Chapter 12

Cleo didn't sleep, that first night. She kept waking with a start, terrified to her unconscious core that she would roll right over and through Billie. That Billie wouldn't be able to stand that reminder. That Billie, finally unable to ignore this one thing they hadn't been honest with each other about, would leave. But every time Cleo opened her eyes, against all odds, Billie was still there, curled up on top of the blankets, snoring lightly.

It made Cleo's heart swell up to an uncomfortable size, seeing her like that—quiet, calm, looking just like anyone else. She wanted to wrap her arms around Billie's middle and burrow into her chest. She wanted to brush that stray lock of hair out of her face and kiss the tip of her nose. She wanted Billie to make some soft sleepy sound at her touch and pull her in tighter, barely awake enough to know what she was doing.

This is good enough, Cleo told herself over and over, her heart fluttering in time with Billie's gold-shot eyelashes. I can live on this, if I have to.

It occurred to her, briefly, that Billie didn't need sleep and was feigning it for her benefit. Cleo brushed the thought away, and lost herself again in imagining warm arms.

***

"Alright, everybody, listen to my beautiful girlfriend," Abe said.

"Thanks, babe." Kaleisha flashed him a brilliant smile and snapped open the extendable pointer she'd unearthed from somewhere in Billie's lab. The rest of them were all gathered around Billie's whiteboard: Ros sunk into a beanbag chair, Abe perched on a suitcase that Cleo happened to know was full of varying sizes of Rubik's Cubes, and Cleo sitting next to Billie on the floor. Abe had covered the board in color-coded diagrams that Kaleisha had surrounded with instructions. "In a few days, we'll officially begin our deceleration in preparation for arrival in the Proxima System. I'll be going over the plan as it stands, with the standard caveat that every plan I've made this year has been immediately dashed to pieces on the rocks of fate, et cetera, so please hold your questions until after the presentation."

Cleo leaned toward Billie. "Hear that?"

The muscles in Billie's jaw were already working overtime, but she shot Cleo a fond look anyway. "You're one to talk. I think I can control myself."

Kaleisha rapped the whiteboard pointedly, and Cleo jumped back to attention, grinning.

"Step One," Kaleisha said, indicating the first diagram, a cartoonish sketch of the Providence surrounded by arrows, "Cleo and I make the last jump to Proxima B."

***

The med bay beds did EEGs all by themselves, which freed up Ros's hands for skittish wringing while the bed scanned Cleo's brain.

"Just as I thought," they said as soon as the machine beeped. "The scan is showing even more unusual brain activity."

Cleo sat up and rubbed her temples. "Meaning what, exactly?"

"Meaning that Halvorsen's influence is fucking you up more and more every day. I think Billie was right."

"Of course," Cleo muttered as she pressed her thumbs against her eyes. "She's gonna be even more insufferable."

"She just wants you to be safe." Cleo heard the sad little smile in Ros's voice, even without looking at them. "We all do."

"I know."

"Do you?" they said, putting a hand on Cleo's shoulder. "Cleo, all this—stopping Halvorsen, saving the crew, getting back home—none of it is worth very much if we lose you."

"Don't you think that's a little shortsighted of you, Dr. Wheeler?"

Ros grinned bleakly. "Maybe. But I really couldn't care less."

***

"Step Two." Thwack. In red marker, Abe had drawn three stick figures clearly meant to be Kaleisha, Abe, and Ros with a rainbow over their heads. "While Billie and Cleo navigate the ship into orbit around the planet, I will fold us three down to the surface."

"What if Cleo has another seizure, and Ros isn't there to—"

"Whoa there." Cleo cut Billie off with a finger almost against her lips, and Billie went quiet and a little bit cross-eyed. "Listen to the lady, Dr. I-Can-Control-Myself."

Kaleisha rolled her eyes, obviously stifling a grin, and swung her pointer in Ros's direction. "You take this one."

"I've rigged up one of the hospital beds to auto-inject the phenobarbital," Ros said modestly. "Once we're gone, get Cleo in that bed, Billie, and you won't have to worry."

Billie nodded, flashing Cleo a look that made her heart grow a size. Cleo lowered her finger.

Thwack.In yellow, a cloud full of pows and bamsand kablooies. "Step Three: The three of us subdue Halvorsen."

***

Cleo hadn't seen her friends sweat so much since early in their training. They were all practically dripping, though, as they ran drills in preparation for the inevitable fight with Halvorsen. Ros had flung icicles through half the pillows on the ship and Kaleisha had made several folds in space so intricate that a rope flung through her distortion came out in a Celtic knot when they finally sat down for a breather.

