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But Bosch’s device could resonate only with worlds very similar to our own, so most of the scientists—with their safe, sheltered upbringings in a city that had eliminated childhood mortality and vaccinated most viral illness into extinction—had living doppelgängers on the other worlds. They needed trash people. Poor black and brown people. People somehow on the “wrong side” of the wall, even though they were the ones who built it.
But Dell comes from a good family, one with money a long way back. In some worlds her parents never emigrated from Japan. In some she joined the private sector instead of this government-research-institute hybrid. But she survived in over 98 percent of other worlds, and in most of those she thrived.
Starla Saeed is one of the last traversers remaining from before I started. She was born in what they call a civil war but was really just a ruler systematically killing his subjects. When she was twelve she took a journey across the sea that drowned more people than it delivered.
Again, I can interpret her fear over a wasted asset however I want, and I choose to pretend it’s affection. The long look she takes at my arms and chest makes me shiver, and for a second I wonder if I am just pretending. But then she sees my reaction and backs away, nearly running into Jean.
I have seen two worlds now and the space between. We are a wonder—
REASONS I HAVE DIED: The emperor of the wasteland wanted to make an example of my mother, and started with me.
“I am not Caramenta,” I say. “Caramenta is dead.”
I just begin the long drive back to the apartment, the city, and everything else I stole. Because it doesn’t matter who it used to belong to. It’s mine now.
“Rather be a drone. They get to fuck the queen.”
Dell’s fingers graze my neck and I shudder with what she thinks is pain. She doesn’t know the serum doesn’t just open my cells, it hones my senses until all I can think about is how loud the world is and how good she smells.
Or maybe it’s just easier to think something is impossible than to try.
“Nothing’s free,” and let her make of that what she would. And she did. And the sex was good, though Dell’s apartment looked nothing like I had pictured.
Sometimes Dell walks past me. Mostly, she doesn’t.
I start climbing the ladder into the hatch before she can say anything else, because if I stare at her much longer, this woman who wants me but is too afraid of where I’m from to do anything about it, I might finally find a way to hate her. And I don’t want to. Not really. Not yet.
He opened his mouth, blood still dripping from his jaw, and declared peace.
If I figured anything out in these last six years, it is this: human beings are unknowable. You can never know a single person fully, not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if your cleverness would outlive your desperation.
In a few seconds, when the door is sealed and the vibrations hit just wrong enough for me to know it’s a killing frequency, I will wish she had. I will wish her eyes, and not her downturned face, were the last thing I’d ever see.
“Goodbye, Yerjanik.” Saying it eases an old ache in my chest, like I’d always meant to do this, to look him in the eye and tell him I was leaving. “Goodbye…” He stops; his eyebrows furrow, then relax. “Caralee.”
I close my eyes. “Go if you want. Can’t stop me from dreaming about you, though.” “Don’t be cruel.”
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.”
“Warlord, emperor, CEO…” Jean shrugs. “No difference. You can’t save the people he killed. You can only damn yourself. Unless you think some trial, some murder sentence, will please the dead?”
“You approached me. I tried to slow things down, but in the end spending a night with you was a gift and I took it. We drank and we talked and you treated me like an equal because, in worlds where you don’t know where I came from, you actually let yourself be attracted to me. I was going to leave before things went too far, but you were charming and open and lonely and you wanted me. I know it wasn’t real. But you wanted me before I said a word. I’ll say I’m sorry it happened if you want me to, but I won’t mean it.”
As I leave Exlee reminds me to say Jean’s name each morning and each night until the burial, because our dead are only weights on our backs when we won’t let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead.
“Only every single time something happens to you,” she says, putting on her coat. “These last few weeks, I’ve felt you truly slipping away from me for the first time. I handled it poorly. I’m sorry.”
“For the same reason I have never taken a promotion or a vacation, Cara. I’m always on the fortieth floor because that is where you are. I will always want to be wherever you are.”
In her apartment I learn that our height difference means I’m perfect for her on my knees, and that her being strong enough to toss me around brings all the thrill of Nik Nik with none of the cloying fear. Most important, I learn that you can love someone so much and so thoroughly it chases away even thoughts of death.
It is only one world in infinite universes where this impossible happiness exists, but that is what makes it so valuable.
