She’s been sober for so long. It’ll be too easy to overdose if she takes the same amount she used to. It says that in the books, the websites. The pamphlets from all the rehabs and doctors and places that were supposed to make her better.

“Yes. My cousin left the party, so she could have taken more.” Drew grips the back of the driver’s seat. “Faster, Nate.”

“On it,” my cousin says.

I have been here before. A pocket of spacetime that keeps happening, over and over. And I can’t change the outcome. It is not up to me at all. It never has been.

“Creation. Destruction. Creation. Destruction.”

I don’t realize I’m saying this out loud until Nate says, “Buzz, you’re freaking me the fuck out.”

As we race toward Hannah, I feel a quickening, like I’m in the lab and five things have come together all at once, suddenly making sense. Making one thing true.

I close my eyes. Breathe.

Maybe we will get a chance to save her life again tonight. But in the end, Hannah has to save herself. She’s going to have to believe she can do right by the miracle.

Tonight, my sister will live or she will die.

I can’t work this problem.

I am not in control.

A strange peace settles over me. The fear and anxiety and horror of it all is still there. The urgency, too. I’m not giving up, not ever. But it’s like when I’m meditating: That’s all on the surface. Underneath: quiet.

Nonattachment doesn’t mean not loving Nah. But this peace, this stuff under the surface of all the waves—that’s the place I can be, no matter what happens. Death to the waves. Or … not to the waves themselves. Death to letting them sweep me off my feet. I can just … ride them.

This is what River meant.

It’s just a ride.

Nate presses on the gas.

45

Mae

ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit

Earth Date: 10 May

Earth Time (EST): 20:06

Ten minutes later, we’re pulling up in front of a house on the other end of Cambridge, and Drew is out of the car before it stops. I run to catch up with him. A few people are smoking on the porch, but he ignores them, just walks right through the front door like he owns the place. He grabs the first guy he sees in the hallway.

“A girl—black hair. Pretty. Where is she?”

The guy holds his hands up. “Whoa, the fuck you—”

“Where. Is. She.”

A girl sitting cross-legged on the couch glances at us after taking a massive hit from a bong. “She’s with Sean. Down the hall. I’d knock if I were you.”

Drew’s face drains of color, and he lets go of the guy. He looks at me.