“Hello? Ma’am? Sir? I’m going to need you to talk to me.”

  “Snap out of it!” Dom yells. “I need you. Come here. I can fix this. Maybe, but I need you to help me look after her.”

  Budgie crawls over and Dom takes her hands and applies them to Tendayi’s chest. The young scientist’s eyes are hazed behind the pain and shock. She barely notices the changeover. “What am I doing?”

  “Here. Press down here, keep the pressure on. You have to tell me your phone number.”

  “What?”

  “You—Budgie—your phone number. I’m going to need to be able to call you.” Even though there’s no guarantee, right? That they’re friends there too. That they’re even in the same city or state or continent. “The police and the paramedics are going to be here soon. The door’s still propped open so they can get in.” Racking their memory if that’s true, if they have to tear downstairs and prop it open themselves. Yes, it’s right. When Tendayi came down to get them, she replaced the brick. “But I need you to look after Tendayi. Can you do that? Keep the pressure on?”

  They pick up the phone, tell the operator, “Hey, I’m handing you over.”

  “Where are you going?” the operator says, alarm in his voice. “You have to stay with the victims.”

  “It’s all right,” they say, pressing the phone into Bridge-Budgie’s hand. “I need you to handle this. I have faith in you.”

  “What?” she says.

  “Take the phone.” It’ll give her something to do. “Talk to the man. Do what he says. Just keep talking.”

  “Hello?”

  “Ma’am, can you give me your name, please?”

  “It’s Budgie—I mean Bridget—Ainsley. No, Kittinger.”

  “Just keep talking. Tell them to take the fire door, come up to the sixth floor. You’ve got this.”

  “The sixth floor,” she repeats numbly into the phone. “The fire door.”

  “They’re seven minutes away, Budgie. Give me your number.”

  She says it numbly, blood welling between her fingers, already blood-stained, and Dom repeats it back three times.

  “Bridget,” the operator calls. “Where is Dom? Can I talk to Dom?” She looks over at them, but Dom is waving, You got this, running for the surgery museum, and they’re digging in their backpack for the Tupperware and hoping to all the saints they do not believe in that the laptop is still set to the same universe key when they find it.

  AMBER

  Missing in Action

  The howl is ongoing through the Ourmind. All the voices, every iteration. The shock. No, surprise. Outrage. The void where Amberlynn should be.

  They’ve lost Ambers before. The one who let the worms grow into a whole city—they cut her off. They had no choice. Another to a heart attack—they all felt the fist clutching inside her chest. A car accident. A mugging. Each time, they felt the suffering, the pain, the fear before they died. But those worlds were lost; they have no way of knowing what happened, if the worm spun itself across the whole universe. It’s part of what makes their work so important.

  So, yes, they’ve lost Ambers before, but never like this. And now she will have to be an avenger, yet more mess to clean up, scales to balance. The interfering mother with the knife—as if she’d dare. Coward. Thief. The way they taped up her wrists with sloppy enthusiasm rather than diligence. The idiot daughter misunderstanding what she was telling her. Unable to face the truth.

  Mr. Floof II is beside himself. He’s still trying to nudge his fluffy head up under her palm, looking for comfort. Licking, licking. What she needs him to do is bite through the tape.

  Amber presses herself against the door to hear, twisting her hands, backward and forward, backward and forward.

  She’s going to kill them. And then find and kill every iteration of both—mother and daughter.

  I can’t, someone says in the Ourmind. Oh, I can’t. As if she did not inject fentanyl into Aiden’s arm yesterday and set him on fire beneath the underpass.

  It’s enough, says someone else, Amber 5, as if she had not faked a murder scene on a boat in Tunis after Amber had helped her through the dirty work.

  Cowards, she thinks back. Cowards! All of you. We have a duty. As if she is not also afraid, confused. Don’t you remember?

  Summoning up the image of Chris scratching at his raw and bloody arms and the threads spiraling out of him, thrashing in the air, reaching out, hungry and blind.

  Remembering the first time she took it and found the others. Aligned, bound together across realities—a fighting sisterhood.

  What makes the pretty flowers bloom. Guts, guts, gritty, grimy guts.

