No Kaori by the Envisioner. No other staff around—she must’ve given them the day off after the whole fleeing for your life thing. There was already talk of adding dozens more armed security posts in a wide perimeter or moving to a new location altogether. Until then, I traced the invisible thread to the glass door of Kaori’s office, finding her sitting at her desk with a cup of tea. Just like old times.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked, plopping onto the stiff-backed chair across from her desk after she waved me in.

“Not after today. You?”

“My brain won’t shut off.”

“How’s Yusuf?”

“He’s fine. Sleeping like the dead. Ouch. I didn’t mean to—jesus, given what happened…”

“What happened is he saved us.”

“I know. I had no idea he was such a crack shot. Good thing you tossed him your gun.”

Her brown eyes, ringed in gold, narrowed slightly. “What do you mean my gun?”

“You had the gun when I turned to the Envisioner. And when I looked back, he did.”

“Hayes, I never had a gun. I was watching the security footage on my tablet and trying to remotely lock doors to trap the intruders the whole time we were in the Theater.”

My throat ached from whatever brick I’d swallowed. The rough weight of it sank deeper into my gut.

“Do you have the footage from the attack?”

“I’ll pull it up.”

I scooted around the desk next to her and she pulled up the Theater security footage with me, her, and Yusuf clustered by the Envisioner before the attack. Everything about that moment was still burned into my brain—my hands on the machine, Yusuf shifting on his feet by me—since I’d been replaying it all night in my head. What didn’t make sense was how, on the screen, Yusuf held the gun and not Kaori. After a minute of tense stillness, something flashed across the screen.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Must be some dust across the camera.”

Dust, my ass. Except that exact moment was probably when I pushed at the machine—or whatever it was that I did—with my mind.

In the footage, the intruder barged in with Xin as his shield. Then Yusuf raised his arm in one fluid motion and the barrel of the gun in his hand sparked to life. But his sudden sharp-shooting didn’t make sense. I asked Kaori to show me the hallway footage from earlier that night, when she’d opened the surprise artillery closet and handed out the guns, toting one herself. In the footage she played for me, the Kaori of the past handed a gun to Yusuf and took a tablet from him instead.