I’ve been practicing, feeling the energy of the machine and testing its limits. Opening portals and seeing how long I can keep them open—one, then two at the same time, then three. I don’t have any weapons for what I know I have to do, so I might as well try to become one.

Even before Yusuf left, I’d wander off and hang with the Envisioner, giving us both some alone time. He’d catch up on sleep or some reading, and I’d pace the quarter mile out to the machine that he didn’t want to be near, especially after the explosion on Luna One. We dropped into plenty of research stations and private labs during our jumps, though no one we spoke to could really give us a good answer about how the Envisioner works. Or what else it can do besides predict, like be used as an improvised explosive device under the right—or wrong—hands, for example.

Right now, Yusuf’s probably drifting off to sleep in a hotel room alone in Beatty while I’m planted in the sand in front of the Envisioner, the stars leaking light down onto me. He’d never admit it—and maybe he doesn’t quite understand it himself—but I think he’s a little scared of me now. Strike that from the script. Let me edit. More scared about what I’ll do for him.

Kaori couldn’t predict what I’d do either, even with her big brain and big machine, before me and Yusuf bailed from under her thumb.

I can see all the threads, all the Envisioners Figueiredo tossed out into the multiverse, so clearly now that it’s just me and my girl here. I can reach out an invisible hand and pluck them, against the tick-tock metronome of my heartbeat, to spin a disco tune pulled from one of Genesis’s shows. Thrumming the threads lights a sparkler of bliss on my tongue like the cider at the Prince of Cups tavern back in Hassan’s Oxford. Maybe my head’s fried from sunstroke. Maybe I’m finally getting what Yusuf felt before I met him—how a billion possible histories means that any moment or outcome isn’t so special. That’s the problem with infinities, I guess. Nothing matters more than anything else.

Except that I feel like the one pulling the strings.

I know when you look up at the night sky, you’re supposed to feel all small and overcome with wonder at the universe and blah. I feel that, too. But when I look up, I always feel—for that first instant—like the center of fucking everything.