“How long can we stay here?” I asked. The funk of stale clothing and reheated food for the first time made me realize that me and Yusuf had absolutely no plan about how we were going to live.

“This is only supposed to be a temporary shelter before the refugees can find a permanent home, but some have been here for months,” Hassan said.

“There are a few empty beds over there, Hayes,” Yusuf said. I could tell he was trying to sound upbeat, but exhaustion was starting to creep into his voice too. “We can—”

“Wait,” Hassan said. He clenched his jaw and shook his head slightly, like he immediately regretted his interruption. “Come on. You can stay at my place. For a few days—until you can figure out what you’re doing. He’d kill me if I let you stay here.”

*   *   *

Turns out the he who would’ve killed Hassan for being a bad host on behalf of his entire universe is me. Or, the other me. Or—the other other me, if the first other is Figueiredo. I’ll have to include a flow chart in all of this or something.

Outside, the curving concrete and glass Predictive Intelligence Bureau building was the bow of a ship against a sea of stars. The three of us loaded into a golf cart thing that whizzed along a solar-panel track through a small meadow after Hassan told it to drive home. The ride to the staff townhouse neighborhood was less than three minutes, which we easily could’ve walked, but I guess the Farsight in this universe bred laziness. Hassan’s house looked like a weathered English cottage squished at the sides and stuck to three other townhouses. He pressed his thumb to a keypad by the doorbell and the door slid open.

He left us in the living room while he dug up some extra blankets in the bathroom closet to make up the couch for us. I watched a small space appear between Yusuf’s lips while he circled the room with its beige walls and crowded shelves of books and knickknacks, studying it like the open-air gallery we saw in Beatty. He pressed his hands on the spines of books and from a shelf picked up a tile circle with Arabic calligraphy. Ceramic pots filled with ferns and scrolling vines lined the floors and windowsills.

“Half these things I have in my flat back at home,” Yusuf said. “The other half I’ve never seen before. It’s like I’m in two places at once.”