  If she lets them go, this mother and daughter, what has it all been for? The sacrifice, every time she killed Chris, her friend, her brother in arms, even in those universes when he hadn’t yet been infected. She has to save the world. They all do.

  War makes monsters of us all.

  BRIDGE

  Truth and Reconciliation Commission

  “Mom, what is that?” Almost too soft for Jo to hear, nudging her head into her mom’s shoulder like a small burrowing animal. It’s everything she wanted, to be held close, to hug her mom. One more time.

  “You took so long,” Jo says, acting as if she didn’t hear the question. Maybe she didn’t. She’s tangling her fingers in Bridge’s hair, like she used to when she was a little kid. “To get here,” she gives a rueful laugh. “I’ve been waiting. I thought you’d be here sooner.” As if she hadn’t had to search dozens of worlds to find her, Bridge wants to chirp in protest, but Jo is holding her tight, stroking her hair.

  “I’m sorry,” she says instead.

  “No. I’m sorry I had to leave without telling you. I wanted to. But I couldn’t wait. She was going so fast.”

  “In the hospital? It was terrible. She was so confused, Mom. The doctors said it was dementia from the chemo and I thought… I thought it was you and I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

  “Oh Bridge. You poor thing. I never wanted you to go through that. You didn’t find the instructions?”

  “Instructions? What do you mean?” If only, Bridge thinks.

  “I left a letter on the kitchen table about rat-fooey, which file to use. I knew you’d get it.”

  “It wasn’t there,” Bridge protests. Why wasn’t it there… how could she have missed it? The break-in. Caden. He must have taken the letter. She’s going to punch that asshole in the face when she next sees him.

  But really, now, for the first time, she’s thinking: Why the trail of bread crumbs, the frozen assets? She didn’t get the instructions, but why would Jo have written them in the first place? Unless… she knew somehow. And there’s that damn box she can see out of the corner of her eye.

  “Mom,” Bridge says, pulling away, “how did you know you were going to be trapped?” Nodoggy home. But Bear was a dog, and dogs don’t know how dreamworms work. Jo, however…

  “Oh, Bridge,” Jo says. Bridge can’t help it, her attention is drawn back to the little DIY radio. The counterpart to the one in her bag. The one Amber wouldn’t shut up about.

  “How did you get trapped, Mom?” she asks again. She has to. Searching her mother’s face.

  “It’s complicated,” Jo says, sad and also faintly irritated. “I wanted to explain in person.”

  “I’m smart. I found you. You can explain it to me now.” Explain it like she’s seven, and her mom is bundling her into the car for a big adventure, aka a kidnapping. Or locking her out of her bedroom while she goes on one of her trips, or winding up the zoetrope and ruffling her hair as the horse starts to run in circles and the sky comes up to meet her and she, Bridge, is falling away…“What is it? What does it do?”

  “You have to understand, baby. She didn’t want to live.”

  “Who?” Bridge’s voice is flat, because she knows, of course she knows. Why won’t you let me go home?

  And Jo knows too. Her tone has turned defensive. “She wanted to be released from her pain, Bridge. You don’t know what she was going through. She was suicidal. I came in the one time, and she had a tab open on her laptop about how to connect a hose to the muffler, seal the windows. It would have been such a waste, Bridge.”

  “Suicidal ideation isn’t the same thing! It can be a call for help.” But what she’s thinking is: The one time. Jo revisiting those realities, the otherJos. It wasn’t a cure she was looking for, all this time.

  “She wanted this,” Jo insists. “This was the best way I knew to help her.”

  “Did you get it in writing?” The magnitude of it is starting to overwhelm Bridge. Jo playing God (playing doggo) with other lives—including her own daughter’s. The 1987 diary, brooding-chicken lovestruck Jo wishing there were a way to stay with her teenage boyfriend. The experiments. We’re looking for somewhere even better. It’s impossible. Absurd. That her mom would even be capable of this. She couldn’t be. Surely she couldn’t, wouldn’t do this to someone? Bridge dips into sarcasm, a smoke screen for the roiling inside, the rising sense of betrayal. “Did she write you a note, Mom? Put up an ad on Craigslist? Hey, not using this life, first come, first served.”

