She screamed as she fell, toward the rumbling, through darkness into a sudden burst of light.
She kept screaming right up until she hit the water, hard enough to nearly knock her senseless. She twisted in the water, orienting herself before clawing her way back up toward the surface. She crested the water with a sputtering gasp, dimly aware of Jules doing the same a few feet away.
Once she got her breath back, the first thing she did was send a splash of water right into Jules’s stupid face.
“You asshole!” she screamed hoarsely. “You shoved me off a cliff!”
Jules coughed out, “I got us away from the horde of retail zombies!”
“They weren’t chasing us until you spouted off that garbage about being sent by our own mother!”
“You didn’t even notice anything weird until they literally asked you for your blood!” they shouted back. “Would you have given it to them? God knows, you do everything else that stupid job asks you to do, even though you hate it.”
“At least I wasn’t almost eaten by a chair, you ass! You’re the most impulsive, infuriating—”
“The FINNA led us here!” Jules roared. “It pointed us toward the pit, I saw the wormhole, and I jumped. What would you have done? Agonized about it until they ate us?”
It was true, but that didn’t mean she had to accept it. “A warning might have been nice,” she pointed out. “Or a quick, ‘Hey, there’s a wormhole, let’s make a getaway.’”
Jules rolled their eyes. “I already apologized, so I don’t know what else you expect from me. You’re welcome for saving your life, anyway.”
They stared at each other in a stalemate. Then Ava realized something.
“Where’s the FINNA?”
She was intimately familiar with Jules’s Oh, shit face, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach when she recognized it flitting across their face. Jules’s personal chaos field had struck again.
“You dropped it, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Shit,” Jules muttered. They looked down into the water, past their feet, searching for it.
“Of course you dropped it,” Ava said. She wasn’t sure how far they’d fallen, but they’d hit the water hard. She would have been more surprised if they’d managed to keep hold of it.
Jules dove down beneath the surface of the water, then came back up. “I can see it!” they said. “I can dive down and get it!”
Ava ducked under the water to look. Far below them, she could see the purple light from the FINNA, its glow barely cutting through the murky salt water.
Ava resurfaced and shoved her hair out of her face. “It’s too far,” she said. “There’s no point—”
But Jules was already taking deep breaths, flooding their lungs and blood with oxygen.
“Jules, don’t—!”
But they were gone, disappearing into the murk beneath the surface of the water. Ava looked around. They had landed in a world made of water, flat and gray-skied. The water, at least, wasn’t too cold, and it was still as glass, mirroring the clouds above. As the seconds ticked by, Ava became aware of how alone she was. The horizon was impossibly distant.
How long had Jules been underwater? Every time Ava had watched a movie when someone went underwater, she’d instinctively held her breath as well. Now, she felt dread stealing the air from her. “Jules?” she said. Then again, louder, “Jules!”
Nothing. No bubbles broke the surface of the water. No ripples. Nothing moved except for her.
Ava ducked back under the water, ignoring the sting in her eyes as she looked for Jules. But there was nothing in the murk, just the distant, barely visible light of the FINNA. She called out again, remembering distantly that sound carried better in water, “Jules!”
Water splashed into her throat and sinuses, and she pulled herself back above the surface, coughing it out. Why had she yelled at them? Why had she made them think they needed to save her? That it was Jules’s fault they were both in this predicament? Why couldn’t either of them move beyond the same, stupid patterns of behavior? She was so—
A splash behind her interrupted her spiral, followed by a wild, retching cough. Ava swam as hard as she could toward the sound, to find Jules paddling weakly, still coughing out water. They looked like they might slip back below the surface again at any moment. She reached them just as their head went under and wrapped her arm around Jules’s chest, pulling them back up. Jules coughed out an apology.
“Couldn’t— Sorry, I—”
“It’s okay,” Ava said. “Shh, it’s alright, just try to breathe.”
Jules shook their head. Salt water was dripping out of their hair, down their face, into their tightly shut eyes. “I tried. I swam as far as I could, but I wasn’t—I couldn’t.”
They coughed out a sob. It was an awful sound, lonely and wretched. Ava squeezed her arm tighter around Jules, even though it made it harder to keep them afloat.
“It’s okay,” Ava said.
“We’re going to die out here and it’s my fault,” Jules wailed, their voice breaking in the middle under the salt water’s assault.
Ava shook her head. “It’s not.”
“It is! I always do this, I try and fix things and I make them even worse—”
“Listen to me!” she shouted. “This is not your fault. It’s Tricia’s for sending us. And corporate’s, they’re the ones that cut the FINNA teams in the first place.”
A moment of quiet. Jules’s breathing was beginning to even out. “I guess that’s true,” they said shakily.
“Capitalism,” said Ava.
Jules huffed a laugh. “Yep.”
They were both quiet for a moment. Now that she was no longer alone, Ava felt the panic ebbing out of her. It was an odd feeling. She’d lived with fear and anxiety for so long, and fell into fits of dread and despair over the smallest things. Going to work. Making a dentist appointment. Grocery shopping. The light right after the sun went down, when she realized she’d accomplished almost nothing that day. All normal things that normal people could deal with, and she was never equal to the challenge of them. Catastrophe seemed to lurk around every corner, and she felt constantly out of control.
