That didn’t matter when I needed to take Yusuf far, far away from here. To find some safe place where Figueiredo couldn’t even drop in. I could almost feel the thread of some distant safe harbor for an instant before it slipped out of my hands. Some gold note like sunlight on my face and warm, pink sand under my bare feet, before it vanished away again.

Figueiredo was a sour note, a clangy minor chord through all this that made me stop, chug some water, and let the guys watching my back take a break. I’d seen footage of him opening gateways into other universes as easily as twisting a doorknob and dropping Envisioners in. He could open doorways to anywhere he wanted instead of just connecting to another Envisioner that was already there, which—as far as I could tell by flying by the seat of my pants—was what I could do. When I met him and Kaori in the interrogation room in Hassan’s universe, they seemingly had no idea how I was able to even jump from my universe in the first place. I could do what other versions of me couldn’t, even if I wasn’t as strong as Figueiredo.

Yet.

He wasn’t better than me, as much as he sneered that I didn’t deserve this link to the machine. He fucked with entire universes just to get whatever he wanted and yet I was the selfish one? He would chase me across the multiverse until he trapped me and made me kill Yusuf. And everything came so easily to him—his brains, his staff falling all over themselves for him, his ease at messing with hundreds and hundreds of universes, and all I was asking for was to stay alive with the man I loved.

“Uh, Hayes?” one of the security guards asked.

I opened my eyes and the two guards near me winced through gritted teeth. A low scraping sound that must’ve been coming from the machine frizzed the hair at the back of my neck, with a pinching overtone that whined higher and higher. The facet under my hands almost quaked, like the tar pit of envy or anger or whatever it was that I felt towards Figueiredo could overload the machine’s systems and it would blow—vaporizing this hotel and everyone in it—if I would just let it. The minor chord in me, amplified through the machine, called to whatever trapped power was inside. Whispering, let me out. I could almost see Figueiredo’s eyes, hear his voice that, for the first time, sounded scared. This is not what the machine is for. And his little whine sounded so, so good because what the fuck did he know, after all, when both me and the machine really wanted to see how it would play out if I just held on a little longer?

“Sorry,” I mumbled, stepping back from black box.