’d be done by now.”

His name is Adam, but Adra, Adra, Adra bounces inside my head. I don’t know how long I can stand there, but luckily Jean saves me.

“I won’t be much longer,” he says. “I’m sure we’re nearly done.”

“Of course. I’ll leave you to it,” Adam says.

The room feels darker when he leaves, but I can breathe again.

* * *

THE NIGHTMARE THAT wakes me the next day is another quiet one, more sad than horrifying but a nightmare nonetheless. Nelline, who was somehow also Caramenta, and somehow also my mother, was lying beside me in bed, telling me over and over again that she’s not here. That she is gone. That everyone is gone. Except me. I am alone in an infinity of universes. I actually miss the quick and easy horror of the Adra nightmares, where his mangled corpse tries to point a finger at me, but he has no fingers, only bloody stumps.

    I’m half-dressed when someone buzzes at my door. Nelline’s body won’t be released to me until I’m at the city border, and I’m not expecting anyone else. When I check the feed, Dell’s on the other side.

My first thought is that she came because she wrote the note. That the note was about me lying about the collar and she’s come to collect. But I still can’t square the choppy handwriting with her elegance. Besides, what could someone like Dell possibly want to extort from someone like me? I gave her my most valuable possession when I handed over the earring.

I open the door. “What are you doing here?”

She walks in without waiting for an invitation. “Today is the burial, isn’t it? I’m going with you.”

“You want to come with me into Ash?” I look her up and down. “You’re wearing all black.”

“It’s a funeral.”

“It is, but—”

A second buzz interrupts me. This time the screen fills up with Esther’s face. She’s staring wide-eyed into the camera and standing way too close to the door. I let her in.

“What are you doing here? Who sponsored you?”

She nods toward Dell. “Ms. Ikari. She told me you had a friend die, and we thought I should help you with the burial.”

“I don’t need help.” I look back at Dell. “From either of you.”

Esther steps forward. “Do you remember the prayers for the dead? The peace ritual?”

Of course I don’t. When someone dies in Ashtown, we just hire someone from the Rurals to say the words. Or a sahira from inside the city, for those who lean a little more toward the pagan. I wonder if Esther has ever been hired to bury the dead. I wonder if Caramenta ever did.

    “Besides,” Dell says, “the van is rented out in my name. Unless you planned on transporting her in the trunk of a company car?”

These are both excellent points. “Fine. We’ll all go.”

“You’re going into Ashtown wearing all black?” asks Esther, whose long dress is in the customary gray of Ashtown funerals, though today’s apron is brown.

Dell narrows her eyes. “All right. I give up. What does it mean if I wear all black?”

I shrug. “It means you’re a professional, and you’re not dressed like a runner.”

Dell looks down at her dress. “I’m dressed like a prostitute?”

Prostitute is another word I learned only after I came to the city. Worker, provider, comforter, house cat, on and on—we have as many words for them as islanders have for water and northerners have for snow, but prostitute isn’t one of them.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Dell. A mere worker would never dare wear all black,” I say. “All black is for the elite.”

Dell looks down, then raises her chin twice as high as before. “I would be elite.”

* * *