I had no idea how to tell time as we walked with the wind whipping our blanket capes behind us. Maybe ten minutes passed, maybe an hour—convulsing with shivers and trying not to chip my teeth with their rattling—when I realized we were going to die here. The thought came on like a chill, at first, then a burn. Then a numbness that crept up from my legs and around my whole body. A storm dumped swan-feather snowflakes around us. Someone would find our frozen, intertwined bodies months or years from now. I’d survived an overdose and had woken up connected to tubes and with cracked ribs from puking so much. Me and Yusuf had jumped from universe to universe, dodging bullets and ray-gun blasts, and possibly homicidal versions of ourselves, and now we were going to fall into the snow and hold each other while the clouded-over Earth looked down at us, like, big fucking deal.

We stopped a few times so I could blow hot breath across Yusuf’s reddening hands and rub the life back into them. The chill was starting to seep in through my eyes and numb my brain, leaving me too cold to even panic. Settling down and just taking a nap wouldn’t be bad, my body wanted to tell me. It wouldn’t hurt for much longer.

“We’re almost there,” he chattered. “We gotta keep going.”

My sweet, brilliant idiot lying to me. The dome down the plain seemed anchored at the exact same distance, no matter how far we walked towards it. I thought about turning around and trying the Envisioner again but with my numb hands, I knew it wouldn’t work.

The voice in my head started when I ducked against an arctic gale. You can’t run forever. You need a plan. One foot, then the next crunching through the snow. You have to kill them. Or at least him, so Kaori can’t follow you. The voice in my head was Figueiredo’s, or maybe it was mine. They sounded the same, now—the Storyteller voice gone hoarse after a night of yelling on the dancefloor and sucking on cigarettes. The end of the word you stretched out into a long moan of ooooo. Then it folded into a blaring mmmmm that seemed to grow louder and louder as I kept my face down against the cold.

“Hayes, someone’s coming.”

My neck creaked towards the gray blur streaking towards us. When it got closer, I saw that it was someone with insect-like goggles and a thick, fur-lined coat plowing over the snow on an all-terrain vehicle. We froze in our tracks. The person rolled to a stop a few feet away and pulled up their goggles to get a good look.

“We saw the fire,” the person said, some guy best I could tell by the stubble on his face. “How’d you get all the way out here with no gear?”