If we all had to be in our original universes for whatever changes we wished on each other to actually take hold, that meant that me and Yusuf could never go home again.

Something colder than our trek through the snow crept into me. Yusuf rustled the sheets, the sound as faint as the falling snow outside. Neither of us could find sleep. I could tell he was wrestling with something, but I couldn’t always be the one to tease it out, as much as I wanted to. I couldn’t push. I needed him to let me in, when he was ready. I ran a thumb over one of his eyebrows.

“We can’t run forever,” he said.

“I know.” I inched closer, his breath sweeping over my bare skin. “We have to stop them.”

“Yeah.”

Don’t say it. Don’t say it. He closed his eyes. Don’t say we have to kill them because that’s not the kind of thing that you can just drop before bed. The chilly dread frosted over me, even through the piles of down blankets.

After a while, he turned away from me. He was so still that he must’ve gotten some sleep. I stayed awake most of the night and watched the edges of the giant dome that separated us from space bloom with the pink of a fake sunrise.

*   *   *

Bitterness cut through the fog in my brain. The cappuccino that Logan made for me the next morning at the bar, while Riz led the wolf pack through a yoga session in the middle of the ring of mattresses, helped me melt the doubt that had frozen in my chest last night.

Step one in my plan—I wouldn’t exactly call it a master plan because I could hear Genesis’s tinkling laugh like, oh, honey—was to get allies. Even with Yusuf in my corner, Kaori and Figueiredo had the brains and god knew what other tricks. If we couldn’t outsmart them, maybe we could outman them.

Logan wiped down the bar top with a rag. I still wasn’t sure what to make of him. He was layered—even if most of those layers were gross—but he was trying to make their lives here as comfortable as he possibly could.

“I’m trying to keep them busy and active,” he said, nodding to the group, wavering in their tree pose. “Yoga. Scavenger hunts around the hotel. Cooking lessons. It keeps the cabin fever at bay for a while.”

“Good idea.”