“We can’t keep doing this,” Yusuf said.

I could barely hear the tired puff of his voice even though he was inches from me on the narrow bed. As much as I needed the practice, I hated putting him at the wrong end of the barrel of a gun each time we were in the Theater. And it would stop soon enough. I threaded his fingers with mine.

“I know. I’ve got a plan to get us out of here.”

“How do you figure we’ll get past security and haul it to the garage and break into a car and…” He trailed, jolting up on one elbow. “Wait. Wait. You’re joking,” he said, his giddy voice saying please tell me you’re not joking at the same time.

I mean, of course he’d figure things out before I even had to tell him. I couldn’t say much else, anyway, because I was pretty sure the room was bugged and Kaori was listening in.

“You want to go exploring?”

“Oh, fuck yes.”

So we waited for the next knock.

21

BREAKTHROUGH

I’ve got a theory about how we’re even in this mess.

Sure, it’s based on one of the marker-board The Alternate World plotlines from one of my Footage Farm coworkers, but let’s call it collaboration instead of plagiarism.

In all the footage from Figueiredo’s universe that we’d seen, there seemed to be a giant patch of time missing. Unless it didn’t exist.

We called his early journals—the ones of him blabbing into his camera in his basement lab—the Basement Records. Creative, I know. In the videos, Figueiredo was gray and full-faced. He looked both older and younger, minus the lines by his eyes, and with the rounder face of someone who’d physically given up around middle age. We had hundreds of hours of him scribbling equations and explaining them to the camera, and welding panels of gray metal to other panels of gray metal in a showering, glowing rain all over his basement lab. Then he tested little gray machines that had a habit of sparking fires, sending him running around with a fire extinguisher and whooping like a goofball scientist on a kids’ show. Hey kids, sometimes when you shatter the barriers between realities, you can make a mess! Remember to get your parents’ permission first.

Then Tiago showed up in the Basement Records and started helping Figueiredo, who then completed what must’ve been his prototype Envisioner. They flicked on the machine and ran some tests that me and the others didn’t understand, and they must’ve worked with how much Tiago and Figueiredo celebrated. All leading up to a kiss, bumbling in front of the machine and suddenly shy, after cresting some mountain between them that they’d been slogging up for weeks.