Finna

by Nino Cipri

  Jules shrugged. “It’s messed up either way. I’m not really in a hurry to go back and tell this girl her grandma is …”

  They both looked at the Ursula-sized lump in the plant. Ava shuddered.

  “Besides,” Jules said, “I’d still rather be out here than back in the store and getting grilled on my gender by random customers.”

  Ava side-eyed them. “You almost got eaten by a chair.”

  Jules shrugged, and Ava could see the response coming. “What’s life without a little risk?”

  “You know,” she snapped. “I really wish you cared about yourself as much as other people cared about you.”

  Jules whipped around. “What the hell does that mean? And who the hell are you to say that?”

  Ava was caught off guard by the ferocity in their voice.

  “You made it abundantly clear that you didn’t care about me anymore,” they said. “You can’t just, just say stuff like that when you don’t—”

  “I care!” She wanted to scream it at them, but all she could get out was a hoarse, broken whisper. “Jules, I—”

  The truth was she cared too much, about everything, but Jules most of all. She couldn’t stop caring, she felt like she was choking on how much everything mattered so much. It froze her, or burned her up inside, or sometimes both at the same time in an impossibly cruel alchemy. She’d been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, but really, all it seemed to come down to was this: she cared too much, too often, and it left her oversensitized and insufferable. Jules, when they’d first started dating, had distracted her from how dire everything felt all the time. The sex had distracted her, the dates and the cuddling and the romance. For a while, it had distracted her so completely that she’d believed she was cured. Why hadn’t she tried treating her mental health by falling in love with a cute, quirky stranger?

  Then she’d started caring about Jules. Jules had been absorbed into the cacophony of competing worries and anxieties. She could see that the way she cared about Jules was making them miserable, and her too, but she’d never been able to just disentangle the different kinds of caring. Especially not with Jules.

  Damn it, she was crying. She grabbed tissues out of Ursula’s purse, hoping they weren’t already used as she wiped her face. When her voice was steady enough to speak, she said, “I care. No matter how shit I am at showing it.”

  “You’re definitely shit at that,” Jules said bitterly. After a long moment, though, the stiff, angry line of their back relaxed. “But you might be right about some of the other stuff.”

  They scrubbed a hand over their face. Ava looked away; she knew Jules hated to cry, hated anyone seeing it even more. When Ava cried, her entire face crumpled, her sobs loud brays that broke through her clenched teeth, but at least she felt better afterward. Jules kept their face as still as a statue, and it never seemed to be the same kind of release for them.

  They’d given Ava time to calm down, so it was only fair to return the favor. When Jules looked like they were ready, Ava put the purse over her shoulder. “We should go before we’re stalked and eaten by a sofa or something. Hopefully the next universe won’t try to kill us.”

  After a brief hesitation, Jules stood up as well. “You’ve cursed us now.”

  “Probably,” she agreed glumly. The FINNA beeped, directing them toward a dirt path that wound its way through the trees.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Walls grew up gradually around them, the dirt path became neat brick, and the plant life began to look more orderly. Ava kept an eye out for the maskhål this time, and spotted it easily. The one in her LitenVärld had seemed to squirm, and was tinted with violet and yellow hues. This seam was thinner, uniform, and seemed … stable? Was that possible? Rather than a shifting, moving scar between two worlds, this one looked like it had been reinforced with a honeycomb pattern of lines. It pulsed regularly as Ava watched it, somewhere between organic and mechanical.

  The maskhål opened into a recognizable LitenVärld food court, bustling with people. Ava sighed in relief, letting the familiar wave of white noise wash over her: the low murmur of voices, cutlery against plates, footsteps. She wasn’t sure she could have dealt with another wilderness, empty except for killer furniture. This LitenVärld looked nearly identical to their own, but the lunch rush was much calmer. No screaming children, no couples arguing over budgets, no amateur interior designers melting down over curtain patterns. It was soothing, exactly what she needed to calm her nerves.

