by Nino Cipri
“What did you tell her?” Ava asked.
“I congratulated her on her overdue promotion to captain, and told her where to find the letter of commission. I wrote it months ago, but haven’t been able to give up the ship.” Captain Nouresh touched the wall affectionately, like an old friend or a family member. She patted it a couple of times, then said, “I’m ready for my next adventure. It’s been too long since I’ve walked through a marejii.”
Ava felt an enormous weight lift off her chest. She listened with half an ear as Jules excitedly told Nouresh about their own world, all the amazing places in it besides Annapolis—though of course Nouresh could go back there, if she wanted, but she should know about some other options. Jules’s secondhand wanderlust was palpable, and contagious, judging by Nouresh’s face.
All Ava could think was that they were going home. She liked the Anahita, and maybe if she’d chosen this she would have been able to enjoy the traveling, like Jules obviously was. But she hadn’t signed up for this, and she was ready to be back in her own universe, back in her apartment, with her books, and her bed, and hours of sitcoms cued up on her laptop.
Still, she cleared her throat to get Nouresh and Jules’s attention and said, “Maybe we can say we lost the FINNA. Say it got eaten by a chair or something.”
Nouresh smiled at the scheming look on Jules’s face. “Some of my information is out of date, but I’d be happy to give you some pointers on traveling through the marejii.”
Jules turned their grin to Ava. “Pretty sure you can get fired for stealing from the job.”
Ava shrugged. Going home was good, but the thought of going back to LitenVärld was exhausting. Moreover, it was making her realize how draining her time there was; how much energy that shit job stole from her every day. “It’s not like they’re using it,” she replied. “And we can keep them from sending other workers to get eaten by chairs.”
“Worker solidarity, nice,” Jules said. They held their fist out, and Ava bumped it. As they shared a smile, Ava noticed that it didn’t hurt. For the first time in a long time, the sight of Jules’s grin didn’t press against something exquisitely painful inside her, or ignite a toxic well. Jules smiled because they were happy, and Ava smiled back, because it was good to see Jules happy. Simple as that.
They turned the corner and walked into a nightmare.
CHAPTER EIGHT
One of the Danas stood in front of them, dripping with seawater and black smears of grease. Her sky-blue polo clung to her ribcage, giving her a sunken, cadaverous look.
Ava’s fear didn’t have a chance to drag her down or cloud her mind. Her senses sharpened until she could see the individual lines of grease trickling down the Dana’s arm, hear the water drip off her clothes and hair and hit the floor. The Dana’s lips pulled back from her teeth, which looked like they’d gotten sharper. In the store, the Danas all had nice French manicures, but now there was muck embedded underneath the nails and in the beds.
“Where is my mother, shoppers?” she asked.
Nouresh shoved Ava back toward Jules, yanking a long, curved sword out of a sheath at her belt. She gave a shout and rushed at the Dana, who dodged away from her and hissed.
Nouresh feinted with the sword, drove the Dana up against the wall, and then thrust a dagger into her chest. It barely seemed to faze the Dana, who screeched in Nouresh’s face and swiped at her with her claws. Nouresh danced back, graceful as a cat.
“Run!” she shouted at Jules and Ava. She took another swing at the Dana with her dagger, catching her in the hand and taking off several of her fingers. The Dana shrieked and cradled her hand, which bled a dark, viscous ooze from the stumps. There were a dozen answering screeches from further down the hallway.
Ava’s brain, which had done such a great job of observing, remembered that it was supposed to be running like hell and also scared shitless. There was a door ahead of them, and Ava’s focus narrowed to it, to the small oblong opening and the thick door that stood ajar in front of it.
She started to shut the doorway behind her, only to realize that she was alone. Ava yanked the door back—no easy feat, the thing weighed significantly more than she did—and looked back down the hallway. Jules was a few dozen steps behind her, carrying Nouresh in their arms.
Nouresh, who was covered in blood, and looked half-conscious.
