Maybe you’re getting annoyed with me and wondering why, now that I had free access to an Envisioner, I wasn’t just connecting to it and changing the future into whatever I wanted. I could trap Kaori and Figueiredo here, or have them explode in confetti, or melt the snow and let the wolf pack frolic in their tropical paradise again, or something.

The simple answer is that I didn’t know what would happen.

Saving Yusuf and altering the world back home was an accident. Kaori wanted to pin all this blame on me for the asteroid that was headed to Earth or whatever else, but I had no idea what I was doing. Once I knew that unnaturally changing the events of the future could throw the whole world and maybe the universe out of whack, I couldn’t do it. Even if it would benefit me. I had a choice. What would happen to everyone was now my responsibility.

Besides, changing things would make me the monster that she’s convinced I am.

*   *   *

The training montage of me working with the Envisioner is pretty boring. Just two days of me and the machine in the airlock, with two bodyguards at my back and two more beyond the airlock doors that led to the hotel tunnels. Bowing my head and running my hands along the machine, trying to quiet my mind and feel the threads of the different universes. While at the same time, tense with the very real possibility that at any moment, Kaori and Figueiredo could pop out of the machine that I was close enough to brush my eyelashes against. Feeling for hours and hours like I was in a car skidding over the ice and not knowing if I’d crash.

Hours trickled through my hands on the machine’s facets, like when I was in a flow state in the middle of editing a doc. I’d never had uninterrupted hours with the Envisioner like this, even back in the Compound. I made sure to open portals to other universes and pop back into this one again quickly, thinking if I could light up a bunch of Envisioners throughout the network, I could hide my tracks.

I may have been still recovering from getting my head knocked around with the way, for the first time, it felt like the machine had a personality. Something a little fierce or impatient, like a dog I had to soothe and gain its trust. I sucked in deep breaths to douse the fire in my gut because just about anyone I know would tell you that I’ve never been patient.