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I go the other way, down the hill, and keep walking until I finally get to my part of town.

It takes about two hours. The trams stop running through the center at eleven, and I don’t have the fare anyway, because I came out of my shift, got put in a car, and nobody thought to check whether I had anything in my pockets.

I have nothing in them but a slate and a shirt that isn’t mine.

From a man who’s no longer mine.

Damn it, Jade, stop pitying yourself.

Stop... just stop feeling, for a moment.

The museum closes at six. I go around the side to the gardens, where the wall drops to knee height by the service gate, as it has since I was nine, and I get over it the way I’ve always gotten over it. I sit on the bench beneath the dead pear trees, the old quarter at my back and the city laid out below.

You can see the whole center from here. All of it lit. The tower is the third one, the one with the bridge across the top. There’s a bar on that bridge. I was there two hours ago with my hand in Asher’s hair, and his mouth on my dick, listening to him ask me to marry him like it was the simplest thing in the world.

Opening my multi-slate, I type a quick message to Onyx.

Ran over at work. Don’t wait up. I’ll bring bread.

I read it before I send it. Two lies in ten words, and I send it anyway because the truth would take too much explaining.

He’d have said yes. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. If it had been Onyx sitting at that table, Onyx with the champagne and the music and a man saying always against his throat, my brother would have said yes.

He would have said it with his whole chest and been happy about it.

And he’d have been wrong, and I’d have had to be the one to tell him so.

So I said it for both of us.

The answer was no. It was always going to be no.

My hands are shaking, so I tuck them beneath my arms. My heart aches.

Ignore it.

Instead, I look out over a city that has given us nothing but poverty and broken dreams. I haven’t been able to make more of it for us. The Hunt would have been a way out, but I couldn’t even do that.

With every passing minute, I shiver a little more. Going home means walking into our kitchen dressed like this. Onyx misses nothing, and I don’t have a story he’d believe.

That’s the reason I’m still sitting here. I want that on the record. Not for the view. Not even for the trees. I’m sitting on a bench at midnight because I’m scared of my brother’s face.

I check my slate, but he hasn’t replied yet.

He’s asleep. He had a bad night last night, and I sat up with him until three, holding him upright through it. Tonight, he’ll have gone down at nine and stayed down, and that’s good. That’s the best thing that could happen.

I count to sixty, then count to sixty again before sending another message.

You awake?

Sent. The little mark under it says delivered. I sit and watch the blue circle, waiting for him to reply.

Did he take the second dose? He needs to take that second dose at ten, and he does it himself. He’s done it himself for two years, and I write it on the door frame anyway.

Did you eat?

Mrs. Varga would have knocked. She knocks on Thursdays, but today it isn’t Thursday.

The cold has gotten past the shirt now and into the skin of my back, and I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to stand, with no idea what I’m supposed to do next. There’s nowhere in this city I can get to fast. I don’t have the fare. I don’t have anything.