When really, we just fell like we tripped backwards out of an open window—just an instant of weightlessness, and then we landed on our backs on the floor. Well, me on my back. Yusuf landed on my chest with all his weight on me. Most of it on my balls. The glowing circle of the gateway zipped closed as soon as we popped through.

Yusuf rolled off me and I tried to wheeze in air against the sparks flying across my eyes. Except for the crash landing, I felt fine. Overhead, what looked like a greenhouse roof of giant panes of glass and copper girders crowned whatever building we’d landed in. He leaned over on his thighs and peeked down at me, his brown eyes goofy and dancing.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” I grunted, still on my back. Letting myself feel, for a second, the sugar-rush of giddiness because I’d actually saved us. Hopefully.

“It worked,” he said. “We’re here. Wherever here is, exactly. I think we’re in… in… an airport? I had this theory that we’d annihilate ourselves once we touched ground here. Like, antiparticles colliding. But so far so good.”

“Yeah. And I’m very glad you didn’t share that idea with me beforehand.”

I’d seen the doubt in his eyes every now and then about the machine, like even after all he’d seen some part of him thought that all this junk about alternate universes was a hoax. That you could theorize about different realities all you wanted, but if you couldn’t get to them or otherwise prove that they were there, the theories didn’t mean a ton.

“Where exactly did you send us?” he asked, squinting as he drank in the world around him.

“I’m not really sure. Just through the Envisioner to the closest universe that I could feel.”

I rolled over and hauled myself to my feet. We stood in a wide indoor courtyard by this universe’s Envisioner, its same hulking spidery shape casting a shadow across the industrial carpet floor of beige and burnt orange triangles. A low pool made of some clear material with jets of water spurting in timed helix patterns gurgled a ways off, in the center of the courtyard, past clusters of brown couches and waiting room chairs. Little rooms aglow with gold light ringed the courtyard. Overhead, deep copper-hued catwalks crisscrossed the air that opened multiple stories up to the greenhouse roof. Recessed lighting in the beams cast a haze of gold onto the glass, like the starry night sky beyond was drizzled with honey.