by Nino Cipri
Ava stopped flipping through the diagrams, enough to signal that she was listening.
Jules took a breath. “Go through the maskhål far enough to be out of sight, and chill. I’ll find Ursula on my own, and then meet you back there.”
The worst part is that she was tempted. Sorely tempted. For a few seconds anyway, before the ever-present anger seeped back in.
“I’m not going to make you wander through a bunch of creepy worlds by yourself,” Ava said grumpily. “You can’t even follow foolproof diagrams.”
“That’s why there are instructions.”
“It’s supposed to be intuitive!”
“It’s not intuitive for me!” Jules said. They always lost their patience with Ava eventually, because she could never keep herself from pushing them past their limit. “My brain isn’t wired like that, and I don’t want it to be!”
Why couldn’t Ava keep herself—keep both of them—from getting stuck in these same stupid arguments? “That’s why I’m not going to make you explore some weird alternate universe all alone. I don’t want you running into whatever the hell those things were in that video,” she said, crossing her arms.
“I’d rather face down a whatever-the-hell than constantly hear I’m a screw-up who can’t do obvious, simple tasks,” Jules said. Their tone was quiet but vehement, full of a subdued anger that cut through Ava’s defenses.
“That’s not what I think.” Had she ever said that? She and Jules had said a lot—a lot—of things to each other when they’d broken up, but she’d never …
“It’s what everyone thinks,” Jules said. Their face—normally open, armed with joy and humor—was stony and closed off. “Like doing things my own way is the most ridiculous shit they’ve ever heard of, even though it’s the only way I’ve ever been happy. Nobody says it to my face, but everyone here treats me like it’s a miracle I’ve gotten this far on my own. I’m on my last warning before I get fired. Tricia would probably be thrilled if I didn’t come back.”
Ava wanted to deny it, but remembered how often she’d told Jules this is why we can’t have nice things, in every tone from accusatory to laughing, but most often with that underlying frustration. Jules was so unpredictable, so messy, forever losing or misplacing things, seeming to move in a personal chaos field. It had been thrilling, until it wasn’t, until it felt like an extra weight on her own shaky mental health. But she’d never meant to make it seem like Jules should change for her, or for anyone. Especially this stupid job.
“Tricia is garbage anyway,” Ava said. “So it’s not like her opinion counts for shit.”
Jules looked askance at her. “Let’s just figure out how this thing works.”
Ava spread out the instructions enough for Jules to peer over her shoulder, then tapped one of the diagrams. The diagram pointed to a large bubble on the bottom of the FINNA, like the plastic capsules for vending machine toys. “I’m assuming ‘insérez un objet personnel’ means insert a personal object?”
Jules wrinkled their nose at Ava’s pronunciation. They used to tease her for only knowing English, when they’d grown up speaking English and French, Creole to their Guianan parents and cousins, and knew enough Spanish to crack jokes with the Honduran and Mexican dudes working down in assembly. “You’re not wrong,” they said begrudgingly. “Just mildly offensive. Here.”
They handed over one of the purple gloves they’d found on the other side of the maskhål. Ava pressed a button, and the bubble cracked in half to open. She stuffed the fleece glove into the hollow space, which stretched to accommodate it like hard plastic never could.
“Cool, just gonna not think about how weird that is,” she said.
“There should be a switch on the side,” said Jules. “Turn it to … I guess that’s a compass?”
When she did, there was a momentary whine, high-pitched as a mosquito. The glove dissolved into a gently glowing purple haze, trapped underneath the plastic. There was a pleasant ding, like an oven timer, and the console lit up.
“That’s so cool,” Jules said.
Ava looked back at the diagrams. “I guess we just point it at the maskhål, and it should …”
The FINNA beeped cheerfully, and a neon-green arrow appeared on the screen, juddering and moving as she swept the device from side to side. Some of the gauges on the console jumped as she pointed it toward that puckered seam where the two worlds joined.