"Guys." Cleo laughed incredulously. She had just watched Ros create a volley of lethal ice spears for Kaleisha to fold across the cafeteria and shatter on a wall. Her concerns about how they would fare without her and the dark energy boost she gave them were beginning, finally, to slip away. "Halvorsen literally won't know what hit him."

Abe frowned, fiddling warily with the pulse blaster Kaleisha had unearthed from one of the ship's escape pods. "We do have to hit him, don't we."

"Uh, yeah. I mean, he's old, but he also has psychic death powers, so I don't think you'll be able to take him out without at least a minor scuffle."

"No, I know." Abe sighed the world's tiniest sigh. "But, I guess I've been thinking... what if we can't restrain him? Are we gonna have to kill him?"

Cleo's stomach plummeted, through the floor and out into the universe. "I don't know," she said hoarsely. "I hope you don't have to."

"Yeah." The stars from the viewing wall reflected blankly in Abe's eyes. "Me too."

Ros slung a tired arm over Abe's shoulders. And Cleo locked eyes with Kaleisha, knowing they were both having the exact same thought:

We can't make those two into killers.

***

Thwack. A devil-horned stick figure with a pouty face and a syringe in his arm, followed by an arrow pointing to the same figure trapped in an awkward oval. "Step Four! Ros injects Halvorsen with the cure, and I fold him into one of the escape pods for confinement."

***

"So." Kaleisha held up the syringe and peered at the colorless liquid inside. "This is it."

"Yup. A serum designed to sever Halvorsen's connection to the Other Place, developed with Billie's help." Ros met Cleo's eyes, and almost smiled. "Plus a hefty dose of sedative, for good measure."

Concern creased Kaleisha's forehead faintly. She seemed unable to look away from the syringe. "Guys," she said softly, "what if this doesn't work?"

"It'll work, Kaleisha," Billie said. "We've isolated the dark-matter-resistant compound in Kris's jacket lining, and combined it with a prokaryotic enzyme that we engineered to splice the modified DNA out of his—" Billie stopped talking at the stop talking look that Cleo flashed her. She cleared her throat and pushed up her glasses. "Oh, you mean the—the everything. It—it'll work. It'll work because you won't accept anything less."

Kaleisha smiled at Billie then. And when her shining eyes found Cleo's, Cleo said "Rocks of fate, who?" and Kaleisha pressed her hand to her heart.

***

Kaleisha landed the pointer on the final diagram—the Providence,which had a smiley face, following a loopy arrow around Proxima B—with one last smack. "Last, but certainly not least, we turn this ship around—using momentum and gravity and a lot of equations that Billie and Cleo can figure out—and we head back to Earth faster than Cleo started flirting with Billie."

Billie choked on something—spit? holographic spit?—and Cleo felt her face go up in flames. "Kaleisha Grace Reid, how dare you?"

Kaleisha winked at her. "Hold your questions."

***

"Billie."

"Hmm." Billie didn't look away from the whiteboard (they were rapidly running out of boards in Billie's lab) that Cleo had been covering with orbital trajectory equations.

Cleo swallowed, rubbing the heel of her hand over a square root she'd miscalculated. "What happens when we get back to Earth?"

She felt Billie's eyes burning into the side of her head. "Well, having handled Halvorsen, we keep working to free Eli and the crew from the Other Place, obviously."

"No, I mean"—Cleo kept scrubbing, stupid board stupid marker—"I mean, like, with you. And me. And, you know, you and me."

"Cleo." Billie stepped closer, and Cleo put the marker down like it had burned her. "How much of your free time do you spend thinking up new and exciting things to be anxious about?"

"Excuse you. My anxieties are extremely reasonable and not at all arbitrary."

"Really? Because I, like most reasonable people would, I believe, have placed that particular bridge firmly in the ‘to cross when we come to it' category. Because, and I don't know if you know this, Earth is very far away."

"Har har." Cleo turned to face Billie. Looked up into that beautiful face that was always one wrong move from flickering away. "Must be nice, to be so clearheaded."

Billie smiled like she couldn't help it, or didn't want to. She reached out to hover her fingertips just molecules away from Cleo's cheek, and Cleo felt her spine turn to jelly.

"Cleo," Billie murmured, "it's going to be okay. I'm not going anywhere."

***

"Bill," Eli says to me at last. "I don't think you can break through by yourself."

"Watch me."

