She swiped a finger across her tablet. On the overhead screens, a video of a suit at a desk—some news show, obviously—flicked to life. I couldn’t hear the guy’s voice over the blood in my ears. I could only see the picture of the Envisioner projected by his head.

15

THE MAGICIAN

As the slow-motion bomb-drop rippled through the crowd, I sucked in a breath and tried to use my burning lungs to anchor myself to my body. The sniper beams of everyone’s eyes pricked my skin. No—they didn’t know. Did they? I tore my eyes from the ground and up at Kaori to try to read the blank screen of her face. Telling myself to act normal. But then wouldn’t she know I was acting? Ball bearings rattled around in the cement mixer of my stomach. Yusuf’s feet were rooted to the ground beside Kaori, with his face so still that he could’ve been asleep with his eyes open.

I’m still not even sure if the first picture on the news was ours. We’d deleted the post and the pictures from our phones, so I couldn’t check. My doubt could’ve just been my brain looking for a way to shrug off the blame.

“I won’t insult your intelligence—you’re all smart people—by reminding you what you’ve done,” Kaori continued, her voice still the soft gurgle of a glacier-fed mountain stream. So, so cold. “How you’ve jeopardized the project. Our discoveries. The safety of everyone in this building. On this planet.”

She wouldn’t meet my gaze, instead scanning the crowd, as much as I mentally screamed at her to look at me. So I could broadcast with my eyes, it was me. I pushed him.

She tapped her tablet again and the volume from the screen above blasted to life. Below the lantern-jawed news anchor, the digital crawl read “Sources describe possible extra-terrestrial origin of unknown, advanced technology.”

“Whistle-blowers are calling the device the ‘Black Box,’” the anchor rumbled. “We’re still unclear about what the device actually does. Based on geo-cached information embedded in the image, it appears to be housed somewhere in the Commonwealth of Great Basin Nations, sparking concerns that the country may be developing a nuclear arsenal amid alleged land disputes between…”

The high-pitched whine of my boiling brain drowned out the rest. My first day here, I’d railed at Kaori, how can you keep evidence of alternate universes away from the public? And now my drunk loose lips with Yusuf were going to spark a war. No. I did what I knew I had to do. Just like Kaori—all of them—gave speeches about security and humanity and bullshit. When they were really talking about control.

Still.