“I guess that’s it,” Ava said. The dread that she’d successfully tamped down with anger bloomed in her stomach again.
“I guess so,” Jules agreed. They picked up the instructions, put them in their back pocket, then held a hand out to Ava. She wanted to roll her eyes, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to force her leaden legs to move without any assistance.
She let Jules pull her up, and they walked toward the maskhål together.
* * *
The weirdest part about walking through the maskhål was that it wasn’t weird at all. Ava had expected to feel something; a membrane, a temperature change, her ears to pop. They took half a dozen steps and were in another world.
It took Ava a few minutes to notice the subtle differences. The world was warmer, a little more humid. The air was fresher in this LitenVärld than in her own. Pastels and paisley seemed to be in fashion in these showrooms, rather than the muted color palettes and natural prints that had dominated this year’s catalogue. But there was nothing that screamed Alien planet! You don’t belong here!
“I really thought another universe would look cooler.” Jules sounded disappointed.
“I guess LitenVärld is the same everywhere,” she said. “That’s what people want, right? Familiarity?”
“Some people, sure,” said Jules. They turned to her. “This place seems chill. You should stay here while I go find Ursula.”
Ava rolled her eyes. “I’m coming with you.”
“I told you, I can do this on my own,” Jules said, frustration bleeding into their tone.
“I know you can!” Ava snapped. It was true. Jules was prepared for anything, everything. They could have been a Boy Scout, if the Boy Scouts weren’t transphobic trash. They may have moved in a personal chaos field, but it made them more at ease with the unexpected and strange than anyone. At their best, Jules was good-hearted and calm in emergencies and tended to know what to do. Jules was the person you always, always wanted on your zombie apocalypse team.
“Of everyone in this stupid store,” Ava said, “you’re definitely the most capable of rescuing someone’s grandma from a horde of spider-monsters or whatever were in that video.”
“Then why—”
“Because I don’t trust you to come back!” Ava hissed. “You always do this. You ignore inconvenient realities like your girlfriend is fucked up in the head and there are giant spiders in other worlds! Then when the problems get too big to ignore, you run.”
“ … You dumped me,” Jules said numbly.
“Because you never would,” Ava answered. “I would have just woken up and you’d be gone.”
Jules looked like she’d stuck a dagger somewhere soft. Some uncallused piece of them, secreted away from the world and from Jules’s own introspection. You’re only with me because you think you can fix me, she’d told them, during that last, caustic fight. And as long as you’re trying to fix me, you don’t have to think about all the problems in your own life. That’s the last thing she’d said before Jules had stormed out. The two of them had talked on the phone after, and they’d both apologized for the things they’d said, but neither of them had retracted any of those cruel truths.
Ava, for once, thanked her own cruelty, because it let her keep pushing. “Let me just help, for once. I know I’m mostly useless, but it’s too dangerous to go alone.”
Jules didn’t say anything for long minutes. Ava, hypervigilant to disaster, wondered if they were about to yank the FINNA out of her hands and run for it. What would she do? Could she fight them off?
Thankfully, s
he didn’t have to find out. Jules cleared their throat and said, “Which way are we supposed to go?”
Ava relaxed a bit. The arrow on the FINNA’s screen had shifted, was pointing them left, toward a large showroom with kitchen tables, astroturf, and fake plants. But when they turned into it, the showroom stretched out into a dizzying, impossibly long room, its end obscured by plants. A warm, humid wind pressed against them. It felt like walking into a gaping mouth.
“Nice,” Jules said. Their excitement was faint but palpable. “This is more along the lines of what I was thinking.”
Jules stepped into the showroom, and Ava told herself that she had no choice but to follow.
As they walked, the plants grew thicker and distinctly less plastic. The astroturf gave way to real grass, ankle high, dotted with ferns. The ceiling receded, until they couldn’t see it past the canopy of plants stretching overhead. The two of them pushed their way through, following the insistent beeps of the FINNA. Ava’s shirt stuck to her chest with sweat, her thighs chafing inside her uniform khakis. Eventually, they broke through the thicket of wild plants and into a clearing—they had, at some unknown point, made their way outside. Ava wiped sweat from her forehead as she looked around.
