I sighed and explained the situation. How I was having the shit kicked out of me by Thing One and Thing Two, while the delivery guy supervised. “They threw me against a wall, everything went sideways, and they took off, leaving me there in the alley.”

Ed furrowed his brow and turned to Eddy. “Check the name of the guy who delivers to the vitamin shop.”

“His name is . . . Gary,” Eddy said, after a few clicks.

“No,” I corrected, “it’s Ralston.”

The Edwards looked to one another like surgeons at a botched operation. Teddy leaned back in his chair and smiled like he knew something the others hadn’t grasped yet.

“I’ll check the previous iteration.” Eddy clicked away while the rest of us waited. Shapes and symbols flew across the screen. “Found him!” Teddy finally said. “His full name is Ralston Klingsmith . . .” Then he tapped for a few more seconds. “Uh . . . Ralston Klingsmith,” he said again, and then stopped tapping. “Hmm. I’m having trouble finding him in our current thread.”

“Interesting . . . ,” said Teddy, leaning back in his chair with satisfaction. But the others were more troubled than content with the news. Ed knelt beside me, and moved the ice away from my face, so he could look me in both eyes. “You need to remember it,” he said. “Time to take a bath.”

The EMP solution burned my wounds as bad as salt would have. The sting made it hard to relax, and relaxation is something you can’t force. And it wasn’t entirely silent, because I could hear Edd on the outside bad-mouthing me while Ed tried to temper his temper. I was unfit, Edd said. I was a disaster. I was the reason they made black holes.

With my eyes open in the darkness, I pushed my thoughts deeper into my aching neurons—a place I didn’t want to be, because my head was getting increasingly crowded with conflicting memories. My brain was not a pleasant place anymore. Not that it ever really was, but now it was positively toxic. Still, I forced myself to go there.

I began to remember the feeling the moment I was jarred into Elsewhere by Ralston’s goons. Nothing specific yet. Just the feeling. An escape from the pain of the beating. Relief. Then the feeling resolved into other senses. A taste of blood. A smell like rotting garbage. And the pit.