The rumor is Nik Nik learned to kill by watching his father, which is why the method is the same, but that the first kill he saw was his beloved older brother Adranik, which is why the location is always kind. Every time I doubt that Nik Nik can truly feel anything at all I remember the way his eyes glazed whenever his brother was mentioned. If nothing else, I know he loved the brother his father killed. Which means he knows what it feels like when a powerful man takes the person you care about most in the world away…and still he does it.
The file is incomplete, so I don’t know where she was found. But the tox screen and wound description in the notes are familiar enough. There’s no mention of it, but I’m sure the small cut is jagged and full of saliva. A perfect match to an obsidian fang.
The first time he used those teeth on me was early in our relationship, our first fight. He’d cut my neck from behind, more a slice with his tooth than a bite. It was a small cut, not even into the artery, but I didn’t know that and I’d heard enough stories to believe I was going to die. Especially once he put his fist in my mouth, my teeth stretched to aching against his second and third knuckle. No one my age has ever seen a real gun, but my mother told me my grandfather killed himself with one. In that moment I thought of him, teeth stretched around a metal barrel, and wondered if this death was in my blood.
I waited for the telling spray, the taste they say is bitter and signals that you’ll never stop bleeding and you’ll never feel again. He left his hand there until my jaw cramped, until the waiting was worse than the ending and I thought about probing the ring for a trigger with my tongue myself, just to have control. Then he pulled his hand away.
“Learn your lesson,” he said before walking away.
I didn’t. And judging by her cause of death, Earth 175 me hadn’t either. Nelline. Her name was Nelline.
Good for you, Nelline.
I hope she died trying to take a piece of something that wasn’t hers. I hope she died trying, because my mother always said that was how I was going to go, so her mother probably did too. Was her mother still alive? I poke at Nelline’s file, hoping for even a next-of-kin listing, but the information is skeletal even for the basic files I usually download. There’s an additional packet of information, but it’s earmarked “Medical,” which means it’s been sent to Dell to compare with my own data. Whether the watchers are sent our dops’ medical files for our protection—using the data to become aware of possible health concerns early—or to track the side effects of traversing against a control, none of us are sure. But I do know the files are locked down as confidential, and even logging in as Jean won’t let me access them. I need to get them from Dell, and to do that, I’d have to ask her for them, and to do that, I’d have to be the kind of person for whom asking for things isn’t exactly the same as drinking glass shards. So…I’m probably not going to get that file.
To palate cleanse from 175, I pull up 255 me. When I see her fuzzy image I exhale, like always. Earth 255 is my favorite. In the three-dimensional image that pops up, she smiles over her shoulder. It’s not posed, just some candid that appeared in their media and so was picked up by our surveillance. She lives in Wiley City, but she wears her hair long and dark and fiercely curly, like she has nothing to lose by looking like an outsider. She’s struck the perfect balance of being enough of them to belong, and enough of Ash to be seen as a novelty, a rarity. Valuable.
A Wiley City couple found her when she was four, barefoot and wandering by the main road into the city. So they took her. If my mother had any rights, it would have been a kidnapping, but she was just an independent worker struggling with addiction. If she’d still been attached to the House, the proprietor would have used their power to fight for the child to stay. But you can’t work through the House if you use like you need it, so her mother had no support when the couple the papers called saviors abducted her daughter and called it adoption. Her name is Caralee, too, and her parents let her keep it. They even supported her as she used a portion of her inheritance for outreach to other children in Ashtown.
She got married last month on a balcony on the hundredth floor to a man who is a little rich and a lot in love with her. At least, that’s how it looked in the photos the Wiley City press ran. I want to print out her picture and keep it on a wall, like a relative I couldn’t be more proud of, but as much as I like knowing she exists, it makes me angry.
I was a climber. When my mother kicked me out as a kid, I would climb onto the roof of our house. 255 was probably just a shit climber, so she walked all the way to the road. That’s how fickle fate is. One day you wander instead of climbing, and you end up rich and happy. One day you don’t, and you’re me. Or you’re drained outside like 175. Or you’re left bloodied and naked, facedown in the dirt on a world that isn’t yours, like the girl whose bed I sleep in.
Fate breaks rough, most of the time.
* * *
MY PULL TODAY is on Earth 238. It’s another rush job, this one being funded by seismologists wanting to know if a recent earthquake was more or less severe on an Earth that hadn’t drilled in the area. By this time next month I will hopefully see the number 238 and know the population and time variances from our Earth down to a single death or tenth of a second. But right now I can only remember the practical: that the payload is in a heavy-surveillance country, so I’ll need darkness and an obscurer for the cameras, but I died here as a young child, which means I can get out of using a veil if Dell’s feeling generous.
I’m not allowed to access the building higher than my level. I have to wait for Dell to send the elevator down. When it doesn’t come, I press a button on my cuff to buzz her.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” I say into the speaker.
There’s a long moment of silence, and then “I’m not a princess” comes over the connection.
“Could have fooled me,” I say, but she’s already closed the link and sent the elevator.
Dell’s prep room is on the eightieth floor, just to the side of the traversing room. I take a second to appreciate the all-glass view. It’s an artery floor. Artery floors happen every twenty stories from 40 on, and are as tall as cathedrals. There are walkways on every floor, each lined with trees and gardens lit from the SimuSun panels on the paths above it, but artery floors are so tall real sunlight slips in like a peeking child. Real sunlight as filtered through Wiley City’s domed artificial atmosphere, but still.
Dell doesn’t know that I know, but she lives on this floor. It’s high up for someone with a real job, the same floor Eldridge CEO Adam Bosch lives on, but Dell is an heir. Every day after work she walks out of the office exit on 80, and follows the curves around buildings for six blocks, and then she’s home.
I don’t live on an artery. Or even close to one. I exit on 40, then take one of the congested escalators down ten stories. I never see the sun, but it’s still a good neighborhood. There aren’t many bad ones in Wiley City. It was built and is still run by people who care…for other Wileyites, anyway. They save all their apathy for the world right outside their walls—for the Rurals, the wasteland, and people like me.