CHAPTER 2

Something incredible happens. I fall asleep, and when I wake up—with the lamp still on and my face plopped in my open book—I see actual sunshine beaming through the window. It appears to be made of genuine, organic photons. I see the leaves on the tree outside shaking, throwing little scraps of light around, and a plane of sunlight crumpling as it hits the heaped clothes on the floor. I jump up squealing and throw a pillow at Stephanie before I remember that she hates me. “It’s morning! You’ve got to see this! It’s real live morning!”

The look she gives me is triple-distilled venom. Then she turns her head away without saying anything. Chelsea’s bed is already empty and I can hear her knocking around in the kitchen. She usually makes breakfast for everyone if there’s been some kind of fight, hoping to restore harmony to our home. My alleged psychological disorders might even rate pancakes today.

The purely awesome fact of bright morning sun is too exciting for me to let Steph ruin it and I’m singing as I get dressed: the BY’s jingle, which is stuck in my head for some reason. “Face me, face me!”

It is a great melody. A classic, even. Iliana says that her parents knew that jingle from way back in the 1950s, when the very first BY’s opened out on Coney Island. It caused a sensation then, since nobody’d ever seen a dancing store before. People lined up around the block to shop there. Iliana says it wasn’t as dangerous in those days. She even went there with her mom when she was little, and loved it. You could get amazing candy at BY’s, things she’d never seen anywhere else.

But going in got riskier over time, and now most people have the sense to stay away. If you don’t bother it, it won’t bother you.

Steph doesn’t tell me to shut up, but she manages to project an impressive amount of loathing through her turned back. I put the same hoodie I slept in back on over my shirt; Erg’s already in the right-hand pocket so I won’t have to palm her and sneak her into a new hiding place.

Except that she isn’t. The pocket is empty. And Erg’s field trips are never good.

In the kitchen Chelsea smiles at me even though she thinks I’m a lying, scheming thief and gives me a kiss on the cheek as she hands me my pancakes. They’re full of blueberries. Her sweetness this morning might be a ploy based on that theory she told me last night: she’s probably demonstrating that I’m loved unconditionally so I’ll stop swiping stuff, already. But it’s still really nice of her. Nice enough to make me feel kind of shy. “Thanks, Chels.”

“Sure thing, li’l sis.” I can guarantee she’s never called me that before. Ploy for real, then. She’s trying to instill a sense of belonging in me. The sick part is that Erg might be rooting through Chelsea’s stuff as we speak.

“The crazy thing about these nights,” I say, hearing how tense and guilty my voice sounds, “is that they make me so incredibly happy to get up and go to school. Even the most boring class imaginable seems like this huge relief.”

She’s gone back to the stove, but she shoots me a funny look over her shoulder. “No school today, dumpling. Saturday. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“There is absolutely no need for weekends anymore,” I tell her. “It’s ridiculous. You could stuff like two weekends into a single night now.”

“Two very, very dark weekends, though. Get out and enjoy the sunshine. We’re probably all getting mad vitamin D deficiencies.”

“I’ll do that,” I say, loudly. Erg has absolutely zero tolerance for my leaving the apartment without her, so the threat of it is a sure way to bring her scampering back. “As soon as I finish eating, I’m taking off for parts unknown. Williamsburg, or SoHo …”

“You’ll get some model scout on your ass if you go into SoHo, I bet,” Chelsea says. In my explanation of our various attributes I neglected to mention that I’m generally regarded as beautiful. People can think that if they want to, but if they’d ever seen my mother they’d know how I pale by comparison. “At first you’ll be seduced by the glamour of it all. Then they’ll tell you the purple hair has got to go, and you’ll start shouting obscenities and storm out in tears, and maybe come back with a tray of cupcakes and fling them savagely into everyone’s faces. And then …”

“Not one thing you said will ever happen,” I tell her. I keep my tone completely deadpan. “You know my sole ambition is to become a stockbroker.”

Chelsea does a double take. Very few people can tell when I’m kidding, but she usually can. “Ah,” she says. “I see. That would be a joke. A funny joke.”

My sole ambition is to be anyone but me, and anywhere but here. But it would just upset Chelsea if I said that, especially in the middle of this attempt at a stealth therapy session. I finish wolfing my pancakes. “You are the best big sister ever,” I tell Chelsea, in that pathetic way I have of saying ironically things I’m too much of a wuss to say like I actually mean them, even though I do. Coward, I tell myself, and I hug her.

