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it?” I ask him. “You’re happy with where they placed you?”
    “Jethro, north side, Sector 15.” He flashes me the cuff again—BPS15J. “Not exactly scenic, but none of us are out there for the view, right?”
    “At least they’re not making you commute out of your ward every day.”
    “True, there’s that. And I’m still getting paid the same as if I were putting in my part-time hours down at the plant. Even my crank of a boss won’t argue with the Board about maintaining salary for employees on tour.”
    “It’s really not that bad?” I ask him, unsure if I’m reading him properly. I don’t know Kasey well enough to tell if he’s just putting up a front for how he might really feel about being so close to the Surround every day. It’s funny—all the way up until completion, tours are distant shadows without identifiable form, a vague and fuzzy danger compared to that which came with being active. Now that I am a complete, I can feel it, sharper and more pressing.
    “Compared to being active?” Kasey shakes his head. “They’re so different, you know? Still a lot of walking around, looking for anything suspicious. But this time the enemy is the Surround and, well … hell, I don’t know. It’s crazy since the Surround is way more than just one person. I mean, it’s the rest of the world out there, and we’re not exactly friends with them. But the danger you feel … it’s not the same.”
    I nod, knowing instantly what he means. The Surround wants everyone in Kersh dead, its goal to kill us all, focusing on no one person. But that’s not true for your Alt, the person born to kill a single, lone target.
    Yet, already I can tell what Baer and Dire would say if they were here, listening to Kasey right now. They’d tell him to wake the hell up if he didn’t want to die on his first tour, mere weeks after surviving his Alt. Directly outside the barrier lies a strip of huge, tangled, thorny bushes and patches of wild horsetails as tall as a little kid and about as stubborn. We call it the Belt because that’s exactly what it is, a no-man’s land measuring a hundred meters deep at its shallowest point as it encircles Kersh. It’s ugly but invaluable and together with the barrier, it is what lies between the city and the Surround. To reach Kersh from the outside, this no-man’s land would be the first obstacle that would have to be overcome. But those thorn bushes and horsetails still just grow on hard earth … earth that enemy feet can walk on.
    “The toughest part is all the alone time,” Kasey continues, frowning now, that weariness coming through again. This time, there is no pride to soften it. So opposite of the guy I remember swaggering his way down the hall. “Other than occasionally seeing the two completes on watches for the sectors on either side of me, there’s no one. So that part of it is like being an active again, if I’m going to compare. All that time just thinking. You know, a lot of what your brain cooks up can get pretty dark. Being out there by yourself, no one’s around to remind you that you’re a trained killer. If you forget for even a second, anything can happen.”
    An old man brushes past us on his way out of the restaurant and pauses to look back at Kasey. I watch his eyes fall on the black cuff around Kasey’s arm and then back to Kasey’s face. For a second, shadowed by the sheet metal overhang jutting out from the restaurant’s storefront, he and Kasey look nearly alike, marked with shared understanding. Then the old man gives Kasey a slow nod, turns back around, and disappears into the crowd.
    “I think the old dude approves,” Kasey says, laughing his laugh that makes me think of Torth, of Luc, who is fading a bit more day by day. “Man, but I should get back to work. I only signed out for thirty minutes, just long enough to run out and grab some food.” He gestures with the takeout container, and the whiff of grease and sauce has my stomach