“Help us!” Jules yelled, but again, Ava’s feet were already carrying her toward them. She and Jules muscled Nouresh through the narrow hatchway, tripping over the tall lip, and slammed the door shut on the echoing shrieks of the Marks and Danas. There was a wheel in the center that Jules quickly spun, just as a series of thuds hit the door.
“Lock it!” Ava cried, taking Nouresh’s weight and laying her on the floor.
“How?” Jules was straining with the wheel, muscles in their forearms standing out like cords. Ava could tell it was all Jules could do to hold the door against them, there was no chance of twisting it shut and locked. An unholy wailing rose up, and the sounds of scratching, muffled by the thick walls.
Nouresh moaned, a pained, pitiful sound. “What happened to her?” Ava demanded.
“She put one down, but another snuck up behind her,” Jules said through clenched teeth. “Started tearing into her before I knocked it away. She lopped off its head but fainted after that.”
Ava, hands shaking, knocked the sword out of Nouresh’s slack grip and grasped her wrist, trying to find a pulse. It was there, but sluggish. Ava nudged open her coat: there were wide, gaping tears across the front of Nouresh’s shirt, and the fabric was sodden with blood, as red as the captain’s coat.
“Shit,” Ava said, trying and failing to remember the mandatory first aid classes she’d sat through six months before. They’d just been another series of instructional videos, which were apparently LitenVärld’s answer to everything. She yanked off her own shawl and tied it around the wounds. Pressure, right? To stop bleeding? It would have to do for now.
“Okay, we have to get out of here,” Ava said, fumbling for the FINNA. “Fuck this fucking place and all the fucking monsters and this fucking job—!”
She finally got the stupid thing out of Ursula’s giant granny purse right as the wheel slid underneath Jules’ hands. With a shout of effort, they stopped its movement. “I can’t hold it for long!” they shouted. “Get my belt off!”
Ava looked back at them. “What?”
“Use my belt to tie the hatch closed. It’ll stop them for a while!”
Ava stumbled over, yanked Jules’s shirt up, and managed to pull their belt through the loops. She slid it through the rim of the wheel, looped it around a metal handhold, and then cinched the whole thing shut. She could feel minute shudders coming through the door as the Danas and Marks slammed against it. It was, what, four inches of solid metal? Christ.
Finally, it was done. Jules relaxed minutely; their knuckles, pale with strain, flushed as blood flowed back into them. Then the wheel gave a short, aborted turn. The leather belt creaked ominously against the sudden strain, and the buckle started to bend.
“Fuck!” Jules shouted, and grabbed hold of it again. “Get the FINNA!”
Ava scrabbled for it again, finally getting the unwieldy thing into her hands. “Home, home, how do I make it take us home?”
“This is why you should read the instructions!”
“Really, Jules?!” Ava screamed. “Because I might need to escape from a swarm of cannibal drones?”
Jules took a precious second to pull the instructional booklet out of their back pocket and throw it at Ava. She snatched it out of the air and opened it. The diagrams swam before her eyes like an alien script. “How can anyone make any sense of this shit?” she hissed.
Jules said, “Check page twelve, that’s where I found the other instructions.”
Ava flipped to page twelve and found the diagrams, right where Jules said they were: a happy cartoon person flipping the dial on the side from the compass to a house. Intuitive desi
gn. A house for home. Sure. She turned the dial on the side of the FINNA; there was a musical beep, and a new blue arrow popped up on the console, directing them down through another hallway. “Okay, I think I got it. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
She began the process of hauling Nouresh up, trying not to think the word deadweight. “Can you help me with her?”
“I don’t think I should,” Jules said. Their voice was strained, but curiously calm. Ava looked back over her shoulder. Jules’s muscles were quivering under their dark skin, shaking with the effort of holding the wheel.
“You go,” they said. “I’ll stay and hold them back as long as I can.”
It was as if Jules had said it in French, which Ava had never been able to understand. The words made no sense, not separately nor strung together. Stay where? Hold who?
“Shut up and stop being stupid,” Ava blurted. Not her finest or most mature comeback.
“You stop being stupid!” Jules replied. At least they were on the same wavelength.
