“Maybe. But I wanted to go, too, because I was sick of moving around and this tribe stay here all year. And I wasn’t able to talk with them back then, so I didn’t really know what the deal was. Fill in the blanks with whatever you prefer.”

“And you were here for four years.”

“Just about.”

“And then the…Nissa found you,” Lee added slowly.

“There was still enough of our Earth in me that I lit all the lights on their detectors. Didn’t belong, right? Just like always.”

Lee was not going to let that “just like always” blunt her ire. She stood suddenly, sending Mal skittering back a few steps. “So what happened then, Mal? I mean, you’re like a superhero now. You’ve got dimension-hopping powers that can save the universe or some fucking thing.”

Mal regarded her sadly for a long while, and Lee thought she might walk away, and that would be it. She felt the connection between the two of them stretch taut, ripe for severing.

“I was on the Nissa’s Earth, briefly,” Mal said at last. “They have an engine that can exploit a fault—enough to send people from one timeline to another. It’s not far from where CERN is in our Earth, actually. It’s fucking huge, Lee. It has to be, to manage all those calculations, and the energy needed. And even then, they can’t just jump about wherever. They need a fault line to follow. So amazingly, no, they have not been able to distil this tech into nanobots or a wearable accessory.”

“But what they were doing at the museum, all that reaching into the air stuff…”

“That was the Fishnet.”

Lee blinked. Apparently four years in the wilderness hadn’t cured Mal of making up jokey names for serious things and she really wasn’t up to it. “Mal, I swear, just tell me what’s going on. Tell me why we’re here, why you’ve…just…why?”

Mal let out a long breath. “Because I fucked up, Lee. I fucked it up for you. I am one hundred per cent to blame. I’m so sorry.”

A stab of emotion shot through Lee, a twisted-together combination of anger and grief and frustration. But also, maddeningly, she felt bad that Mal felt bad—like she always had. Lee was scrabbling to make things better even though these things had been done to her. “That’s not,” she said tightly, “an explanation.”