FOUR

Alala doesn’t give me a name, she gives me an address. A guard that she says is perfect for this—same coloring as me, in case there’s anybody glancing at screens and faces to see if they match. He lives out in the suburbs. Because the city is a wheel, I know how to find him—the outside edge of the city where I live, the poorest part, with the houses spooling inwards and upward. There are very few places that aren’t new, that aren’t designed to house everybody—those who can afford it, at least—in the most comfortable way possible. The richest can afford to keep the beautiful, centuries-old mansions. Sometimes you spot one nestled between tower blocks: old stone instead of glistening plasticrete. People won’t move themselves somewhere different if they can stay where they are, where their history is. History is where people feel safest.

It’s not that different from being on Australia. When I imagined leaving the ship, I imagined a total change, a life that I wouldn’t recognize. That was when everything was still a promise, a hope, a dream—when knowing that the new life, the better life we were looking for might come to pass. And then we found it—the new world, same as the old world in so many ways. There are walls around me that I cannot climb, towers hundreds of stories high that overwhelm me.

A. Australia was hellish: dirty and terrifying, threatening and broken. It’s cleaner here, and there are police making the streets safe. Food is abundant, and I don’t mind eating the replicated stuff—even as the people who grew up here moan about the lack of real beef, of real chicken. There are people who want to help me. There’s a way forward and I can see it.

It doesn’t mean I’m not scared.

I find the address Alala gave me. I’ve never been to this part of the city before. I never had a reason to. It’s an estate, an entire complex, a kind of neighborhood: buildings grouped around each other all forming one large area. The towers here are older, a little less impressive. No built-in security here aside from the cameras, and very little sign of any private guards. As you get deeper into it, you can see that it’s not as comfortable as other parts of the city: the paint is chipping, the grass overgrown or barely growing at all. These buildings are cheaper to live in because they’re older and shabbier, because they’re less desirable. The government needed to build these places when they started working on making the cities hospitable. They didn’t care if they were nice, just that they did the job.

Ziegler has explained it as being an act of government: Everybody had the right to a roof, was the rule. Only after enough people had died was it actually practical to offer everyone left a place to live. Not everybody made it into the cities, though. Those who couldn’t contribute—or didn’t want to—were left outside the Wall. Outcasts. Ziegler says he spoke to some of them once for a story. There’s no hope, no getting into the city. Because when you’re that poor, that lost, there’s simply no way to come back from it. Nobody’s going to give you a job because you’re unskilled and out of touch with the world as it is. You’re opened up to disease, because so many things thrive in the heat; it’s likely you’re not healthy because the sun will have whittled you away. Being out there? It’s a death sentence.

This man I’m coming to find—he must be grateful to live here, as shabby as it is.

I sit at the back of the bus, keeping my head down, my face hidden. The clothes Ziegler gave me have a hood that I can pull down over my face so I can act as though I’m sleeping. It reminds me of my outfit from the last days of Australia, the one that I made myself. I wonder, as I stare at my hands, at the corner of the window that I can see without exposing my face, if I’ll ever be in a situation in which I don’t need to hide. Not yet, that’s for sure. At any stage, any of the cameras—the ones in the bus itself, the ones on the streets, the ones in eye augments—could recognize me.

As far as the people here are concerned, I’m a criminal, just like everybody else who landed from my ship. They’ll want to pack me off, take me away, lock me up.

The towers we pass in this part of the city are so much more dilapidated than Ziegler’s. His is far nicer, far cleaner. There’s an attempt at making it feel as though it’s a part of the city’s heart: clean and white with reflective windows and balconies with flowers and plants on them. In this part of the city, the people don’t have those luxuries. There are work terminals on street corners, where the queues to get picked for construction jobs or landscaping or wall maintenance happen. There are people here that I vaguely recognize from the docks lining up with the rest in their best clothes so that the employers might not realize that they live where they live and give them some paid work. Save enough credit, you’ll drag yourself out. Spend too much, you’ll plunge back down. That, Ziegler says, is the real wheel of the city.

My target—that’s the word that Alala used to describe him, refusing to use his name—isn’t paid enough to be of any real importance. He’s just a worker, just a guy who does whatever in the Archives, which is good. His home won’t have security measures. I asked her how she picked him and she said that he was perfect—not even much taller than I am. She knew him because he did some work for her once. (“Terrible liar,” she told me. “Nothing but false words. I don’t like this. He owes me money, so.” That’s her reasoning—this is how his debt is going to be repaid.)