  “Do you think this place accepts money from other universes?” she asked Jules. The second she’d smelled the food court, her hunger rumbled through her. But when she turned to look at Jules, she saw that they were hanging back by the wall, eyeing the cafeteria uneasily.

  “I don’t think we should eat here,” they said.

  Ava rolled her eyes and handed Jules the FINNA. “You’re just mad because nothing is trying to eat us.”

  She got in line. The familiarity was almost as comforting as the thought of getting some food in her belly. She recognized everything from the food court in her own LitenVärld: slices of smoked salmon, potato salad, smörgås arranged in neat, orderly lines, the silver carafes dispensing surprisingly decent tea and awful hot chocolate. Ava got a tray and loaded it up. She paused in front of the desserts, having automatically reached for a plate of the addictive chocolate cake. Her therapist had been yelling at Ava to try and eat at least A Fruit and/or Vegetable A Day. She added an apple from a large glass bowl before moving toward the register.

  The apple felt odd in her hands, and she examined it as she waited to pay. It was as round as a tennis ball, red as a fairy tale with bright golden splotches. The splotches looked uniform, evenly dotted around the circumference of the fruit, as if they’d been designed that way. She looked back at the bowl, and saw that the other apples were exactly the same. As if they’d been stamped from the same mold.

  Well, it was a different universe, she thought. Just because it felt familiar didn’t mean it was the same. Maybe apples in this world were like bananas in her own, identical genetic clones.

  “Are you ready, shopper?” the cashier said. Ava looked up and froze.

  The woman from the training video was standing behind the register. Dana? Had that been her name? It couldn’t have really been her, just someone who bore a creepy resemblance to her. Even though her hair was different—limp blond waves instead of a teased-up helmet—the likeness was uncanny enough to freak her the hell out.

  “Shopper?” the woman said. “Are you ready?”

  The voice, at least, was different. Ava shook herself and moved her tray up to the register. “Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Will this be all?”

  Ava nodded. The woman watched her expectantly, the blank smile fading into something suspicious.

  “Place your hand on the mortänder, shopper,” she said. She gestured to a pad in front of the register. The shape of a hand had been indented into it, and there were small slits interspersed evenly throughout.

  Okay, different universe, different rules. Yes, it was creepy, but drawing attention to themselves would be worse, right? Ava hesitantly moved her hand toward the pad, and nearly screamed with fright when someone seized her wrist.

  Jules. She snatched her wrist back and hissed, “Don’t scare me like that, jerk.”

  Jules’s eyes were on the cashier. “What did you call that thing?”

  The woman shifted her unnerving gaze to them.

  “It’s the mortänder, shopper,” she said evenly.

  “What’s it for?” Jules demanded.

  “It’s for taking payment, shopper.”

  “Payment of what?”

  Ava was about to elbow Jules and tell them to stop being rude when the woman’s reply froze her.

  “Why, blood, shopper,” she said in an aren’t you silly voice. Dana nodded to one of the other registers, and holy shit, another Dana was standing behind that register, and helping someone who bore a te
rrifying resemblance to Mark. Mark placed his hand in the mortänder, half-obscured by the tray of food he’d bought. Ava registered, with growing, distant horror, that they’d bought the same food; the smörgås on his tray looked like exact replicas, the chocolate cake and the apple were identical. The sameness was dizzying.

  There was a clear snikk, a metallic whisper like a blade being drawn. Ava realized that she’d been hearing it this whole time, over and over, but that it had somehow settled into the orderly bustle of the food court. She’d dismissed it as the sound of cutlery. The man’s smile twitched, and he drew up his hand.

  Blood flowed in bright rivulets down his palm and fingers, spattering across the hand-shaped depression.

  “First the mother teeth take the payment. Then Mother’s love soothes the hurt,” Dana explained.

  A thick liquid, like bile, oozed up into the hollow, and the man plunged his hand into it. Red tendrils of blood swirled through the slime until, with a hungry sound, the goo was sucked back down. The man withdrew his hand; the blood was gone, and the cuts had healed into bright pink scars, vivid against his pale skin.

