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Now I just need to get out of here. In her rumpled nightgown, Ana follows me as I run out of Marka’s lab and head to the front door of Carus.

“Can you unlock the doors, Ana?”

She shakes her head and promptly crumples into a ball on the floor. I knew her mood would only last so long. She kneads her belly with her fingertips. I pull her hand away, risking a slap, but she lets me. Her fingertips are smooth and silky. Something’s wrong. I bring her hand closer and see that the pads of her fingertips are scarred by flat skin. Something or someone burned off the whorls and lines of her fingerprints.

“They open nothing,” Ana says.

“Did Marka do this to you?”

She shakes her head, rocks a little more.

“Micah,” I say. “Micah did this.”

Ana doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to.

WE HEAD TO MY ROOM. THE CITY
is lit with the yellow-green lights studding the underside of the agriplane. Blue ones glow on the corners of buildings below.

“Open windows,” I bark. The three invisible glass squares move aside, disappearing into the layers of the thick glass. The perpetually balmy Neian air breezes in with its familiar smell: the stagnant odor of a city shrouded under a ceiling-sky of crops.

On my bed, Dyl’s purse is curled into a small lump. I spill out all the items onto the bed. In the empty purse, I stow the cold pack with the Zelia-brand of elixir and a microcard with copies of my notes. I hold the ring pillow and Dyl’s holo stud, thinking.

I’ve missed listening to her voice on the diary, but Wilbert’s dream/wake concoction has been too much to handle; adding Dyl’s voice would have been intolerable. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m going to get her back and screw the odds. When she’s safe again, I’ll have her tell me everything she never had the chance to, because I’d stopped listening.

The book of poetry is the last item in the bag. I pull it out, smoothing the cover with my hands. It opens effortlessly to the most read page.

Remember to be strong.

The trees do their duty—

Tho’ bound to the earth

They are nothing without light,

Invisible gasps, the weeping sky.

Dad never meant for me to see this poem. But I don’t care. I’ll own it anyway. For Dyl’s sake, I’ll forget how he made my weakness into a living thing, so much larger than I was. I’ll be strong for her.

“Take it. I should have given it to you before.” I hand the tome to Ana, who flattens it against her chest, eyes closed. I hug her tightly, book and all, and she stifles a cry.

Cy’s old climbing shoes lay dark and tangled in the corner. I pull off my soft boots and start to lace them on tightly. He won’t be happy once he realizes his climbing lesson helped deliver me to Aureus.

I jump onto the bed, piling up the cushions on a chair, and lift myself through the middle window. My muscles are still sore from my climbing session. It takes a lot of maneuvering not to jostle the vials under my shirt. Ana holds Dyl’s purse with its precious cargo. Once I’m halfway out, I find a finger hold above my room where the thin metal slats run horizontally. Luckily, the agriplane shields Neia from difficult weather, so the wind is mild.

It’s surprisingly easy to get out. The flat surface of my climbing shoes rests on the window’s bottom edge and I grip the slat with one hand, bending down to thrust the other hand through the window. Ana passes me Dyl’s purse, and I sling it over my head and shoulder. She puts her hand on my toe and squeezes it.

“Come back to us. To Cy.” Her other hand protectively goes to her chest.

I feel a parallel softness touch my own chest. For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m leaving a real home. The realization twists at my throat. What am I doing? What have I already done? Ana blinks at my indecision, waiting. But I can’t go back. Dyl needs me.

“Good-bye, Ana.” I blink away tears and swallow down the fear rising quickly in my throat. I can’t let myself go there, not now. Maybe not ever again.

One thousand feet above the actual earth is not a good place to lose it.

I have to climb about thirty feet before the agriplane and the underside of endless framework begins. I call Micah on my holo, but he doesn’t answer. I hope that doesn’t mean they’re backing out of the plan. I lick my salty hands, making them sticky enough to grip the dusty metal struts of the building. I don’t look down. I don’t look anywhere except up for my next handhold. There is no room for worry when your foothold is a few inches deep.

Every few feet another metal strut encircles the building. I try to use my legs to push upward instead of relying on my chicken arms, like Cy had taught me. My thighs start to burn with lactic acid buildup because I’m not breathing enough, so I step up the rate and depth of my inhalations. By the time my muscles are screaming from the climb, I’m only one more strut from the agriplane.

Focusing on the climbing alone, I feel strong and capable. I swing my leg up to a thin metal bar running under the agriplane. The nearest supporting building is about a quarter mile away. I’ll have to shimmy over, holding on to a pole above me and balancing on the one below. Once I’m out of range of the tower, I’ll call Micah and try to figure out how to get down.

I take a mincing step on the metal bar, stretch to make it a whole twelve inches. My hands slide along the pole above me, and I ignore the blisters already forming on my fingers.

Twelve inches, done. One foot. Several breaths. Only 1,319 more to go. And I have two hours to do it.

Shit.

After I’m halfway there, I’m horrified that I’ve only got one hour to go. My blisters have popped and started to bleed. Dark red smears my hands and wrists. Everything is slippery and sticky, and my arms ache so badly, they threaten to fall off in rebellion. I can’t even use Cy’s brew to fix my hands, because it takes two hands to unstopper the bottle.

I watch one drop of blood lay a trail down my palm and sway, shimmering like a ruby in time to the pulse in my wrist. It falls off into the gentle wind. Down, down it goes, through that watery darkness and onto the building three hundred feet below me.

One excruciating hour later, I am there, but barely. The building looms almost next to me, a deep, brown monstrosity with weird brassy metal pyramids studding the entire façade. There are no metal struts, or handholds, or tail-holds, or anything. There’s no going back, but right now it seems there’s no going down either.

