Up ahead I spot an enormous glass fish tank of a room surrounded by what looks like a jungle of dew-tipped trees and hanging moss. Figueiredo must’ve upgraded to a new facility since the dim, gray one I saw in his footage. In the center of the room, a faceted black crag that’s huge enough to hold up the sky rises through the floor and bursts through a hole in the ceiling. I hug the wall and run through the door against the stream of green-coats, knocking into one who doesn’t seem to notice with all the panic. Of the few people still in the room, scrambling between control panels, no one sees me. No Figueiredo either. He must still be with Kaori on my world.

I stop, in full view of the hulking, irregular mass of the All-Eye with its hundreds of screens like unblinking eyes. As big as a small house with manic additions added over the years. Its blunt facets the red-black of dried scabs, dull even under the lights from the ceiling and windows. The thing rests on dozens of bent metal columns that look so much like muscled human legs that I have to tear my eyes away as my stomach spins. The All-Eye, and the dozens of thick black cables that leach from it, ruptures through the ceiling and more of it must hulk through the floors above. Probably connected to thousands more machines in the rest of the facility.

So here we are again, rewinding back to the beginning with me walking over a tightrope to the Envisioner, the first time I spotted it. Dizzy and reeling from the height and trying not to look down. Shrouded in glass walls, the whooping of the alarm is the caw of a night bird.

The lights flicker again before snapping off. With a crack I can feel in my bones, red overhead safety lights switch on and cast the room in red shadows. The heavy air is a sour metal tang in the back of my throat. Ignoring my screaming pulse at the sides of my neck, I reach out to one of the facets of the machine. My hands snap back against the fire that ignites in my brain. Because I can feel a million threads at once—a million universes all interconnected by the whole poisoned web of these machines, with Figueiredo’s hands everywhere, pulling the strings. Each a slice of razor wire into my scalding skin. Already so tight that if I pushed just a little, I could short out the whole network and smash every one of the Envisioners to bits. And probably myself to dust, too, which at least would drown out the screaming in my head.