I ran my hands along the facets of the Envisioner like I was trying to concentrate. Really, I was nervous and killing time.

Sure, I’d seen Figueiredo sending things to other universes and I knew they’d arrived intact. I mean, I was touching proof of that now. In the footage, Figueiredo’s hands sometimes crossed the gateways he created, and his skin didn’t bubble, or burn, or anything. What I was about to do was possible and technically safe. But I gave Yusuf shit about that technically word before. Technically means I’ll accidentally gate us to the bottom of an ocean.

This or watch Yusuf die here, then throw myself at the security guards until they snuff me out too.

I closed my eyes and felt for a thread that seemed so close it almost crossed this universe at this exact moment. I tested the string with my mind and its tension felt familiar, somehow—add this to the growing list of shit I can’t explain. I knew I had to open a gateway to someplace similar, with breathable air, with gravity that wouldn’t rip us to confetti when we stepped through. The thread felt right as I tried to steady my breathing, wrestling myself down from a panic attack.

I thought of my mom. I know that sounds weird. Genesis pushed me to go to a couple group therapy sessions after my mom had died, the sight of her gray and frail, and the oxygen tube snaking from her nostrils following me when I closed my eyes. “Don’t remember them as they died. Remember them as they lived,” the counselor had said between sobs and sniffles from us griefbags. We’d been in my mom’s home—the house where I grew up in South Boston—and the home hospice nurse came to get me from the kitchen where I’d been making coffee. It’s time. I’d waited by my mom’s bedside for hours and talked to her, trying hard not to be a mess but mostly failing. My mom had looked at me as her last breaths rattled through her and told me, “It’s okay, querido.” Even when she was dying, she was more concerned about me, the one who’d been beyond terrible to her when I was a kid and had spent years and years trying to be better.

I knew she’d fought as hard as she could and that it’s okay had been for her, too. Sometimes you have to give in and let whatever’s going to happen just happen. And maybe there’s some peace in surrender.

I tried to borrow a little bit of her strength whenever I was making myself sick over something stupid. Or wallowing about how life was sprinting past me all because I wasn’t who I’d thought I’d be by now.