I followed him home yesterday and he didn’t see me. He didn’t notice as I crept behind him, as I walked past his bus stop where he waited for a bus that was five minutes away, as I ran so that I could get onto the same bus at the next stop down the road, or as I sat right behind him. When we got off, I stayed twenty steps behind—far enough away to avoid suspicion. I kept my head down. When we reached his apartment, I watched him climb up the stairs on the outside of his block—these buildings too old, the elevators seemingly broken, nobody caring to maintain or fix up this part of the city, tired and creaking concrete covered in so many coats of now-peeling paint. The climb left him exhausted. I watched the lights flicker on as he passed them, until the light outside one front door went bright and he went inside. I watched his windows to check that he lives alone and I saw only one shadow moving around inside— making food, going between the two rooms that he calls his own. I watched him shut the blinds (the building is too old for dimmable glass, even) and turn the lights off when he went to sleep.

I waited a few more hours to make sure he didn’t have a partner who worked night shifts or anything like that. I needed to make sure.

It gives me a strange feeling to be here in this decrepit old building. It feels like I’ve been here many, many times before.

The rows of balconies going upward, the gangways between them, the paths that wind their way through, the soft noise in the background—a buzz of generators, of power lines—the connections that run through everything here. And in the middle of this particular block—four towers arranged so that they’re all just about facing one another—there’s an area of green at the base between the buildings, it might have once been parkland. I wonder if they ever grew anything here, if there were ever plants and flowers and crops, pear trees and a stream of some sort, if they ever worked that land.

I struggle not to think of the people who live here as living in berths. I imagine living here and feel afraid of the Pit. The image of it keeps coming back to me like a shadow, the darkness at the bottom so powerful.

There are no guards here, no sentry points or cameras; it’s not like in Ziegler’s building. Here you have a broken door up to an exposed stairwell and then you climb. It goes up and up, right to the top. Everything is dark, the lights only coming on as you pass them. Makes it harder to be sneaky—but then, nobody seems to notice or care. They watch out for themselves.

Be selfish. I hear my mother’s voice in my head for just a moment and I remind myself that this is what I’m doing, that all of this is for my benefit. Fine, I’m trying to find Mae. I don’t know what’s happened to her, where she’s been taken. I imagine trials, examinations, probing. I think of the stories about the surgery floor on Australia, the stuff the doctors did to people.

In the museum at the Smithsonian there are bodies, skeletons. Humans from back before they were even humans, before they were able to walk around and talk as we do, wear suits and work and live. In my worst dreams, I worry that this is what’s in store for Mae. Survivor of the Australia. See how she’s developed. That she’ll be killed, stripped to bone, put in a museum. We’re shorter than the people here, I think. On average, they seem bigger, taller than we were on the ship—apart from the Bells, that is. The people here are healthier, their breathing better. Mae will be an anomaly to them.

As I climb the stairs, the lights flicker. I can hear them as they come on, a soft ticking. Outside the target’s door, I look for a way in. Just a finger-pad attached to an elaborate series of locks, four of them, each covering a quarter of the door. It’s very secure.

I grab the door handle and try it gently, but it doesn’t budge. The door is metal of some sort—dented in places, the paint chipped off where somebody (years ago, going by the rust in the cracks) once tried to break through. Force isn’t going to work, I can tell that. I can’t even hack the lock. I’d need his finger for that.

It’s an hour before I see the bus pull up on the street outside the complex. He’s the only person who gets off. I watch him walk up the path through the bit of wasteland in the middle of the buildings. He pulls off his re-breather while he walks and coughs—a small clearing of the throat really, but the noise echoes around the towers, bounces off them, repeating and repeating.

I stay crouched on the landing outside his apartment. I hold my breath. Stay still. Wait.

A woman leaves a tower in the adjacent block and I track her. She pays no attention to my target. She has a child with her, a little girl. She’s quiet, head bowed, hand holding her mother’s. Down in the wasteland is the remnants of what I’ve learned is probably a playground: some metal frames, a round wooden thing with a shattered top that turns a little when you touch it. I imagine that, once upon a time, there was more noise in this part of the city. Maybe it sounded happier then. I stop looking at her and return to my target as they pass one another: no eye contact, both of them with their heads down.

My target gets to the stairs in his building and I lose track of him behind the concrete walls. I lean over the ledge and watch the lights flick on as he passes them, climbing up floor by floor, getting closer. I can’t have him being wary. I look for somewhere to hide only now—I’ve left it so late, I’m slacking—and there’s nowhere, nothing. The flickering lights will give me away. I look over the edge and glimpse him in the windows that line the edges of the stairwell. Like the little girl, his head is down, staring at his feet. Okay.

There’s a way to do this.

I grab the edge of the handrail and climb over. Then I let myself drop so I’m just holding on, hanging seventeen stories above the rusted playground below. Everything pulls in my arms as I hang. He won’t see me here, maybe only the tips of my fingers as I cling to the railing. I used to do this all the time on Australia. Maybe I’m not as strong as I once was. I look down as I feel my fingers twitch, as I feel sweat on them, as I feel my grip slipping.

Don’t die.

