I hauled myself up and he brushed crusted chunks of snow off Rui’s shirt. My T-shirt was underneath and I was looking forward to tossing my blood-spotted souvenir from Hassan’s house, but I needed all the warmth I could get.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Sorry I couldn’t find us a beach planet.”

“It’s fine. I burn easily.”

The snow burned my bare shins. I thought we could spare him the pain, Kaori said, her steeped-tea eyes the softest I’d ever seen them. I don’t think so. I’ll take the pain if I have to, not him.

“Sorry Hassan turned out to be a psycho. I assume he wanted to slice you up and see how you connect to the Envisioner?”

“Something like that.”

“What was that thing in the lab?”

“Time machine to get Rui back. I think I was supposed to be the battery?”

“No. No way.” He paused, shivering. “If we’re being honest, I’m curious to see if that would’ve worked.”

“If we’re being honest, you probably shouldn’t’ve told me that.”

He grimaced.

I circled back to the Envisioner and tried to find us another Earth to land on. But when I touched its surface, all my shaking hands felt was the frozen, hard shell. I was too cold, with my head still on spin-cycle from Figueiredo’s fists, to be able to reach out and find the threads. The threads that I could see were spun of clouds. Fluffy and slipping through my fingers when I tried to hold on. Whatever anti-concussion meds Hassan had pumped me with were taking their sweet fucking time.

We crunched through the snow to the open bay door and stepped out. Under the pale blue sky, a featureless plain stretched all around us, white like the cotton balls my mom glued to constructed paper during craft time with me when I was a kid. Yusuf shivered in his long pants and T-shirt, framed against the whiteness like a painting in a gallery. The wind whirled small cyclones of flakes from the top of the packed snow. Down the plain—two miles away? Ten?—I could just make out a smudge of brown that maybe was a building, but could’ve been a pile of dirty snow. I grunted against another arctic gale and pressed my arms in close.

“There might be people down there,” I said, pointing at the distant shapes.

When he said nothing, I turned to find him staring off into the pale sky, where I noticed for the first time that the hazy giant marble of the Earth looked down over us.

“Jesus,” I breathed. “No way. We’re… we’re not.”

“We’re on the moon.”

*   *   *