The FINNA led them into what looked like a wild, overgrown orchard planted high up on a hillside. The sun peeked out from behind fat, fast-moving clouds that seemed to race just above the tops of the trees. The trees themselves sprawled low and wide across the grass, with branches that twined into the shapes of chairs and tables. Cookware sprouted up from the ground like sharp, metallic flowers. Two massive butterflies chased each other, each wing the size of a paperback, and with a pattern that looked weirdly like fabric swatches.
“This is amazing,” Jules whispered next to Ava. Their voice was hushed, awed. They weren’t even out of breath. Ava waved away a cloud of gnats that suddenly descended on her.
“This is weird,” she said. “Where is everyone?”
“Who cares? It’s gorgeous out here.”
It was pretty enough, but Ava was too distracted by the miserable heat to appreciate it. She’d always hated summer. “Can we rest for a second? I feel like I’m going to die.”
Ava plopped down in the grass, feeling a vague wave of annoyance toward Ursula Nouri. Why the hell hadn’t Ursula turned back once she’d realized she was lost? Then again, maybe she had tried, but gotten increasingly turned around. LitenVärld was disorienting enough without adding in multiple universes.
Jules was running around like a kid at a playground, zooming around and investigating the plants. “This place is amazing. These can’t be naturally occurring, right? They must have been cultivated.”
Ava lay back on the grass and closed her eyes. Her nose itched. Great, she was allergic to this new world. Still, the intermittent sun felt good, and there was a fresh breeze drying the sweat that had pooled on her skin. She asked, “If it’s cultivated, where are the workers? Where are the customers?”
“Maybe they’re permaculture gardens,” Jules replied. “Super-casual cultivation. Or maybe this world has moved beyond materialism and the need to keep buying the same crap over and over. Oh my god!”
Ava sat up, ready to run. “What? What is it?”
“Look at these chairs!” Jules called out. “This is so cool!”
Ava wanted to throw a clod of dirt at them, but instead dutifully stood up and looked at the chairs Jules was geeking out about. They were bright green wingbacks with purple-red accents, and their fuzzy fabric looked plush and inviting. As Ava got closer, she realized that the chair was covered in gossamer-thin hairs that stood on end, as if at attention. Jules waved their arm, and the bristles seemed to follow the movement, stretching upward toward the limb.
Something caught Ava’s peripheral vision, a color that seemed out of place; an artificial crimson that didn’t fit in with the lush garden. A scrap of red fabric, just peeking out from a massive, tightly curled bud. She walked over to get a closer look, thinking of Ursula’s red coat. Maybe this was another clue. Ava looked down as her foot collided with something. A leather purse.
There was more red on the grass, but not fabric, not a flower. Blood.
“Jules?” Ava said, but her voice had no strength. She turned around, and saw them reaching closer to the chair, toward those wispy bristles that strained upward in return.
Ava had never really had to deal with an emergency; just the slow disaster that was her life. But if that was anything to go by, Ava had always assumed she’d be useless, do the worst possible thing in a horrible situation. But now, she didn’t have time to stop and make a decision. She didn’t even have time to doubt herself. Her brain shut off, and her body moved in giant steps until she was close enough to grab hold of Jules’s shirt and yank them backward.
The wingback chair snapped shut inches from Jules’s outstretched fingers. Jules screamed. Ava realized that she’d been screaming the whole time; her throat felt raw, abraded by terror. They stumbled backward, a safe distance from the wingback flytrap.
“Holy shit, that almost killed me,” Jules said. They could have been commenting on the weather. “And I’m glad it didn’t, but also that is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Ava socked them in the arm and stomped away.