“I won’t,” I whisper under my breath. I can hear his footsteps now, the echoes of them on the floor, bouncing off the walls, his breathing behind them—one breath for almost every footstep—then the soft rip of him pulling his gloves off to expose his fingers. Then there’s the buzz of him pressing his thumb to the pad and the whirring of locks. A small, quiet voice—the same voice that comes from Ziegler’s car when you talk to it.

“Welcome home, Dave.”

“Okay, okay,” he says. “Okay.” He sounds young. His voice has that tone to it, that lilt that says he isn’t happy, not truly. He doesn’t sound like he’s accustomed to his life being what it is. I hear the door creak open.

Okay.

I pull myself up and over the railing in one smooth motion—and my arms sting because I haven’t done that move in a while—but I land on my feet and push forward, arms extended, shoulder primed; and I barge into him, slamming my weight into his back, pushing him into his apartment, driving him into the darkness. We hit something—a chair that crumbles under our weight. The sound of snapping. The guard tumbles, kicks out with his boots. One smacks into my thigh, but that’s nothing. I’ve had worse.

The lights in the apartment flick on, picking up on our movements; he looks at me—terrified, staring right at me. He’s on the floor on his back, and I scramble to get control of him. He’s got a foot and a half on me and he’s probably twice my weight, but again, that’s nothing I need to worry about. He’s slow. I jam my forearm into his neck, his throat. I push just hard enough that he gags. But he can breathe, he absolutely can. There’s just a moment when he thinks that he can’t. It’s more the threat of what I could do than what I am doing. I could push down much, much harder than this. These bits of the body snap easily. I could crush his throat: That’ll stop him and he knows it.

“I need your help,” I say. “That’s all this is. You help me and I can help you.” His eyes are wide and red with welling tears because he thinks that this is it, that I’m going to kill him right here, right now. I feel sorry for him and I don’t know if I should. I don’t know anything about him. He could be a good person, could be a bad one. I don’t know. He’s the first person I’ve ever attacked where I didn’t know that, where I couldn’t somehow justify it. “Do you understand me?” He nods, the flesh of his throat softening around my arm. “Because I could kill you,” I say. This is when I reach down and pull out the knife that I got from Alala when I first arrived. I needed one and she had one to trade.

I ran packages to earn this knife, going to parts of the docks with drugs she was giving to people, packages I hand delivered because Alala gave me food and told me how this place worked; this knife that’s been blunted from rubbing against the sheath that I made for it; this knife that’s been used to cut wires, make food, help me build the tents and shacks I’ve been calling home, however temporary they might be. But I flash it up, hold it right in front of his gaze. I’ve polished it as much as I can so he’ll be able to see himself in it—his eyes reflected along the length of the blade, their redness, the tears on his cheeks, the fear singing out from them. “I’m going to stand up now,” I say. And I do, pulling my arm away slowly. My target breathes heavily, heaving in air as if I’d stopped him from breathing—I hadn’t, I know how to strangle someone—and he rolls over onto his front. He pushes himself up to a crawl, like some sort of animal. I sit on a chair and I feel my own ribs ache a little, my shoulder sore from plowing into him.

“What do you want?” he asks. His voice is staggered, the words with pauses between them, broken down. He doesn’t look directly at me.

“You owe somebody.” His body tenses. Maybe he owes a lot of people. “Alala. You know her. She told me where to find you.”

He nods, his head going up and down, lolling like he’s a doll. I wait for him to push himself to standing. He uses the wall and the sideboard to pull himself up. He isn’t looking at me, which is a bad sign. Not looking means he’s thinking.

He’s going to try something, I know that much. But what exactly I can’t—

He runs. The front door is still open and he charges out, his mass carrying him with a lurch of speed. I’m up only a second after he is and I watch him almost bounce off the edge of the gantry, hurl himself toward the stairwell. He shouts, his voice surprisingly reedy given how big he is, coming back to me on the wind.

“Please! Let me go, I’ll do what she wants!” he yells, his words echoing, beating around the walls, the towers. I don’t know what he did to Alala. I don’t care right now. He’s got something I need and running just means it’s going to be harder to get him on my side. I’m faster than he is, though. “Tell her I’ll make it right!” he shouts.

“Wait,” I say, because I don’t know how else to stop him without charging him down. He doesn’t give me a choice. He gallops down the stairs, thudding, jumping three or four at a time, trying to take them as fast as possible, slowing at the corners. So I chase him. The corners are where I really gain on him because I swing around them, almost jumping to save time, not missing a step as I hit the ground and bear down on him. At every corner there’s a window looking out, a hole in the concrete waist-high. I wonder what the people down in the city can see of me and him; a flash of us as we tear past.

Two flights down, at one of those corners, he turns his head, cranes his neck to see where I am. I’m right behind him. He spends too long looking for me.

