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against asphalt, the world spinning around her. Her feet throbbed, shocked into numbness, but Jessie didn’t have time to think about how much it hurt. She rolled over and pushed herself upright.
    She needed to get to the city carousel. Each progressively lower tier of the city expanded, got darker and darker, like some kind of twisted metal layer cake, and she knew how to hide in the depths of those streets just above the walled-in ruins of the old city.
    The carousel didn’t allow foot traffic, but the stairs near it bored through cement and structured metal to connect the mess of city levels. Even better, they’d been enclosed. All the commuters using the maze of roads comprising the upper-level streets would never have to see the poor peasants who had no choice but to take the stairs to get around. Like her.
    If she was lucky, the missionary and his friends would assume she’d go back to her job as the one safe place she had. Maybe she would have, under any other circumstances. Not this time. She’d have to start all over.
    It took her a few tries, but Jessie’s legs remembered how to move before she kissed the ground again.
    The rain pounded the city into submission, making visibility difficult at best. She lowered her head as she ran for the nearest street, hoping she hadn’t misjudged the distance from the block of low-income housing to the highway that wrapped around New Seattle like a coiled serpent.
    The kind of fly-by-night motel she’d need to hide out in hunkered two levels below the Perch, sleazy enough to pay by the hour and destitute enough not to haggle for the amount of cash she had on her. Going up was out of the question; too far, and she’d end up in front of security checks, sec-comps with tasers set to strongly dissuade , and a distinct lack of survivability.
    With all of her belongings left at the Perch, Jessie was at a serious disadvantage. It was going to take a lot of effort to build up her resources again, but she could do it. She’d done it before.
    She ducked into an alley, lungs squeezing as she tried to catch her breath, and scraped her wet hair back from her eyes. When tangles pulled at her scalp, she realized the red wig had come off her head at some point—probably in the fall—and hissed out a curse.
    She might as well have been naked. It had been a long time since she’d hit the streets with her natural hair. Still, she could barely see ten feet in front of her. There was no way anyone else could see her easily enough to get on her tail. Could they?
    The thought made her nervous.
    Ducking her head, she pulled up the collar of her jacket. There wasn’t anything else to do but run.
    She was good at running.
    Limping slightly, Jessie ignored the angry beat from her abused ankles and hurried down the alley, stepping over sodden refuse and discarded plastic crates. She squinted against the sharp rain, at the lights of New Seattle that flashed through it.
    Layers upon layers upon layers of humanity. Cement and metal foundations, glass skyscrapers at the top like something out of a twisted fairy tale. She could barely make out the glittering upper spires through the sudden storm, but she didn’t need to see them to know they were there. This was the edge of civilization, the City of Glass.
    A new hope for a struggling humanity.
    Jessie’s mouth twisted. She’d never intended to come to her mother’s birth city, but it was easier to hide in a metropolis. Especially a metropolis as divided as this one. Years buried in the chaos of New Seattle, and she still hadn’t exhausted the city’s cushion of anonymity.
    Caleb hadn’t liked it much. Maybe that was why he’d left, in the end.
    Maybe he just wasn’t as ready to live hand-to-mouth, to travel from rat-infested apartment to apartment, to work and steal and run. It stung when she thought it, but maybe she’d done everything wrong, right from the moment she’d found their mother murdered, crammed into her own bakery oven like