“So, um, what exactly happened back there?” asked Zander. “You... time traveled?”

  “Went back a little ways, encouraged our local friends to start a separate dig here,” she said, shrugging as she ran. “Don’t look so surprised. Mucking with the timeline doesn’t need to be so complicated.”

  Whatever Blayde had found in her memories, well, a different Blayde had come back from that experience than the one who’d gone in. She somehow, impossibly, walked taller. Her confidence was so strong it was infectious. Or maybe that was the whole ‘being in a bubble universe not contaminated by the Dread’ that did that.

  “So, what are we looking for?” I asked. “Do you think Nimien did hide a weapon in here after all? That whatever Miro has been protecting really will save us all?”

  “You heard what they said,” said Blayde. “We are the weapon.”

  “Of course we are,” said Zander. His hand reached for mine, clutching it tightly. My heart clenched. I had been so focused on the end of the universe, on the mission or whatever this trek was, to stop and think about us. About him, and what he’d just been through. About his outburst and failed memory retrieval. His only chance to find himself, to find home, and it had been shattered.

  And we didn’t even have time to talk about it. All I could do was squeeze his hand, so I did it better than anyone in the universe.

  “If we find the twins,” said Blayde, “shoot first. In the meantime, we need to find anything that can destroy the Dread. We need to destroy the amplifiers they’re using to create the feedback loop everywhere at once. We need to un-broadcast the Dread.”

  “If you could go back in time and destroy them all before they create the Dread in the first place?” said James, weapon drawn, ice cream inhaled.

  “The unicorns would probably intervene for a change on that big of a scale,” said Blayde, shaking her head. “No. But we can use time to our advantage and set up a web of destruction.”

  We reached the end of the maze. Blayde cooed politely at the doors, and they slid open for her. We had reached the inner sanctum of the temple, all in one piece.

  She made it look easy.

  Dirt was piled high outside the stained-glass windows, hiding their majesty. Even with Zander’s torch and my phone light, it was impossible to see all the intricate details of the tiles, the beauty of the room that had been forgotten for years. Blayde led us forward, striding out of the room and into the hallway with the cryogenic pods, without even pausing for a second.

  “Blayde?” Zander muttered hastily, stopping as he looked into one of the cryogenic chambers. “I think...”

  “What?” she snapped.

  “Miro’s here. Your Miro, I mean.”

  Blayde was at his side in a second, looking into the green chamber with eagerness written across her face. She nodded quickly when she saw him.

  “He’s still alive?” she asked, almost like a child.

  Zander nodded, tapping on the top of the chamber. “Life signs are good. He’s perfectly fine.”

  I glanced over their shoulder, and my heart dropped. It was Miro, that was sure. But it wasn’t the Miro we had left yesterday. This was the Miro at the end of their days, entering the temple to become part of it forever.

  The core was still that strange, round room, with the intricate designs covering the walls. Miro’s hologram didn’t show, but Blayde didn’t seem to need them anyways. She marched right to the metal plate they had been standing on when we’d first met.

  “I’ll bet you anything that there’s something under there,” she said solemnly. “Anyone ready to test it?”

  A loud roar came from the room, and the intricate designs split, pulled apart to reveal a pit below, making us jump out of the way. It wasn’t a very deep pit, barely a meter down, but it was unlike anything inside the room, its walls a sleek metal like the underside of a ship. Only one item sat inside it, something which made each of our hearts drop.

  Because it wasn’t a weapon. It was a slap in the face.

  Inside the pit was a karaoke machine.

  “The weapon...” Zander turned slowly to Blayde his face dropping. “Nimien wasn’t being deliberately coy at all. He was telling the truth. The weapon—”

  I took a deep sigh. “We are the weapon.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Miro’s Got Talent

  While we were busy being insulted, Blayde was busy making a plan.

  “Pick a song,” she said, grinning ear to ear. It was the first time I’d ever seen her smile like that. Today was full of firsts.

  “We’re not seriously going to spend our last minutes singing,” said Zander, staring at her with wide eyes. “I’m all for a bonding experience, but can’t we save that for after we save the universe?”

  “We’re not going to do the actual signing,” said Blayde, laughing. “No, we’re just getting the stars to their gigs. At best, we’re glorified chauffeurs. Today, karaoke will save the universe.”

  And she laughed again, light like the tinkling of bells. Zander turned to James and me, brows at the hairline, eyes stuck to their widest stretch. No, this Blayde was not the Blayde we knew.

  Mega Blayde was scary. Too confident for comfort.

  “Come on,” she said, reaching for my hand and dragging me forward. “We gotta wake up my ex.”

  I threw one last look at Zander as she dragged me into the room of cryogenic pods. She pulled me right up to the nearest one, fingers flying over the console.

  “This is how you wake them,” she said, demonstrating the process. “We’ll start with the oldest ones. They’ll take the longest to get their bearings. Just be gentle, all right? The pods should shut off immediately afterwards. It seems this place used every drop of power just to keep them online.”

  With so little time on the clock, I went to work. It didn’t mean I wasn’t going to bug her, though.

