They nearly fell headlong into a giant pit where the Gen X Family with ’80s Nostalgia showroom was supposed to be. Ava had to yank Jules back as they teetered above the pit, which was too dark to see the bottom of. The rising air smelled fetid, like a brackish swamp mixed with dog breath. The sides of it stretched from one side of the walkway to the other, impossible to get around.

“Shit,” Jules said. “Shit!”

They tossed the FINNA to their left hand, grabbed a towel rod in their right, and swung it at the advancing group of Marks and Danas. To Ava’s surprise, the crowd retreated, backing away and giving them space. Jules looked shocked, like they couldn’t believe that had worked.

Ava’s wild, trembling hope ebbed as she felt rumbling under her feet. The tremor quaked up through the cement floor, reminding Ava of previous apartments too close to the Metra tracks, or of the tiny earthquake that had woken her once on a visit to family in California.

At the same time, she caught a whisper from the crowd, a growing murmur that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Mother. Mother. Mother. Mother.

“Oh, shit,” Ava whispered.

The murmur grew along with the thunderous vibration below, becoming a shout, a chant, an invocation.

Animal panic was taking over now, that last bit of her brain that had been watching in detached irony consumed by the knowledge that she was going to die.

Jules fumbled at her hand, and turned Ava toward them, blocking her view of the Marks and Danas shrieking around them.

“Ava, listen,” they said, and somehow, the quiet intensity in their voice cut through her panic. “I’m sorry.”

Confusion pushed down the noise in her head. “About … about the breakup?” she asked. Jules cut their eyes toward the pit.

“Sure, that too,” they said awkwardly.

Ava followed their gaze and caught a glimpse of an impossible rend in the air below them, illuminated with a gray-blue light that pulsed along its circumference. A maskhål.

Then Jules shoved them over the edge of the pit.

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE

She screamed as she fell, toward the rumbling, through darkness into a sudden burst of light.

She kept screaming right up until she hit the water, hard enough to nearly knock her senseless. She twisted in the water, orienting herself before clawing her way back up toward the surface. She crested the water with a sputtering gasp, dimly aware of Jules doing the same a few feet away.

Once she got her breath back, the first thing she did was send a splash of water right into Jules’s stupid face.

“You asshole!” she screamed hoarsely. “You shoved me off a cliff!”

Jules coughed out, “I got us away from the horde of retail zombies!”

“They weren’t chasing us until you spouted off that garbage about being sent by our own mother!”