“They’re—they’re inside,” Yusuf muttered, blinking down at the tablet she’d handed them. “I’m picking them up on security footage in the main artery.”

“Vasquez,” Kaori snapped into her belt radio. “Where are you? Did you make it to the bunker?” Her narrowed eyes hit mine. “Did you get anything from the box?”

“Not yet.”

A weird calm frosted over me, like the second that the grenade had rolled to me and I knew what to do. I turned back to the Envisioner, hands planted on the facets, and sucked in a breath. We still had time.

The door to the Theater hissed open.

Hands on the Envisioner, me and the machine were one circuit, with electricity sparking between us. I didn’t ask the machine. I told it. Save Yusuf. The command was a knife jamming through the machine’s faceted armor into whatever unknown thing waited in the center. I could almost hear the box groan under the stress—beams and armor flexing and grinding—like I warped it into doing something it was never supposed to.

What’s supposed, Yusuf would ask, shrugging off fates and plans. For a second the whole world free-fell under my feet. That instant of liftoff in the plane that brought me here, vaulting into the sky for the first time with Yusuf at my side.

Snap.

The gunshot was a thick cable splitting, the soundwaves warped like I was diving underwater. Everything slowed into a disaster-movie crawl that saw every brick of a building smashed to dirt, every windowpane disintegrated into fairy dust. By the time the waves of the gunshot rolled past, my head was clear again. I was back in the Theater, my hands still crammed against the machine, until my legs gave out and I hit the floor.

When I opened my eyes, they were level with the unblinking blue eyes of the man who’d barged in here. A thin trickle of blood leaked from a hole in his forehead, where Yusuf—from the look of his arms still outstretched and holding the gun—had shot him between the eyes, and he’d crumpled to the floor.

Xin tittered away from the body and screamed.

19

OBSERVATION EFFECT

The AC had gone on the fritz one weekend early in our days here and my Quantum Mechanics for Dumbasses tutoring. The room had smelled of us—of sweat, and spit, and musk. Yusuf had hopped off the bed with its sweat-slicked sheets and scooped up a stray T-shirt to wipe the pearly beads from the hair that trailed down his stomach. The lamp on his bedside table had turned the room into a kids’ shadow puppet theater, projecting a huge version of him onto the ceiling.

“You’re telling me that if we leave this room and shut the door and there’s no one looking at this…” I’d glanced around. “This lamp, that it stops being a lamp?”