“You fucking idiot!”
The sound breaks us apart. August reels back just in time for me to see Assassin August flop down on the floor, his hands still tied behind his back.
Before I can react, Jon appears out of thin air. “Okay. Now there are three of you.”
“Four!” the August on the floor shouts. “Now there arefourof us! And just how long do you think this new world is going to last with all of us in it?”
“I don’t care.” Jon shrugs. “Stick your heads together and figure it out.”
August raises his appalled eyes from Assassin August. “Jon, what did you do?”
“It wasn’t my fault!” he protests, then addresses me. “Your boyfriend punched me, then he jumped straight through. I couldn’t stop him.”
“You had it coming,” my August rattles out. “But what the hell ishedoing here?”
“I wasn’t about to abandon you.” Jon’s eyes warm on me with a love that’s still there, still plain to see. “Told you I’d be there for you, baby.”
A laugh rips out of me, gallows humour again.
August on the floor rolls over, clambers onto his knees. “He pushed me through, the idiot!”
“I’m not an idiot.” Jon grins. “I know exactly what I’m doing. You’ll do the same thing here that you were doing there, only this time you have weeks to do it, right?”
“No!” Assassin August cries. “What if there’s no Shashi here to get that supercomputer login?”
He shrugs again, bracelets jangling up his wrists. “Ask someone else for it.”
“What if there’s no supercomputer in this universe at all?”
“Well…” His smile fades a little. “I hadn’t thought about that bit. Not yet. But?—”
“What if space is different? What if there is no supermassive black hole? What if the physics work totally differently here and you’ve just blown our one shot at fixing this?”
Jon tsks his tongue as though Assassin August is being totally unreasonable. “Shashi will fix it. She’s fine back there. And now you’re here, she has even more time again.”
As the words drop from his mouth, all our stomachs drop too, the sound of her voice ringing through the air. “No! Stop! We can’t go!”
“Pop like a grape in the microwave!” Amber comes into view, two arms working hard to pull a third into this reality. “You heard him! I don’t want to pop like a grape in a microwave!”
“Let her go, Amber!” August on the floor scrambles forward. It all happens so fast, his shoulder shoving into her, maybe in an attempt to break the contact, but all it does is push Amber off balance. She goes tumbling backward, August and I leap forward to catch her, but she’s falling fast, and her full body weight yanks Shashi through, knocking Jon to the ground, all of us landing in a heap on the floor.
There’s a mad scramble for stability, everyone trying to find their footing amongst a tangle of Augusts, one of whom can’t do a thing but roll into everyone else with his hands restrained. Shashi claws her way out of the mess, clambers up, then turns a full circle, searching the room. “Where’s the portal?”
I hate to be the one to say it, but someone has to. “It’s gone. You can’t find it from this side.”
“No.No, no, no! No, this is not happening.” Her hands fly out, searching the air as if she could rip a hole back through with her bare fingers.
“It’s fine,” Jon says helpfully. “We’ll open another portal with the clicky thing whenever we need to.”
“The clicky thing?” Assassin August snaps, voice thick with disbelief. “You mean the particle accelerator?”
“It’s pretty straightforward,” Jon drawls. “And here’s me in a room full of geniuses, being smarter than you all.”
“Jon’s right,” Amber agrees, holding my hand to steady herself as I pull her up. “Just click the clicky thing, and we’ll move on.”
“You can’t just click the clicky thing every time there’s a problem,” Assassin August seethes, his rage barely under control. “Do you even know how powerful that device is? The damage you could do?”
I attempt to calm them all down, even if I can barely put two thoughts together in the chaos. “We’re not going tokeepclicking it. Next shot’s the correct one. We’ll head straight for that baby universe. I mean, I did try to aim for that direction when I opened this one. But Jon’s right. You’re all here now, and this has bought us some time. Less time than we’d like, with four Augusts in the world, but enough time to figure out where we need to go, surely.”
