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.”
She doesn’t make excuses, just like she didn’t ask before giving my lunch away. When Dan steps down it will be Esther, not Michael, to replace him, and at times like this it’s obvious why.
We get home late for dinner, but Michael comes home even later. He plops down loud with his eyes raised. I wonder how long it took him to make noise again, to learn how to lift his eyes. In Caramenta’s journals he’s a pious boy, as reluctant to be noticed as the rest of his people.
His fingertips are clay red, like all the edgiest Ruralite teens. They dig their fingers into blood-colored rivets in the ground and leave them for as long as they can. The brownish stain on the nails is the closest thing to the black nail polish of downtowners they can get away with.
I’m admiring the ingenuity of his rebellion when he turns it on me.
“Is it true you kill people?”
“Michael!”
He flinches, but doesn’t look at my mother. “Jeremiah says traversers actually go to other places to kill people. They laserblast their heads right off.”
“You know we don’t discuss that…business in this house,” Daniel says.
That “business” is my job. Or my company, I’m not exactly sure which, but I know it’s living, breathing, blasphemy to them. People who don’t believe in taking up more space, air, or attention than strictly necessary are unsurprisingly opposed to claiming whole new worlds. They see it as new colonialism, and they’re not wrong.
I turn to Michael.
“That’s a ridiculous urban legend. Laserblasters don’t exist, and even one of Wiley City’s stunners would probably get fried if I tried to bring it over.” I flex my fingers at him. “I have to use my bare hands.”