I snag Junior and a roll of duct tape from the supply stash, then wiggle my feet into a pair of Yuppie Hayes’s running shoes. One last look around our campsite, feeling Yusuf so close he could be standing behind me, before I turn and hoof it towards the Envisioner.

I lift Junior, flip her viewing screen so I can see my face as I talk, and cheese for the camera.

“I guess this is all a warning,” I say, white waves rolling behind my back, this after-credits scene that sums up the whole film. “If you ever find one of these fucking machines on a mountaintop, or on an asteroid, or whatever—just do yourself a favor and leave it there.”

Cut.

I stick Junior to the side of the Envisioner with long strips of duct tape and then jump through.

34

THE HANGED MAN

I know that things seem like they’re building, here. That in the movie version of this, I’d amass an army of other Hayeses and together we’d storm Figueiredo’s universe. There’d be this big adrenaline-boner of a fight sequence where my army and his security team pick each other off one by one, until it’s just me and him left, running around a hangar filled with tarp-covered previous models of the Envisioner. And then we both strap ourselves into mecha-like battle exoskeletons and try to punch each other’s dicks off.

But I don’t have an army behind me. Basically everyone I thought I was friends with in the multiverse is either dead or wants to kill me. Logan. Hassan. Kaori. I don’t have time to win different versions of myself over to my cause, and Yusuf was always the more likeable one, anyway. And seeing as how I dropped the camera, I have to stop running my mouth and actually do something.

I’m not telling Yusuf—not yet, anyway—that I’m going to try to jam a red-hot poker right into Figueiredo’s All-Eye and destroy the whole Envisioner network. I’ve tried to do it from the beach here but the All-Eye is too strong and I can’t get it to heel from this far away. I’ll just have to work my mojo in person.

I gate from the beach and into Yuppie Yusuf and Hayes’s universe, appearing in the glass-and-chrome skyscraper of South Station. I wriggle through shoulders and elbows of people teleporting to their morning commutes and out into the street, where the city smells of rain and wet autumn leaves.

If I was telling Genesis all this like I was bellyaching about some guy backstage at one of her shows, she’d practically scream at me, hey asshole, didn’t you learn anything about keeping secrets? Don’t you get that the worst shit you’ve done in all of this is keeping Yusuf in the dark?