My heartbeat soared at the sides of my neck. I flashed back to opening my eyes after I’d crumpled to the floor of the Theater. The vacant blue stare of the dead man on the gleaming white tiles.

“You okay?” she asked. “You look green.”

“Yeah.”

“I can play it again?”

“No, I’m good.”

“We had a riot here, just like in Figueiredo’s universe. History does tend to repeat itself.”

“I guess.”

Only when I was out of the Compound and onto the painted green concrete outside did I let my brain form the thoughts of what I’d known, somehow, since the Envisioner crackled under my hands. The machine showed me that Yusuf would die in the attack, but I changed it. With all the threads, with all the possibilities of what would happen the instant that the man in black with the gun burst through the Theater door, I flung us over into another possibility. I hadn’t just changed the future events by making a gun appear in Yusuf’s hand. I’d somehow changed the recent past so that what I’d wanted to happen—what I’d willed the Envisioner to make happen—would be what happened all along.

My head was crammed with hypotheticals and parallel threads and fucked tenses. Of course all that was batshit crazy. As crazy as an alternate version of myself creating a magic machine and sending it on over from another universe.

Proof. I needed proof.

*   *   *

Honestly, the weirdest part of what had happened was when I turned around on the green concrete before even stepping foot into my house to head back to the empty Footage Farm and watch the video of the riot in Figueiredo’s universe. Kaori’s little history repeats itself ditty wasn’t some off-hand comment. She didn’t do off-hand. She was telling me, check Figueiredo’s footage, you dolt.

She’s so brilliant it’s scary, looking back now.

I get how people like Yusuf and the others are brilliant on, like, a theoretical or experimental level—their brains can spin calculations or imagine universes with ten dimensions folded in on each other. To Kaori, this entire world is her lab and all of us are just variables she can tinker with in her experiments. She sees our weaknesses and histories—I can play on his vanity issues here or her mommy issues there—and knows how to mold us. How to use her scalpel to splice in the right scenes in the film reel.

I followed her thread to the farm, where I played the footage from Figueiredo’s riot. I’d seen it a million times before. Except this time, the man in black pulled a gun and shot Tiago dead.

*   *   *