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He turns to the road and begins to walk. I’m reeling, and I catch up, closing the distance between us. I try to change the subject.

“How’d you do that? The thing with Freeley and the
papers? Did you know you were going? Did you really file papers?”

He pauses. “I don’t know. I was as surprised as you were. I was getting ready to shove him out of the Chopper and take it myself.” He’s lying, at least about the last part.

I stop walking. “You know what that means, don’t you?”

“I’m a lucky bastard?”

“No, you idiot. Someone knows we’re here.”

“News flash. I’m Ambassador Amare’s only child. Someone knows where I am practically every second of every day.”

“Oh. Right. I forgot.”

“Yeah, well. I never do.”

We walk on in silence.

I used to think about how alike we all are. The human race, those of us who survived. Then I thought, if the stories were true and there were other Icon Children—if I met any—we would understand each other perfectly, the way Ro and I so often do.

But now, standing here in the middle of the desolate highway, I can see how different we are. How little Lucas actually has in common with me, the girl who is never known and never remembered and never looked after.

Not usually.

I try to sound reassuring. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s nothing.”

“I didn’t say that. It’s always something.” He looks at me, with a hint of a smile on his face. “It’s just never what you want it to be.”

We’ve reached the road to the Avenues that lead into town. Las Ramblas. I stop following Lucas when the road flattens out in front of us, at the top of the hill. “Do you have any idea where you’re going?”

He points. “All the major roads run west to east in the Hole. Las Ramblas will take us there.” I nod, but I’m impressed. I only know the basics—that Las Ramblas is known for its massive crowds, and that today is no different.

The crush of people is dizzying, particularly for me. I can’t think—at least, I can’t separate out what I think from what the world is thinking. “You said you’re here to meet someone?” I fumble to string together the words.

He nods, but doesn’t answer.

“Who, Lucas?”

“You’ll see when we get there. This way.” Lucas motions, and we begin to move eastward into the Hole.

We walk beneath the giant banners that flutter in the air over the city streets. Here’s what I learn in the span of a few short blocks:
The Lords Are Generous. The Embassy Is Kind. The People Are Lucky. The Future Is Bright
. A stern-faced painting of the Ambassador in her scarlet jacket rises to the height of an abandoned building. I can count the golden birdcage buttons on it, each one the size of my head, while the breeze blows through the broken-out windows that puncture the paint.

Are all cities like ours?

I don’t actually know, seeing as I’ve never seen another, except for those few moments of the Silent Cities that the Ambassador showed me. The Embassy media is so tightly controlled, it’s impossible to know for certain. Sometimes, Ro would come to dinner at La Purísima, his eyes crazy and full of fire, and tell us bits of stolen Grass news. How the Lords have wronged us. How the Embassy lets them.

Right and wrong. The whole world divides into two columns, for Ro. He sees things differently than I do. I’m overwhelmed by a million perspectives, all at once. There’s no one right answer, not when everyone is shouting at the same time. That’s why the feelings are so hard for me to sort out. So draining. Half the time I agree with everything they feel and everyone I meet.

Weaving my way through the crowded street with Lucas
at my side, I realize Lucas isn’t afraid of how he feels. He wants to feel it—it, me, everything. Everyone. He takes it all in, deep inside him.

Not Ro.

For Ro there is only black and white, right and wrong—and he is right. He doesn’t care if you agree with him or not. In fact, it’s better for him if you don’t.

Ro just wants to fight.

The famed Avenues food vendors line the curb. Handmade tortillas fry on the top of the nearest overturned trash can. Potatoes sizzle together with onions on the next. Ropes of cheese or bread dough twist around sticks. Ropes of snake meat, too, but I look away before my eyes can rest on the place where the sticks push out of the blackened, impaled mouths.

“Why are you making that face?” Lucas looks at me, laughing.

I shudder, shaking my head, and he relaxes against me, letting our shoulders touch.

You’d almost think we were regular seventeen-year-olds, on a regular walk, through a regular city. But none of those things are true. I’ve escaped a military complex for an illicit rendezvous with an unknown source in a dangerous city.

With the Ambassador’s son.

Part of me is glad the Padre isn’t here to see it.
He’d worry
, I think—
like I’m worrying now
.

We reach the end of the Avenues, Las Ramblas, and though Lucas hasn’t said anything, I see the rails and realize we are going to ride the City Tracks—my first time. Unlike the Californias Tracks, which run along the coast, the City Tracks only operate within the Hole.

Ten minutes later, we’re heading east. At least, so says the sign on the door of our boxcar, which is nearly empty; only Embassy Brass can ride the City Tracks. Though Lucas’s plastic couldn’t get us into the Hall of Records, a quick flash at the bored Sympa guards still got us onto the Tracks. Thankfully, they didn’t look too closely at the last name.

At Union Station, I hop down from the edge of the car, after Lucas, and follow him as we make our way through the crowds in the vast, spacious lobby. A row of Sympas watch us. I try not to look in their direction, as if not watching them will keep them from watching me.

The lobby is endless. My heart pounds, and the doors to the street seem a mile away. Thickly cracking leather chairs sit in groups like a brown herd. Beneath them, the floor is beautiful, a mosaic tile pattern that builds into the center of the room as if it were a long, ornate rug.

