All eyes are on me, following my August’s out-thrust hands, and it’s an odd feeling being assessed as to whether you’re attractive enough to be held responsible for destroying a world via sex.
Amber’s the first with the conclusion. “You look exactly the same.”
A loud scoff breaks out of my August. “Look athim!” he insists. “He has abs!”
Their eyes drop, and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to pull my shirt up as proof.
Amber turns her head slowly to Jon for help, which I’m sure is a bad idea.
“He’s so hot,” Jon interjects with conviction. “All versions of him. If I were in his shoes, I’d do the exact same thing.”
My August looks like he’s about to punch him, I’m about to die of embarrassment, but the other August comes back with a dubious, “You’d fuck yourself?”
“It goes a bit deeper than that,” August snaps at him.
But Jon says, “I totally would. Can you imagine that? All the things you’d like to do that you could never admit to a regularpartner? He’d just know. Imagine how depraved things could get…”
I don’t like the way literally every person in this room is looking at me again. I rebuff them with, “You never struck me as especially repressed, Jon.”
“You might be surprised.” Giving me a slow nod and a disconcerting smile, he returns to the kitchen bench for more tea.
“I’m so glad we got that out of the way,” Shashi sighs out. “Now if we could get down to the science?”
We’re shunted over to the table by Amber’s insistent shoves, and the scale of the work Shashi’s done comes properly into view. It’s that thing where someone hyperfocuses on something they find fascinating. She’s been over and over it. She grabs more papers from her bed and bedside table, laying them all out in whatever chaotic order is making sense in her mind.
“Here’s what I’ve figured out,” she begins. “We have parallel worlds sitting side by side—that much we all know from theoretical physics, correct?”
There’s a vague mutter of agreement from all but tea-carrying Jon, who’s just happy to be involved.
“According to this, Villain August?—”
“I’m not a villain!”
“—punched a hole into the next world using… what?”
“Um…” There’s an odd shyness about him, mingled with something that looks softly like… pride? “A Blackthorne particle.”
“A Blackthorne particle?” I breathe out.
“A Blackthorne particle,” he reiterates. Then, with the kind of sweet smile I’d like to lick off him… “I discovered it.”
“I called it the same thing!” Assassin August interjects, and they almost share a moment of excitement. I do too. Honestly, that’s amazing. If only I knew what that was.
Shashi gets there first. “What’s a Blackthorne particle? Please start at the beginning, and explain exactly how you got here.”
“So, um… in my London, we had a powerful particle accelerator, and it’s a bit shit that this London doesn’t have one?—”
“Right?” says Assassin August.
“Ridiculous,” my August agrees before taking back up his explanation. “If you fire particles at high speed, then you’ll see some disappear. They’re just gone. And we all worked, trying to figure out where they went, or why, until I realised they were merging with something, or crossing over. They went somewhereelse. Gone. So, I hypothesised that, given enough of these Blackthorne particles, all in the right place at the right time, couldn’t you follow their path? See where they were going? Even if you’re not made of the same thing, they would create a gap. And they’re everywhere. All around us right now. It’s just a matter of isolating them, amassing enough of them, then directing them. And that’s what I did. But…”
When he breaks off, Assassin August lets out a long and slow sigh. For once, it’s not mocking. It’s sad, and he lowers his head as my August speaks on.
“I didn’t know how to close it. I tried. Opening it was easy. I created a particle accelerator of my own to distribute solely Blackthorne particles. I set it off in the lab, by myself. It was one push of a button, and there it was, a hole into another dimension.”
August’s eyes turn wistful, but the emotion soon fades to sadness. “The first one I let off, nothing. There was nothing there, but the second, I remember, I… I remember walking up to it. And I put my hand through. I couldn’t feel anything, but it was there. I poked my head through, and I found the same room. It was as if my room had just ripped open, this slight quiver in theair, like you see above a road on a hot day. And there it was, just the same. Shimmering a little. I’d cracked it. All alone in the lab that day, I’d discovered interdimensional travel.”
His words don’t arrive with the sort of fanfare you’d expect with a statement like that. He drops into that distant melancholy I’ve sensed in him so many times, back when I couldn’t figure out why it was ever-present. Back before I knew he was carrying all the universe, and then hundreds more of them, on his shoulders.