“I didn’t mean—” he starts to say, but he smacks into the wall at the edge of the stairwell, the same stumpy wall and handrail you find at every other edge in the building, and he topples, barely even stopping. He doesn’t even seem to reach for the rail or for me. I’m there, hand out, trying to save him. I don’t know what his weight will do to my arm—wrench it out of the socket, maybe pull it completely off for all I know—but I’m too slow. Or, just as likely, he’s too fast. I watch him fall.

There’s nothing soft down there to cushion his fall. Not even the Pit.

Gray stone sprouting patches of grass.

His head tilted downward.

The thud as he hits.

On Australia, you never heard what happened at the end of the fall. Now I know that the sound is wet; I wonder if it’s been raining or if that’s just the ground. I look. His eyes are open and they’re staring up at me. I shut my own eyes—just for a second—to the sound of people screaming. The Lows are attacking them, killing them, hurting them; and I’m trying to help but really what am I doing but pushing everything forward, driving them into danger? And then Mae is there with her dolls, dropping them and watching them fall—one, two—way down into the darkness of the Pit.

I get out. Away from there. I don’t risk taking the bus because maybe I’ll be spotted. I’ve assumed the police are looking for me all this time. I don’t want my face on some screen and somebody nosing around to recognize me. So I walk quickly, head down, to the docks, through routes with no cameras, or on the other side of the road from them. I walk against the traffic so I can’t be seen on the cameras embedded in cars, hood pulled tight, tied off. I’ve got a re-breather on that I took from the target after I had dragged him back to his apartment—his body, his weight, his heft. Stair by stair I heaved him up, his body weighing more than I imagined it could. I smashed the lights in the stairs as I went, praying that nobody would notice me.

Nobody came. It took me so long, but eventually I got him there; to his floor, to his front door, to his sofa.

Dave, I remind myself. He had a name.

The docks feel so much colder than the rest of the city tonight. They always do—it’s been explained to me that what’s pumped out of the Wall comes from some chemical reaction, and the docks are where it’s at its coldest—but I really feel it tonight. My lungs ache from running through the city and my skin prickles when the warmth of my blood pumping meets the chill of the air. I feel the cold in my knees, which ache; my ribs jut out as I run my hands over them, as I check for bruises and breaks. I don’t think I’ve been eating as well as I could. I’m thinner here than I ever was on Australia even though there’s more food here, more variety, but so much of it, while delicious, is worse for you. I’ve been sick a few times—more than my share. Ziegler says that it is because of the germs I never got used to, the bacteria. He bought me medicine and when that didn’t always work, Alala got me inoculations. You need to be on government lists for them, but of course she has her ways.

I call her name as I approach her home. Her door is closed, which means she’s not open for business. It looks polished, the number 39 fastened to the middle in solid bronze, and protected—a lock keeping a clasp shut to one side. That’s her rule: The door is open, you come in. It’s shut—don’t even think about it. I’m surprised it’s shut. Maybe she wasn’t expecting me to work so fast. Maybe she wasn’t expecting me to return to her at all.

“Alala!” I shout. I bang my hands on her door and on the corrugated metal walls around it. It’s dark inside. “Alala, wake up! I need you. Please, please, I need you.” In the distance, somebody else shouts at me to shut up, that they’re sleeping. “Please!” I shout, one last time.

I see light trickle out from the gaps at the sides of the door. I hear noise, shuffling inside. She swears loud enough that I can hear it. I’ve disturbed her and she won’t let me forget it. Whatever price I’m going to pay for her help, it’s probably just doubled.

“Tomorrow,” she replies. Her voice sounds different, her accent thicker. Usually everything she says sounds rolled and curled around her tongue before it leaves her mouth. Tonight it’s harsher, somehow more brittle, the words spat out against a throaty, guttural noise. “Come back tomorrow, junkie girl.” She thinks it’s somebody here for more drugs, somebody unable to control themselves.

“It’s Chan,” I say. I lower my voice, even though there are no cameras here, nothing that can hear us. “He’s dead. I killed him.” She doesn’t reply.

And as if that was the password, I hear the locks moving. She lets me in.

She makes tea. I’m grateful it’s not her poitín again, but right now I would probably drink it. It would numb me and I wouldn’t mind—that’s how people used alcohol on Australia. But instead she takes out tea leaves and a beautiful glass teapot, and she doesn’t say a word or ask anything of me while she brews them. She’s given me a fur to wrap around myself and I hold it close. I keep my satchel clutched in my lap, my knife in its sheath. She pours the tea into a cup then hands it to me, and I sip. It burns my lips. That’s okay.

“Tell me what happened,” she says, as she sits down opposite me. “Are you sure he is dead?” She shakes her head. “Start at beginning.”

“I went to his apartment. I wanted to persuade him to help, you know.”

“But you killed him.”

