“Let me try again,” the woman said. “Actually, is it okay if I show you a video?”

Ayanna nodded, sipped more of her water. If she weren’t working, she would have a million questions about how the water had been charged by the quartz, or whether the quartz had been charged by something and then dumped into the water, and what it was supposed to do. The woman pulled out her cell phone, scrolled and fussed, until she found the video she wanted to show Ayanna.

“I look so young,” she said. “I’ve lost all of my lips.”

Ayanna could not see what she was talking about; neither woman really had lips to lose. The difference in the faces was fullness, aesthetics, and movement. There were more lines on the younger face. Her skin was not shades of milk but had the color of a white person who sometimes used tanning beds.

In the video, the woman began. “I am Margot Cherry, I am twenty-six years old, and I am the only survivor of what I am now calling the Septaria Expedition. The US government claims this never happened. They have perpetuated a lie that my older brother died in a yachting accident in the Caymans. My brother was Jason Cherry.”

Ayanna made her face blank. She could feel Margot’s eyes on her.

“We went on a sanctioned expedition through the Michigan door, paying the US government and Pathsong each a million dollars for permission to go through and use our own guides.”

Ayanna had to take a deep breath. Margot was one of the rich people she had talked shit and complained about that whole summer. Her father had told her they had ignored everyone’s warnings after she and Olivia went through the door. He had told her, shaking with emotion, about the snow, how the path had changed, how they had watched as almost every member of the expedition horrifically died. How the woman had run through the snow, screaming, and everyone on the other side had been too scared to go through and make her return.

She had never heard how much the church had gotten and the amount made Ayanna’s eyebrows want to creep up all the way to her hairline.

“This movie was meant to clear up the lies and conspiracies around Jason’s death, but everything I tried to write came out wrong,” she said. “No one would buy the original draft.”