I couldn’t hold it in, not after I’d already been keeping so much from him. He squinted against both the bright afternoon sun and his worry at seeing me crouched in the sand like I was praying to the machine.

“Kaori played us,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I sucked in a breath, wiping the sand off my knees and avoiding his eyes. He dumped the coconuts onto the sand and sat down in front of me.

“She’s known everything all along, about the Envisioner, even the right order of Figueiredo’s footage. All of this was a game to bring me and you together so she could—I don’t know—make us fall in love. Make me similar enough to Figueiredo that the Envisioner would link to me and she could use me to change the world however she wanted.”

“Well. Huh.”

“It’s like none of this was ever real.”

“What, this?” He brushed the back of my knuckles, twisting his mouth in a smile. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Hey, watch it.”

“Of course this is real. We’re real. Does any of this change how you feel about me?”

“No.”

“Did she make you feel anything? Could anyone do that to you? Who cares how we met?”

“Yeah.” I wiped at my face.

“That machine doesn’t offer any answers. Just more problems.”

I knew he was right. He took me by my hand and I helped him lug the coconuts back to our camp where we made dinner by the fire, slamming the coconuts with rocks and watching the liquid inside slosh onto the pink sand below.

*   *   *

I got pretty good about covering our tracks. Usually, we leapfrogged through a couple of universes before we headed back to our oasis. I felt the thrum of dozens and dozens of threads across my ribs and simultaneously opened gateways to a bunch of other machines to try to throw Figueiredo off the trail.

We slept on our air mattress on the sand and roamed the little island while the sun warmed our skin. Then, we fell back into our pattern. We’d drop into another universe for supplies, or to laze on a real bed, or wash in a real shower, though something was always wrong in each place we ended up. We’d stay a day and I’d get restless and say that we should leave. I could see the arguments building up behind Yusuf’s eyes, the things that I knew he wasn’t sure how to say, and I was a jerk for not asking. Are we jumping again because you can feel Figueiredo coming or because you’re bored? I ignored it because opening each new gateway was like a big middle finger to Figueiredo and Kaori. Especially Kaori. Because if they could do whatever the fuck they wanted, why couldn’t we?