“No? It’s a beautiful city of bricks, at the crossroads of a river and the sea. I was happy there for a while.”

Jules and Ava said that it sounded very nice, wherever it was. (Maine? Maryland? They’d have to check the LitenVärld directory.) Then Ava gave a performative shiver and asked, “Is there a place we can get some dry clothes?”

“I’ll take you to the market,” Nouresh said. “Follow me.”

They followed the older woman through a series of halls, all of them similarly low-ceilinged, and lit with the same emerald lights that Jules eventually pointed out looked alive. “They are,” Nouresh said. “Tiny creatures that give off light.”

“Bioluminescent plankton!” Jules said. “That’s so cool!”

Nouresh seemed bemused by their outburst, and Ava explained, “They said the same thing about a chair that almost ate them.”

“Oh, the Soft Snare? In Universe 241?”

Captain Nouresh, it seemed, had compiled a taxonomy of the universes she had traveled to in her youth, in service to something called the Cooperative of Nations. She’d taken detailed descriptions, notes on languages, flora and fauna, dominant species and their social structures. Ava could see Jules’s eyes growing wide as she told them of the places and things that she had seen.

Wanderlust. Ava had never really had it. Jules always had. They’d always felt stuck, both at LitenVärld and in their hometown, where they had returned after dropping out of college. Ava was aware of this large portion of Jules’s life that they didn’t discuss—what had happened at their school, why they had dropped out, why they had come back home afterward—but never asked about it, even during that first, dizzying flush of falling in love. Ava had always skirted it; she’d thought that she was giving Jules room and space to bring it up on their own schedule, but they never had. And she’d assumed that now they never would, but maybe that could change.

“How many worlds did you come through?” Captain Nouresh asked.

“Three?” Ava said. “It’s hard to tell. I couldn’t spot all of the seams.”

“Not bad, for a first trip. What made you leave your world? And what are you using to navigate?”

Jules looked at Ava. “We were actually—”

“Using this old piece of shit,” Ava interrupted, pulling the FINNA out of Jules’s grasp. “Didn’t hold up to the water, though.”

Captain Nouresh cooed at the FINNA like it was a small, injured animal. “Oh, look at this. Haven’t seen one of these since I was your age.”

She pressed one of its buttons and it beeped at her, the sound warbly and sad. “Shouldn’t be too hard to fix. These things were designed to take a beating.”