“You can’t leave,” he said, tipping his head a little, like obviously. His widow’s peak of cropped hair pointed to the furrow between his eyebrows. “Not at least until you help me get Rui back.”

“Wait. What? He’s—he’s dead, Hassan. What do you want me to do?”

He flicked his hand at the mess of wires and the hunk of rock behind him. “I’ve made some improvements to the Farsight. You’d be amazed at what you can do when you’re stuck in a museum in a quarantined nation. Living off grief and boredom.”

The machine behind him pulsed with light from deep inside its crystal form. If the Envisioner was a spider, this was some type of enormous frozen jellyfish, luring with delicate, icy lights before it stung.

“Don’t tell me you made a time machine,” I said.

He shrugged. He and Kaori really did have that detached boredom for everyone around them down pat. “Not really. It’s more a navigation device. Once you connect us to another universe and we step through, we will use it to find a specific point in this universe’s greater landscape of simultaneous space-time before Rui got sick. We gate to that point, retrieve Rui, and then we bring him back here to the present where he belongs, with me. At which point, you’re free to leave.”

“Sounds so easy,” I said. “I bet you have every possible universe-ending paradox all worked out.”

“Time is one continuous, entangled moment,” he said, waving me off. “The multiverse is resilient. You being here is proof.”

I flexed against the duct tape again, to keep from screaming. Still no budge. Just the dizzy spins of my head thanks to Figueiredo’s fists and the claustrophobia of my arms clamped down at my sides.

“How will that even work?”

“I’ve run the necessary simulations. There are still some things, though, I haven’t figured out. About you and Dr. Figueiredo. How does your connection to the machine work, exactly?” he asked, poking at the blood-spotted bandages on the table beside me. “Blood? It can’t be just genetic. Rui never could access the machine’s restricted functions. And his hair, and dust from his skin, was all over our house. His pillows. I can still smell him there. I grew a patch of his skin and grafted it to my palm, but I still couldn’t interface.”

Jesus. He stank of sweat and grief as he stared down at one hand. With the bare floors and walls of whatever basement lab we were in, with Hassan’s distant eyes—we could’ve been in Figueiredo’s first lab from his early footage. History couldn’t stop repeating itself. Just me and Yusuf jogging the track outside the Compound, never really going anywhere.

And I was probably going to die here, my body divided up into little slides all over this doomsday basement lab.