“Please,” I chattered. “We’re freezing. Can you get us outta here?”

“Yeah.” He hopped off the ATV and I saw for the first time that he was dragging some improvised cargo sled that looked like it was made from a door and some canvas and ropes behind his beat-up three-wheeler. “It’s five klicks to the hotel. Hang on. I’ll get us there as fast as I can.”

Me and Yusuf clambered onto the sled and laid down. The guy tucked blankets all around us with surprising tenderness before he jumped back onto his ATV and darted over the snow.

Yusuf squeezed his eyes shut. But we were together. His breath was on my face and I was whispering into his ear over and over again, against the drone of the ATV engine. We’re safe. We actually did it.

Speeding across the snow on the improvised sled felt like we were falling sideways the whole time. The three-wheeler engine growled a minor chord, a long, drawn-out ohhhh. Owe. You owe it to him.

I held on to as much warmth as I could, shivering under the blankets until the Hotel Selene drifted into view.

*   *   *

Our goggled, ATV-riding savior’s name was Riz. He puttered his ATV to a stop in the valet semi-circle in front of the hotel by a fleet of a dozen or so others, along with golf carts and things that looked like souped-up camera dollies. Me and Yusuf shifted up in the sled to eye our surroundings. Nearby, frozen plumes of water burst out of a marble fountain and hovered in the air. The domed, terra-cotta colored hotel rose three stories out of the white blanket of the snow, the huge sign with Hotel Selene in looping script dim against the darkening sky. A woman in a toga lounged on the final e in Selene, the letter stylized as a crescent moon. Beyond the tall glass doors of the hotel, a lobby of marble and rich silk glowed with warmth, all of this under the half-Earth that lingered overhead.

None of this looked like it belonged here.

The pillowcase wrapped around Yusuf’s face slipped off in the wind. I pulled mine off too, letting the cold air sear my lungs.

“Joel?” Riz asked, looking to Yusuf. “Are you back already? And where’s Niall and Jerome?” Then he looked at me, and I swear I could see the exclamation point bouncing off his head as recognition shifted into huh?

I sighed. Here goes. Soon, I’d meet the version of myself in this universe who was an axe murderer or anti-vaxxer guru fraud or something. “Take me to the other me and we’ll explain everything.”