Now Ava was literally at sea, in an alien universe, at the whim of her shitty retail job. She had no control. Her limbs were already drifting toward exhaustion. And she was calm.
“We should conserve our energy,” she said softly.
“Why?” Jules said brokenly. “What’s the point?”
There was no point, and they both knew it. So Ava ignored the question. “Here, float on your back,” she said, thinking of long-ago swim lessons. “Like this.”
She let Jules go and shifted in the water until she was horizontal, arms and legs akimbo. The salty water buoyed her, made her feel weightless.
“What if we float away from each other?” Jules asked.
Ava turned her hand over, holding it out to them.
So they floated like that, quietly holding hands. It felt too normal for the situation. Here they were in another universe, facing death by drowning and/or hypothermia—but the touch, the calmness, felt, in some ways, more normal than the last three days, since Jules had walked out of Ava’s apartment. More normal even than the month preceding it, after the shift in their relationship that Ava couldn’t articulate but that she felt in her bones; her body knew it had been the end, looming. And it had been sudden and inexplicable and, like all ends, utterly implacable. The more desperately Jules had tried to fix it, the more irreparable it seemed.
But that wasn’t quite it, was it? The more Jules had tried to fix things between them, the more broken Ava had felt. Breaking up with Jules felt like the only way she could salvage anything of herself.
Ava imagined what the two of them looked like from far above: two bright specks against the dark sea, dressed in the same sky-blue polos and khaki pants. She wondered if their bodies would ever be found; if there was life in this sea that would eat them, take nourishment from them.
“Do you think there’s a universe out there where we didn’t break up?” she asked Jules.
Jules was quiet a moment, then answered. “There are infinite universes.”
“So there are universes where we … worked. Where my brain wasn’t garbage.”
“And I didn’t run away from my problems.”
Ava thought she should argue, but she was too exhausted. “Where we stayed together, had a big gay wedding, adopted kids, and then died together. In our nineties, in the same bed.”
Jules snorted. They knew The Notebook had left an outsized impression on Ava’s preteen mind. “Sure,” they said. “And just as many universes where we never met at all. Or stayed together and were completely miserable.”
“Or broke up and managed to be friends.” There was salt in her mouth; seawater or tears, maybe both.
“Infinite iterations,” Jules said. Their voice was hardly more than a whisper, but Ava could hear everything Jules was feeling in those two words: grief, but also acceptance, and just a hint of the wonder that always animated Jules, an abiding surprise with the world. They had told her once that they’d never expected to live to be twenty-five, and they still had a hard time imagining that they’d live to be thirty. It had seemed like too much to ask for, as a Black, trans teenager of immigrant parents. Thirty years had felt like an unreasonable expectation. So every day is like a gift, Ava had said. It had been early in their relationship, and every night had stretched into cycles of sex and kissing and rambling postcoital conversation.
Existence isn’t a gift, it’s a right, Jules had replied. But having to reclaim it every day makes life easier to appreciate, maybe.
Ava squeezed Jules’s hand, wishing she had the energy to articulate her feelings. She’d wished that she could have felt a fraction of their appreciation for existence.
“Do you hear that?” Jules said.
“Hear what?” Ava asked, but she realized that she did: a soft pinging sound from the water, like an underwater bell. Ava counted six pings before a flurry of bubbles erupted all around her and Jules.
What now? she thought, sure the two of them were about to be eaten by a whale. The previously calm water churned, buffeting them with waves. Ava lost her grip on Jules’s hand and was briefly sucked under the water, only to realize that there was something sturdy underneath her hands and knees. It rose steadily up and out of the water: a giant, dark gray surface, pebbled enough that she could stand on it without slipping. As the enormous thing breached beneath her, Ava thought again of a whale, but it seemed too broad, a surface nearly the breadth of a city block, the shape of a baseball diamond. Maybe she was going to be eaten by a giant manta ray. How novel.
A few feet away, she saw Jules scramble after something. The FINNA, she realized, and she watched it bounce and roll toward the edge. Jules caught it just before it toppled off, back into the water.
“This is real, right?” Ava asked them. “I’m not hallucinating from hypothermia?”
“Maybe we both are,” Jules called back. They stood on shaky legs, making their way back so the two of them could stand together. “But also, we’re in a different universe, so who actually knows.”
Ava looked closer as the pebbled skin of whatever they were standing on and found rivets in it. “I think it’s a ship.”
“Then what’s that?” Jules asked. They raised a trembling finger, and Ava followed it. They were pointing at a mound in the center of the—the hull, Ava thought, the word coming to her from the brief two months when she had entertained fantasies about joining the navy, which she’d indulged by binging sailor movies.
A hatch atop the mound in the hull suddenly sprang open with a hiss of air. A figure climbed halfway out of it; an older woman in a high-collared coat, crimson with sky-blue piping.
“Ahoy!” Jules called to her. Then, to Ava: “That’s what people say on boats, right?”
Ava was looking closer at the woman who had just climbed out onto the hull. She yanked open the waterlogged purse she’d found in the deadly garden LitenVärld, miraculously still over her shoulder, and pulled out the pocketbook, flipping it open to look at the driver’s license.
“Ahoy yourselves!” Ursula Nouri called. Or at least, this universe’s approximation of her. “You seem like you could use a lift!”