Guns in this world were just not a Thing. A mass-shooting in America in the early 1990s led to a nationwide ban on assault rifles that soon spread to most of the industrialized world. When the Farsight was discovered here a couple years later, the free exchange of scientific advances led to a United Nations wet dream of global cooperation. Science and diplomacy would save them all, and there was a big show of ceremonially disbanding armies and dumping weapons into plague pits that workers filled over with cement while politicians shook hands nearby.

The age of human violence was over. For a century and a half—at least until the biological warfare of the Second American Civil War—the world was a big family around a campfire, strumming the guitar and singing and advancing human rights and all that. Guns, kids learned in school, were like siege warfare or the Crusades: a cruel and barbaric part of the past that humanity was really embarrassed about. Besides, no one needed guns. Advances in synthesized food meant no one hunted with rifles anymore, not even for sport. All of this Figueiredo must’ve known, because he has a giant machine that’s connected to a million universes, including this one.

Besides all that, even though the Predictive Intelligence Bureau housed refugees, there was little security since the displaced people weren’t going to rise up against the one nation that would take them in. The security guards there weren’t exactly top brass, and I walked into the room thinking the two people who likely wanted me dead had at least been patted down.

We were also all thinking about Kaori and Figueiredo as just two people—geniuses, sure, but still contained and way outnumbered—and not the forces of nature that they really are.

Got it? Back to just before the snowstorm of glass that’s still spinning out in slo-mo.

Figueiredo whipped his arm from behind his back with the muscled grace of a gymnast on the rings. Kaori shifted just ever-so-slightly to her right, her hair swaying, out of the path of a pink blast of light from his gun. My mouth fell open into a drawn out oh, fuuuuuuuuuuuu—

Cue the glass speeding up into real time and me trying to dive out of the way.

What I’m saying is: yeah, I really wish they’d checked Kaori and Figueiredo for weapons, too.

*   *   *

I cracked my head on the ground. The pain was so bright that I swore I’d been struck by lightning.