In that second, I knew, you monster, Hayes. He’s doing all this because he thinks he’s saving you from them. I pushed at the machine with my mind—almost the same way as the very first time that started this whole mess—now with more control instead of blind panic. Gently, coaxing the Envisioner that shivered beneath my hands like a raging horse to dial back down from a supernova to something that the airlock doors could hold. This had to happen. I didn’t want to light the fuse—my body vibrating like a plucked string—but they were forcing my hand.

Blow.

I grabbed Yusuf and we jumped through the Envisioner’s glowing, circular gateway. It zipped closed behind us just as a panel from one of the airlock walls sliced through and clanged into the opposite wall of the hospital we’d landed in, if the white room surrounded by glass cubicles with prone patients hooked up to monitors was any hint. I barely looked up at the stunned, painted faces of the wolf pack and the staff in purple robes and surgical masks who screamed at us in a language I didn’t recognize. Then, whooping alarms, and guards with clear face shields and batons, and I didn’t have time for this again—to learn the rules of a new place and stick around for a few days and hope that maybe, maybe we were safe this time. What was left of the wolf pack was safe here, and the best thing I could do for everyone was get as far from them as possible.

I whipped back to the Envisioner with Yusuf’s hand tight in mine, my other hand on the machine’s facets. I opened another gateway and we jumped through to a grassy field. Through another to a bombed-out military outpost. Another, on stage at a university auditorium where we crashed the speech of a suited speaker at a podium two feet away. Faster and faster—in wild panic and barely able to suck in air until the weird calm of exhaustion weighed me. I had nothing else in the tank. Tearing through universes, farther and farther away from the train wreck of Hotel Selene and our old lives. A dozen or so gate jumps later, I could barely hear Yusuf at my side, begging, Hayes, you gotta stop, over the zipping of gateways that I slammed open and closed. One last one.

I reached out for that thread I could barely feel when I’d practiced with the Envisioner in the airlock, the one that had promised warm sun and pink sands. Kaori and Figueiredo must be ashes on the moon, I knew. We were safe and this all had to be over. I grabbed the thread, held on tight, and gated us through.