Besides, the All-Eye already showed me a hint of what I need to do. I can feel the weight of the giant machine like it’s a black hole I’ve been circling my whole life. Like the night I overdosed was me remembering, somehow, that I’d be here in this exact spot giving into this riptide that I’ve been running from for years.

I really don’t want to be the one pulling the strings. Then there’s Kaori with her wry smile offering, but at the same time, here we are.

I wrack my brain for a while, cramming my fingers into the red grass and the dirt, begging for some other way. Nothing will work, the machine tells me, and I can practically see her big melty eyes because she’s sorry and knows this isn’t the answer that I want to hear. Nothing will work and you know why. Adjacent realities seek a zero sum. Too many lives here on the scales, on our little dust-specks of planets drifting through space. Genesis on stage her last night, knowing that her cause was bigger than just her one life, and knowing what she needed to do.

I can’t go back to Yusuf for help because I know, as much as he’d be relieved to see me alive, deep down, he’d sooner off himself if that meant saving the world. And I can’t let him do that.

So give me some distance, right now, when I’m digging in the grass and cramming red dirt under my fingernails. When I’m pounding my fists into the ground and screaming. Give me some of Kaori’s observations, for fuck’s sake, her marker-board equations where she has everything sketched out with zero emotion. Or give me her steady hand holding up a gun to Yusuf’s head because she knew he had to die or billions would. And she was more than ready to pull the trigger.

I know all the parts of the equation. All the excuses and the wars I wage with myself, raking my nails along my thighs and ripping at the grass. I can’t destroy a world to save him. I don’t know how I can take on that weight. Worse than that, though—what’s unbearable, what would end me—would be watching him die. A coin flip: him or a world. Except I’m the magician and it’s a fake coin, anyway, and I control what side it’ll land on. I’d say there’s no other way, but that’s a lie.

With that, I make up my mind.

“You ready, girl?” I call back to the machine, so, so tired.