She had the momentary satisfaction of seeing his smiling mask split open to reveal the howling outrage of someone who is not to be touched by the hoi polloi under any circumstances. It was mingled with the panic of a man who really needed his phone at that exact moment. Then Lucas straight-armed her in the chest and sent her flying across the room to bounce hard against the wall. Julian went for him, and Rove’s man slugged him in the temple with his artificial hand, flinging him senseless to the floor.

Rove picked up his phone. The universe held its breath. Her heart plummeted as she saw his crisp smile re-establish itself.

“Kill the bitch,” he said, tapping at the screen. Stony-faced, Lucas drew his pistol and, even as Alison drew breath to yell, shot her in the head.

II

In the aftermath Lucas asked, “Do I get Khan or the rat next?” He was talking too loud, his ears ringing after the shot, but that was par for the course.

“We don’t need them any more,” Rove said. “We don’t need any of them. They’ve done their part.” There was something in that smile that made Lucas grab his wrist. But Rove made no protest nor tried to shake him off, so perhaps he hadn’t been about to abandon Lucas after all.

There was a lot of shouting, and people would be barging in at any moment. Lucas toyed with the idea of putting a bullet into Sabreur as well, for completeness. They were committed now, after all. Even as he lifted the pistol, though, the air around them rapidly dropped ten degrees, and Rove tapped his phone’s frosted screen one more time.

They fell. At first they fell in that other direction, Outerwards. They were travelling away from the dying world, back through the failing timelines that their Ediacaran gardener had cultivated so carefully.

Then they were falling in a far more real, gravitic way. They’d been ripped into a different timeline, exactly where Cam had been floating—materializing over an ocean of riven, jagged ice. Their Wayfarer host was nowhere to be seen. Lucas heard his own scream before something rose to meet them.

It was a boat, rising towards them as the broken plain below swelled into a great stylized wave. It resembled nothing so much as a Hokusai print, the wave lifting the narrow skiff towards them. Lucas’s arms and legs were windmilling as he fell, all attempts to retain contact with Rove forgotten. But he and Rove both ended up sprawled inside the boat, caught perfectly as the wave broke and then ebbed.

“Fuck,” Lucas got out, lungs filled with icy air.

He clutched the boat’s rail with his black hand, which didn’t really feel the cold in more than a distantly informational sense. Rove sat up and plucked at his clothing, restoring his dignity before reapplying his smile.