In the kitchen we heard Hassan fill a glass of water and glug it down. He was being more generous than I probably would be if I met a guy who was wearing my dead husband’s face and another one who was wearing mine. At the same time, if he could hurt Rui by turning him into a research paper subject, I didn’t want to find out what he’d have no problem doing to us.

When Hassan came back, he apologized, saying he didn’t get to talk about what had happened much. Enough of the past for the night, what about me and Yusuf? Hassan did grow up in a world completely shaped by evidence of multiple universes, which seemed to explain how unimpressed he was about meeting us. He even had a book filled with hypothesized histories of Figueiredo’s world on the coffee table by us, the touch-screen pages complete with video stills from footage historians pulled off the Farsight.

Around here was when I spaced out. I dimly heard Yusuf talking about how I seemed to be able to interact with the Envisioner like Figueiredo had. He mentioned Kaori as the head of our Predictive Intelligence Bureau-like organization, and how she probably wanted to slice me up and figure out how I connected to the machine, leading us to jailbreak out of our universe. He stumbled over Kaori’s name like the word was hot on his tongue. Give me a break for not jumping in here with actually she wanted me to kill you or use my freaky gift to change the past and revert our universe back to the one where you died in the attack, which is apparently what should’ve happened. All in one day, I’d saved us from dying, had ripped a hole through universes, and had heard the story of how my alternate, saintly self had died while trying to save others, when I would’ve barricaded myself in a grocery store and waited out a plague while stuffing my face with potato chips. I let the two of them talk physics while I, outnumbered, leaned back on the couch under a blanket and watched the shadow the lamp cast on the wall blur in my eyes. They swapped theories about how it might be the same year on Earth in both our universes, but maybe the nature of the multiverse made room for spontaneous Big Bangs or finite universes tucked within a greater, infinite space. And all the Envisioners or Farsights or whatever you wanted to call them—it was like they sang to each other. They were all networked together across the multiverse, with a little part of each one lighting up once someone in one universe asks it a question.