She shrugged and stood up. “I just wish—when I hear men like you, like Trey, complaining about life in Hell, I just wish you’d realize that, just like above ground, Hell is not the same for you as it is for me. Even here, you have it better than you think.”

I swallowed and said nothing. There was nothing for me to say.

That was when she made her second big mistake.

She held the silence.

I imagine she purposely let it go on, to give my shame more time to sink in. But she underestimated me. Or, perhaps, overestimated. Because shame didn’t really interest me, but something she’d said did. And when she stayed silent, I had time to notice.

“Why do you remember that?”

“What?” she asked, and sipped her soda.

If we were animals, that would be when I’d see the hair rise on her neck.

“Nobody remembers their life on Earth. We all lose the memories eventually, and you’ve had it rougher than most, with millennia on the belt.”

Cal was scared. Not wide-eyed, admonished-by-KQ scared, or even the kind of scared she seemed the morning after she gave away too much at the Honey Pot. This was not the fear of prey. It was the fear of a hunter who blinked.

“What are you not telling me?”

“I need to take a shower.”

“No, you need to answer my question.”

Cal bit down on her lip, thoughts spinning so fast there was practically smoke coming out her ears. Then she put up her hands.

“Just let me take a shower,” she said. “I need to show, not tell.”

I didn’t answer right away but instead took her and her new fear in, a fear I’d caused. What would’ve made me feel powerful a few days before now made me uneasy.

“Just wait; I’ll be out in a minute, and I’ll explain. I’ve been trusting you since the Looking Glass; you owe me the same.”

Finally, I nodded. Not only because I was curious to see what her memory had to do with hygiene, but because something else occurred to me when she said “the Looking Glass.” If she took a shower, I could be alone in the rest of her apartment. I could find my results.

I listened as she turned on the water, the pressure like a weepy drunk against the tile, and I listened as the sound changed when she stepped under it.

Then I didn’t waste another second.

Her apartment was exactly like mine, so I worked quickly. I started in her bedroom, careful to skip the floorboards in the hallway I knew were prone to creak. I found her closet open, her jacket over the back of the regulation chair. The pockets were empty, so I moved to the closet, touching each of her bland sweaters with desperate fingers.