The yellow puddle of puke on the floor expands until it hits the soles of my dirty shoes.

I take all the screams and the impossible weight and the images of fire raining down from the sky and pour it like glowing toxic waste into a metal drum and push it deep, deep down. I wipe my mouth on the bottom of my dirt-caked and blood-splattered shirt. I wrap myself up in film reels and doc still printouts that stick to me like armor. In my head, I see the film treatment character sketch of who I’m supposed to be—Hayes Figueiredo, early 30s, damaged but trying to laugh through it and definitely not someone who just scorched an entire planet to dust—until it feels almost familiar. I’ll spend the rest of my life pretending to be the person I used to be, and maybe after a while I’ll start believing it.

36

BRANE TRUST

The wide, white-walled room of the Theater back in my universe is just how I remember it when I gate through. The FantiSee screens above offer a clear afternoon sky and a fake sun with no warmth. Seabirds swoop across the blue, cawing and dive-bombing for fish. My mom used to say that the noises they made sounded like they were asking, “Quem é? Quem é?” Who is it? She’d flap her arms, running on the beach with me as a kid, and laugh an answer into the sky for us. É Maria e Hayeszinho!

The Theater is empty except for Kaori, who must know it’s me before she even turns from the machine.

“You look good for someone who’s supposed to be dead,” she says.

She levels me with her tea-colored eyes, squinting at how I look like I crawled to the Compound over broken glass. And jesus, how did we get here, light-years away from knocking back margaritas? I can feel Yusuf nearby, somewhere, in the maze of white halls. Tethered to me by a tight string, even when we’re apart. The three of us are game pieces stuck to a board and neither me nor Kaori want to make the first move.

What would the Before Hayes say, now? Can I get a line, please?

“Thanks,” I say, flatly. Snark—yes, that’s him. I bolt on a crooked smile that jabs pain through my split lip. “Where’s Yusuf?”

“Here.” She tips her head, her calculating face when she’s scanning an Envisioner readout.

Already, I know she can see I’m a different person than the one who dropped in here a year ago, so obsessed with his dumb little problems that seemed so huge.