  “You’re going to have to explain,” I begged, typing the simple commands to wake the ancient sleeper from their pod. The one she had started with was hissing as steam spewed out of the gently opening lid, making me jump, but she had moved on already. “How is a karaoke machine going to save the universe?”

  She moved on to the next pod down the line before running back to the man groaning in the first one, whispering hasty instructions before moving on to the next.

  “Right,” she said, once the first three ancient Miros had been given more of a rundown than I had. “Do you believe in angels?”

  “I’m sorry, what now?”

  “Angels! You know, multidimensional beings who come down from the sky and sing your ears off? Tend to have a confusing number of eyes?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Why? Are they real? Are we supposed to be making offerings?”

  “Probably,” she said. Somehow between all this she was still able to open pods, reassure ancient Miros, send them on their way. “But you know the power of song. The twins have been feeding the universe into the universe in order to create their feedback loop, waves in opposing phase to destroy everything everywhere. But if we can mess up their harmony, we can give ourselves enough time to stop them. Change the frequency, throw off the pitch, it doesn’t matter so long as whatever they’re using to match the waves is thrown off.”

  “Miro,” I gasped.

  “Yeah?” asked the Cowboy Miro in the pod beneath me. “What’s happening?”

  “You’re going to sing the universe to safety,” I said. “All of you at once.”

  “Brilliant!” they said, pushing themselves to their feet. “When do I start?”

  Blayde gestured for the circular chamber and he rushed to follow the others, greeting the past and future selves with an excitement reserved for long lost friends.

  “And what about Desmond and Sidera?” I asked.

  “What about them?” she shrugged. “They’ve probably found themselves a cozy nook in here to ride out the end of the universe. It’s not like they know their way through the maze. But if we find them, we take them out. It’s as easy as that. We’re in the only place in the universe where we can actually do that.”

  After every pod was opened, we rushed back to the antechamber, which was now so full of Miros we could barely make our way back through to the center. Zander and James were still scrolling through the karaoke machine, and even my translator couldn’t make sense of what letter they had reached.

  “Right,” said Blayde. “May I have everyone’s attention please?”

  The Miros turned silent in an instant, so quickly it was almost eerie.

  “It’s really good to see you,” they said as one. “Would you like to go out for coffee, see if we can pick up where we left off?”

  “Later.” Blayde waved them off. “Right now, I need all of you save one to press the emergency exit button with us. We’re taking you on tour!”

  The Miros cheered. I should be saying Miro, but it was too unsettling to think of them all as one single mind. Especially since some were dressed as Vikings and others as Flash Gordon. So much spandex. They must have gone through a phase.

  “Sally, you and James stay here, guard the designated singer,” she said. “As soon as we’re all out, Zander and I will spread yourselves far and wide.”

  “But I—” Zander started, but she silenced him with a dazzling smile.

  “You don’t need to know where you’re taking them,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be precise. Just random jump and come back. We’ll be done in no time.”

  “I’ll stay,” said a Miro. “This is the body that’s most familiar to them.”

  The selves parted and there was the Miro we had known and conga’d with, bearded and aged and grinning ear to ear. They strode forward and hopped into the karaoke pit.

  “You didn’t have to climb down there, but okay, I like your enthusiasm,” said Blayde. “Zander, let’s go. You three, if we’re not back in an hour, presume the universe was destroyed, and don’t go outside for a while. You understand?”

  We nodded, and she hit the exit button. In a flash they were all gone, leaving the three of us in our karaoke pit to ponder the end of the universe.

  “So, um, Miro,” said James, handing the microphone to our charge. Without the hundreds of other selves in the chamber with us, the silence was deafening. Every word she uttered bounced off the empty walls. “What song are you going for?”

  They scrolled through the list, which seriously must have held every single song ever made on any planet. Nimien’s weapon was an interesting choice to put it mildly.

  “This one’s a good one,” they said. “Very appropriate for the end of the world. I used to listen on repeat when I was planning my race through the labyrinth. Winner May Die, But Not Today, Baby.” They loaded it up, waiting with their microphone in hand, only their head sticking out of the pit.

  I gritted my teeth, and we waited, silently, for the magic moment to begin. Every minute bringing us closer to the end. If the universe did implode while we were in here, it meant sharing the new place with terrible roommates, and I’m pretty sure they’d have killed us before the recombination period even began.

  “Are you okay?”

  I looked up. James stood poised, flanking Miro, radiant in their role of bodyguard. I realized then that I was shaking—shaking with a nervous energy I couldn’t dispel.

  “What if this only delays the Dread?” I closed my eyes. None of my calming techniques were working. I wanted to throw up in the corner. “What if we can’t stop it? What if everyone feels this way... forever?”

  James took a deep breath. She looked like she wanted to step closer to me but kept to her role instead.

  “Why does it all have to be on you?” she asked. “You’re not responsible for the fate of the universe.”

  “B-because!” I stammered, throwing my hands up in the air. “Because I know what it feels like! I know what it means to question my every thought, to judge and evaluate them, not knowing if it’s my mind being sincere or having a breakdown it hasn’t warned me of. I know what it’s like, and I know what to do, and I need to help! I can help!”