He sits next to me on the floor of my stupid, empty room that looks the same as his, and every other room in this stupid, empty place. "I think we both know that Cleo has to be the one to do it."

I sigh, and the strands of the multiverse I'd been coiling around my mind fall away. I'm not Cleo, and I'm certainly not Kris—I don't have their DNA-level connection to the Other Place's power, I can only surf its intersections with our own dimension from within. It doesn't seem fair, given that I know what's going on, Cleo doesn't, and Kris is—well, the goings-on.

"There has to be another way."

He narrows his eyes at me. "Why are you convincing yourself you've lost her before you two even meet?"

I want to splutter, scream, deny it all. But Eli sees right through that shit. "You know why," I say instead. "Easier."

He nods sagely. "Then I think I speak for myself and for Neil when I say: You're a fucking idiot."

I noogie him on the arm, but we both know it's half-hearted.

"Dude, I can feel just by looking at you how much you care about her. And I don't even have psychic powers like Cleo. So there's no way she won't feel it too."

As I watch him walk out the door, his words churn around in my head.

And all at once, I know what I have to do.

***

The night before the last jump to Proxima B, they danced.

Abe put on the dress that Kaleisha had worn to the Space Heist, and Kaleisha and Ros painted flowers and crescent moons on each other's faces, and Cleo doused her body in glitter from the rec room craft closet, and they danced. Billie dimmed the lights and blasted the twenty-year-old music. She smiled as Cleo shimmied and bounced around her, laughed as Cleo tried to grind up on her, responded to Cleo's bellowed "come on, baby" by wrenching her hair out of its ponytail—oh,Cleo thought, oh no, oh yes—and joining their tangled four-person rave as best she could. And they danced, and Cleo accumulated three sets of lipstick prints all across her face, and in the barely orange glow of the room the waves of hair tumbling over Billie's shoulders looked like sunset, and as she twirled and raised her hands to the stars (in every direction, because the stars were all around), Cleo thought: Right. This is what the world is.

***

ARCHIVED: Emergency Response Protocol for the Crew of Providence I, February 9, 2041

***

"Kaleisha, Cleo, get yourselves into position," Billie called.

"Aye-aye, Captain." Cleo, wearing her NASA jacket for luck, stood next to Kaleisha in front of the flight deck window, stance wide and knees bent. She closed her eyes and listened to the space in front of them. She found and latched on to the feeling-sound of the dark matter filament surging ahead of them, the shimmering undercurrent of dark-gold energy. "Abe, what's our velocity?"

"Twenty thousand kilometers per second and dropping fast," Abe answered. "We'll reach our, uh, target orbital speed? In twenty-three seconds."

Cleo took Kaleisha's hand, letting a tendril of power flow through her—it was so easy, now, whether from practice or something else she didn't know—and into her friend. "Ready?"

Kaleisha stretched out her other hand toward the vacuum of space. "Ready."

"Kal, Ros, be ready to fold down there as soon as we enter orbit," Abe said. "Ten seconds to jump, guys... nine... eight—"

Cleo glanced back at the console, even though she knew it could break her concentration. Abe was sitting in the copilot's seat like he'd been born there, and Billie was sitting in the captain's chair. Her eyes were half elsewhere, scanning through the numbers and trajectory simulations deep inside her mind, but she still smiled, just a bit, when Cleo looked at her. And Cleo turned back to the sparkling nothing in front of them, satisfied, and lost herself in the river flowing through her.

"—two—one."

Cleo's spine snapped straight as the dark river, stronger and more overwhelming than ever, rushed through her and into her friend. Kaleisha closed her fist and ripped, and the stars bent around them. For a moment, the Providence wasn't moving, or maybe it was free-falling through the impossible kaleidoscope of darkness and light around them, and Cleo felt small and enormous and tired and unstoppable as she and Kaleisha held the fold in the universe together—

And then, with a thunderous crack, everything unfolded, and for the first time since they'd left Earth there was something in the window.

Cleo and Kaleisha practically collapsed against the glass, their legs and breath stuttering, and stared. Abe, Ros, and Billie crowded in around them, even though they were supposed to be in ready positions.

Proxima Centauri B hung in front of them, all of it still easily visible in the window, its dark surface a craggy red brown under a vibrant blanket of auroras. As they curved slowly around, the planet pulling them into orbit, the light side came into view, and the twilight zone, the strip of icy mountain between the day and the night. And there, in the distance but nowhere near as far away as Cleo had expected, was Proxima Centauri, tiny, red, and raging, spitting looping strands of plasma into the ink-black sky.