  “You’re strangers, aren’t you?” asked the woman, drawing her eyes away from the blood and goo.

  Ava nodded dumbly, before realizing that was probably a bad idea. The man—the Mark, she couldn’t help thinking—came over to them. Ava grabbed onto Jules’s sleeve, huddling close to them.

  “It’s been so long since we’ve had strangers in our hive,” Mark said. His voice was nothing like the training video, but it was nearly identical to Dana’s in cadence and pitch.

  “I wonder why,” Jules said faintly.

  “We should take them to Mother,” Mark said to Dana.

  “Let us take them to Mother,” Dana said to Mark.

  “No, that’s okay,” Ava tried to say. She felt breathless, her skin was prickling with fear. This was worse, somehow, than the wingback chair.

  “Mother will want to meet you.”

  “Mother will have questions for you.”

  “Mother will want answers.”

  Jules pulled Ava back the way they’d come. “We actually have to get going,” they said. “We’re, uh, on a mission? From our own mother! She sent us here to, uh …”

  Mark and Dana’s faces darkened in awful unison. “Your mother sent you to infiltrate our peaceful hive?”

  Ava looked over her shoulder, and felt her stomach drop. They were attracting attention from everyone in the food court. Ava beheld an entire crowd of Marks and Danas, gazing at her and Jules with open hostility.

  “No, no,” Jules stammered. “That’s not what I—what we meant was—”

  “Abort,” Ava hissed. “Abort!”

  “Yeah, fuck this,” Jules said. They grabbed Ava’s hand, and the two of them ran for it.

  So this is what it’s like being chased by an angry mob of clones, Ava thought. Cool. This was shock, wasn’t it? While she could feel a mute, animalistic terror taking over her body—had she ever run this fast? She hated running, had always walked the last three-quarters of the timed mile during gym class—a part of her brain stood aside and watched, hands on its hips, vaguely bemused.

  She followed Jules through the store, showroom cubes blinking past them. The layout was nearly identical to their own LitenVärld’s, and she realized that Jules was taking them toward one of the fire exits in the back of the store. It was one of the shortcuts that only employees knew about, or serious LitenVärld shoppers who had memorized the store, followed all the sales, and could order the secret off-menu items in the food courts. Even a stupid place like LitenVärld had a fandom.

  They nearly fell headlong into a giant pit where the Gen X Family with ’80s Nostalgia showroom was supposed to be. Ava had to yank Jules back as they teetered above the pit, which was too dark to see the bottom of. The rising air smelled fetid, like a brackish swamp mixed with dog breath. The sides of it stretched from one side of the walkway to the other, impossible to get around.

  “Shit,” Jules said. “Shit!”

  They tossed the FINNA to their left hand, grabbed a towel rod in their right, and swung it at the advancing group of Marks and Danas. To Ava’s surprise, the crowd retreated, backing away and giving them space. Jules looked shocked, like they couldn’t believe that had worked.

  Ava’s wild, trembling hope ebbed as she felt rumbling under her feet. The tremor quaked up through the cement floor, reminding Ava of previous apartments too close to the Metra tracks, or of the tiny earthquake that had woken her once on a visit to family in California.

  At the same time, she caught a whisper from the crowd, a growing murmur that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  Mother. Mother. Mother. Mother.

  “Oh, shit,” Ava whispered.

  The murmur grew along with the thunderous vibration below, becoming a shout, a chant, an invocation.

  Animal panic was taking over now, that last bit of her brain that had been watching in detached irony consumed by the knowledge that she was going to die.

  Jules fumbled at her hand, and turned Ava toward them, blocking her view of the Marks and Danas shrieking around them.

  “Ava, listen,” they said, and somehow, the quiet intensity in their voice cut through her panic. “I’m sorry.”

  Confusion pushed down the noise in her head. “About … about the breakup?” she asked. Jules cut their eyes toward the pit.

  “Sure, that too,” they said awkwardly.