“What the hell are you even saying?” Ava shouted.
“It’s bad enough that they followed us into this world!” Jules shouted back. “Can you imagine what would happen if we led them back to ours?”
Would they do that? The mother was dead, but what if one of the Marks or Danas was like, a hive queen-in-waiting? Was that possible? The only person who could tell them was unconscious and possibly bleeding out in Ava’s arms.
“Okay, but—” Ava started to say, though she had no idea what she was going to follow it with.
“I don’t have to hold them off forever,” Jules said. “The crew will come eventually. They can hear the alarm. Besides, even if they get through”—they nodded at Ava’s foot, where the curved blade of Captain Nouresh’s sword lay in a puddle of blood—“I can hold them back. They can only come through this door one at a time.”
“That sounds like suicide,” Ava pleaded.
“Would you just trust me this fucking once?” Jules screamed. “I promise that this is not a noble sacrifice! I can do this, so give me the damn sword!”
She wondered desperately if Jules even knew how to use it, or if this was just bluster to get Ava to leave.
But on the heels of that came another thought: could she, just this once, trust Jules to know what they were capable of?
Ava bent down and, grunting with effort, hauled Nouresh’s weight up over her shoulder. Then she kicked the sword over to Jules, so that they could reach down and grab it. Ava stared at them for a second. “You weren’t planning on coming back, were you?” she asked, needing to confirm it.
Jules shook their head. “Didn’t imagine it would be because I was holding back a swarm of violent sales associates, though.”
Her eyes started burning, and her face flushed. Ava felt a wave of impatience with herself. She had already promised that she was done crying over Jules, and her hands were too covered in blood to even wipe the tears starting to scald her cheeks. This was truly not the time.
“It’s okay,” Jules said. They looked … not calm, exactly, but not scared. They looked, as they had for most of their trip, thrilled that they weren’t getting misgendered while answering customers’ stupid questions about how much weight a towel rod could really hold. “This is what I want. I’m not running from something, I’m choosing it.”
Ava tried desperately to think of some final, parting words. There was so much left unsaid, but all the words were tangling themselves up in her head.
The door rattled under Jules’s weight, and the smile on their face turned into a snarl. “Go!” they screamed, and Ava went, forcing herself not to look back again. Not when she heard the door slam open and the voices of the Marks and Danas come in clearly. Not even when she heard Jules’s answering scream of defiance, and the sound of a sword whistling through the air.
She couldn’t look back. If she didn’t look back, she didn’t have to know whether she was leaving Jules to their death.
The FINNA directed her through a labyrinth of passages, all of them stained yellow with what she realized were the emergency lights. First Mate Mirya apparently had more to mop up than they’d realized, because the sounds of fighting echoed down other corridors. The FINNA, either by luck or according to some weird twist of its programming, led them only through empty corridors, dodging other battles, the Anahita’s crew, and the Marks and Danas they fought. Eventually, the FINNA beeped again, more urgently than it had before. Ava shifted Nouresh’s weight, grimacing at the tacky feeling of blood that had soaked into her tunic, and ran faster.
She almost didn’t recognize the maskhål when she saw it. This one pulsed with a sickening, reddish light, unlike any she’d seen before. The place where the worlds were stitched together wasn’t a line, but stretched out, creating a tunnel made of twitching, juddering skin. But at the other end, she recognized a familiar sight: the Nihilistic Bachelor Cube.
Even as she looked, the familiar interior receded, grew more distant.
The maskhål collapsed after a couple of hours, she remembered. She thought again of the animation in that god-awful video they’d watched in the break room: the doorway between universes stretching like a piece of Silly Putty until it snapped and collapsed back on itself.
How long did she have?
“Fuck it,” she said, and sprinted.