“I tried to talk to him—”

“Then he attacked you, so you fought back.”

“I attacked him. He ran away, said something. He was scared.”

“Of a little girl? Some guard he was, scared of such a little thing.” I don’t say that it was her he was scared of.

“He fought, and he ran. And that’s when—”

“How did you kill him?”

“He fell. A long way.”

“Well, now. That’s maybe not your fault. And you weren’t seen?” She stands up, pours herself another cup of tea. “We can find a new way to get you into the Archives. Plenty of guards.”

“It’s not that,” I say. I shut my eyes. I don’t want to look at her. They’re nothing alike, but she reminds me strongly of Agatha all of a sudden. But there’s one major difference: I’m sure that nothing I could say or do right now could shock Alala. She’s seen it all. “I couldn’t just leave him there, not when I was so close.”

All that I wanted was to get him to do the job for us. I was going to tell him what we needed—something really easy, really simple. Take something to the Archives computer, put it inside, and then one of Alala’s people (a hacker) would get the data we needed. Then the guard (Dave) would bring the device back out to us. The hacker would have Dave’s ID card, linked to his blood, his eyes, his pulse—his genetic makeup.

I put Dave’s ID card on the table first. Alala shakes her head at me because the card isn’t enough. “We need DNA, ocular patterns. This is no good,” she says.

So I place his hand on the table, the stump of it wrapped in cloth I took from his kitchen. I hold his right eye out on my palm and I say to her, “I think we can still find me a way in.”

Judging by the look in her eyes right now, I was wrong. I can definitely shock her.

She swears at me, wild-eyed and furious. Using a towel, she stuffs the hand into my bag for me. She opens the door and stands there, a sentinel, waiting for me to leave.

“Get out of here,” she says.

“I don’t—”

“No excuse. He’s a government employee—they’ll be keeping tabs on him. They will know. And now? He has no pulse! Get away from here.”

“They won’t find him,” I say. “They don’t know. I put him in his apartment, and I . . .” Did I shut the door? Did I close the windows?

Did I leave a trail?

“You stupid little girl,” Alala says, and she shakes her head. But I can see something whirring inside her, something happening. She shuts the door and traps me with her, then reaches out and takes the hand back out of the bag. She walks to her kitchen—nothing more than a sink and an old cooker that seems to rattle almost constantly—where she picks up a box from underneath the sink, thick and gray and lumpy, like she made it herself (no hinges, nothing delicate to it). When she opens it, I see several vials—some full of blood, but one empty. She takes this one, pulls the cap off with her teeth, and holds the hand above it.

“Hope you’re not squeamish,” she says, and she looks at me with something like disgust. Then she squeezes the hand—holds it in hers as if she’s shaking it, meeting it for the first time—and blood runs from the wrist stump then quickly slows to a thick drip. I hear the sound of it pit-patting into the vial. “All we’ll need,” she says after a minute or so, as the flow slows to a stop. She reseals the vial and puts it into the box. “They can’t track it if it’s in there,” she says. She wipes the ID card clean and puts it inside the box as well. “Now the eye,” she says. “And to get rid of this”—she holds up Dave’s hand—“we need ice.”

I follow her out of her house. Somebody is waiting: a girl, a junkie. She’s been nodding off, curled up outside Alala’s house like a cat. As soon as she hears us she’s up and on her feet, her mouth open, her eyes slits. “You’re awake,” she says.

“Not now,” Alala tells her, and I feel special for that second—what I’ve got going on is more important. Alala and I start almost running, darting around the other homes, her holding the hand to her chest while I carry the eye in my palm.

It’s so soft that I think about squeezing it just to see if it will pop.

Suddenly I feel sick.

I tell myself that it’s not my fault that he—Dave, the target—died. He shouldn’t have run. He was afraid—whatever he was into with Alala made him scared of her. He was unfit, out of shape. It would have happened sooner or later, I’m sure. If it wasn’t me it would have been someone, something else. But I have needs. I had to do something. What I’m doing is bigger than him. It’s more important.

It’s crucial, for Mae’s sake.

I tell myself that it’s not my fault, but I know one thing that I simply can’t shake: He wouldn’t have run down those stairs if it wasn’t for me. I might not have killed him, but I certainly helped him die.

Alala walks through the shanty town and people try to speak to her—she’s almost a celebrity around here, and she never comes this far into the docks, this close to the water and the Wall—but she brushes them off. Head down, eyes forward, she keeps moving ahead. She’s got one of her furs wrapped around her like a shawl and it keeps slipping. I rush to keep up with her stride and put my hand on the fur, to steady it, and she almost leaps away from me.

“Do not touch me,” she says, and then, still not looking at me, powers forward. “You have no idea what you are going to owe me, Chan.”

She’s always known my name, since the first day we met. But I think that this might be the first time she’s ever actually called me by it. I’m shaking, my arms wrapped around myself, but still, I’m shaking.

