“Yeah, but that doesn’t make that one August any more expendable, or anyone else. How can you say that about yourself?”
The way he assumes I’m being some kind of brave or self-deprecating crushes me, so I dance around removing the imageentirely. “Look at it this way. Do you feel bad when you see an ant house with a billion ants and you step on one?”
“Yes!” he pretty much shouts.
“Okay, me too.” Bad analogy. “But what if you kill it outright, and it doesn’t suffer at all?”
“That’s less bad, but I would never do it deliberately.”
“Okay. And now, what if you did it by accident?”
“Didthey do it by accident?”
A lump swells large in my throat. One that I can neither talk nor breathe around. My lungs feel as though my ribcage is turning in on them, every barb of every bone ready to puncture me. “They didn’t—I don’t think they meant for this to happen. I-I don’t think they foresaw the consequences.”
“So that’s what they’ve done?” he asks, his low and gentle voice scarring in the way it shows more concern for me than fear for himself. “They obliterated the whole ant nest? August, is that what happened to your universe? Who did this?”
Me.
The word dries on my lips. It crumbles to dust and blows away like ash from the fire of my past. “Some physicist.”
“What do you mean, ‘some physicist?’ Who did this?Who?” He reaches for me, his arms running down mine in the closest thing I’ve had to an embrace in years. He’s looking me over, as though he can see the holes in me, the missing particles and pieces and all of what’s wrong when a person’s dragged from one universe to another again and again with no end in sight. “How are you here? What happened to everyone else?”
“I don’t know. I was there. I was in the lab when it happened. When we had this particle accelerator, andhejust did it. And truly, August, I had no idea. I… There was a rift, there was, but my studies showed nothing. It seemed to go nowhere, seemed to just have been a mistake, or proof that the maths was wrongentirely. I didn’t foresee the danger. But then…” My eyes flutter closed over the ache behind them. “He tried again.”
I’m back there. In the lab. Aiming the particle accelerator. So very sure it would work this time. This time… Too soon. Too careless. Too heartless. Too reprehensible.
“He opened another rift. And no one… And I have no reason to think anyone else made it out.” My fingers dig into his arms, clinging to him, like he too might be blown away with the rest of it at any second, and my voice comes hoarse and hollow, like I haven’t heard it in years. “Everything crumpled, everything burned up. It-it was one atom forcing its way into another, this coalescence of all matter, and it grew and it shifted and it was like all reality melted around me…”
“August.” He pulls me against his chest and holds me so tight that I only realise I’m shaking in comparison with his stability.
I hadn’t noticed I was crying until the dark patch on his shirt presses wet against my cheek with the expansion of his chest. I can hear myself saying, “It just happened. It happened so fast. And I wish I could stop it. I wish I could go back. I wish I could take it back. If I had one chance…”
“It’s not your fault.”
But it is. It was me. I did it. I destroyed that universe, and the next one, and the one after that.
And I’m about to kill this man.
At the very thought, I wrap my arms around him, as though it could change a thing, as though my embrace or my protection could keep him safe. But I know. Nothing changes this. I know what’s coming. “I was pulled into the next world. I guess it threw me out of that reality, through some tear the expansion created.”
“But then…” He pulls back to look at me, and I grieve the distance. I don’t want him to see me. Not the real me. And I don’t want to lose his touch. “How do you know you’re not safe here?Maybe… maybe you got thrown out, and it all calmed down, and now that you’re here, it’ll be okay?”
“August, it’s not stable. Not with me in the wrong reality.”
“You can’t know that.” It goes straight to my heart the way he seems to be clutching at the same straws I did, so many times over. But he still doesn’t know the whole truth. That the rift will open again soon. That it follows me. That it always opens wherever I am. That it’s me who causes it.
I tell him softly, “The time slip, this time loop today—it’s all signs of an unstable universe.”
“Those things happen,” he argues. “I’d heard of them before you ever arrived. That’s not proof of anything.”
“The barista’s hair?”
His eyes scan the carpet, as if he might find a better explanation there.
“You’re too smart to put it all down to coincidence.”
“But surely it can’t all be caused by this. Just you being here in this entire universe. You’re just one person. Nothing’s changing, nothing’s exploding. We’re totally fine here.”