Running through the maskhål as it collapsed was like walking quickly through the showrooms at her LitenVärld, the disorienting effect of seeing wildly different rooms stacked next to each other. The walls of the maskhål reflected and refracted images of other universes, all of them focused on her: a thousand different versions of herself, some nightmarish, some wildly surreal, others utterly mundane. All of these Avas seemed to notice something strange, looking up from whatever they were doing and staring toward Ava as she stared at them. It was dizzying, to look into these mirrors come to life. She was drawn to a set of universes that seemed perilously close to the one she was in right now: dozens and dozens of Avas trying to make their way down the tunnel of a collapsing wormhole. Some of those Avas were alone, sprinting through unburdened. In others, Captain Nouresh walked beside her, uninjured. There were more than a few where she carried Jules’s bloody, lifeless body.
In some of those mirrors, she watched the tunnel tearing apart at the seams, exposing a void that writhed out of its cracks, crumbling the maskhål even faster. In others, the Avas seemed to grow desperate, distracted by the reflections that surrounded them. They took a wrong step off the path and winked out of existence. They staggered under the leaden weight of the people they carried, and finally, in desperation, dropped them. One after another, the Avas around her met their ends; some bloodless and calm, sitting down and accepting their fate, others fighting and clawing as their existence disintegrated. She didn’t see a single one ahead of her, reaching the end of the tunnel and the stupid Nihilistic Bachelor Cube where this whole damn thing began. A thousand versions of herself assured her that it was hopeless.
It was a familiar refrain, one that Ava already knew how to ignore.
Ava dragged her eyes away from her reflections and focused again on the tunnel, just in time to realize that she was about to wander off the path and into the void that surrounded it. She staggered, nearly tripped, nearly dropped Nouresh, but managed to right herself. She forced the end of the tunnel to fill her vision, and pumped her weak legs even faster. It was like a nightmare; working so hard and seeming to move hardly at all.
She didn’t realize it until later, but it never occurred to her to drop Captain Nouresh. That stubbornness finally was useful for something.
The other end of the maskhål loomed suddenly in front of her, her own world rearing up like a startled horse. She shoved herself and Nouresh over the threshold, into the world she knew as the wormhole snapped shut behind her.
Maybe there was a word for the way time slowed as she and Nouresh fell from the entrance of the maskhål and onto the futon in the Nihilist Bachelor Cube. Ma
ybe it was a specific phenomenon that had been studied by physicists or LitenVärld’s FINNA division. Maybe Tricia had an instructional video about it. Spooky Action in the Workplace: Side Effects of Collapsing Wormholes and You. Or maybe it was just the first of many PTSD symptoms that Ava could look forward to.
Whatever it was, Ava felt curiously detached as she observed the chaotic swirl of bodies around her. Tricia, Ursula Nouri’s granddaughter, and half a dozen coworkers crowded around her and Nouresh. The young woman grasped Nouresh’s pale, bloodstained hand in her own. Tricia yelled for someone to call for an ambulance. All of their voices were muted, as if coming from far away. Ava wondered if she was somehow still in the tunnel created by the maskhål, and that’s why everything sounded like faint and fading echoes. Was this her world? If it was, why did it feel so strange?
CHAPTER NINE
Ava hated the hot chocolate from the food court. So of course, that’s what Tricia brought her.
Tricia set it down on the vast desk that occupied nearly half her office. There was a crack in the glass top that had been mended with a thick band of epoxy, and Ava found her eyes tracing its length as Tricia made her way to the other side. Everything in this place was so ugly.
Tricia cleared her throat. “It seems like you were successful in retrieving Mrs. Nouri.”
Ava glanced up at her. She recognized one of Tricia’s patented Managerial Faces: Empathetically Dealing With Conflict. “Ursula Nouri got eaten by a plant,” Ava said. “That’s her ‘appropriate replacement.’”
Tricia’s Managerial Face cracked into a frown. “I see. Well, the EMTs told me that she was seriously injured, but will likely recover.”
“Did they say where they were taking her?” asked Ava. Her eyes drifted back to the epoxied crack in the glass.
“Saint Joseph’s Hospital, I believe.”
Ava nodded. There was a long, heavy silence. Then she said, “Jules isn’t coming back.”
She wasn’t sure what she expected. Tricia to swear, fume, roll her eyes. Make a cutting, disparaging remark, at the very least, about Jules’s unreliability.
