The companion drone says nothing; its lights stay dark as it hovers in front of me.

“You know what to do,” I say.

A brief flicker of green light and Apple-Moth flies to the gap in the window and then stops. “Do you wanna hear a joke?” the drone whispers.

I nod my head. “Yes.”

Lights flicker excitedly on and off, and then the drone is dark again. “What do you call an alligator who wears a vest?” Apple-Moth asks.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

“An investigator!” Apple-Moth says.

I laugh.

“Goodbye, Luka,” the drone says.

“Goodbye, friend,” I reply.

Apple-Moth’s lights turn pink and then it’s gone, zipping out of the gap in the vents and into the night sky, and I’m left in silence.

Happy has provided clothes: an Alt uniform with no markings. I leave it hanging in the wardrobe.

I sit and watch the city. I look at the towering Verticals, built to stock the growing number of poor. I look at the villages around the city, spacious second homes for the ultra-rich, and I think about what the Alts were: a walking advertisement to the poor; look what you could achieve if you just worked harder! But the opportunity didn’t really exist, not to Regulars; you had to be born into the right family to have what they had. I look at the financial district: hundreds of thousands of Coin wasted on golden statues to the Final Gods of Prosperity, when that money could have gone to schools, to hospitals, to the millions of homeless people in the slums around the Verticals. I look toward the Loop, a place for kids who fell foul of a corrupt justice system, no mercy for circumstances.

For a moment I think, Yeah, bring it all down, but I’m making the same mistake as Happy—I’m looking at humanity as one entity, a uniform species.

I look toward my old home, the Black Road Vertical, and I think about my mom teaching us sign language, my dad taking us to the river. I look toward City Level Two and remember sneaking into the gated community with my friends to knock on doors and run away. I look to the sky-farms; the hundred-yard-high Ferris wheels that turn night and day, rotating crops in overlapping troughs to feed the entire city, and I think about me and Molly sneaking into a potato trough and being carried high up into the clouds.