The windows are tall. I think of the pictures of the
cathedrals I have seen in the Padre’s study. The light filters through them, and most of what I can see in the light is dust.

We push open the doors to the visible world.

In the broad whiteness of daylight, I have to blink to make out the dark shape I am looking at. It’s a tree, growing in the center of the plaza across from the train station. People peek out from the roots, hiding and sitting and even sleeping inside them. Sympas stand idly by, ignoring them, as if this mess of humanity was something invisible, something that never could be considered part of the city plan.

“So many people.” I can barely choke out the words, because I feel them all. Everyone in the plaza, the streets—needing, grasping, wanting. Fear seeps into every other emotion, every interaction. I clutch Lucas’s sleeve while I struggle to get my bearings.

He slips his hand down to my wrist and pulls me gently through the crowd. His touch is reassuring, and I let him calm me.

Lucas points. “That’s the Pueblo. The oldest building in the Hole.” I can’t see where he is pointing through the crowd.

I pause, and focus on breathing. I focus on not feeling. I focus on the wall between my feelings and theirs, willing it to hold. Willing the Hole outside to not absorb me.

“Come on.” Lucas disappears in front of me. Our
fingers pull apart, and I try to follow, but within three steps I have lost him.

“Miss lady. Miss lady. Miss lady.” I move carefully past the extended hands. A hammer drops rhythmically in the distance. I hear drums. No. Firecrackers—and drums. Stomping feet beat to the rhythm. The twanging of strings, maybe a kind of guitar? I crane my head to find the music, but it is easier to hear than to see in the mash of people. Three competing groups of street musicians perform in three plazas nearby. A fringe of feathers bobs, appearing and disappearing in a splash of bright color above the clustered heads of the crowd.

Another hand appears in front of me. I shake my head: “Sorry. No digs.” It’s true.

The hand grabs my arm and pulls. I turn to see Lucas, looking exasperated. “There you are. Stay with me.”

Stay with me.

I take his hand. It is warm and his sleeve is once again down over his wrist. I squeeze it, without realizing what I am doing. He stops walking.

“What?” I look at him, embarrassed. I try not to act surprised to find myself holding his hand.

“Nothing.” He smiles and looks away.

But it isn’t nothing. I can feel him. Lucas on the inside is as sprawling and chaotic as the Hole itself. He’s warm and pounding and hopeful and scared. Terrified. He’s overwhelmed and intimidated and alive. He feels like the
Hole, only better. He feels like the only hopeful thing in the Hole. Because I can feel that too, the hope. It’s only a tiny spark, a flutter. But it’s there.

I’m lucky to feel it, even once in my life
, I think. I don’t feel it often. So I don’t say a word when he laces his fingers through mine as we walk.

We push past the stalls, and I catch a glimpse of the inside of a shop, through a doorway. A woman is selling Mexicali dresses, long swaths of cotton that hang off the shoulders in brilliant colors, embroidered with rainbows of thread.
Feasting-day dresses
, I think. I should steal one for Biggest, back on the Mission. She would like the green one, with the rainbow woven belt. But that isn’t what catches my eye. It’s a painting, on hammered tin that looks like silver, of the Lady. Stripes come from her head like the rays of the sun itself.

“Miss lady? You like?” The shopkeeper is a woman with black hair and brown skin. Her eyes are brilliantly blue. “
Tres.
Three hundred digs. It’s a good price,
para la madre de todos
.”

Lucas tugs on my hand. I keep walking.

“Miss lady! Miss lady!”

Lucas turns back to her, and I can feel the moment she recognizes his face.
“El hijo! El hijo!”
For a minute I think she is talking about the son of the Lady—but she means the son of the Ambassador.

Her own face freezes as she takes it in. That’s right, the son. She must have access to a vid-screen. Now she disappears inside the shop, slamming the blue-painted doors behind her.

“I have that effect on people, sometimes. Or, more to the point, my mother does.” Lucas looks at me. “Sorry. You weren’t really going to buy that, were you?”

“With what digs?”

“It’s just as well. If you like that, I can show you a better one.”

“A better painting?”

“No. Not a painting. A better Lady. You’ll see. Come on, it’s on the way.”

We weave through the alleyways of stalls, passing pepper candies and peanut candies. Old candy from old Mexicali.
Pulpa de tamarindo
in waxy packets, as sweet and as sour as the Hole itself. Mangos rolled and dried in chili powder. Miniature accordions and blue toy guitars and yellow maracas and pink harmonicas and red
trompos
. The colors and faces appear in layers, drifting in and out like the breeze and the sky.

We turn up a broad boulevard, where a man walks a donkey carrying bundles of what look like T-shirts past a giant wall of graffiti.

“You can’t possibly know where you’re going.” I pull on Lucas’s hand.

“But I do.” He looks at me with a sideways smile.

“But I don’t.” I smile back.

“Have a little faith, will you?”

“I wish I could.” My smile fades. “I wish I did.”

“Are you always this cheerful?” He laughs, and I shake my head, looking up in time to see an archway as we pass beneath it. Two dragons, hammered together out of some sort of red metal, are fighting overhead, from one side of the street to the other. Their bodies are long and twisted like snakes, but their clawed arms and legs are short and sharp.