  “Look at this.” Jo gestures around the dreary apartment. “Look at how she’s been living. She wanted to die, she was done”—as if by saying it again, it would carry more weight. “She didn’t want to live. She wouldn’t get out of bed most days, would lie there hoping she would just stop breathing.”

  “You don’t know that. You weren’t inside her head.”

  “That’s the point, I was. I came back again and again. I saw. She kept a journal too. I’ll show you. People have the right to die.”

  “Did you ask her?” Bridge is yelling. “Did you ask her if you could steal her whole fucking life? Did you make a deal? Did you tell her how much dying of cancer would suck?” You’re not my daughter. “It took her days to go, Mom. Do you know what she said to me as she was lying there, facing the wall and sobbing because she didn’t know what the fuck was happening to her? She said, ‘I want to go home.’”

  “She wanted to die,” Jo snaps. “I gave her what she wanted. It was mercy.”

  “But did you ask her?” Bridge sits down heavily on the couch, tears coming again. What do you do when your whole world collapses? When the closure you thought you needed tears the universe apart? When your mother isn’t the person you thought and maybe never has been? Our parents are supposed to disappoint us, but Jesus Christ, not like this.

  Jo closes her eyes, tilts back her head. “No,” she says finally. Anguished. “I didn’t ask her. I didn’t think I needed to ask her. It was so apparent. And I wanted to live.”

  Bridge has mistaken her expression. It’s not anguish, it’s pity, because Bridge doesn’t understand, and why can’t she understand? Wouldn’t she have done the same? Sophie’s choice, but both babies are Sophie and so are you. And if it’s true, if otherJo really wanted out, the two could have come to some kind of fucked-up agreement… but she didn’t know. Because Jo didn’t ask. And she didn’t tell Bridge either.

  And her plan this whole time was—what? That Bridge would follow the clues and come here and steal Budgie’s life, and they could play happy families and raise the grandkids together? What the fuck. “Fuck.”

  “I know.” Jo sits down next to her, takes her hand. Long fingers, good for magic tricks and science and gently stroking her daughter’s hair. “It’s going to take some getting used to. I didn’t want it to be like this. But I had to, Bridge. You understand that?”

  “You left me.”

  “But you’re here now. You found me.”

  “You left her to die in your body.”

  “Bridget,” she says, wrapping her ponytail around her hand, “I know it’s difficult.”

  “And Amber!” Bridge gets up as if yanked by a string, stalks the room. “Did you know about her?”

  “I’ve never seen her before. I didn’t know.”

  “She’s going to kill every other Bridget. She’s already started. There are people who are dead, Mom! I might be dead.” She’s thinking about the way Agent Drew was spitting into her face. “You have to send me back. You have to tell me how to stop her. Will that box do it? Is that the secret? Do you realize she used one of those to torture me?”

  “You have to calm down.”

  “Calm down? That murderer is hunting me in every conceivable reality! Did you know? Did you know about the extruding?” She starts unraveling the bandage, which is soaked through again. Peeling it away reopens the wound further. “Did you know about this?” She jerks the bleeding gash at her mother’s face. “They’re inside me.”

  “The dreamworm?” Jo is puzzled, intrigued, leaning in closer.

  “No. Don’t you understand? That’s why she’s hunting me and all the other Bridgets. Because when you switch, you infect the other you.”

  The dog is howling in the bedroom. And Bridge’s—Budgie’s—phone is ringing. Ringing and ringing and ringing.

  “No,” Jo says, a mix of horror and fascination on her face. “It’s never happened to me. Not here or anywhere I visited.”

  “Congratulations for being fucking magic, Mom. It happens to everyone else. Caden, me. The Haitian artist guy, Rabbit. We can’t find any trace of Mina Remington either.”

  “Not Rabbit,” Jo says.

  “Sorry to break it to you, but yeah, around 2002, John Ravet. Cut up and burned, like Amber was cutting me up.”

  “That’s not his name. It’s Jon Coello. He’s in a step-down psychiatric facility in Oakdale. I saw him a few weeks ago, before I… left. He said he grew the dreamworm inside him, but I didn’t believe him. He showed me how to make the box.”