The wall juts from the icy water, the most impenetrable barrier. One hundred stories high, dotted with lights that mark out the hatches and vents for the climate generators. It’s nothing like Australia, not really, because you can only climb the Wall if you’re working on it, if you’ve got the equipment. The noise of the generators is overwhelming today. I’m sure it’s never been this loud before, and something inside me almost feels like it’s itching. Somewhere deep inside me I’m still stuck, still trapped. I swapped one prison for another.

No, I tell myself. This is action. This is moving forward, taking control. Saving Mae. Saving myself.

And yet here I am, letting somebody else talk me through the things that have terrified me, that I have done wrong—fixing my screw-ups, holding my hand as I try to pick up the pieces.

Alala stands at the edge of the concrete. The ice has holes in it. It doesn’t always—it depends on how hard the air conditioners in the Wall have been working—but today we’re lucky. “The cold should freeze this,” she says. She looks down and I can tell that we’re both thinking about the bodies that we know are down there, those trapped in the ice even though we can’t see them through the darkness. People drown out here and their bodies sink to the bottom of the bay and the cold keeps them from rotting. And there they stay, forever.

The lights from the red beacons that mark the Wall along its length are barely enough to see by as Alala hurls Dave’s hand out toward the Wall. I hear the splash as it hits the water, but I can’t watch it sink. “You used your own knife?” Alala asks. I can hear the shivers in her teeth, the slight chatter as she speaks. “Throw that as well.”

I take the knife out of the sheath and I hold it up. The blood is gone, as best I can make out. I remember—I wiped it on my clothes, on my side, under my arm. I wanted the blade clean. I tell her this and she sighs.

“Then you have to throw those also. The cold will kill the isotope they use to track.” She softens, puts her hands onto my biceps and squeezes. “Just get it done and then we will get you warm.” She reaches out with her fur, jabbing it toward me. I take it and I stand there. “I won’t look,” she tells me, and she turns away.

I wrap the fur around me and take my clothes off. My only good clothes. I kick them into the icy water. They don’t even make a sound as they sink.

“I will take care of the next part,” she says. We’re back in her home and I’m wrapped in more layers of fake fur. She’s given me stuff to wear—garish things that look like they were once hers until they became a little too threadbare; they’re Alala’s style, her taste (or lack of it) in even more faded glory. “I will talk to the hackers. Leave it with me. Come back tonight. It’s morning, too early to do anything now.” She’s right. There’s the cold, red light of morning in the sky. Somehow the entire night has been and gone.

“What do I do next?” I ask, but I know the answer.

“You have to go into the Archives and get the information you need.” She pats me on the knee. “This is a window, an opportunity.”

“I can’t,” I say to her. No question, I’ll get caught.

“Cannot is not a word where I come from. You know that? My language, closest thing is Will not. A choice.” She tuts.

“There must be another way,” I say. It sounds like begging. Balking.

“You will not back out, little girl. No, no. You owe me, now. This is a deal. I save you and you help me.” I haven’t seen this side of her. People talk (but of course they do) about how she’s a nasty piece of work, about how she’s been involved in things that no one would ever admit to. Rumors that sounded like lies until this moment; until I see this look in her eyes that says that she is not kidding around. That I have absolutely no choice.

“Okay,” I say. I’m shaking—my hands, my fingers, every bit of them. I try to stop it, putting one hand over the other. My skin feels even colder now than it did before, when I was naked at the water’s edge.

“Will anybody find him? They cannot find him before you finish this.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “He’s in his apartment.” I propped him up on his sofa. He’s sitting, facing the door, waiting for somebody to come in.

I wonder when he’ll start to smell. I wonder when his work will ask why he isn’t there.

I hadn’t thought about all this before. I hadn’t considered it properly.

“Chan,” Alala says. She clicks her fingers in front of my face. “They could find him. We need to fix, okay? And when we have, I will let you find out where your daughter is.” I told her that Mae was a little girl that I needed to find—not my daughter. That’s her assumption and I don’t correct her. More than that: she will let me find Mae. Her words, like she’s in control— which I suppose she is. “I tell you, because I help you? You will do favor for me. Very big favor.”

“I owe you,” I say, and she nods. I think about the target—Dave, he had a name—and how scared he was, what he was actually running from. Me—yes, but something else. Whatever it was that he owed to Alala—that made her pick him.

I haven’t tested her yet, but I’m fairly certain that Alala doesn’t forget a debt.

I’ve got some credit left over from what Ziegler has given me in the past. I hoard it, have been hoarding it for a time like this when I actually finally really need something. It’s on a chip registered to my fake name, and Ziegler puts money onto it when he thinks I might need it. I haven’t had the chip implanted because I can’t bring myself to. I don’t want to put it in my body. So I have that and some cash—actual money, which is a real rarity here. It’s legal currency but nobody ever uses it. It tends to get you glares if you try, that’s what a hassle it is. But it’s what I’ve got.

