“The thirtieth floor. As high as anybody can pile a house.”

They passed an unblocked window, open to the dark interior of the building.

“What’s inside, then?” he asked. “Empty floors? How much space is between the support beams? Surely thousands of people can still live there. Has anyone ever renovated?”

“No,” Mistletoe said. “No one goes in there.” She shuddered.

“Why not?”

“I mean, no one who goes in ever comes out.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You wouldn’t go in, either, if you knew about it. You wouldn’t even go near a window.”

The path dipped sharply and dropped them onto a sagging bridge made of boards lashed together with twists of blackened wire. Nelson adjusted to the staccato bumps.

“Knew about what?” Ambrose asked, the words rising shrilly as the houses beneath the bridge gave way to empty space.

“Nothing.” She didn’t want to talk about the Scourge. Not now, not ever. “We’re almost to Aunt Dita’s. She’ll know what to do.”

“Who’s she?”

“Jiri’s sister.”

“No, I mean, what does she do for a living? What’s her contribution to society?”

“Contribution to society?”

Ambrose was the strangest boy she’d ever met. She wondered how long he would have survived on the streets of Little Saigon if she hadn’t found him. Probably about two minutes. What had Jiri wanted with him?

She gunned the scoot across the bridge and skidded hard onto the path at the peak of a new stack. The lifts protested with a piercing mosquito hum. Ambrose squeezed the air out of her lungs. She elbowed him in the stomach, so he eased up.

Aunt Dita lived a few tiers below the peak. Mistletoe slowed to a crawl and turned off the mostly empty upper path onto a winding street choked with people and dogs. They fell in behind a painfully slow gypsy cart overflowing with vivid shawls and bags labeled COFFEE, which Mistletoe knew probably contained either guns or Little Saigon’s latest drug of the month. A rickety transport hauling some kind of antique salvage—power cords and busted screens—pulled up behind them, boxing them in. Mistletoe felt her patience wear perilously thin as they crept along at a slug’s pace. She bit the inside of her lip to keep from screaming.

“How many people live in there?” Ambrose asked, pointing to a tiny yellow hut squeezed between two dingy brown hovels. A lemon sandwich, thought Mistletoe.

“Probably a whole family,” she said. As if on cue, a woman came to the door, bouncing a tiny baby in her arms. A second later a little boy burst from the hut, slid between her legs, and ran off into the crowd. The woman glanced around in bored detachment, sniffed the air, made a face, and stepped back inside.

“Where do they put everything?” Ambrose asked.

“What everything?”

“Their … stuff.”

“You’re the stupidest friending smart person I’ve ever met,” Mistletoe said. “Can’t you use that Process Flow thing you were just bragging about to answer your own question?”