  “But just because you can doesn’t mean you can,” she said. “It’s not your responsibility to save the world just because you’ve suffered and survived. It’s too much for just one person. Trust me. We’re in this together. Otherwise, you’re going to crush under the pressure you’re piling on yourself.”

  I swallowed, hard. She was right: I was only reinforcing the Dread by feeding into it myself. My thoughts and fears of failure, knowing exactly what would happen if I let everyone down, was crushing me. I forced a smile, and breathed, letting part of it go—slowly. I couldn’t drop it all at once. But with every breath, I stood taller.

  We could do this.

  I turned to Miro. “So, when do you—” I started, but before I could even finish my question music blared from the karaoke machine.

  Well, I call it music. But whatever words Miro had used to describe the title of the song never made it into the song itself. No words had. If you could even call it that. Like two whales flirting with each other across an ocean and getting as dirty as they please only the whole thing was being recounted by an angry cricket pleading with the mafia for his life.

  But in that moment, I knew everything would be okay. Because as terrible as this excuse for music was, it was also cosmobeat, the awful new genre that had taken the world by storm back on Earth.

  Which meant somehow, the interference was working.

  That or some off-worlder was making a killing passing off number one interstellar hits off as their own, but hey, the Agency would have to deal with that now.

  Miro screamed into the microphone, my translator trying so hard to interpret what was going on that instead all I heard was quiet sobbing on top of the beat. Somehow, outside, out there, all their selves were singing the same song, together as one, across the stars, across the galaxies, throwing off all the work Desmond and Sidera had built to generate the Dread.

  It would have been beautiful if the song wasn’t so awful.

  The doors slid open, but Miro was still singing. It wasn’t another self. Not the siblings, coming to relieve us of duty and of fear.

  Desmond and Sidera had solved the maze.

  “Hasn’t anybody told you it’s rude to sing outside of common hours?” spat Desmond.

  Miro hit a high note and all the colors on the wall turned into a whistle sound, drowning out Sidera as she tried saying something surely equally snarky.

  James took the distraction and fired, leaping between the twins and Miro. I grabbed my tiny sword and joined her, an impenetrable wall defending the universe’s musical savior.

  Only we weren’t impenetrable. I didn’t even have my only asset on my side. I was as mortal here as James was, and barely a fraction as competent.

  Sidera screamed as James’s beam ripped through her leg, but she’d missed Desmond and he rushed us, screaming a war cry as he attacked.

  Click. Click. James’s blaster was dry. She cursed under her breath, but Desmond was already on us. I didn’t think, only stabbed. With every ounce of strength I had, I pushed the sword forward, only for him to sidestep me as quickly and easily as he had dodged James’s shots, reaching—

  James kicked him the gut, swinging her empty gun at his head before tossing it away. She tackled him to the ground, but he rolled away easily, flying to his feet as she spun back to hers, fists raised and ready for a fight.

  So, this is how it was going to go down. The way all things should go down: four barehanded mortals with a backup track.

  I gasped my last breath of air as Sidera’s arm wrapped around my neck, pulling tight and crushing my windpipe. My lungs screamed as they failed to receive adequate support for their essential workforce. I grabbed at her arm, ripping, pulling anything to get her off me.

  Miro switched to his next song, something sweet and oddly familiar. The instruments rose and swelled, a sad, emotional tune. He took a deep breath before the beat dropped and he belted out the sound a seagull makes when it finds its wife has been cheating on it.

  I slammed my heel down on Sidera’s toes, jamming my elbow into her ribs. Her arm slackened just enough for me to fill my lungs with air, burning hot against my throat.

  She was going to kill me. She was going to kill everyone. This wasn’t going to be a pretty fight, let alone fair.

  I went for the hair.

  She screamed as I tugged. For a woman who had never once experienced mortal pain, it must have been agony. My upper hand didn’t last long, as she grabbed for my own hair, and shit, that shit hurt like shit.

  But I knew how to handle hurt. I threw my head forward, slamming it into her face. The pain was instantaneous and overwhelming, filling my body with nausea. Sidera must have felt the same because she threw up on the floor.

  James had managed to somehow push Desmond back into the pod room—and it was fist against fist, knee to knee, the kind of hand-to-hand combat reserved for martial arts movies, but unlike when the siblings fought, it was at a pace I could follow. Not that I had the opportunity, having Sidera to fight on my own.

  I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t trained enough. Tears ran down my face, tears of exhaustion, of pain, as I struggled just to stay alive.

  But that’s all I needed to do. Stay alive. Stay alive long enough for Zander and Blayde to return. For the song to work. For Desmond’s beacons to break or deactivate or be destroyed, whatever Blayde, the actual hero, decided to do.

  All I had to do was keep Sidera distracted. Keep her on me, not on Miro.

  “How does it feel?” I screamed, pulling my best Blayde sneer as I deflected one of her punches with the palm of my hand. Pain jolted up my arm; no one told me it would hurt that much.

  “What? Beating you?” she replied. “Hardly even notice it. It’s not a big deal to me. Just like squashing a bug.”