What time is it? Midnight looks the same as six in the morning or evening in Neia. I detach one sticky, painfully sore hand to turn my holo on.

“Time,” I command. For the first time in a long time, the green screen comes on without any static. The display shows 11:57 p.m.

So close.

“Micah,” I call. “Are you there? I’m outside the top of a building, the one with the pyramids on it.” I wait, my biceps and triceps on fire, my hands throbbing with pain, my knees jittery with weakness.

The green screen remains blank.

“Oh, god,” I utter. It’s too late. After all that, my escape plan is half-assed and I’ve lost my chance. And I’m stuck up here, one last muscle cramp away from failing once and for all.

What am I going to do? After a few minutes, I realize I don’t have an answer. I need to go back. But the idea of crossing back on the scaffolding with my torn-up hands is overwhelming.

A scraping sound rattles the silence. It grows louder and louder, from the building only feet away. One of the decorative brass pyramids trembles as if it’s undergoing a small, self-contained earthquake. A puff of metal dust spews from the corner of the pyramid base, and the entire thing retreats into the building’s innards.

A gaping square of darkness remains, like a metal tooth knocked out of the socket. A hand slides out of the black depths, covered in hard, green-brown bumps, followed by a face with the same lichen-over-bark surface. Tegg’s two glittering black eyes take me in. I am summarized in his glance:
All this trouble for you? Not worth it.

“It’s about time,” he says. Not meanly, but it’s so matter-of-fact. Spoken by someone who’s won a game before he even picked up the dice. “We don’t have all night. They’re waiting.”

He offers me a rough hand, which hurts more than I want to admit. It squeezes mine painfully as I put a shaky foot inside the hole of the building. The second I’m on the solid floor, he takes his hand back and points to a transport. He’s as big as Hex, but without the kind spirit I’m suddenly homesick for.

Glancing at my ragamuffin appearance, he almost says something—cruel, insulting, who knows—but doesn’t. Maybe I look too pathetic to insult, or maybe somewhere inside that shell is actually a conscience.

“Let’s go.” He walks ahead of me, not fast, but too fast for me. My legs still feel like jelly. We end up downstairs in a dim corridor that ends abruptly with an iron door. Tegg shoves it open with a grunt.

A fancy char, even nicer than the Porsche, is silently purring in wait. The silver color gleams in the gloomy night and a tiny metallic jaguar decorates the very front. We must be in the back of the building, because there’s no lobby here, only a few refuse chute openings.

The back door to the char opens as I walk forward.

“You’re late.” I recognize Caliga’s high-pitched voice.

I duck my head and enter the backseat. Caliga moves over to make room, but not enough. The right side of my face and thigh tingle, and my tongue already feels heavy. My stomach roils in response. She really is like a bad pill, complete with awful side effects.

Caliga delicately nibbles a cuticle. She’s dressed in a long, flowing blouse of deep purple and tobacco-hued cigarette pants, her white hair in a bun on her head. I’m sure I look like an orphan from a fifth-world country compared to her.

“He said you’d come.” She studies her fingertips when she says this. Apparently her cuticle deserves more attention.

“I don’t really care what Micah says about me,” I mumble with my half-numbed tongue.

“You little idiot. I’m not talking about Micah.”

I snap my head up. Who is she talking about?

Tegg slips into the front seat and starts the char. In the rearview mirror, he checks on me, then glances at Caliga. “Lights out, dearest.”

“Oh, right,” she says. One hand goes to cover my eyes and they go numb, doing that rubber eyeball thing again. I blink and see nothing. The char pitches to the left and speeds up, making me sink deeply into the leather seats. Ugh, not good. My belly swirls faster than a gyroscope, and acid creeps up into the back of my mouth. I’m charsick.

“You’re nauseating,” I mumble.

“I think you take the cake, honey. Have you seen a mirror lately?”

What an annoying rhetorical question, when clearly I can’t see a thing. I turn my face away from her, trying not to squirm. The Carus kids may look frightening, but they’re not monsters. This girl is a totally different beast.

Caliga clucks her tongue. “I know what you’re thinking. You with your nose in the air.” The leather seat creaks as she leans closer. “I have news for you. You’re just like us.”

“No. I’m nothing like—”

“Me? Why, because you’re magically less illegal? Because you want to live your life your way? I’ve made a choice about how I’m going to survive. My choice.”

“Shut up, both of you. And you . . .” Tegg pauses, and I know he means me by the disgust in his voice. “Take out your holo. Now. House rules.”

I’m in no position to protest, so I wiggle it out of my earlobe and offer it to the darkness in front of me. Caliga takes it, making my hand prickly and heavy, and causing my stomach contents to swirl inside my belly again. I hear the window open, and the air whips my hair against my rubbery eyelids. I’m guessing my holo just became a gutter ornament.

“Now, what’s this? You brought us a house-warming gift?” There’s a tug at Dyl’s purse, still firmly hanging across my torso, then the squirrelly feeling of a hand rummaging inside. I can tell from the slinking, metallic sound that she’s ignored the vials and has taken my necklace.

“No!” I yell, and smack the air around me haphazardly, trying to get it back. I’m so stupid. I should have put it on, just to be safe. My non-numbed hand swings to make contact with something soft and Caliga utters a cry of surprise.

“Uh! You little piece of—” Her hand clutches my neck, and numbness starts to seep down my chest, around my rib cage.

Tegg curses. “Leave her be. Remember what SunAj said. He wants her intact.”

Caliga lets go and makes a sulky noise. “Doesn’t matter,” she mutters, making clinking sounds with my necklace. “Nothing’s yours for much longer.” I’m afraid to tell her how valuable that necklace is to me. It’s one thing to be weak; another thing to be completely helpless.

Unfortunately for me, right now I’m both.