No time to wait for anyone else. Yusuf slammed one of the buttons on the control panel by the door and it creaked—achingly slow—open. We crammed through before the door even widened all the way and soon he was whipping around—slamming buttons and sputtering how do we lock it, how do we keep them out, as the door rolled closed. The armored guys were already at the door and screaming we’ve got them!

“Okay,” Yusuf heaved. “This is an airlock. The only way to keep the inner door to the hotel locked is to open the outer door. Just a crack.” He jerked his thumb to the thick bay door that led out to the moon and our suffocating, oxygen-less death. “Just a tiny crack. But Hayes, you need to move. You need to be fast.”

My hands were numb. “Okay,” I said. Then again, to try to convince myself. “Okay.”

The surge of my heart in my ears cranked the sound on everything else way down. The muffled, distant noise of the wolf pack shouting as the armored men outside fired bullets into the shatterproof glass window. Yusuf tapped around at a few panels and the outer door snuck open—such a tiny space that I couldn’t even see it—but the angry red lights that ringed the bay door flicked on. A sign above the inner door flashed to life. Airlock engaged.

As tiny as it was, the gap in the bay door was sucking the room of breathable air, I knew. My hands flew to the machine and I begged it, get us out of here.

The gateway glimmered open beneath my hands, offering a glimpse of a white room—always white, always gleaming with metal and windows, and pressed lab coats—of some other research facility in some other universe. I widened the gate for the guys to bolt through until it was just me and Yusuf in the airlock, my skin already cold from the venting air, with lava flowing under the surface. The machine wanted me to keep holding on. To crank the frequency of the sound that was rattling both between my ribs and deep beneath the gunmetal casing way up—to test the limits of the machine’s power. Letting us jump to safety through the open gateway just before the whole thing smashed apart, taking Kaori and Figueiredo, the whole hotel, and probably half the moon along with it.

“We need to go!” Yusuf yelled over the spray of bullets on glass.

Maybe I was looking for it, but some softness in his eyes, in the middle of all this, seemed to give me permission to do what I had to.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll come back for the other guys.”

He knew to lie. “Yeah.”