Back at margarita club, that would’ve killed. She didn’t even blink.

“Thanks. Sorry it took so long to find you.”

“Yeah. It looks like you couldn’t do it on your own.”

I bobbed my chin at Figueiredo, who was still leaving scorch marks on the floor behind her. For just a second, a dark flash hit her eyes until her cool mask of gold slid back into place.

“A temporary colleague. Seeing as how Yusuf abandoned his post.”

“How’d you get here?”

“How’d you get here?”

Figueiredo lunged forward, pounding on the divider and screaming something I couldn’t understand, his spit flecking the glass. I didn’t need a translator to tell me that the way he pointed and screamed roughly meant this is your fault. I only jerked a little, even as my pulse sprinted so hard that I could feel it in my eyes.

Kaori snapped something at him in his language and he pushed away from the glass and punched the back wall. So—what the actual fuck—she’d learned his language in the past two days Yusuf and I had been gone, or she’d known it all along.

In the woods, during the hornet attack, we’d flailed at the bugs all around us and barreled through the trees, swatting branches and tripping over roots. When I’d looked down, hornets had been stuck to my shorts. “Hornets bite so they can get a better grip to sting you a bunch of times,” my friend’s dad had told me when he’d cleaned our wounds.

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“I am the one person—the one person—who is thinking clearly.”

“He killed my husband, Nakamori,” Figueiredo snapped in a thick accent. “He will fix this. He—he does not deserve all that I built… this existence. This face. This genome.”

“I didn’t kill anyone. Please fuck all the way off.”

“Gentlemen, let’s stop with the dick-swinging.” Kaori cast barbed glares at us. “Alright. Here’s how we fix things. Hayes, you and Yusuf are returning with us—”

“The hell we are.”

“—to our home universe where you’ll connect with the machine and set the paths right. We’re too far away, here, for the ripples to hit and everyone has to be in their original vector in the multiverse because—”

“Adjacent realities seek a zero-sum,” I said. “I got it.”

Kaori’s smile stung. “You’ve been studying?”

“I’m a quick learner.”

“Clearly not. Look where we are.”

“Why am I even here, Kaori? I’m digging the cat-and-mouse thing we have going on, but you know I’m not going to let Yusuf die. Not to mention I don’t even understand how I can change the past with the Envisioner.”