I’ve been in Wiley City for six years as a resident. In four more, I’ll be pronounced citizen. For now, I’m nowhere. I live in Wiley but I’m legally still Ashtown’s, and neither has a claim on me that counts. It’s a space between worlds, no different from the star-lined darkness I stand in when I traverse. The darkness is worth it, because I know what waits on the other side.
* * *
REASONS I HAVE DIED:
The emperor of the wasteland wanted to make an example of my mother, and started with me.
One of my mother’s boyfriends wanted to cover up what he did to me.
I was born addicted and my lungs didn’t develop.
I was born addicted and my brain didn’t develop.
I was left alone, and a stranger came along.
The runners came for a neighbor, and I was in the way.
The runners came for my mother, and I was in the way.
The runners came for my mother’s boyfriend, and I was in the way.
The runners came for no one, serving nothing at all but chaos and fear, and I was what they found.
Sometimes, I was just forgotten in the shed where she kept me while she worked or spun out, and in the length of her high and the heat of the sun I fell asleep alone and hungry and forever.
REASONS I HAVE LIVED:
I don’t know, but there are eight.
CHAPTER TWO
I’ve been driving in the desert for an hour when the truck pulls up too close behind me. I’ve prepared to be stopped, but deep down I’m still surprised. Getting shaken down by border patrol is only for outsiders, and the man walking up to my car with a greedy silver smile is proof I’ve made it. His teeth tell me he’s one of Nik Nik’s lieutenants, the kind of guy I would have been happy to land when I was from here. Like all runners, he smells like dirt and sun. He’s tattooed solid up to his jawline, where the ink stops abruptly. The display of vanity strikes me. These days I look for status by reading clothes, haircuts, and high-dollar wrist cuffs, but this too-pretty runner reminds me that I grew up wanting to lick silver teeth.
“Lovely weather for a day trip,” he says, like it isn’t the same ninety degrees with a hot-wind kicker it always is out here.
“Not taking a day trip.”
I don’t know when my posture changed, when my voice dropped, but when I look at him square I want him to recognize me as one of his own almost as much as I don’t. I wish I knew him, knew the name his mother called him so I could throw it in his face. Nik Nik’s runners all go by mister—Mr. Bones, Mr. Shine—but I’d bet he’s an Angelo.
“Toll for lookie-loos from the Wiles is three hundred.”
“You mean two-fifty.”
“Times are tough.”
“I was just here.”
“Three hundred.”
I reach into my dashboard and take out three hundred, just like last time, though I’m going to try haggling every visit until it works.
He takes the cash with a nobleman’s slight bow. “Enjoy your stay in Big Ash.”
When he starts to walk away, I clear my throat.
“My receipt.”
“Mr. Cheeks,” he says. “Tell the next one you’re paid up.”
* * *
MY MOTHER LIVES in a farmhouse in the Rurals where a real farm never was. The Rurals are a part of Ashtown that thinks itself a subdivision, even though the only thing separating it from the concrete stacked pods that make up the rest of the city is a wooden fence and the agreement of people on both sides of that fence. The people in the Rurals are all about charity and piety and religion. The people in downtown Ash are all about anything else.
There aren’t many cars out here—even runners usually keep their vehicles on the other side of the fence—and sometimes when I drive out kids run beside me for as long as they can, reaching out to touch the paint. Not today though. Today they’re all indoors, sequestered in thankful prayer as they prepare for the dedication ceremony.
My mother’s house is in deep, where the gray-white sand begins to turn a natural tan at the edges. The front of the house has been whitewashed for the day, the plaster cast of Mary wiped clean. It’s Jesus’s mother, Mary, not the foot-washing ex-prostitute Mary, which has always struck me as something of a missed opportunity given my mother’s background. Mary’s head is inclined toward a flute-playing Krishna, who smiles benevolently in the empty way everyone in the Rurals smiles at strangers. And at me. My stepfather generally preaches more from Islam than Hindu, but there isn’t really a statue for that.
My mother lets me in, her mouth a line as even and unbending as her principles. Her black hair, 4C hair that I know is twice as wild as my own, is pulled back in a bun so tight it looks straight. Her patterned dress is clean, but washed thin. It bears no scars from mending, so it must be one of her best. I could buy her new dresses. I could keep her in the kind of flash she used to demand from her men before she walked away from the life with a preacher from the dirt. But she won’t take anything from me these days, not even a hug.
Her eyes are down. Her eyes are always down, this mostly silent woman who’ll wear no skirt higher than her knee and no lip stain darker than a blush. My mother was a woman who had hair feathered whatever color suited her mood and knew how to look men in the eye until they gave her what she wanted.
“You’re early,” she says. “That’s nice.”
“I took today off,” I say, but she’s already turning to lead me inside.
I’ve seen her a hundred ways—with a shaved head, with hair to her back, with rows of piercings for eyebrows, blind in one eye, pockmarked with no teeth, and even as a still-beautiful matron of the House, who could charge as much as the young because she never used and always took care of herself—but this version is my least favorite. She spends her time passing out pamphlets downtown, shaming the workers at the House who took care of me when she didn’t, who saved my life enough times to get this version of me to adulthood.
My family’s walls are covered with more of the same holiness that’s found outside. At least when we were poor she was original, painting murals on the concrete with the same paste she used to dye her hair. Now her walls are grids, family pictures—the old-school static holograms that flicker on and off with age—broken up with religious icons.
The more interesting things on the wall—dried animal bones and drawings of creatures with skulls for faces—are from Esther’s faiths. My stepfather might love the Bible and the Quran, but my sister gives almost as many sermons as he does these days and she favors less organized religions, some that don’t even have a unifying text.