The sound is too loud in the room, which has suddenly gone silent. Which means he’s here. If I turn around, I’ll see the spectacle of Nik Nik: two tight rows braided just above his left ear, because he is the third in his line to control Ash; the rest of his hair left down so everyone who sees him knows he is not a man who works in the wastelands or with machines or at all; and in his mouth, all four incisors plated in synthetic onyx so they shine like black diamonds and, yes the rumors are true, cut just like them too.

    And there is a world where in this moment a more reckless and honest me smashes my lemonade glass and cuts his throat with a shard, where I put my hands into his still-warm blood and the thick of it washes away the multitude of shames I carry. But that world and that me are so different from this one I doubt Eldridge would ever be able to resonate with it. I am no longer reckless, and I have never been honest.

I set the glass back down at my mother’s station and leave the room to find Esther. I haven’t heard Nik Nik’s voice in over six years, and I intend to keep it that way.

To bring the night to a close, everyone is gathered outside. Daniel and Esther have each had moments addressing the crowd tonight, but this time it’s Michael who steps forward alone. He doesn’t speak. He just kneels, checking the wind every so often, until we finally see a faint spark in his hands. By the time he walks back to the crowd the sky is exploding over us. Michael is the son of the Ruralite leader, but he doesn’t give sermons. He worships with fire.

The religious are the only ones who use explosive powders anymore. Weapons capable of murdering from a distance were banned after the civil wars, when Nik Senior took power, long before I was born. It feels miraculous to watch the fireworks, louder and brighter than anything Wiley City can ever give me.

Voices murmur through the crowd. This is when Ruralites believe in making confession, when the fire has grabbed God’s attention and no mortal ears can hear through the explosion. So I wait, and when the next bloom of gold breaks open into the sky with a scream, I tell my truth.

“I am not Caramenta,” I say. “Caramenta is dead.”

* * *

    CARAMENTA DIED SIX years ago on Earth 22, my actual home Earth.

I was born Caralee, but I’d been Caralexx since my seventeenth birthday when I’d finally gotten tired of fighting for scraps in a world that would always be Nik Nik’s. Once his dad died and Nik got true power, I put an x on my name and became his favorite girl. But he had a jealous streak as wide as his smile. I learned early on he was no different from my mom in handing out punishments for things I’d never done. My real mother—not the wilting silk scrap of a woman on Earth Zero who belongs to Esther, Michael, and Daniel but who will never be mine.

Out on the edge of the wasteland that was still half wet from the mostly dead river, Nik spent the night pretending to drown me. He held my head in the muck, but pulled me back before my lungs were even really burning.

I’d say, Why’d you stop?

And he’d say, Practicing.

Then he left, and left me alive, like he always did, because he liked me walking back to him tired and blistered. He liked caring for me afterward, as if the damage were done by someone else.

I was in a piece of the wasteland where the Rurals still reach in Earth Zero, face caked in mud that had turned as hard as fired clay under the sun, wishing I had anywhere else to go. That’s when I saw the body.

Her eyes had starbursts of red in the white. Her left arm was broken out once and then back in again like a puppet, her shoulders caved forward but her spine bent back. In all my years living rough, I’d never met anyone who could stomach doing that to a person. Hers were the only tracks in the dirt—drag marks, not footprints. She’d pulled herself a little with her good arm, but whatever grace had pushed her had worn off, and a blood tide was crawling from her mouth across the sand.

I crouched down when I should have run away. Maybe I meant to steal what I could. Maybe I needed to see what mark that kind of death left on a human face.

    That’s when I saw it. The part of the face that wasn’t destroyed was mine. The corpse was me, a neater, un-tattooed version of me. I stared at her face, my face, and thought it was a joke.

Next I heard the voice, small but not distant. It was saying a name.

I took out the transmitter, grazing an unpierced version of my own ear, and put it in.

“…menta? Caramenta? Are you there?”

It wasn’t that the voice was lovely, but the concern in it was pure and sweet, something I’d never heard before and haven’t gotten tired of yet.

“Yes…I’m here,” I said.

I put on the woman’s cuff and it activated, recognizing me as her. The picture on Caramenta’s digital ID looked even more like me than her corpse. Her address was in Wiley City. I always wanted to live in Wiley City.

Caramenta, Caramenta, Caramenta. I repeated it so I wouldn’t forget.

“Good. Thought we’d lost you on your first day out.”

“No. I’m just…confused.”

An irritated sigh, followed by, “I’m bringing you back. You’re not ready. I’ll walk you through the return procedure, but just this once. When you get back you’ll need to do more than pretend to study the manuals.”

Maybe it shouldn’t have been easy, peeling the clothes off of my own corpse and leaving just enough of my things to identify her as me, but anything is possible once you convince yourself it’s necessary. I’m not sorry, and I’ve never been ashamed.

After I changed into her clothes, Dell pulled me over and I was born into a brand-new world. That was six years ago. Six years since I’ve heard anyone say my real name. Some days, I can’t even remember it.

* * *

ON SATURDAY I work in the garden with Esther, because it offends me less than accompanying my mother and stepfather while they preach. The ground in Ashtown grows like it’s half salt—leftover corruption from the same factories that used to pump soot into the air, giving the town its name—so the “garden” is an abandoned airplane hangar on the edge of my parents’ land. There are rows of pots filled with imported soil, and the insulation is better than most houses in this area. The congregation helps with the tending and my stepfather divides the harvest evenly among his parishioners.

    Ruralites aren’t allowed to gossip, but they are allowed to stare, and those working with us can’t help but look at the once-holy daughter of their leader, who went into the city and turned sinner overnight. I stay close to Esther, hiding in the shadow of her belonging. The work clothes I’m wearing stay in the back of my closet until visits like this, so even though it’s been years since I bought them they still have that too-new look. Like I am an imposter. And I am. Back in the Wiles, I pass for someone who has known stability and money her whole life. Here, I pass for someone who remembers how to pray and scrape, who would never let the same kind of peppers they’ve spent weeks nurturing mold forgotten in the back of her fridge. I am always pretending, always wearing costumes but never just clothes.

Esther and I water and check the plants for salt-rot, a parasite carried in on the bodies of flies. It’s the only thing that lives in the sludge far to the south that used to be a lake. The environment got too toxic for anything else, but salt-rot survived, jumping from reeds to ground plants to trees, leaving petrified white behind as it leached the nutrients out of its hosts.

On Earth 312 the factories we chased out here are still pumping, and there are no human inhabitants beyond workers who don’t leave the airtight facility. In that world, salt-rot continued to evolve after the trees and the flies were dead. In that world it can infect the skin of a human and spread slowly but inevitably until a few years pass and all that’s left is a glistening white corpse. They used to call it salt-rot too, but now they call it Lot’s Wife and treat it like it’s a curse instead of just a virus. I have the tiniest leaf of it in one of my sealed bags in the collection on my wall, and even though Eldridge’s specimen bags are guaranteed to contain it, having Lot’s Wife in my home is the closest I get to feeling true danger anymore.

    I think about that danger as I watch my gloveless stepsister frown at a white leaf before tearing it off and tossing it into the incinerator. On 312, this whole building would be burned, and Esther would be exiled into the wastelands for daring contact with it.

We’re supposed to stop to eat, then finish up, but there are two kids watering the other side and Esther walks our lunch over to them. Where Esther’s clothes are faded thin but still clean and intact, these children’s are crusted and ripped. They’ve got more in common with me than her, but they’ve been avoiding my gaze all day.

“We’ll just push through and finish up,” she says when she comes back from speaking with them. “It’s an easy day anyway, and we’ll have an early dinner.”