As I’m heading for the door I feel something small and wooden crawling up the leg of my cargo pants. Erg keeps on climbing as I walk down the street, bypassing my pocket completely. She winds up sprawling on my shoulder under my clothes, clutching on to my bra strap. “I can’t believe you didn’t save me a pancake,” she says. Her voice is uncomfortably shrill this close to my ear.

“I’m never saving you food again,” I tell her. “If you want to eat, you’ll stay where you’re supposed to stay.”

“And where is that?” Erg snips. Impudent little thing. “I had important work to do, and I don’t think it’s too much to expect that you’ll think of me when you’re pigging out. Pancakes are my favorite.”

“Important work? Erg, you’ve done enough work already that I can barely face being at home anymore! If I can figure out some way to keep you chained up …” A man comes walking down the sidewalk, so I take out my cell phone and hold it to my head. It’s my usual stratagem for talking to Erg in public.

“Gosh,” she says. “So many negative assumptions. What if I was doing something nice? For someone you like? Maybe I was doing somebody a big favor, but no, you just jump to your nasty little conclusions.”

“I dread to think,” I tell her. “So what was it this time? Did you poison someone?”

Erg squeaks indignantly and feigns an offended silence for maybe two heartbeats, but then she can’t hold out anymore. “You know that guy Miguel? The poetry geek who’s on Chelsea’s chess team?”

“Not really,” I tell her. “Barely. I’ve seen him making a big deal about how he’s going to get back at her after she kicked his ass at their last practice.”

“I called him,” Erg says. “From her phone.”

“You did what?”

“And then I hung up. On the third ring.”

“At least you didn’t try to pretend you were her. But Erg, he’s still going to see her number! He’ll think …”

“He’ll think she wanted to call him and then panicked.” She sounds gleeful. “He’ll think, oh my God, she likes me!”

“Great.”

“She does like him, though. And he’s in love with her. But neither of them was ever going to say anything! Until now! And now he’ll ask her out! I win!”

It could be worse, I guess. “She’ll see the call, too, though. On her phone’s history. And she’ll think …”

“At first she’ll think it was you and get mad,” Erg says. “But then she’ll realize the call went out right when you were eating pancakes with her. See? You have an alibi. Airtight!”

“But then … what will she think? I guess there’s still Steph, but that really doesn’t seem like something she’d do.”

“Well, I’d think that Chelsea will be very confused,” Erg says. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“And you should not be messing with people’s personal lives this way, Erg. It’s none of your business who Chelsea likes.”

“Ooh, but it is. I think it’s all my business!”

Sometimes I have a hard time knowing what to say to her—not that anything I can say ever makes any difference.

“Leaving him is going to break her heart, though, when she goes off to Stanford,” Erg observes after a moment. “Oh, well! Too bad! C’est la, and better to have loved and lost, and such.”

I should have known there was a catch. “Do you ever do anything that isn’t partway mean?”

“And now my exertions on your dear sister’s behalf have left me quite famished and moreover deprived me of my rightful pancake. The sacrifices I make! At least get me a granola bar or something, Vassa!”

She won’t stop griping until I do; I know that from experience. I stop in a bodega and buy one. Erg likes cinnamon almond. Once we’re back on the street I say, “You have to get back in my pocket first. I don’t want crumbs in my bra!”

“Are we going to SoHo?” Erg asks, clambering down. I’m pretty used to the cold slithery feeling of her grappling inside my clothes, but it still tickles.

“No,” I tell her. “I don’t feel like getting on the subway. We’re just walking wherever. The cemetery, maybe? I really don’t care.”

“I wanted to go to SoHo!” Erg squeaks, so I unwrap the granola bar and stuff it in my pocket. That’ll shut her up. For a little while.

The sweet musky stench of rotting flesh on the breeze lets me know, as if I didn’t already, that we’re getting near the local BY’s. I turn the corner so I won’t have to see it all tangerine bright and glossy in the morning sun.

BY’s does all kinds of public relations campaigns saying that they only behead shoplifters. They say law-abiding consumers don’t have a thing to worry about, and deterring theft is what lets them keep their low, low prices. Somehow everyone seems to accept that, more or less, even though you’d think the police or the mayor or somebody should really shut the whole chain down. I mean, beheading must at least count as a violation of the health code, right?

