“It’s okay,” Jules said. They looked … not calm, exactly, but not scared. They looked, as they had for most of their trip, thrilled that they weren’t getting misgendered while answering customers’ stupid questions about how much weight a towel rod could really hold. “This is what I want. I’m not running from something, I’m choosing it.”

Ava tried desperately to think of some final, parting words. There was so much left unsaid, but all the words were tangling themselves up in her head.

The door rattled under Jules’s weight, and the smile on their face turned into a snarl. “Go!” they screamed, and Ava went, forcing herself not to look back again. Not when she heard the door slam open and the voices of the Marks and Danas come in clearly. Not even when she heard Jules’s answering scream of defiance, and the sound of a sword whistling through the air.

She couldn’t look back. If she didn’t look back, she didn’t have to know whether she was leaving Jules to their death.

The FINNA directed her through a labyrinth of passages, all of them stained yellow with what she realized were the emergency lights. First Mate Mirya apparently had more to mop up than they’d realized, because the sounds of fighting echoed down other corridors. The FINNA, either by luck or according to some weird twist of its programming, led them only through empty corridors, dodging other battles, the Anahita’s crew, and the Marks and Danas they fought. Eventually, the FINNA beeped again, more urgently than it had before. Ava shifted Nouresh’s weight, grimacing at the tacky feeling of blood that had soaked into her tunic, and ran faster.

She almost didn’t recognize the maskhål when she saw it. This one pulsed with a sickening, reddish light, unlike any she’d seen before. The place where the worlds were stitched together wasn’t a line, but stretched out, creating a tunnel made of twitching, juddering skin. But at the other end, she recognized a familiar sight: the Nihilistic Bachelor Cube.

Even as she looked, the familiar interior receded, grew more distant.

The maskhål collapsed after a couple of hours, she remembered. She thought again of the animation in that god-awful video they’d watched in the break room: the doorway between universes stretching like a piece of Silly Putty until it snapped and collapsed back on itself.

How long did she have?

“Fuck it,” she said, and sprinted.