I’m cold, and that won’t change unless I do something about it. The wind and breeze from the Wall cuts right through this whole place, billowing out gusts that seem to find exactly where I’m coldest and make it colder. They say it’s sweltering outside the city walls, so hot it’ll cook food if you leave it in the sun for a while—cook you if you stay in it longer. I watch the usual crowd waiting for Alala to wake up, waiting to get their fixes. She went back to sleep leaving me outside her cabin, telling me to wait just as they do. I pace to try and get myself warm but it doesn’t work. Some days are colder than others. I had one set of clothes and I need more. Alala’s cast-offs don’t fit; they jangle when I move, rattle almost. I could buy clothes from the people who live here but there’s no point. Those things will only fall apart. I have a blanket wrapped around my waist, tied off as a skirt and Alala’s fur around my shoulders.

I feel ridiculous.

I leave Alala’s as the junkies start getting anxious, arm-scratching and signing at each other. So many of them are muted, because that’s what living here—being born here—can mean. They don’t get the choice to speak. And the drugs—they’re not from Alala, not originally. She’s not the reason they’re addicted. She just profits off their addictions. I’ve seen what happens when they go into withdrawal. My first week here: the pain in a man’s face as he scratched at himself, his skin rotting off his frame.

From where I’m standing, if you look straight up all you can see is the Wall. But in the distance, above it, there’s the sky, the color of it changing as night gives way to dawn, which gives way to the rest of the day. And the birds—the morning birds—starting to flock, casting shapes. Arrowheads, wings, clusters of galaxies that form, explode, and form again against the pale blue that’s starting to creep through the reddened black, advancing into its territory.

I stand up and walk away just as the mist settles in. It comes every morning, a haze of vapor, plumes of white cloud that spurt out from the generators in the Wall and settle in over the edges of the city. Eventually, as the sun creeps into view above us, the air warms up and the cloud dissipates. I pull the edge of the scarf that’s covering my shoulders over my mouth to protect me.

The buses are running but they won’t be full of commuters yet, which means there’s a better chance my face will be caught on camera. I don’t have my hood. I don’t even have a hat—so that means hair down, over my face. It needs a wash. It’s a bit of a joke for me to even have hair. I’ve never had it this long, not in my whole life. On Australia, we cut it regularly because there was such a high chance of lice. But it’s been growing since the moment we landed. I haven’t had to cut it. I can’t tell if I like it this way or if it’s just easier not to bother. And when I see the local people— their hair done so elaborately, dye jobs and highlights and all of these other augments and processes that I don’t understand—a part of me wants to feel like that could be me. That maybe doing it would help me fit in.

I take to the streets that don’t have cameras: store entrances, throughways, on-ramps that never go anywhere and just seem to join one avenue to another. As I walk—the pavement cracked and ignored, the roads pretty much empty—I watch the streetlights twitch out, their brightness giving way to the darkness of the dawn; the buildings cast more of a shadow than the night itself for a few moments. Some are so large that you can walk in the shade of them for so long you forget what time of day it is.

I had imagined that when we landed there would be a horizon—a far-off place that I could stare at and wonder what was there, what was so distant that I couldn’t yet see it. That’s what I wanted. Now I live in a city surrounded by a wall a hundred feet high. There’s no horizon. There’s no distance.

Cars and commuters pass me. They rush. They don’t worry about the fact that they’re trapped here. We were told what life was like before Australia left Earth the first time: that people were free, that life was open. The world was swollen, sure—but everything was allowed to swell more. The swelling was our right, our destiny. Now I know how much we can be lied to—the capacity for those in control to tell us what they think we want to hear, to keep us from the truth. These people don’t even know how free they are. There have been calamities and there have been traumas. Technology halted for a while because everything—everybody—was focused on saving the planet. We were their backup plan—people sent into space to see if that was viable. If all else failed, would being trapped in a box in the stars be enough? If the climate couldn’t be controlled, humanity would have abandoned Earth.

Instead, they abandoned us.

I get angry as I walk. I notice that my feet are hitting the pavement harder. The city gets cleaner, shinier as I walk toward the center. There’s better lighting, even if I don’t factor in the sun. The streets are wider as I get to the shopping district, and this isn’t even one of the bigger shopping centers. It’s mostly market traders, a few smaller shops, a couple of much bigger stores that sell clothes. I head to one of these. No need to wait for them to open. Nothing like the markets here, with set times. The automations mean that almost everything is available around the clock. Doesn’t matter what I want, when I want it. All that matters is that I can afford it.

That’s another thing I hate—there’s no haggling here.

