She doesn’t answer, of course. Hands on the facets, I reach out with my mind and don’t feel the same resistance that I did when I tried to gate in through the All-Eye before. Because the king is toppled and the machine at the center of this web has been waiting for this moment the whole time, so it unlocks the door and I gate through.

Inside the empty glass fish tank of Figueiredo’s Theater, someone cut the alarms. Shapes seem to move in the trees just beyond one of the glass walls, but it’s probably just my fried brain seeing snakes slithering in the branches. Thick and black like the cables that stick out from the All-Eye. This thing with its red-black scabs of facets like the wounded body of a giant beast.

I touch the machine and the only threads, the only universes that feel close now, are filled with different versions of me and Yusuf. The versions of us in their high-rise in Boston that overlooks the twinkling city, coming home tanned and exhausted from their honeymoon and spotting the picture of Yusuf that I stuck on their wall, and wondering just how that got there. They must’ve taken it but can’t remember exactly when. Time doesn’t mean much. Hassan is marrying his Rui and burying him at the same time. In decades to come, when the researchers who fled Luna One before the asteroid slammed into the Earth return to their base to salvage the technology there, they’ll find a frozen, bombed-out hotel and a withered body with a curtain cape in the snow. And all the different versions of us that still haven’t met, but will. The stupid, blind luck that had me and Yusuf even alive on our Earth at the same time lights me up, and then I can feel all of the threads glowing like the sparklers Genesis waved at her last show.

I know that the All-Eye is trying to show me that all of this is a loop. That the universes were already entangled and Figueiredo knotted them even tighter together when he started breaking through the barriers and tossing his machines inside—each a snag, a snarl. That time flows differently through all the universes and past and future don’t mean a whole lot. Adjacent realities seek a zero sum. And I already screwed with things once when I saved Yusuf in place of Tiago at the start of this mess. A life for a life. A world for a world. I could just portal the asteroid away, out of the path of our Earth, which would still leave us with a debt and I would just be stalling. Like every time I pushed at the machine back before we went on the run, and each change was a dice roll leading to a new world-ending disaster.