Cleo fingered the logo on the arm of her dad's jacket. "We're in another solar system, guys," she murmured, in case saying it helped her believe it.

"You're the first humans to lay eyes on an exoplanet," Billie said behind her. Cleo would have shivered at her voice in her ear if the sight of Proxima hadn't already prickled her skin into goose bumps.

"Halvorsen doesn't count?" she whispered.

Abe snorted. "I'll make sure he doesn't, even if I have to write the history books myself."

Cleo grinned at him. "Don't you three have somewhere to be?"

She followed Billie back behind the console, hoping nobody saw the wobble in her knees as she watched the planet grow to fill the window. She could pick out wispy clouds now, the wrinkled lines of frozen riverbeds. She pictured the cave where Halvorsen was hiding, with the valley below and the impossibly high peak above. The frozen lake in the distance, multicolored light glancing off its surface. She scanned through the ship's tracking system, searching for anything resembling what she'd seen.

"Alright," she said, landing on a set of coordinates. Kaleisha leaned in close so Cleo could point them out. "I hope that's it. Please don't be mad at me if you end up on a different weirdly tall mountain, though."

Kaleisha wrinkled her nose at her. "I forgive you in advance, babe."

She joined hands with Abe and Ros, the three of them standing swaddled in parkas and silhouetted against the window.

"Ready?" Billie said.

"As we'll ever be," Kaleisha said, and she reached out her hand—

And then the world lurched, and they all fell to their knees.

Cleo gasped, the pain from the impact flaring up her thighs. "Billie, what the fuck was that—"

"I don't know, I'm not getting any—"

A siren started blaring, harsh and matched by a flashing red light that cut right through Cleo's aching head like a knife—

A flash of somewhere else, an icy rocky mountainside where a man stood, raising his frail arms to the rainbow-red sky, and his eyes screwed in concentration as he opened his mouth and said:

"Dear old Billie. Bless her for turning the Providence into a mind."

And Cleo slammed back to the flight deck, where Abe and Ros were struggling to stay on their feet, Kaleisha was punching buttons, and Billie's eyes were flicking back and forth so fast they blurred and the sound, God, the too-familiar roaring of the ship crashing through an atmosphere they'd never intended it to—

"It's Halvorsen," Cleo said between heaving breaths. "He's bringing down the ship."

Kaleisha, Ros, and Abe all started shouting at once, but Cleo blocked them out.

"Billie," she said, pulling herself to her feet by the edge of the console, "what's he doing to the systems?"

Billie groaned, clutching her head in her hands. "Fuck. He's inside, he's wrecking everything, I can't I can't I—"

She cried out, and Cleo stumbled toward her over the seesawing floor of the bridge. "He's messing with your head like he's been messing with mine. Don't fight it, you don't have to—"

"No!" Billie gritted her teeth and clenched harder at her temples, her face turning red with the effort. "He's taken out one of the thrusters," she boomed over the cacophony, the way she had the first time she'd ever spoken to them. "And he's"—she winced, like something in her own head had burned her—"he's hijacked the autopilot."

"He can do that?" Kaleisha yelled, tapping frantically at a screen that refused to cooperate. "Did we know he could do that?"

"Doesn't matter." Billie half looked at Cleo again. "What does he want?"

Cleo reluctantly reached for the white-hot simmering at the back of her mind, letting herself fall into it—

Rage, and exhaustion, and a plan so much worse than she'd expected, though he wouldn't have to do this, would he, if you would just cooperate, Ms. McQueary—and an image in her mind's eye, or maybe Halvorsen's, of a dark-bright swirling hole between two dimensions—

"He wants the dark matter engine," Cleo gasped.

"What for?" Ros shouted.

"Its power. Its direct connection to the Other Place. Doesn't matter." Billie stood, and her eyes were bloodshot and clear. "He's not going to get what he wants. He's not going to hurt anyone else on his way to a better world."

"Billie," Kaleisha said, "can you get the autopilot back under your control?"

"No, he's got too—ahh!—too firm a grip." The floor lurched again, and Billie flickered. "But if I disable all systems entirely, the ship will crash to the surface, destroying the engine."

The air tightened, as they all realized.

"And the ship along with it, right?" Kaleisha's voice was smaller than Cleo had ever heard it. Maybe she was trying to remember the last time she'd heard her dad's voice. Maybe she was trying to remember what a warm breeze felt like on her cheeks.