But there’s a kind of atmosphere around BY’s that makes it hard to stick with the idea that they’re doing anything wrong. I’ve seen cops walking toward BY’s, and the closer they get the hazier they look, and their eyes start to go out of focus, and they get these quirky little smiles on their faces like they’re thinking, Boy, those darn thieves sure had it coming! I even used to think that sometimes, though it felt like the words were creeping into my brain through my ears.

But Joel Diallo was about the straightest arrow in my grade and the last time I passed by his head was still up there, though it wasn’t all that fresh anymore. His mom was sitting balled up in the middle of the parking lot with tears dripping off her chin. At school everyone said his family couldn’t even get his body back. He’ll never have a grave. Someone had tied a few pink daisies to his stake, because what else could they do?

It’s probably easier for the police to ignore since the people who get offed are mostly on the margins: immigrants who don’t know better, tough local teenagers, older women on heavy medication who go shopping in their nightgowns. Chelsea says that BY’s would never open a branch in Manhattan, for example, because the potential customers there would be too well-connected to kill. The wrong people would get upset.

Some kids picked on Joel. He was kind of introverted and awkward, an easy target for the jerks. People barely had to look at him to think they knew exactly who he was: that kid who always wore the school uniform, which most of us blow off; who spoke even less than I do; who held doors for teachers. I pretty much went on the default assumption that that stuff summed him up, too. For years. I mean, when I’m all withdrawn and distant, I know it’s because I have too many secrets to risk getting close to anyone. But I saw Joel acting basically the same way I do, and for some reason I thought it meant that there wasn’t much to him.

So how did I start to understand I was wrong? It was maybe January when we were all squeezing down the hallway between classes, and this guy Andre started harassing him: not pushing him physically, but just pressing sideways to drive him toward the tile wall. In the crowd Joel couldn’t get away, and when he stumbled into the tiles Andre laughed. “See, that’s the difference between us,” Andre said, like he was picking up some conversation they’d had earlier. “You have to take shit, and I don’t.”

I was three rows back, jostling along in the flow of arms and legs and book bags, half-wondering if I should say something. But as it turned out I didn’t have to, because Joel actually talked back, though his voice was so soft I could barely make it out. “No. The difference is that you’ll always be exactly what you are now. And I won’t.” There was something in his tone, self-conscious but also knowing, like he could see Andre’s entire future right there. It was enough of a surprise that I started straining to hear them over the clamor, because who just comes out and says something like that? “And you’ll always belong in the same place, but I’ll be far away.” It had a weirdly authoritative sound, like Joel was sentencing him to be boring for the rest of his life. Andre’s jaw was hanging, like a bubble of shocked silence was inflating in his mouth and he couldn’t speak.

They’d stopped dead against the wall so that everyone eddied out around them, and I was shoved against Andre’s arm. He saw me there and twitched, then started scrambling to save face. “Yeah, you don’t belong here. You should try a different planet.”

It would have been a pretty weak comeback even if Joel hadn’t smiled, obviously not insulted at all. He smiled like his spaceship was parked right outside and Andre was just too dumb to realize it. And then the moment was over and we all slipped into our class-rooms, but after that I didn’t look at Joel the same way; I knew now that he wasn’t quiet because he didn’t have anything to say. It was because in a way he was already somewhere else, reaching for some beyond, and he’d left the everyday crap at our school behind him. When I heard he’d died at BY’s it made a queasy kind of sense that he would have wanted to try going in there: it’s the closest thing to beyond that we have in the neighborhood, even if it’s horrible.

But is it possible he tried to rip off BY’s on a dare, striving to seem cool? Maybe, though it feels really out of character. Barely.

Or, more like, not really. Or even, I’d say, not at all.

I should have tried to know him better. We should be wandering together now, saying that we truly will get out of here someday. Reminding each other that it’s a big planet and if we can just hang in there we’ll both see a lot more of it.

We should have been friends.

Our nights drag on endlessly, but our days are just as perishable as ever. My street, like all the streets around here, runs smack into the stone wall that outlines the Evergreen Cemetery. Block after block, if you try to get through that way you bash against a yellow sign that just says END. Then on top of the stone wall there’s a chain-link fence, letting us look in on the elaborate marble tombs with their columns and swags of stone drapery and their perfectly carved climbing roses: these gorgeous miniature mansions. Around here it’s the dead who are living large. On the living side of the fence we have plastic kids’ bikes wedged into the balconies of burned-out apartment buildings. Mosaics of garbage and broken glass in the mud. So it’s not too surprising that I tend to wind up wandering around the graves. It reminds me that there are always options.

