Chapter 2 Gray wrists in a branded world

He walked for 20 minutes but still didn't know where he was going.

That was fine. His legs walked and his brain wasn't fully present. It was in a Wednesday alley on Pelham Avenue, still trying to make the knife fit the unmarked skin under his ribs, still repeating the impossible over and over: a tongue trying to find a broken tooth, a tongue that couldn't let it go, couldn't make it add up.

He was dead. He knew he was gone. The memory wasn't one of foggy uncertainty like that of dreams. It was clear and sharp, the feel of the knife, the coldness of the concrete, the sound of footsteps. taking off without a frantic pace. That had happened. He knew it must have occurred.

But there he was. Walking. Breathing. Forty-three dollars in the pocket of a coat that he did not own, on a street that was almost right and was wrong in every detail that mattered.

He refused to raise his gaze to the wrist bands, maintained his speed and focused on not looking at them.

He was unable to get his eyes off the wristbands.

Each of the people he went past had one. Some were pale, white, faint yellow, or even green, but they were everywhere. Ethan thought about it. He noticed the obvious empty wrist of the man and saw how people looked away in disgust.

It meant something. He didn't know what was it. He knew nothing about this except that it was like his city, and not, that the tower to the east pulsed its blue light at time intervals starting to feel less architectural and more alive, and that he had died on a Wednesday, and woken up here, with no framework for any of it.

He was surrounded by a group of men who were coming around the corner.

Four of them, who had grown accustomed to moving together, registered them carefully, as if they were moving on a street that was not well lit, and with a peripheral look as of someone who grew up in neighborhoods where that sort of attention was a life skill. The colour of their wrist bands was yellow-green. One color that no one else had had up until then. They were scanning. Not walk around and looking at destinations or phones or each other, but just looking around the street, doorway, and faces of those who walked by.

Looking for something.

Ethan maintained his speed. He did not increase or decrease his velocity. He kept his eyes at the middle distance and came to the right of the sidewalk and let them pass and felt it in the half second break in the man's stride, the turn of his head, the nudge to the man at his side.

He never turned his head around.

He reached the next corner and walked faster.

His heart was racing so hard like it was fighting to live whether he liked it or not.

Footsteps. One set, perhaps two, who were coming around the corner at a somewhat faster than running speed, but with purpose.

Someone was following him.

The knowledge came to him with clarity. He had never known such clarity before, not since he first opened his eyes on that sidewalk. Did not understand the location or meaning of wristbands or why the sky was not the right color. Just those men were looking for something and they had decided that it was him and they were coming, and he was in a doorway in a city he didn't know, and he had forty-three dollars and bare wrists and he didn't know what would happen after that.

His steps halted at the corner.

Silence. There were then some voices, one of them a coming from a direction and then the stamping of feet faded away. Go back the way they had come.

Ethan remained in the doorway for some time after the noise died down.

When he did move it wasn't in a direction, it was away — away from the corner, away from the well-lit streets, away from the food carts and the damp concrete, away from the familiar but not exactly comfortable. The specific aroma of a district that was left to run itself. He knew that smell. He had been born and bred there. This city was whatever it was, but it had places like this, and he gravitated towards them on instinct, at least he knew the grammar of surviving in places like this.

He noticed the steps leading up to a broken window and sat down outside the building.

This isn't the first time he's shaking. A little less than before, but still shaking, and he pushed his hands hard against his legs and gazed at the street and he tried to find out what he knew.

He was breathing when he shouldn't be. That was fact one, and it was fact one, no matter what he did, it had to be fact one. He was in a city that was like his own city but not. Fact two. All the people he had ever encountered wore wristbands and his wrists were bare, and this was important enough to warrant a woman pulling her child from the vicinity of the man and a group of men wearing yellow-green bands moving around the corner after him. Fact three. Within twenty minutes of him beginning to walk somebody – those men, whoever – had been searching for him; for something he stood for.

His presence had been announced he was just unaware.

He considered the time when he awoke. The manner at which people slowed down looking at their wrist. At the time he was too dazed to understand it. He was done processing it now. Upon his arrival something had shot through those wristbands. Some sort of signal, some kind of notification, and those men in their yellow-green bands had reacted to its call in time to be on the streets looking before he had walked 20 minutes.

He wasn't sure what the alert had said. He wasn't sure what these men did or what they were looking for. He didn't know what his bare wrists said or what the tower to the east was or why the evaluation of a dead man who had come to his parallel city would call for such an organized response on the spot.

He knew he was sitting in the dark shaking and that was no time for that.

Ethan closed his eyes and squeezed his hands. He pondered his sister. He’d thought about the way she used to say that the only direction that had any value was forward, that there was nothing to be done about things that had happened, and she'd always said to him to stop looking for reasons to be still.

She was smarter than him. She usually was.

He removed his hands from his eyes.

At some point a man came out of the building behind him and was standing at the top of the steps looking down at him, with the cautiousness of a man deciding whether to consider the person on his steps a problem. He raised his eyes to him. The wristband of the man was white. His expression was not hostile, just wary – the wary expression of a man who knew that, if he were walking at night, strangers with dark intentions could be on his path or not, and if they were, he had a range of options for how to behave.

The man asked, "You lost?”

Ethan opened his mouth. closed it. The question was immense, so much bigger than the man thought.

"Yes," he said. It was harsher than he wanted it to be, the voice of a man who hadn't spoken for several hours, who was not only shocked, but was moderately shocked. "I just — yes. I'm lost."

The man glanced at his bare arms. In his face there was a change, not the fear but something more like recognition – a category that came together. “The only thing that happens is you get assessed.?”

Ethan didn't know what that meant. He replied, "It's something like that".

Slowly, the man nodded, looking at something but not at ethan. “If you don't have a band, they will sort you in their three streets north of Bureau at the transit junction.” He paused. “Better hurry up before it's too late, the warrens is not a good place for bare wrists at night"

He went back inside.

Ethan sat for a while more on the steps. Then he stood up. His legs were more firm than ever. Not steady. Steadier.

Three streets north. Whatever it was, a Bureau. A person who would sort him, what-ever this meant. It was not a plan. The direction was little more than a glimpse. It had been the first tangible thing anybody had presented him with since he woke up on a sidewalk and found out that maybe death is not as permanent as it's been billed.

He straightened his coat.

He took a stroll going to the north.

Behind him a yellow-green band glowed on the wrist of the owner. Which made him wonder why the other man had no band.

Ethan was unaware of the message.

He was still struggling to keep his balance.

But something was settling, somewhere below the shaking and the grief and the unmanageable burden of being alive when he remembered dying. Still and soft and kind. How foundations settle once they have reached firm ground.

He didn't yet know what it was.

It was awaiting his response.