The clothes are all described in terms that I still barely understand six months after I arrived here: They’re all active or enabled, lights blinking as you walk past them, colors shifting, hues going from darker ends of the spectrum to lighter, the fabric twitching almost, begging to be bought.

I enter the one with the least obnoxious sign, the least loud music pumping out of the doorway. “Good morning,” a girl says, smiling at me. She works here, you can tell. Her outfit’s a mess of colors, like ink in a painting being pushed around, like a blurred tattoo. She’s my age—taller, skinnier (of course she’s taller, everybody’s taller here). There’s not an ounce of muscle on her: all sinew, all bone. “I love your shrug,” she says. She means the tatty fur wrapped around me, the one pinned with a ludicrous safety pin. “Is it custom?”

“Yes,” I say, the words stumbling out of my mouth. I don’t know why I don’t tell her the truth. That it’s all I have—a loan—that tomorrow I’ll be dressed as I always am. Or—no, I do know. She likes it, so she doesn’t see me for who I really am. Right now, I don’t live in the docks. Right now, in this moment, I belong.

I walk past the dresses, past the shoes, toward the STANDARDS section at the back. No bells or whistles: t-shirts, hooded jackets, jeans, sneakers. One of each, either in black or as close to a shade of gray as they sell. A t-shirt in something called “Midnight Ink,” which looks like it’s wet, a moody lake, the pattern swirling. In the fitting rooms, I try everything on. I watch them adjust themselves to my body in the mirror: shrinking away from me in places, bulking up in others. The hood extends around my head, smoothly lowering, the technology in the fabric making sure it does what it should.

“Lower,” I say as I rest my finger on the edge of the material. Silently, the tip comes down to cover more of my eyes. “Lower.” You can’t see my eyes at all, can’t see what I’m going to do anymore.

“Miss?” the girl asks through the door. “Miss, can I get you anything else?”

I want to barter. I want to trade. I think about running.

“I’ll just take these,” I tell her. I try and make my voice sound like I’m smiling.

The checkout machine doesn’t take cash, that’s the first hurdle. My credit isn’t quite enough to cover all of my purchases. I press for help, which sends the girl over; then she goes and fetches a manager, who fumbles his words as he tries to unfold the notes I give him, presses the authenticator strip to check that they’re not fakes, then scans them against stolen banknote records. He watches me the whole time. Cash apparently makes him suspicious.

“This takes a while,” he says, his tone suggesting an apology that never comes. “It’s inconvenient.” It’s only inconvenient because he doesn’t trust me, because he decides that he has to run five or six different checks to stop his store being even slightly out of pocket. “We don’t have change,” he tells me, when he’s finally satisfied that the notes are legit. “I can give you store credit.”

That’s when I see the arm bracer hanging from a rack at the side of the counter. Thick black leather—or something close to it. It has spikes, but they are softened down, the tips sanded off. No one could hurt themself on them. I pick it up and turn it around in my hand, feeling the tautness of it.

“How much?” I ask, and the manager puts it under the scanner. It’s less than I have left over. I tell him to bag it up.

Outside, I find a stoop, sit down, and don’t care who watches. I pull my t-shirt on, then discard the fur from Alala into the bag my new clothes came in. I pull the jacket on, yank the hood over my head—again feeling it molding to me—then I pull on the trousers, then the shoes. I let everything adjust. The clothes have forgotten who I am since I last wore them. They only have a memory of a few minutes.

Then I put the bracer on and I think about Jonah. How he had one around his neck when I met him. The bracer tightens around my wrist, pulling itself closed until it’s tight around my skin the whole way, until it’s secure. This is when it catches me out. When something reminds me of him it’s so strong that it pushes me back almost; it knocks the wind out of me and forces me to take stock. A flash of red hair in a crowd, something tied to a neck, a kiss in a holo between people I’ll never even know. Or I’ll hear somebody saying a prayer and I’ll remember his voice; hear it saying that same prayer, explaining it to me. I haven’t thought about him for days. The memories hit harder when that happens.

I learned that the people have his Testaments here, which surprised me. I thought they were a ship thing for the longest while. But Ziegler showed me a copy and it was sort of the same, like a broken, not-as-exciting version. On Australia, they were much shorter. I appreciated that. Also, here there’s not the last bit, the bit about the nine levels of hell. I think that must have been Australia only. Too convenient.

But then the sharpness of the memory fades. With Jonah, it takes triggers to remember. The others? They’re there the whole time. I can never escape thinking about my mother or Agatha or Mae or even—for some reason, as if she’s been burned into my brain, seared and scarred—Rex.

I remind myself that Jonah is dead—and that’s awful and terrible and sad but there are a lot of dead people out there and I can’t cry over them all.

I pull the sleeve of my jacket over the bracer. It’s there, holding me—a pressure that’s so tight it almost hurts, but I can get used to it. It fades into the background.

I need to speak to Ziegler. I need his help.