I left Hassan outside with his observations and crept onto the couch beside Yusuf. A line ran across his forehead above the thick arches of his eyebrows, frowning even in sleep. The three-day stubble painted a dark shadow along his face. If he heard anything, he pretended to be asleep. Are you awake? I wanted to whisper. Invalid query.

The box told me that he had to die to save our world, but fuck that. We’d stay here, forever. I would keep this secret even if it rotted me from the inside out because I would launch a million asteroids into a million worlds just to keep him safe.

*   *   *

Here’s some math for you, courtesy of Hassan.

Let’s say there are a hundred Envisioners bobbing around the multiverse. There are likely many times that, but he didn’t want to overwhelm my tiny mind with too many big numbers. Thirty of those hundred are free-floating through space. Another thirty are on an Earth but otherwise undiscovered or inaccessible—lodged in an underwater crater, buried miles under glacial ice, floating like a crouton in the French onion soup of the interior of a volcano. Ten landed in universes that are uninhabited for one reason or another—wonky physics or still too early in their histories to support life. Thirty to go. Let’s say another ten were discovered but the cultures who found them ended up accidentally obliterating their planets. Now that’s twenty Envisioners actively in use throughout the multiverse. And each time someone uses one, it pings the whole network—most importantly the Mother of All All-Eyes sitting in Figueiredo’s office.

How long, really, would it take Figueiredo with all his brainpower and resources and technology to poke around twenty Earths and sniff us out? Not that long, apparently. And much less time if he asked for help.

*   *   *

We whizzed over the lawn in Hassan’s little electric golf cart the next morning, the three of us like coworkers carpooling to the Predictive Intelligence Bureau. I was wearing one of Rui’s short-sleeved white collared shirts with huge black polka dots over my T-shirt and shorts. I know “borrowing” Rui’s clothes again was a touch mean, but hey, Hassan was a dick to me last night and I’d chirped something at him that morning about wanting to dress business-casual for the job. Yusuf didn’t seem to sense the whiff of tension between me and his alternate self.

In Hassan’s office, the two of them hovered by his computer, which projected 3D models of particles and equations into the air, while I breezed to a corner bookshelf like I was banished to the kids’ table with a box of crayons. I plucked out a landscape photography book and was just settling down into a cushioned chair when a whirring shriek hit so hard it could’ve shattered the windows of Hassan’s office.