Here, I floated away from my body, tugged upwards by the Storyteller voice. Shouldn’t you get your hands on that footage? Yusuf said something about bringing in linguists to help crack the speech from the other universe, which was likely related to some Paleohispanic languages. I watched his lips but all I could hear was you need to get your hands on that footage.

“Put me on the video team,” I said. “I know jack shit about all else, but film I know.”

“That’s not my call. It’s Kaori’s. I can talk to her.”

I watched the muscles working at the sides of his jaws, maybe out of doubt or regret that he just spilled all of this out to me.

“Let me. I don’t want you to get you in trouble with her.”

“She’ll know I spoke to you about this, anyway.”

“Yeah, but I can be convincing. And obnoxious.”

“I can see that.”

I snorted a laugh. Yusuf’s dark eyebrows just knitted together.

“How you’re convincing—that is,” he said.

We rounded the corner of the clay track again, our feet trampling over our past footprints.

“You built the machine,” he continued. “A part of you might understand how it really works.”

“The other me.”

“You’re connected to him. Everything’s connected. Theoretically.”

Even with the sun sizzling on the back of my neck, I’d rather have wandered out there for hours with him than lock myself back in my room. We looped once more before heading into the vacuum-sealed air of the Compound, where he was quiet again. Almost shy.

“I’ll see you later,” I said, at the crossroads between the little hotel hallway with my room and the Theater. “Theoretically.”

Yusuf shook his head a little, rolling his eyes. For the second before he smiled, I thought, ugh, I was a dick again when I was trying so hard to be funny.

He started down the hall. “And your cardio sucks, by the way,” he called without turning back. “Later.”

I watched his back until he banged a right down the hall towards the Theater. I could still hear his footsteps, matching the quick time of my heartbeat. The happy little merry-go-round head-spins trailed me back to my room while I tried to think of whatever joke I should’ve yelled back at him. But he snatched all the words out of me, and already I loved it.

*   *   *

Kaori had to eat at some point, right? I staked out the cafeteria until she floated in from the kitchen with her red plastic tray and sat alone at a table. I let her have a few bites of her food—I’m not a complete dick—before I swooped in across from her.

“Oh, goddamnit,” she said.