Yusuf was burning miles on the treadmill in the basement fitness center after saying he needed to clear his head. He’d scrounged up a pair of shorts and a T-shirt from one of the guys. If we had any hope of getting out of here alive, we needed his brain. Besides, as much of a help as he was dealing with mad scientist Hassan, navigating imploding gay relationship dynamics was more my wheelhouse. I was happy to do the recon work.

I tried not to stare at Logan while he steamed milk for more cappuccinos for the guys. Seeing Figueiredo and Rui had prepared me for a kind of curious distance from other versions of myself. I had to stop thinking they were all different versions of me. Me with a different haircut. Me with a mustache in a palette-swapped crowd of other me’s. Because however this universe existed—if each one was created at the same time or if they split apart at different points—we were different people.

For the first time, I was thankful for my all-but-ignored docs that I’d blown my money on, for the watch parties that Genesis had hosted at a popup club where I’d bought cheap beer for everyone. I watched Logan’s pulled-tight face and his eyes that drank in the sights of the lean bodies of the men who he probably thought, on some level, belonged to him. Success, and ego-stroking, and money had warped Logan into this person who felt he was owed something.

“I need you to get us out of here,” he said. “Even with rationing, we’ve got three, maybe four months, tops, before our food stores start to run out.”

Riz’s voice floated over to us. Now we move to corpse pose. We’re going to stay here a while. Just breathe.

“Do the others know anything?”

“Joel. And Riz has some inklings.”

“We’ve got people tailing us who want us dead,” I said after pulling on my cappuccino. “Help me with them and I’ll drop you off in whatever Goldilocks universe you want.”

“You’ve got a deal.”

He clinked my mug with his champagne flute of vivid orange mimosa.

Kaori and Figueiredo had taken two days to find me and Yusuf in the last universe. Less than that, really, because maybe they never would’ve found us if I hadn’t snuck out of the house and used the Farsight alone at the Predictive Intelligence Bureau. I’d only ever used my mojo on the Envisioner to emergency eject out of one universe and into the nearest one. And that had already almost killed us once. I needed time to practice with the machine and see if I could hone whatever connected me to it. Practice, meaning touching the machine and connecting to it over and over again—basically lighting up the whole Envisioner network and flicking on a big HERE WE ARE for Figueiredo to see.