  “This box?” Bridge picks it up.

  “Be careful!”

  “That psycho used hers to torture me, to draw out the worms! What does yours do, Jo?”

  “Amber said she had a brain injury.” Jo is pacing, calculating, tugging at her ponytail. “It doesn’t affect her the same way. She doesn’t make them—what did you call it, extrude? And me too. My brain. Maybe—”

  “I don’t care, Mom! What does the box do?” She moves to turn the dial.

  “Don’t!” Jo yells with such terror, Bridge understands exactly what it’s for. If she felt sick before, this is worse. Worse than she could have imagined.

  Jo sinks onto the couch, forlorn and guilty. “It lets you stay.”

  DOM

  Echoing

  Dom-dom-dom, they’re thinking, a horror movie riff. Feeling a little mad. They’re sitting on a memorial bench, the laptop balanced on their knees, surrounded by the evidence of dozens, no, hundreds of what were previously considered “wild experimental procedures.” And all that turned out okay, right? Apart from the lobotomies, and the boiling oil used to cauterize gunshot wounds, and the leeches applied to the cervix, and the malformed rickets bones broken to try and straighten them…

  But hey, can’t get worse than it already is.

  Dom-dom-dom. Luckily, or unluckily, for them, the file is still open, playing in the window, on a loop. Two hours? What was Bridge thinking? If only they could just hit Pause and prematurely eject her back here, into her own body. But it doesn’t work that way; it’s something in the frequency, the brain waves it stimulates. Caden would know. But Caden… Nope. Eject. Don’t think about it.

  The file is ZC, and they pull up their carefully plotted spreadsheet on the laptop that listed all the universes and ding-ding-ding, we have a match! Budgie, the young mom with two kids. They weren’t sure if Jo was alive in that universe and maybe she isn’t, but Bridge is there, Dom’s Bridge.

  The only thing left to do is the thing. Here is the dreamworm, squelchy yellow rotten spaghetti, chew it down.

  They don’t know who they’ll be on the other side. That’s what’s terrifying, even more than the idea of worms hatching inside their veins, spiraling through their body, eating their way out. Dom has fought so damn hard for this life; why would they be interested in any other? What if they’ve failed? What if their sisters, their parents, have died somewhere along the way? What if Dom is boring? Or small and broken inside, still in denial and self-hate? If they haven’t found their them.

  Swallow it down, baby. Tune in, drop out. ZC_12m. That’s twelve minutes. They can always go back if they need more time, but they need to be here when the cops come, probably a whole SWAT team by now, to try and explain. Oh, Christ, how are they going to explain? But they can’t dump that on otherDom. They hope they don’t hate them too much, that they don’t hurt themselves or get too frightened.

  They’ve left them a note from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, a smiley face and the words Don’t Panic in friendly letters. Please let them be a sci-fi geek too. And more:

  Read this! You’ve swapped realities. You’re safe as long as you stay here. It’ll last twelve minutes. There’s a timer on your watch. Don’t go anywhere.* I know this museum is creepy but it’s the safest place. Trust me.

  I love you

  —Dom

  *Except if the cops arrive, then stay calm and go out slowly with your hands above your head.

  They settle the headphones over their ears, click on Play in the window. They’re so afraid.

  The video starts. Old-fashioned animation, the zoetrope. A horse galloping. Faster and faster and faster, until it’s no longer a horse, only light, and it’s warm on their face, like lying on the beach—or the heat death of the universe. And colors. Like seeing the inside of their own brain, filigree veins, electrochemical signals, dropping down into pink crenellations, and see, they knew, they knew it was just a trip. But then it turns to the gray static of an old television screen, giving way to fractal swirls spinning wider and wider, a Wizard of Oz twister into neon blues and greens and blossoming parabolas of mathematical flowers, because everything is math, and this is what is happening inside their brain, inside everyone’s brain all the time, this is consciousness, all of us flying alone in these hallucinating meat cages, so of course we try to reach out to other minds, to other stars in the firmament, wide and deep and greater than all of us, spanning the universe, and every universe, every self, and oh, wow, holy shit, how high are they right now? The tornado is back. Howling wind; they remember Bridge describing it.