MAYBE NOT ALWAYS SO COMPLETELY
GOOD AUGUST
Do I feel bad for shooting myself? Twice? Yeah, I feel like shit. I also feel like shit for killing all those other people in those other universes. And I also feel like shit for August feeling like shit for killing all thoseotherother people.
But above all that? I feel good.
If what these Augusts said is true—and with nothing to lose, why wouldn’t it be?—this really is it. End of the line. There’s no going forward now, only facing what’s behind us.
“What’s your plan then?” August, walking faithfully by my side, asks. “You wouldn’t have shot them if you weren’t sure you could fix this. I know it.”
His voice is so firm and resolute. It’s nice he thinks I’m that certain or that good. I wish I could tell him I was sure my idea would work. All I can do is tell him what I’m thinking and hope he goes along with it. “There’s nothing else in this direction, right? We’ve hit a wall.”
“And nothing back the way we came either. Except the remains of every galaxy I tore apart on its way through to annihilate us.”
“So, what happens if we…”Here goes nothing.“What if we fuck this one up?”
He stops dead in the already weirdly frozen street and blinks at me. “I… I don’t… What do you mean?”
“What would happen,” I nod my head slowly and meaningfully, “if we fuck this one up?”
“I don’t know what would happen. The energy has nowhere to go. So I guess, in theory, um… maybe we would just… die more horribly?”
Not what I wanted to hear. But also, not what I believe will happen. “That past, all the worlds, all the memories—they need to be pushed back into place by an equal and opposing force, right? Just like we said.”
His brow furrows. “Yes, but you heard the Augusts. We can’t break through to any fledging universe. Apparently, it’s not where we’d hoped it would be. Bloody ‘paleo quantum physics.’ What a prick.”
“He is but…” Deep breath. “What if we don’t need to do that after all?”
August’s head tilts, his pretty hair shifting to the side. “I’m not following.”
Yep, that’s fair.
“We want raw energy, right? We want power. We want defiance—an opposing force.” I take my chance, taking his hand up with it. “August, that’s us.”
His lopsided smile displays his confused disbelief in full, like this is some cute party trick I’ve come up with. “We’rethe opposing force?”
“What else could it possibly be?”
He lets out a soft, sympathetic half laugh, then tries to turn away.
Clearly, I’m not doing a great job of explaining this. I wrench him back. “Listen. The universe isn’t just random particlesfloating about, correct? It’s ordered—a perfect symphony of shape, and colour, and sound, and life. Things don’t just happen for no reason out there. One thing feeds into another, creating solar systems, galaxies, universe after universe. There’s atomic memory. Quantum entanglement. Patterns everywhere. August, it’s like a song, don’t you think? It’s the precision beauty of maths, the way everything can be explained with an equation, neat and tidy, that it all makes sense and holds and never falls apart no matter how extreme the physics.”
“Well, yeah. It is. Or it was.” He gives a sad, soft little shrug. “In fact, it was lovely until I fucked it all up.”
“There! That’s the key.” I grin at how astute he is, even if I don’t think he’s got the full picture yet.
“The key is that I fucked it up?”
“That’s exactly right.” He stares into my eyes, searching, so I prompt, “What’s the opposite of order, August?”
Those gorgeous eyes widen, and I watch the spark light. “Chaos.”
“Chaos. That’s us. That’s you and me. What we create together… We’re chaos.”
He laughs louder than before, an edge of avoidance in it. “That makes no sense.”
“That’s theonlything that makes sense! Everything worked to keep us apart, reality itself, hundreds of universes separated us. But you found me. You moved worlds to come to me. Don’t you see? This whole time, you’ve been concentrating on finding a world where the physics are just right, where you could slip in seamlessly, buy time, find calm, do your work. But that’s not us. That’s not howwework.”
