Ralston took the Things off pause, and they got back to business, slamming me hard against the brick wall.

And the moment I hit that wall, I felt something.

A snap of cold. A sideways vertigo.

And I instantly knew what was happening.

I was shifting again.

A barista from the Starbucks next door found me slumped in the alley, barely conscious. It could have been seconds later, but it felt like much longer.

“My God! Are you all right? What happened to you? I’m calling nine-one-one!”

“No . . . don’t . . . ,” I muttered. But he had already done it. He urgently asked the operator for help, then brought me into the back room of the coffeehouse.

“Do you know who did this to you?” he asked. “Were you robbed? Was it s’equals?”

I grimaced. Not from the pain, but from that awful epithet. It meant that this unplanned bounce didn’t bring me any closer to home.

I hurled, suddenly and completely. I emptied my guts all over the barista and several sacks of coffee beans. I made a note to stay away from this Starbucks for a while.

I felt a little better after throwing up, though. Good enough to get to my feet and bolt out the back door before the paramedics could arrive.

But even before I left the mouth of the alley I was intercepted.

By quintuplets on skateboards.

“Whatever the change was,” said Ed, “it was pinpointed, and controlled.”

I was sitting in the Edwards’ defunct retail den, moving a bag of ice between my eye and my lip, not sure which needed it more.

Teddy, the newest Edwardian iteration, was a bit more Zen than the rest. While most of the others were frenetic, Teddy was content to sit in one of the space’s few comfortable chairs, and take it all in. He wasn’t frazzled and overstimulated like the others. He was pensive. I’m sure his wheels were turning just as much as the others’, but his were deliberate. Like the gears of a clock. I found myself glancing more at him than at the others, because there was a calmness there that I wished I could borrow.

“Control is a good thing,” Ed said, as always trying to find a silver lining. “This shows that he doesn’t have to be playing football to shift realities. It can be induced.”

All the while, Eddy sat on the couch furiously working the QuIRT, searching for the variations between realities, to figure out how this world was different, and Eduardo was off in the corner of the huge space, preparing the isolation tank—because if I was going to remember exactly what had happened in Elsewhere, I’d have to really get inside my head.

“Can you at least tell us what was going on before the shift happened?” Edd asked, already on his last tether of patience.