Chapters (41)
One glance back at the camera before he rested one of his palms on a facet of the closest Envisioner. Something sparked under his hand, though for a second I thought it was some trick of light or glitch in the video. Until a wavering, gold-edged circle appeared on the Envisioner beneath his palm with a sploosh like waves hitting a rocky shore. A night sky hovered within the circle. I don’t know how else to describe what I saw other than that he cut a circle into a glass window like he was some spy breaking into a shop window. Except instead of a storefront, he somehow cut a hole into reality, and through the circle was another world.
The circle expanded until it was about fifteen feet across. Just big enough for him to walk around to the opposite site of the Envisioner, plant his feet on the ground, and shove the thing into the hole. The circle fizzled out as soon as the machine passed through.
I had to hit pause on the playback here and just let the facts of what he was doing pound against my brain. I was watching him send his fleet of machines into other universes, and one of those was probably the machine that had crash-landed into ours. I watched with a detached gaze that would’ve made Kaori proud.
Dark circles of sweat appeared under the dusty green armpits of his lab coat while he worked, pacing to the next Envisioner and the next, opening a portal with the noise of a wave-slosh, and shoving each machine through. He got creative with some of the drops. He’d place his hands on a facet and a circle would bloom between the legs of the machine until it grew wide enough that the Envisioner dropped through. He was showing off—a little jig in his step here, a little flex for the camera there.
I had no idea how important the footage that I watched was. Not just for work—with it being the first evidence we’d seen so far that Figueiredo had sent other Envisioners to other universes besides just ours. Important because it completely changed what happened with me and Yusuf.
He’d told me before about how the machine responded to Figueiredo’s touch. But seeing him send the machines away—moving further into the distance so he was little more than a blur against what must’ve been hundreds of machines—spun my stomach. Like I was in a bomber jet, staring down the open hatch, and dropping bombs onto the cities below.