I thought of Genesis a lot, that first night my thrumming body wouldn’t let me sleep. In my delirium of exhaustion, we were getting brunch some Sunday and swapping stories about our Saturday nights. She’d killed herself for what she believed in. One life, and it was her own. I’d blown up an army. I could see her leaning back and playing with the paper napkin on the table, cracking, You always have to one-up me, don’t you?

I forgave her, hot tears spilling out of my eyes, just as I passed out from pure exhaustion.

I waited until sunrise to ask the Envisioner if the blast had killed Kaori and Figueiredo, because I wasn’t sure I could handle the answer. They were alive, the machine told me, but trapped in the rubble of the hotel. I spilled this to Yusuf and we agreed to keep a lookout. He wouldn’t let this kill our mood, though. We were safe, and alive and together.

The questions in my head echoed like the fading explosion. Safe, yeah, but for how long? Could we run forever? I followed Yusuf to the shore where he shucked off his clothes and rinsed off in the water, splashing me and laughing when he caught my eye. I couldn’t pummel him with my doubt, so I swapped those questions out for others.

Where do you go from here, when everyone who tries to help you winds up dead or tries to kill you or use you?

We tried to think of it as one long vacation.

I gated us from the Envisioner on our beach to another one in some version of New York where the machine was perched on a platform in Central Park, lit up with soft pink light like a war memorial. A security guard yelled at us to get down and we bolted, laughing—two teenagers sneaking out past curfew instead of two men on the run. We walked all night, hand-in-hand, talking about where we’d go and what we’d do now that we were free. What worlds we wanted to see together. No one would ever understand us better than each other, with all the weirdness and trauma we’d lived through. The squat buildings of the city were covered in soot. On the sidewalks, people in long skirts and heavy wool jackets wore long-beaked facemasks against clouds of dust that the aboveground trains belched into the air.