She said something to me about just needing to pop out for a second, and when she came back it was with Yusuf and two of her lapdogs, the four of them catching up like just another normal morning-shift debrief. Meanwhile I was still toeing the ground with my hands on the Envisioner, feeling for the invisible threads that didn’t want to vibrate for me. Yusuf nodded a business-casual good morning to me like an hour ago our naked bodies weren’t all wrapped up on his bed.

“Yusuf, would you mind helping Hayes with something?” Kaori asked, as casual as if she wanted the two of us to move a planter in her office.

“Sure.”

Then, like a Renaissance painting, I stood by the faceted spider of the Envisioner with Yusuf at my side, and Kaori across from us with her backup, when she reached to the small of her back, pulled out a gun, and leveled it at Yusuf’s head.

“What the fuck, Kaori?” I snapped.

Yusuf just kind of tipped his head like a dog saying, huh?

“Would somebody like to tell me what’s going on here?” he asked with more calm than I’ve ever felt in my life.

“Sorry, Yusuf,” she said, over the murmurs of her staff behind her. “I know this is abrupt. I’m just trying to inspire Hayes to do me a solid here and avoid an apocalypse.”

“Hayes?” Yusuf asked.

“Nutshell: I changed the future with the Envisioner or something, and now a plague is wiping out a few billion people in a year.”

“Huh,” he breathed.

“Hayes said he only felt inspired enough when there was a gun pointed at you yesterday,” she said, almost bored, now, “so here we are.”

“I’d really like if you pointed that away from me, Kaori,” Yusuf said.

“Don’t worry, there is no way she’s actually going to shoot you,” I said, camouflaging the panic with fake cool.

“I would prefer not to,” she said, “but you are absolutely wrong in assuming that I won’t kill one man to save billions.”

“I thought we were friends,” I said.

“If we were, then you’d understand why I have to do this.”

I faced away from them, back to the machine, and squeezed my eyes shut. Trying to drown out the fuck fuck oh jesus fuck voice that wouldn’t shut up. Willing for a spark, for anything, but the thing only felt dead under my palms.

“I can’t,” I said, turning back to them. “Yesterday I could feel the machine, like it was alive. Now it… it’s just a machine.”

Hands still outstretched, Kaori shifted the gun just a few inches to the right and squeezed the trigger, shooting one of the big screens that ringed the Theater. The noise slammed me back into myself, away from the whitewater rapids of panic.