"Unless you have a better idea," Billie said, her voice strained but not unkind.

"If Halvorsen gets the engine, it'll be bad?" Kaleisha asked Cleo. Cleo closed her eyes and saw screaming and suffering and the fabric of a universe unraveling, knowing it meant death without understanding why, and she nodded grimly even though she'd already seen the resignation in Kaleisha's eyes.

Kaleisha breathed in, breathed out. She gave her head a little shake, like maybe that would dislodge any memories of Earth that were keeping her from making a call. "Okay," she said. "Do it, Billie."

Billie braced her hands on the console, and her breath might have hitched a little, or Cleo might have imagined it. "The escape pods are outfitted with survival packs—more coats, food, water, meds, everything you'll need." There was silence as they all stared at her. "Well, get going!"

Kaleisha grabbed Ros's and Abe's hands and tugged them toward the elevator. Cleo went too, holding her hand out for Billie as if she could have pulled her along.

"Come on, dude, I want a window seat," she joked, because there was nothing else for it.

Billie put an arm out, stopping Cleo in her tracks. Their eyes met, and that was when Cleo should have realized what was about to happen, because Billie's were wet and miserable and very, very sure.

"Cleo," she said. "I can't go with you."

Cleo was only dimly aware of the other three freezing in place behind Billie, even though the elevator had just dinged onto the flight deck. "Sure you can."

"No." Billie winced and took a shuddering breath. "The escape pods aren't connected to the ship's computer."

"So we'll download you." Cleo's mouth was full of wool, and so was her head, and she hadn't known it was possible to feel so dry and dumb and desperate. "We'll transfer your program to the pod computer, no problem—"

Billie laughed, empty. "You said it yourself, I'm just an ungodly amount of data. You don't have time to download me."

"But." The other three, over Billie's shoulder, were looking at her with so much pity she was sure it would shatter her apart. "If the ship is destroyed, you will be too. I'm not leaving you here."

"You have to."

"No, I—" She reached up to hold Billie's face between her hands but she couldn't get close enough, the floor was shaking too badly. "I'll stay here with you, then."

The line of Billie's mouth went hard. "Don't be an idiot, Cleo. You would die."

"Maybe."

"Definitely. And I'm not worth it. I'm not real."

Furious tears dripped down Cleo's face, and she didn't care. "What are you talking about, you are real, you are—"

"Not real enough to leave this ship." Billie was so close that Cleo should have felt the vibrations of her voice on her own lips, but she didn't. "Just real enough to save you."

Cleo shook her head endlessly, out of words. Billie ran her fingers over the space above Cleo's hair.

"Let me save you, Cleo," she said, her voice going rough. "And you'll survive, and you'll stop Halvorsen, and you'll—you'll find her."

Cleo's heart clenched around the words. "Her?"

"Her. Me. The other me." Billie squeezed her eyes tight, just for a moment, and when she opened them again she looked almost calm. "You'll find her, Cleo. And she'll love you, because she's me, and there's no version of the universe where any version of me doesn't love you."

Cleo was never going to stop crying, just like she was never going to be able to move her feet from that exact spot. She looked up into Billie's eyes and leaned closer, listening for something, anything but empty space and sirens and the ship plummeting through alien air—

"Find her. Find me," Billie whispered. "Go."

And Cleo opened her mouth to say no, to say not on your life, to say you said it was going to be okay, that you weren't going anywhere, you promised me, Billie—

But before she could say anything, there was a pair of strong arms around her middle, and before she knew what was happening she was in the elevator, kicking and scratching against Abe's grip on her. And through the door she could see Billie, silhouetted against the rainbow light, raising a hand in farewell like they were going to see each other again.

And the door was closing, and Cleo was screaming, and that was the end of it.

The others watched from the escape pod as Providence I burned through the atmosphere. Cleo curled up in her seat, as far away from the window as she could get, and tried to forget how to exist.

***

I swim through the golden edges of two dimensions, my mind diving deeper and deeper with every push. I've learned how to see back into the universe, how to hear, how to watch from the outside as time unravels before me in its twisting, knotted skeins. But it's only now, thanks to Eli—thanks to Cleo—that I think I've figured out how to feel my way back into the universe.

The boundary, despite what Kris has done to it, is still strong, and my mind was never meant to cross it. I can touch it, though. I can poke around the places where it's cracked and the light is bleeding through. And when I find the right spot, I can put my mouth right up to the keyhole, so to speak, and whisper across time and space and everything else between us:

Come find us, Cleo. Come find me.