I spend hours walking up and down the cemetery’s hills with their ranks of spiky white angels. One tomb has a crack-faced statue of a girl, leaning sideways and sunk in the turf up to her knees; I almost feel like I should try to help her climb out. Below me the train station perches on its mess of tracks, and this tinny synthetic voice keeps echoing up and telling the dead how long they have to wait for the next train. There’s a bench where I sit reading, then I walk down to a donut shop in the late afternoon—chocolate glazed and a cup of coffee for me, a heinous pink-sprinkled custard-filled blob for Erg—lingering at my outside table until the twilight starts rolling in and I get too hungry and chilled to ignore it anymore. Going home means facing Chelsea’s kindhearted efforts to patch up my leaking psyche and Steph’s conviction, I bet, that I’m beyond repair, and Iliana too tired and worried to deal with any of it. “Erg? I don’t know if I can go home.”

She jumps in my pocket. “Sure you can! It’s dinnertime!”

“Maybe it’s time for us to get out of here. Just get on a bus and go.” I hesitate. “I guess you’d have to swipe our bus fare, though. I only have like ten bucks.” I’ve never asked Erg to steal for me before, but since she started the trouble at home she might as well help get me out of it.

“Oh, no. Nonono, Vassa. Go home. It’ll be fine.” Her voice wheedles from my right hip. A few times people have heard her and thought that I had a phone with a really weird ringtone.

“You don’t understand what this is doing to me, Erg. Every time they look at me I feel sick because I know what they’re thinking. I just want to get out and start over, and maybe next time you won’t—”

“Vassa,” Erg says firmly, “it’s going to be fine. As long as we’re together, you’ll be fine. And we’ll be together forever! So stop worrying!”

“I think you’re missing the point here, dollface. Us being together is what’s making things totally not fine.”

“Vaaaasssaaa.” She practically sings it. “Go home. Trust me. Anyway nobody’s home but your stepmom, and she’s asleep. Okay?”

The surprising thing is that when Erg says something like this she’s always right. Anyway, if I do decide to run away, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pack a bag first. “Okay for now. I’m not promising anything for later, though.”

“I can take care of later,” Erg squeaks primly. “I’ve got everything under perfect control.”

It’s true, the apartment is totally dark and there’s no sound apart from faint snores coming from Iliana’s room. I heat up some left-over pasta in the microwave—Erg leans so far into the bowl while she’s eating that I’m amazed she doesn’t fall in—then watch some TV in our bedroom. I’m chilled and damp from being out for so long and the warmth starts oozing through me, beginning at my stomach and then bobbing up into my head.

The lights were on when I fell asleep, but when I wake up the only light is a dim staticky flicker. Someone is knocking around the bed-room, yanking drawers and dropping things; I know it has to be Stephanie. Chelsea would at least make an effort to be quiet. “Oh my God,” she almost shouts, “I can’t find anything!”

“You can turn on the light if you want,” I tell her. “I’m awake.”

“No, I can’t, smartass. You try it!”

I’m confused. “You can’t? Which one?”

“Any of them!”

My first thought is that there must be a power outage, but the TV still glows and chatters in front of me, its colors ambling from red to blue. I reach for the bedside lamp and twist the knob, once and then again to be sure. She’s right, nothing happens. “What’s going on?” Through the window I can see the building across the street, its panes a shining yellow grid against the darkness. Stephanie shuffles back and forth, blotting out the distant glow. One curve of her cheek is outlined in faint gray, but that’s all I can see of her face.

“The bulbs have burned out,” Stephanie says with ornate exasperation. “Duh, Vass.”

Maybe I’m still dreaming a little bit because it takes me five heartbeats to realize that there’s a problem with this. “All of them? Um, Steph, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Why would they all burn out at the same time?”

“Why is the sky blue? They obviously did! And we don’t have a single spare bulb anywhere!”

It’s true, I guess, that we’ve been using all our lights an awful lot, though this still seems like quite a coincidence. “In all the rooms? Did you check Iliana’s room? Because we could borrow a lightbulb from her and buy new ones in the morning.”

