There’s one last loop to close in another adjacent reality—as close to mine as mine is to Figueiredo’s—something that must happen to balance the scales and then we can be free. I know where to pay the debt of the lives impacted by Tiago and Yusuf’s work, and how to balance this whole mess of an equation. And maybe this one is easier because I’ve already seen its aftermath and I can tell myself that I’m just playing a part.

All of this has already happened, with time folded in on itself like the rumpled sheets of our air mattress on our beach. When this whole journey has been about rocks in the sky. And fate and probability, and the tiny instant when both of those seem like the same thing. And blind luck—the Envisioner that Kaori’s team found on the Endovelicus asteroid and then dragged to Earth. And the rock that obliterated Logan and Joel’s Earth without warning, while the wolf pack lounged in the tropical forest under the fake sky of a dome on the moon. How it never really made sense that their world had the technology to build a habitat on the moon but couldn’t spot an asteroid on a direct course to Earth until it was too late. Unless it appeared literally out of nowhere.

Honestly, maybe Figueiredo dropped my Envisioner—and it is mine, now, all of them heeling for me like I tell them to—way out on that asteroid because he wanted the data from my universe but wanted me nowhere near the machine. Either to spare me from it or because he knew I’d turn out to be so much like him, with our realities brushing together, that I’d drop-kick him off his throne and take his crown.

The universes flap against each other like the sheets on the clothesline my mom strung across her small deck. She escaped a drowned island to watch the water lap at the sidewalks around her home where she was raising her son, alone, and he skipped curfew again last night. She looks up at the cloud-wisped sky, and, Jesus Cristo, what was she going to do with him?

I’m quaking inside. Someone must’ve cranked open an airlock door because all the air is gone. I can’t breathe. I know if I do this—and I have to, there’s no other way—I have to leave this all here, in this reality. I can’t bring the weight with me because I know, day by day, it’ll crush me until there’s nothing left. No other choice, though. No turning back.