“You are fractionally more similar to me than the others, at best. I am curious to study a blood sample, if you’re offering. Perhaps we share the most common genome out of all the iterations due to similar large-scale histories.”

“Intellectualize it all you want. I don’t like it either.”

He shrugs. “What is this like? You’re attaching human observational importance to the result of residing in adjacent universes that exist as different expressions and often opposing outcomes of the same variables. Two sides of a coin flip. A dice roll.”

“Two bullets aimed at two different husbands. Tiago must love this kind of pillow talk.”

He can’t hide the flare behind his eyes, though just like Kaori and her mask, it’s gone in a second. I internally toss myself a high-five for finding his wound between his plates of armor. I’ll just keep jamming with the knife. How’s that for brane incision?

“Go ahead and think I’m a monster,” he says. “Your thoughts leak out of you because you’re too soft to keep them in. Tiago surviving the riot in my universe was my rightful outcome. You loaded the dice.”

“You can spout shit about probability and variables and fuck all. Rightful my ass. Your problem is that you think you’re special, deep down. That you deserve whatever you want. That you can do whatever you want.”

“You’ve altered reality so deeply that your actions have rippled out, pulled an asteroid off its predicted course, and hurled it towards your planet to try to balance the scales again. Please tell me how I’m the one acting irresponsibly. You only even met Yusuf because of the Farsight. You are indebted to me. I’m pulling rank.”

“Rank? Oh my god. Meanwhile, you’ve fucked with I don’t even know how many universes just for your own research.”

“I swear, Hayes. I swear.” He walks so close that I see the red webbing his eyes as he stabs the air with one finger. “I’m sending you back to your world. Dr. Nakamori will aim a gun between your eyes, and you will separate the branes and set our universes right. Then you can go back to your miserable life—alone, because that is how you always will be. Do this or I will implode my world just to watch yours burn.”