* * *
Jules knew her well enough to give Ava some time and space. Maybe they had, against all odds, developed a sense of self-preservation. If they had, they could surely tell that she was ready to toss their ungrateful ass into the waiting maw of one of those flytrap chairs. Ava closed her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to will away the tremors and slow her heartbeat. She flinched at a sudden loud clapping sound, opening her eyes and scrambling backward.
It was just Jules, though, sitting a safe distance from the carnivorous wingback chair, and poking at the hairs with a stick.
At Ava’s glare, they dropped the stick. “Sorry,” they said. Ava turned her back on Jules, grabbed the leather purse, and started going through it.
It was a true grandma bag, roomy and full of all kinds of junk. Ava dug through cough drops, reading glasses, tissues, hand sanitizer, perfume, and several bottles of hand cream before she found a pocketbook. She opened it up: the driver’s license read Ursula Nouri, and Ava recognized the woman in the photo from the young woman’s selfie.
“It’s hers,” Ava called out. “Ursula’s.”
She started flipping through the rest of the pocketbook, mostly out of morbid curiosity. About thirty dollars in cash, some crumpled receipts, a well-used library card, a half-dozen memberships for big box stores like Hearths and Crafts, Hammer City, and, of course, LitenVärld. Tucked into the same clear plastic sleeve that held Ursula’s driver’s license, facing the opposite side, was a picture of her with a teenage girl. The young woman at the customer service desk, but years younger. Middle or high school maybe, judging by the acne and the awkward emo outfit that screamed trying too hard.
Ava could easily imagine this Ursula dropping some commentary about the skinny plaid pants barely hanging on her granddaughter’s hips, and how much eyeliner was too much. Ursula looked a little judgmental, but her arm around the girl was protective, comforting. Ava smiled, then remembered the woman staring at the selfie and saying that her grandmother knew how worried she got.
God, this job sucked.
Jules, never able to leave well enough alone, had progressed to balling up wads of grass and tossing them at the chair. It seemed to be getting wise to their tricks, only half closing when the grass hit the sensitive hairs on what Ava couldn’t help but think of as its tongue. “So she got eaten?” they asked.
Ava looked over at the curled-up plant. The lump was definitely human-sized. “Something is in there. I’m not sure I’m willing to pry it open and find out.”
“Yeah,” Jules agreed sadly. “That’s above our pay grade.”
“This whole trip is above our pay grade,” Ava muttered. She looked at the FINNA. The arrow in the center of the conso
le still moved as she did, directing her toward something. Oddly, it wasn’t pointing at the now-digesting plant. “This thing is still telling us she’s out there, though. Piece of crap.”
She dropped it and began setting Ursula’s purse back to rights. The granddaughter would probably want it back, but she wouldn’t miss a couple of cough drops, and Ava’s throat was sore from screaming. She popped a cough drop into her mouth and sucked on it.
Jules was squinting at the FINNA’s instructions. They liked to talk up their French fluency, but Ava knew that their reading was rusty as shit.
“What color is the arrow in the console?” they called out.
“Yellow?”
“Huh,” Jules said.
Ava looked back at them. “What? What is it?”
“It says here that the arrow is green when it locates the exact match of the person being sought. But if that person is indisposed—and I’m guessing they mean dead—the light will change to yellow and the FINNA will locate instead …”
They trailed off, looking stricken.
“What?” Ava asked. “Locate what?”
Jules closed the booklet. “An appropriate replacement from another universe.”
Ava sat up straighter. “Appropriate replacement?”
“That’s what it says.”
She bellowed, “Appropriate replacement?!”
“I am literally just translating.”
Ava dropped the FINNA and put her face in her hands. She wanted to scream again, but her throat was still too sore. She crunched the cough drop vindictively.
“This is so fucked up,” she said between bites.
“Capitalism,” Jules said philosophically.
“Yep.” She took her face out of her hands. “So we’re supposed to find some alternate universe version of Ursula and bring her back instead?”
“I guess,” Jules said, though they sounded conflicted about it. “That’s better than coming back empty-handed.”
“Is it?” Ava asked. “Is it really? Or is that sorta messed up?”