  Ava followed their gaze and caught a glimpse of an impossible rend in the air below them, illuminated with a gray-blue light that pulsed along its circumference. A maskhål.

  Then Jules shoved them over the edge of the pit.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She screamed as she fell, toward the rumbling, through darkness into a sudden burst of light.

  She kept screaming right up until she hit the water, hard enough to nearly knock her senseless. She twisted in the water, orienting herself before clawing her way back up toward the surface. She crested the water with a sputtering gasp, dimly aware of Jules doing the same a few feet away.

  Once she got her breath back, the first thing she did was send a splash of water right into Jules’s stupid face.

  “You asshole!” she screamed hoarsely. “You shoved me off a cliff!”

  Jules coughed out, “I got us away from the horde of retail zombies!”

  “They weren’t chasing us until you spouted off that garbage about being sent by our own mother!”

  “You didn’t even notice anything weird until they literally asked you for your blood!” they shouted back. “Would you have given it to them? God knows, you do everything else that stupid job asks you to do, even though you hate it.”

  “At least I wasn’t almost eaten by a chair, you ass! You’re the most impulsive, infuriating—”

  “The FINNA led us here!” Jules roared. “It pointed us toward the pit, I saw the wormhole, and I jumped. What would you have done? Agonized about it until they ate us?”

  It was true, but that didn’t mean she had to accept it. “A warning might have been nice,” she pointed out. “Or a quick, ‘Hey, there’s a wormhole, let’s make a getaway.’”

  Jules rolled their eyes. “I already apologized, so I don’t know what else you expect from me. You’re welcome for saving your life, anyway.”

  They stared at each other in a stalemate. Then Ava realized something.

  “Where’s the FINNA?”

  She was intimately familiar with Jules’s Oh, shit face, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach when she recognized it flitting across their face. Jules’s personal chaos field had struck again.

  “You dropped it, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “Shit,” Jules muttered. They looked down into the water, past their feet, searching for it.

  “Of course you dropped it,” Ava said. She wasn’t sure how far they’d fallen, but they’d hit the water hard. She would have been more surprised if they’d manage
d to keep hold of it.

  Jules dove down beneath the surface of the water, then came back up. “I can see it!” they said. “I can dive down and get it!”

  Ava ducked under the water to look. Far below them, she could see the purple light from the FINNA, its glow barely cutting through the murky salt water.

  Ava resurfaced and shoved her hair out of her face. “It’s too far,” she said. “There’s no point—”

  But Jules was already taking deep breaths, flooding their lungs and blood with oxygen.

  “Jules, don’t—!”

  But they were gone, disappearing into the murk beneath the surface of the water. Ava looked around. They had landed in a world made of water, flat and gray-skied. The water, at least, wasn’t too cold, and it was still as glass, mirroring the clouds above. As the seconds ticked by, Ava became aware of how alone she was. The horizon was impossibly distant.

  How long had Jules been underwater? Every time Ava had watched a movie when someone went underwater, she’d instinctively held her breath as well. Now, she felt dread stealing the air from her. “Jules?” she said. Then again, louder, “Jules!”

  Nothing. No bubbles broke the surface of the water. No ripples. Nothing moved except for her.

  Ava ducked back under the water, ignoring the sting in her eyes as she looked for Jules. But there was nothing in the murk, just the distant, barely visible light of the FINNA. She called out again, remembering distantly that sound carried better in water, “Jules!”

  Water splashed into her throat and sinuses, and she pulled herself back above the surface, coughing it out. Why had she yelled at them? Why had she made them think they needed to save her? That it was Jules’s fault they were both in this predicament? Why couldn’t either of them move beyond the same, stupid patterns of behavior? She was so—

  A splash behind her interrupted her spiral, followed by a wild, retching cough. Ava swam as hard as she could toward the sound, to find Jules paddling weakly, still coughing out water. They looked like they might slip back below the surface again at any moment. She reached them just as their head went under and wrapped her arm around Jules’s chest, pulling them back up. Jules coughed out an apology.