Like invading a research compound in a foreign universe on your own, for example.

I can see that kid in Cape Town taking the backpack bomb from the man in his doorway, and my hands quake just like his. I’m alone here on the beach, with the fern trees in the distance crushing in. Weighing into me and watching. Every breath is a struggle against the boulders on my chest.

I try to feel for Figueiredo’s world, reaching out with my mind to trace the knotted threads and thorny vines that lead to the All-Eye at the center of this whole network. I feel a heaviness—a resistance—when I try to latch onto the thread that ends at Figueiredo’s machine, like the thing does not want me gating through. I can almost see his version of the Theater, crowded with his sage-coated techs, where the machine lurks like a giant black mass on an X-ray, its black tendrils creeping out to infect the world around it. I pop over to one of the tendrils and follow it until it splits into dozens of others, all leading to what seems like a room in the same compound with Envisioners waiting in the dark. All spinning calculations and feeding them to the main machine, all of them connected with cables like veins flowing to the pulsing heart of the All-Eye.

I flick on the camouflage disk in my pocket and the little thing works its magic, bouncing light beams away from me and dropping an invisibility cloak over my shoulders. Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess. I cast one last look at this beach that became mine and Yusuf’s home, in so many ways, before I gate through.

At first, I think that my eyes are still crammed shut since the long room I’ve landed in is so black. The darkness crushes me, seeping into my mouth and stealing my breath. I almost scream and chicken out, slamming into blunt shapes and tripping over snakes on the floor. After a minute of stumbling around, my eyes adjust to the dim red overhead lights and the candy-colored pulses from the dozens and dozens of Envisioners in this airplane-hangar-sized cargo bay. Each one signals to the others in a bioluminescent language I can’t make sense of. I dropped through an Envisioner about halfway between the sliding double doors that probably lead to the rest of Figueiredo’s facility and the far wall that’s studded with red safety lights. No one else is in here with me, as far as I can tell. I move like a shadow anyway, over the Envisioner cables that line the floor like snakes waiting to strike. Nights dodging creaky floorboards to sneak out when I was a kid, creeping out of Hassan’s house and leaving Yusuf in bed—the memories all blur together.