“You think I didn’t think of that? Oh, gosh, I just stumbled around the apartment in the dark for an hour, and it never even occurred to me to check my mom’s room! Thanks, Vassa!”

Could this be one of Erg’s pranks? Not really; she’d never make it to the overhead fixtures. “Go to bed, then. We’ll deal with this tomorrow.”

“So you expect me to just sit here in the dark for ages? It’s only midnight.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

She’s closer to me now, enough that her face shows up like an unstable map in the TV light. Terra incognita, an ocean at the edge of the world. Blues and whites squirm across her features; she won’t look at me.

“Why don’t you go out and buy some? You’re dressed.” She’s wearing pajamas, and she’s right, I fell asleep in my clothes. But if it’s midnight …

“All the stores will be closed, Steph.”

“They won’t all be closed.” Her lips pucker as if she’s fighting a smile. “BY’s is still open. It’s like five blocks away.”

At first I think she’s kidding. At first I think she has to be. Her eyes are flickering toward the shadows behind her dresser and waves of gray light go crashing across her cheeks. There be monsters. “You aren’t serious.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Make yourself useful for once.” Her gaze is shifty, darting, and her mouth twists with what looks like embarrassment.

Where is Chelsea? She wouldn’t stand for this.

I still can’t quite believe it; I’m still trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. “Stephanie? They kill people at BY’s. Remember? People go in for a bag of chips and come out with no heads. Remember?” Though really, there’s no way she could have forgotten. No matter how oblivious she is, that kind of thing does tend to make an impression.

But she’s right that BY’s is still open. It’s open always and forever and its lights never go out. Even the tangerine plastic walls give off a glowing haze like radioactivity, and the windows shoot out saw-toothed beams. They never stop gouging huge holes in the darkness.

She opens her mouth to snap back, then stops and stares at me. With our dad gone and as good as dead for all practical purposes, Stephanie is the only blood relative I have left. I get up from the bed and stand facing her, only two feet away, staring back into her brown eyes. Blue light stutters across her pupils. I’m still hoping, barely hoping, that she’ll think about what she’s doing and back down.

Her cheeks flush scarlet and the corners of her mouth hike up, but that’s it. My own sister is trying to get me killed. Knowing that—knowing it for certain, now—is what makes up my mind.

“All right!” I say. I sound like a very cheerful boulder. Shiny and hard. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes!” And I slam my feet into my shoes, never letting my eyes leave hers. My hands are in my pockets and Erg wraps her arms around my right thumb and squeezes.

I walk through our dark apartment: past the sagging sofa and Iliana’s needlepoint pillows with their depictions of galloping horses and wild rivers—I’m obviously not the only one who dreams of being anywhere else—past the chipped coffee table and the vase I made last year in art class. I can hear the faint jitter of roaches in the kitchen. Stephanie drags along behind me as if she was stuck to my shoe. Maybe she thinks I’m just bluffing. Shows how well she knows me.

When I get to the front door I take my army jacket off a hook and shrug it on. It was getting pretty cold earlier. I turn back to her and smile brightly; there’s just enough whiskery shimmer from the streetlamps outside that I know she can see my face. I want her to remember this forever. I want her to wake up sweating, years from now, and watch me smiling while I float over her bed. “See you soon, sis! Want me to pick up anything else while I’m there?”

And that’s when we hear footsteps creaking up the stairs, and a key turns in the lock. As soon as I see Chelsea’s face framed by the hallway’s harsh fluorescence, her happiness collapsing into confusion at the sight of us by the door, something compresses in my chest. I’m not the one who has a reason to be ashamed, though.

“Hey, Chels!” I say. It’s strange, I know, but I don’t actually want her to stop me from going. “I was just running out.” I try to move past her—let Stephanie do the explaining, if she can—but Chelsea’s blocking the door. Did I mention that Chelsea lifts weights? She’s what you’d call strapping, in an attractive way, but she could definitely pick me up and throw me if she felt like it.

“It’s a little late for that,” Chelsea says. More puzzled than angry. “Isn’t it?”

“Just for a few minutes,” I say. “Picking up some things for Steph. I’ll come right home.”

Chelsea hasn’t processed the implications of this yet and she comes in and tosses her bag on the sofa. Behind the theatrical blandness I’m putting on there’s a lot for her to take in, really. I’m able to scoot behind her, out into the stairwell and then down the first three steps.

