“It…doesn’t work like that. Being the same isn’t the same as being close,” I say, but I clutch the jar anyway.

Esther gives a satisfied smile. “Light it when you want to talk to her. Or when you want to remember. It will run out when you don’t need her anymore.”

That part I know is a lie. I couldn’t afford a full burial when my mother died, but Exlee paid for my mother’s candle. It ran out too quickly. I still needed her. I still do.

After I take the mourning candle I think, and fear, that she’ll go back to giving dirty looks to the runner, who is now crouched by the bog watching the horizon for signs that the night predators are waking. Instead, she stays with me.

    “Do you know what I have to do to prepare for this? To make myself worthy of ushering the dead?”

It’s a trap. The answer is no, but it should be yes, so I stay quiet.

“I have to be anointed in oil and wholly cleansed. I go to a cave known only to me, my father, and the one who will take over my duties if I ever leave or die. There is a hidden spring there. I drink from the spring, and bathe in its waters to become pure. Afterward, my apprentice works holy oil through my hair.”

“Sounds…slippery.”

“You can say it sounds strange. Even when I was the apprentice I thought so.”

“You apprenticed?”

She looks at me. “I used to prepare Caramenta.”

Caramenta. Not you.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“How long have you known?” I ask. I realize now that she wasn’t checking the body to see if it was me; she was checking to see if it was her real sister.

“From the very beginning.”

My mind stutters. I think back to every interaction we’ve ever had, and all along she knew I wasn’t her sister. A phone call stands out. When I was getting ready for the dedication, it was Esther who called to tell me Joriah might come.

…you remember. Tall, red hair? He moved out here for a little while when we were young, but then left for the deep wastes as a missionary.

She wasn’t making small talk. She was feeding me information.

“Was it the tattoos?”

When I realized my mother was still alive here, that Caramenta had a family, I rushed off to see them. I still had tattoos on my forearms then. I thought I kept them covered, but if Esther was used to bathing Caramenta naked, she would have known something was off.

“No.”

“The way I talked?”

“You certainly sound more like her now than you did at first. But no. I knew you weren’t her because you brought me a gift.”

    I remember that. I was always the youngest around my mother’s friends and colleagues. I didn’t know what a twelve-year-old girl would like, much less a twelve-year-old girl from the Rurals. But I wanted to bring her something, because I had a little sister and first impressions matter even if she didn’t know it was a first impression. I settled on some strawberry lip gloss, which my mother quietly “lost,” and some dried flowers pressed into a necklace, which Esther was allowed to keep.

“She would have known not to bring you lip gloss,” I say.

“She wouldn’t have cared enough to try. Caramenta hated me.”

“What?”

Esther wasn’t half as spoiled as she could have been for being the Rural leader’s heir. She was kind when she didn’t even have to be. Who could hate her?

“Cara had a thing about men, and boys. She liked Michael, she loved Father, but she had no use for me. As I got older, it was like I was worse than in the way. It was like she saw me as some kind of obstacle. A problem. She made things…hard for me. I don’t know what I would have done if that offer hadn’t come in from the city. She didn’t want to take it, but Dad thought the money would help out here. She said she’d do it for no more than a year. In my head, I thought, Oh good, I’ll be thirteen before she moves back. Plenty old enough to run away.”

“Jesus, Essie.” I swallow my reaction, a horror-concern cocktail that’s years too late. “Thirteen is too young to run away. So is eighteen, by the way, for a girl from the Rurals.”

She smiles at me—nice, wide, and bright—like she doesn’t know I’m not her sister.

“But I didn’t have to leave. Because things changed when you came back. You didn’t scheme with Mom anymore, and you smiled at me. I’d been praying for Cara to become different. I hadn’t known exactly what I was asking for…but I wasn’t sorry. Even after I was old enough to realize you being here meant she must have died working, I wasn’t. I prayed for you, and you came. To regret that would be to reject a miracle.”

    That’s twice now someone called me a miracle. And again it comes from the mouth of someone whose sibling I killed.

“How did it happen? Did Eldridge really think they could replace her without anyone noticing? Was it to avoid paying out the death benefits?”

I shake my head.

“You know why she was recruited?” I ask.

“Because she died on a lot of worlds and you can’t travel to a place where you’re still alive.” She says it like she’s twelve again, reciting the facts of traversing exactly as they were first explained to her.

“Right. And if you try to go to a place where you’re still alive, it kills you. Usually. Almost always, with the very rare exception. She tried to come to my world, and died because I was there. I found her body. Eldridge doesn’t…actually know I’m not Caramenta.”

Her eyes go wide and her mouth goes small as she processes that I am not the company’s contingency plan, just a first-class grifter.

“No one knows? Dell?”

“Just you,” I say. “I didn’t have a good life. My mother is the same person as here, but she never made it to the Rurals. She died when I was sixteen, and I didn’t have a lot of options. When I saw Caramenta’s body, when I heard Dell saying she was bringing her back…I didn’t even care where I was going. But I got lucky. I got you. And your family. And an apartment in the city.”

She takes a breath and looks back over the horizon at the nearly downed sun. She’s giving more thought to her response than I gave to looting a body and taking its name, and she’s younger now than I was then.

Finally, she makes a decision and looks back at me.

“I understand that the multiverse means there are many of you, and some live and some die. But I think, I believe, there is a reason for those who live. Death can be senseless, but life never is. There’s a reason you’re here and she’s not.”

“People get lucky every day.”

    “Is it easier for you to believe in chance than the will of the universe?”

“Yes? Obviously?”

She shakes her head at me. These days she only looks truly young when I’m irritating her. I reach up to wrap an arm around her neck, kissing her head the way she hates because it makes her feel small. I need her to be small. I need her to be small and stationary and easy to protect forever.

“You’re a pain,” she says. “But I’m still not sorry I wished for you.”

When we finish talking I notice the sun has mostly set. I hadn’t heard Dell leave the car, but she’s walking quickly back from the bog now, like she’s running from something. I go to the bog’s edge to investigate. The surface is a darkness so still and total it may as well be the hatch. I will Nelline to sink down into the perfect black until she comes out the other side, going home the way she came.

Mr. Cheeks starts his car, and the headlights shine on something in the liquid. I can’t reach it, and it’s sinking slowly, so I lean down until I can make it out. At first, I think it must be a rock, the kind from the mountain that contains enough metal to wink if the light hits it right. But then I recognize its shape: an Eldridge collar, fully intact, sinking to a place no one will ever find it.

I look over my shoulder, but Dell is already in the vehicle, staring at her hands.

* * *

ESTHER STAYS THE night with me, and we hardly sleep for all our talking. She asks me questions she couldn’t ask Caramenta, or any other Ruralite, even though I try to answer as if I am one of them. She even asks about my last job. I don’t hold back, so by the time I’m finished my little sister knows everything about me. Nearly. I don’t mention the note, because I don’t want her to worry, but I give her everything else.

I thought she’d get caught up in the murder, but not my teenage sister, who’d squealed like a teapot when she’d heard about me dating Nik Nik in my old world.

    “Wait, so he had the hots for you on this other world too?”

“No…maybe…it doesn’t matter. It just means Nik Nik’s type is consistent across the universes. I probably remind him subconsciously of his mother or something twisted like that.”

“Does he remind you subconsciously of your father?”

“Wait, what?”

“?’Cause you had the hots for him twice now too.”

Her eyes are wide as she looks up at me. She’s sitting cross-legged on my bed with her hair braided for sleep.

“I did not.”

“Some things are inevitable.”