Malik shifts his gaze to me. “You should know,” he says, hand on the butt of his gun. “Every step we take away from this building is a step towards danger.”

“Well, if you’re afraid,” I tell him, “you better stay close to me.”

Malik laughs.

17

A silver sun wheels across the dial of a new Earth. Lūna. It’s a cloudy, cold afternoon. We walk—Vidhan and me on one side of the road, Akuji and Malik, the other—through a futuristic London. There are echoes of Sol: St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, countless other limestone landmarks that look unchanged. It’s a deceit, of course, I know that now. And yet the idea hasn’t quite sunk in, that I’m not in my world, that this is an actual parallel universe.

A world apart.

With every footfall, I think of Bea—somewhere out there, lost in the multiverse. And I know I won’t stop until I find her.

“Look,” Vidhan says, pointing.

A video newsfeed high on a billboard. Prince Harry pressing Hillary Clinton’s hand to his lips. Which doesn’t shock me, but the scrolling heading does:

WHEN HARRY MET HILLARY…

U.S. PRESIDENT CHARMS KING OF ENGLAND

A hover-car comes whumping past and we’re hit by a hot gust of air.

“Trump lost,” Vidhan says. “Slunk back to his golden tower.”

“And Harry’s the king?”

“Yep. But just as a figurehead. A central computer system runs the show here—banking, traffic, tax, defence, NHS, immigration—everything is down to an Artificial Intelligence machine.”

“That’s nuts.”

“That’s Lūna. In many ways, the strangest of the seven realms. On the surface, she can look the same. More modern, yeah, but the street names are the same, some of the buildings, even the parks. See, she teases ya. If you’re from Sol, you think you’re home, but you’re bloody not. She’s like that on purpose, I reckon. To let ya know there are planes beyond the knowing. The other worlds, they can be a little intense. Way different from Sol. But Lūna…she’s deceptive. A soft landing.”

“Soft landing?”

“Pathfinders like us, we can usually remain hidden here,” Vidhan continues. “In Sol, we’re unknown and unseen. In Lūna, that’s mostly true as well.”

I look at the unfamiliar (yet familiar) London around me.

Doesn’t feel like a soft landing.