Did I mention the guns?

Logan had been filming a military flick, and along with the cast, the first shuttle from Earth had dumped a bunch of supplies on Luna One. Sewing machines for the costumers—which the pack had used to Frankenstein together some winter gear—lighting equipment, more food, and a crate loaded with enough guns to arm a militia. Sure, most of the ammo was blanks for filming, but the studio’s insurance company wouldn’t let the production film off-world without a security detail. Four of the wolf pack were hired guns packing actual heat. Plus, Yusuf still had Chekhov’s ray-gun lifted from Figueiredo in our hotel room, stashed in one of the nightstand drawers.

The four security guards and two others had ridden off to drag the Envisioner back here from the abandoned building that me and Yusuf had bombed into. It didn’t take a whole lot of convincing, Logan told me, since the box was their only shot off this ice cube. They’d hauled the Envisioner down a freight elevator and into the underbelly of the Hotel Selene.

Logan led me, Yusuf, and Riz past the tapestries of the lobby and into gray tunnels to the freight airlock. Down a dim hallway that was lit with red overhead safety lights, a tunnel from purgatory into hell. The hallway ended at a thick set of metal double doors to the left of a huge window that looked into the steel box of the airlock, where the Envisioner waited for me. The door set in the airlock’s far wall was ringed in more red lights and led out to the suffocating surface of the moon. A few gauges, switches, and a row of spacesuits were the only colors in the gray cave of my workroom.

“That’s the thing?” Logan asked.

“That’s it,” I said.

“So it… predicts? It’ll tell you what I’m gonna say next?”

“Something like that.”

“Then what the hell does that say about free will?”

“Yusuf, you wanna take that?”

“Not really.”

Logan scratched absently at one front tooth. “Remind me,” he said to Riz, “to turn this into a screenplay when we’re outta here.”

Yusuf warmed up a bit to all of us being here in the bowels of the hotel, seeing as how it was mostly his plan. I’d have two armed guards in the airlock at my back the whole time, with two more beyond the doors that led back into the hotel. Four guards were ready to shoot at Kaori and Figueiredo or whoever else dropped unannounced through the machine and all I had to do was run through one door and we could vent the airlock out to space.

All our plans and preparations, even a fire drill when we rehearsed how long it would take the doors to the hotel hallway to open and the guards to rush in as my backup.