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MAYBE IF I MOVE A LITTLE SLOWER, I can prevent the inevitable. Time will freeze and it’ll be easy to pretend we’re not moving again. I don’t want to budge from the roof of this cruddy building.

The door to the stairwell creaks open. Dad sees the lump of me at the edge of the roof, unmoving. Dark clothes, dark frizzled hair. I am depression personified.

“Here you are, Zelia. I told you to stay off the roof,” Dad says, his voice scratchy with fatigue.

I jerk to my feet. “Sorry.”

“Traffic is about to get bad. Let’s go.”

“Okay.” I cross the gravel roof quickly, trying to catch his shadow slipping down the stairwell to our apartment. Our old apartment. This place is nothing to me anymore. Dust bunnies lurk in the angles of the hallways, kicked around by the maelstrom of moving activity. Inside my small bedroom, I push my duffel bag to the door. Just one bag, crammed to the brim. It’s not much. After years of moving every ten months, you give up amassing anything larger than your fist. Basically, heart-sized or smaller is all I can take.

Around the empty room, remnants of the past haunt the surfaces. Rings from juice bottles cover the desk; pictoscreens glow in big white rectangles where photographs have been deleted. I still had eight weeks of rental left on those images—the latest telescope images of the M-16 nebula, beaches and mountains from the twentieth century untouched by humans. So pretty. So gone.

Down the hallway, I smell my little sister walk by. This month, it’s Persian freesia. Dad says nothing about her pricey scent downloads. He also hasn’t commented on the string of boys popping up with alarming regularity on her holo. Unlike me, he’s not bothered by Dylia’s flourishing teenage hormonal nirvana. In fact, she’s chatting up one of her undeserving male friends as she skips down the stairs.

The glowing green screen hovers at an angle in front of her, a projected image from an earring stud that everyone wears. It’s practically impossible to live without our holos. They’re like a sixth sense, with limitless connections and information. Dyl got her first holo stud six months ago when she turned thirteen and barely turns it off now. Within the green rectangle, a boy’s face is shadowed under a hoodie and he’s wearing an oily smile.

I follow her downstairs and join Dad in front of our dilapidated townhouse. I tell myself I won’t miss the building’s crunchy gravel roof, or even the ancient ion oven that always zapped our food too much on the crispy side. There’s no point in getting attached to the good or bad of wherever we live.