I feel something inside the machine quake as soon as I touch it, a dog flapping its ears down at me and wagging its tail now that I’m home again. Kaori is rooted to the floor, unmoving. She doesn’t even try to stop me. I push with my mind and open the gateway beneath the Envisioner. Off in the distance, muffled by the wind that whips up from the portal, Kaori screams something. I almost lose my balance and teeter through the gap in the floor just beyond my toes. The machine bombs-away through the portal, which zips closed again in just an instant, unknotting us from this whole mess. I can almost see the Envisioner dropping through the air a million universes away, running free from all our meddling. Leaving me free from the temptation to undo anything or change anything else ever again.

The doors across from me whoosh open and I search Yusuf’s face, his crinkle-cornered eyes, his eyebrows that furrow and carve deep lines in his forehead. What? I watch the thoughts collide into him. One corner of his lips swoops up in a question mark, his eyebrows knit together, and his beetle-shell eyes—the ones I’ve seen smiling at me on a leaky air mattress on our beach paradise and cringing as I bowed to him in Oxford and called him My Lord and flashing to mine in panic just before I detonated the Envisioner on Luna One. How?

Our whole journey was worth it. And if you want the truth—even though I know it makes me a monster—watching the asteroid slam into an Earth that wasn’t mine was worth it just to see the relief flood his eyes.

*   *   *

Leaning back on the hood of one of the Compound’s electric cars, the sky above us is an ocean of stars. I bundle the thin blanket a little tighter around us in the night air that’s cool, even here in the desert.

We’re quiet, now, an easy silence settling over us after the tears in the Theater and running to each other and holding each other up so we wouldn’t crumble. With me whispering I’m sorry into his ear over and over again, until his arms knotted around my waist, the tight bands of iron that gushed the air from my lungs. We walked the track a lot in silence that afternoon, me not wanting to push, until he was ready to ask what he needed to.

I peeled off my sweat-plastered clothes in his bathroom and didn’t recognize the bruised face and body in the mirror. Under the spray of the scalding shower, I watched the dirt and dried blood wash off me and mar the white tile. Trying to fool myself that the water was washing away some of the weight strapped to me.