“The lady in your ear, on the phone or whatever, said Carpe somnium? Are you sure?”

Ambrose ran a finger along the stem of the orange graffiti flower. “I’m sure. The security guard said it, too. It means—”

“Seize the dream. In Latin. I’m not a friending idiot. Dita and Jiri say it all the time.”

She slapped the lone button on the wall. The doors slid open, creaking in protest. Ambrose stared, transfixed. “Everything’s so old down here,” he said.

She shoved him.

Harder than she’d meant to.

His back slammed the wall and his mouth dropped open as she got between him and the exit. She almost laughed at how shocked he looked—this boy wasn’t used to being pushed around. She got in his face.

“Jiri was my friend, okay? And he died saving you.” She wasn’t exactly sure about either of those things, but it sounded dramatic. “Remember that next time you feel like telling me my neighborhood is old, or smelly, or crowded, or noisy, even though it’s all those things, just because you’re from topside and…” She leaned closer and sniffed him. He shrank back as far as he could. “You smell like a fruit salad.”

He swallowed. “It’s synthetic citrus essence cologne. From Brussels.”

“From where?”

“Brussels, a city in—”

“Just, whatever. Shut up. Come on.” She eased Nelson out of the lift and waited for Ambrose to hop on the back. He situated himself slowly and gingerly, as if Nelson was some kind of malfunctioning transport that could fling them off at any moment.

“He doesn’t bite, you know.”

They followed a narrow path that bumped along the top of the shanty-stack next to a dull gray wall lined with windows, the glass long gone and replaced with pockmarked bricks, wooden boards, or nothing at all. The peeling cream-colored underside of the canopy was just above their heads. Hundreds of little houses like the one she’d shared with Jiri were huddled beneath them, sloping down to the street. Roads like lazy rivers divided the stack into haphazard tiers.

“What is this place?” Ambrose asked.

She looked around, puzzled, before reminding herself that he was seeing each part of her neighborhood for the first time. It was impossible to put herself in his shiny black shoes and unknow the familiar places of her daily life. When Aunt Dita had snuck her topside to visit the Designated Young Person Recreational Zone, she’d felt untethered without the canopy overhead, as if she could simply float away from the surface of the earth and never stop going up. Maybe Ambrose was feeling the opposite: trapped.

“You know your big office buildings and apartments?” she asked.

“Atmoscrapers. I live in one.”

“Ever been to the bottom?”

“Of course. My favorite restaurant’s in the lobby, where they serve this—”

“No, not the lobby, twitterbrain. The bottom.” Anxious as she was to get to Aunt Dita’s, she slowed for Ambrose to take it all in. Once again, she noticed that her scoot’s engine was startlingly loud this far from the streets of Little Saigon. She wished she could afford a muffler.