“Wait,” Chelsea says, looking back and forth between me and Stephanie. Stephanie’s lower lip is jutting out defiantly and her chin is up; she’s giving off way too much drama to convince Chelsea that this is just a casual errand. “What things?”

“All the lights have burned out,” Stephanie says. She sounds in-solent and, for somebody engaged in a murder attempt, weirdly silly. It makes it all worse and my knees start shaking, though I swear it’s not from fear. “Vassa’s just going to out to buy bulbs.”

“I guess it’s okay if she hurries,” Chelsea says, and I realize she still hasn’t figured it out. I’d be in denial too in her place. She’s standing sideways in our doorway, bisected by shadow and shine. “The corner store closes at midnight. Oh, V., can you get me some ice cream while you’re there? Cherry vanilla?”

“It’s after midnight,” I tell her, moving slowly down the stairs while I’m talking. I’ve decided I don’t want Stephanie to be able to pretend later that she didn’t know. “Steph said I should go to BY’s.”

I can’t see Stephanie from here, but I can see Chelsea’s face waking with outrage as she swings around to glare at her. “Stephanie! You know she can’t do that!”

“Why not?” Stephanie’s voice falls out of the door and bangs around the stairwell, bouncing off linoleum and glossy green paint. “They only kill shoplifters at BY’s. Scummy, sneaky thieves. Why would that be a problem for Vassa?”

I’m still heading down, turning at the landing now. A triangle of Chelsea’s back shows overhead, sliced by banisters. Her attention is all on Stephanie. “There is absolutely no excuse for you, for your even suggesting this! Stephanie, you need to apologize to Vassa now!”

“Why? She’ll be right back,” Stephanie says. Her voice is filthy with a sick kind of sass. I’m at the second landing now and I can’t see even a scrap of the girls who used to be my family.

There’s a loud crack and a wail, and I know that Chelsea just smacked her across the face. It’s about the best goodbye she could give me. They’re both screaming now and I’ve reached the foyer with its corpse-colored mailboxes. And then I open the building’s metal-grate door, and I’m running. I’m in the night, and for a few moments all I feel is free. Darkness drums up through my body and the streetlamps sweep my head up and away inside levitating blobs of pure brilliance.

Somewhere behind me a window flies open. “Vassa!” Chelsea screams. “Get back here!” I keep going. Chelsea’s stronger than me but I’m faster, and she knows it. “You don’t have to prove anything to us! Come home!”

Us? I’d like to say. Who is this us, Chelsea? We’re just people who got stuck in the same apartment, and there’s no us anywhere around here.

As for home, well, I’ll have to borrow a dictionary.

And then I’ve passed enough slabby brick buildings with crappy swan planters and ugly cement lions that I can swing onto another block which is exactly the same, except with a closed auto-body shop, and I don’t have to hear Chelsea anymore. She can’t fix this for me. She can’t, and I don’t even want her to try.

I’m just getting wise now to what must have happened: I bet Stephanie unscrewed all the lightbulbs just enough so they wouldn’t work. I bet they’re not burned out at all. My hands are balled in my pockets as I run and something starts kicking at my right palm. It’s only now I realize that I’ve been crushing Erg in my fist this whole time. I pull her out, half-afraid I might have hurt her. There’s a cold wind winging down the nothing-stuffed streets; I feel wet trails licking my cheeks and then spilling down my neck.

“Oh, Vassa,” Erg says. Her painted violet lids flutter over round azure eyes; for something made out of wood she’s doing a great job of looking concerned. “Oh, you’re so sad! That was so mean of Stephanie! Do you think I could bite through her jugular? If I opened my mouth extra wide?”

I’m not out of breath. I don’t know why I stop running—stop moving at all—and just stand swaying in the middle of the sidewalk. There’s no one around, thankfully, but the tears still feel degrading. Nothing Stephanie does should have the power to make me cry. “This is what you call everything being fine, Erg?”

Erg just stares at me for a moment, her little body still wrapped up like my hand is a straitjacket. She can’t possibly have retinas—there’s nothing behind her black lacquer pupils but a chunk of wood—but I’ve never doubted for a second that she really, truly sees me. “Why yes, Vassa,” she says after a second. “I do call it that. Indeed I do.”

My last night on Earth, with its stars fuzzed out by the rusty city sky and its rambling maze of emptiness covering every possible inch of ground. I guess Erg has a point. What could be finer? If this is all there is, well, then by definition it’s the finest thing out there.