Look, I didn’t blame him. We hadn’t talked about the King Yusuf thing and he was probably still embarrassed and annoyed with me. He and Hassan traded theories as I tried to add a hmm and oh, wow here and there for as long as I followed things. Something about how Hassan hadn’t been able to prove his theories about time travel, even with the Farsight. The key could be to exit a universe and then choose at what point in space-time you hop back in, like Figueiredo had likely been able to do when sending his machines. Time travel was a problem of scale and observation.

“I get it,” Yusuf said. “Like a GPS. You have to be above the thing you’re exploring to really get an accurate point-of-view.”

This was Yusuf’s sweet attempt to loop me in again with an explain-to-the-audience movie dialogue simile when he saw my blank face.

“Oh wow,” I added, uselessly.

If I was Yusuf, I would’ve grilled Hassan about every life choice he’d ever made to figure out how our lives had panned out differently. But I’m more interested in my personal history than the collective responsibility that comes with the Envisioner and blah.

They talked time while I grabbed our now-clean clothes from Hassan’s clothing sanitizer, shrugged out of Rui’s ripped jeans, T-shirt, and flannel, and tried to pull myself back together.

*   *   *

The ceiling of Hassan’s living room was the white of untouched snow. I waited until Yusuf was asleep next to me on the couch, when I whispered his name and he didn’t answer. Sneaking out when I was a kid both gave my mom mild heart attacks and taught me how to move like a whisper, dodging creaky floorboards and hopping in and out of shadows. I left the ground-floor window in Hassan’s bathroom open a crack so I could climb back in when I was done exploring without having to fiddle with the thumbprint-coded lock of his front door.

Out the front door, over the front porch and down the steps with Hassan’s work security badge in my pocket, wearing his gray lab coat that I borrowed from the hook by the door. Over the dew-drenched grass towards the Predictive Intelligence Bureau building in the distance, lit up on the hill like the beating heart of a synth. Quick and quiet over the grass and through a side door with Hassan’s badge.

The Farsight was easy to find in the main courtyard of the building, which glowed like the crystal spire-filled center of the city. Already the sight of the faceted spider sent a gurgle through my guts. I steeled myself, pressed my hands to the cool edges of the machine, and crammed my eyes shut, hoping that I could feel the other Envisioners out there.

“What should I do?” I asked that machine.