We agreed, wordlessly, to Not Talk about What Happened back at Luna One, besides a quick thank you from Yusuf for doing what I’d had to do. After a couple of days, the guilt of what must’ve happened to the rest of the wolf pack weighed on me. Mostly, and if I’m being totally honest here, finally being free from Kaori and Figueiredo—temporarily or not—had me closing my eyes with my face tilted towards the clouded-over moon above and breathing deep. Somehow, the life I’d been living had been somebody else’s, and now it was actually my own. Right?

Sure, the hours wandering with him were romantic, but we had no money and no place to sleep. We dozed on park benches once the sun rose, my arm around Yusuf and me pinned down by the sweet weight of him, while pigeons plucked at the grass by our feet. I stole us pasties from street vendors and the occasional wad of cash from the tweed jacket of someone on the train platforms. The stern face of Queen Victoria IV glared at me from the red-inked bills. I wasn’t proud of dusting off my childhood shoplifting skills, but we had to eat and Yusuf didn’t have any better ideas.

We skipped town before long. We crashed in a dorm at the University of Nairobi where researchers were using the machine to break the light-speed barrier. Then the private mansion where the woman who’d found the machine was using it to manipulate the stock market. At the top of a dry hill in the north of Portugal, the Envisioner spat us out at the pre-Roman megalithic sanctuary of Panóias just before dawn. We walked the huge granite stones carved with flat altars and rectangular slits to catch rainwater, with signs pointing out inscriptions to infernal gods, and how the strange machine at the top of the granite hill was likely proof of the existence of some advanced, undiscovered civilization. The groundskeeper chased us away, screaming about how kids always left beer bottles around for him to clean up.

A dizzying trip to Singapore where the Envisioner powered the city that existed half in this world and half as a digital creation, its streets aglow with billions of AI citizens and their shimmering bodies spun of light. With bridges made of crystallized star-glow that rose into a holographic, mirrored version of the city that stretched across the sky. We tried to follow the crowd onto one of these bridges and almost fell off the side of a building and into the spires below us.

Yusuf’s wide, bright eyes at each of these new worlds, his laughter at karaoke bars and wonder at networks of teleportation pads, delayed the sinking doubt in me for a while. Because how much of a future do you have if you can’t put down roots? If you can’t make friends or hold a job?