I was skating on a slippery slope on the edge of the pit. I had sensed that pit the last time I shifted. There were unrealized worlds surrounding me, needy, seeking, caressing me, tugging at me. But this time, I wasn’t the only one there. Three others were skating at the edge of that pit. It was Ralston and his goons. Then suddenly I wasn’t spiraling toward the pit anymore. I had dug in my heels and I held firm. But the other three were still sliding. In the alley, they had all the power, but I was the one who had power here.

I could have reached out to grab them. And now I remembered—I did reach out. But I didn’t grab them. Instead, I pushed. I willfully, decisively pushed.

And the three of them went down the drain.

Then I was in the alley again, nauseous and aching, and being helped by the barista.

I let the memory go and brought my thoughts back to the here and now. I slowly climbed out of the tank. “I know what happened,” I told the Edwards. “I know what I did.”

Ed called it a “localized excision.” Eddy called it a “surgical expunging.” The five of them bickered over how the event should be labeled, because it was something they’d never come across before. They had no name for it. But I knew what to call it: murder.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Edd, when I pointed that out. “You can’t murder people who don’t exist.”

It only took a little data crunching by Eddy to confirm it. I had gotten rid of all three of my attackers. But, as Edd said, I didn’t kill them. No, that would have been too easy.

“So . . . I jumped into a world where the three of them don’t even exist?” I asked.

But Eddy shook his head. “More than that. From what I can see, you obliterated every single world where they could have existed.”

The Edwards were literally and figuratively beside themselves. They paced, throwing around phrases like “unprecedented complication,” and “dire ramifications.” Until this moment, I always had the sense that they knew what they were doing, even if I didn’t. But now they were flying as blind as me.

Through all of it, only the new guy—Teddy—kept his cool, his wheels slowly turning.

In the end, they decided to call it a “pan-dimensional expulsion,” PDE, and somehow having a name for it made them feel a little bit better. Again, it made me think of doctors. My aunt had this weird blood thing that gave her unexplained purple spots on her legs. They diagnosed her with ITP: idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, which sounds very lofty and professional, until you look it up and find out that it means “unexplained purple spots.”