Ava had never been on a submarine before. Her initial assessment: maybe she should look back into being a naval seaman. The hallways were low-ceilinged but wide, with strips of light glowing blue and green and red, jewel-bright and cheerful. Brass dials and instruments littered most of surfaces, and layers of graffiti crowded any empty space. It was certainly better than the fluorescent lights and smooth jazz covers of pop songs that were hallmarks of working retail.
“Welcome aboard the L. V. Anahita, merchant class vessel,” the woman said. “I’m Captain Nouresh.”
She looked them over and they did the same. Captain Nouresh had a thick braid of white hair that hung down one shoulder, and wore black high-waisted pants and a white linen shirt underneath her coat. She looked stunningly similar to the old woman Ava had seen in the photo on the young woman’s phone, though her hair was longer, her face paler, and she had a few extra scars.
“You’re travelers then?” Nouresh asked. “Through the marejii?” At Ava’s blank stare, she amended, “Sorry, what do you call them? The hallways between worlds.”
“Maskhål,” Ava answered.
“Wormholes,” Jules corrected. “Our stupid boss at LitenVärld calls them maskhål, because they’re a Swedish corporation.”
Nouresh looked at them blankly. “I thought I could still speak your language, but maybe I was wrong.”
“Wait, how can you speak our language?” Ava said, wringing out her hair.
“I’m a traveler myself,” Nouresh said, bowing with an ironic flourish. “I spent my youth navigating the marejii. I stayed for some months in a city where they spoke your language. It was called Annapolis.”
Jules and Ava shared a look. “I have no idea where that is.”
“Minnesota?” Ava guessed.
“I think that’s Minneapolis.” Jules looked back at the captain. “Sorry, we haven’t traveled much.”
“No? It’s a beautiful city of bricks, at the crossroads of a river and the sea. I was happy there for a while.”
Jules and Ava said that it sounded very nice, wherever it was. (Maine? Maryland? They’d have to check the LitenVärld directory.) Then Ava gave a performative shiver and asked, “Is there a place we can get some dry clothes?”
“I’ll take you to the market,” Nouresh said. “Follow me.”
They followed the older woman through a series of halls, all of them similarly low-ceilinged, and lit with the same emerald lights that Jules eventually pointed out looked alive. “They are,” Nouresh said. “Tiny creatures that give off light.”
“Bioluminescent plankton!” Jules said. “That’s so cool!”
Nouresh seemed bemused by their outburst, and Ava explained, “They said the same thing about a chair that almost ate them.”
“Oh, the Soft Snare? In Universe 241?”
Captain Nouresh, it seemed, had compiled a taxonomy of the universes she had traveled to in her youth, in service to something called the Cooperative of Nations. She’d taken detailed descriptions, notes on languages, flora and fauna, dominant species and their social structures. Ava could see Jules’s eyes growing wide as she told them of the places and things that she had seen.
Wanderlust. Ava had never really had it. Jules always had. They’d always felt stuck, both at LitenVärld and in their hometown, where they had returned after dropping out of college. Ava was aware of this large portion of Jules’s life that they didn’t discuss—what had happened at their school, why they had dropped out, why they had come back home afterward—but never asked about it, even during that first, dizzying flush of falling in love. Ava had always skirted it; she’d thought that she was giving Jules room and space to bring it up on their own schedule, but they never had. And she’d assumed that now they never would, but maybe that could change.
“How many worlds did you come through?” Captain Nouresh asked.
“Three?” Ava said. “It’s hard to tell. I couldn’t spot all of the seams.”
“Not bad, for a first trip. What made you leave your world? And what are you using to navigate?”
Jules looked at Ava. “We were actually—”
“Using this old piece of shit,” Ava interrupted, pulling the FINNA out of Jules’s grasp. “Didn’t hold up to the water, though.”
Captain Nouresh cooed at the FINNA like it was a small, injured animal. “Oh, look at this. Haven’t seen one of these since I was your age.”
She pressed one of its buttons and it beeped at her, the sound warbly and sad. “Shouldn’t be too hard to fix. These things were designed to take a beating.”
Ava hadn’t realized how deeply she was afraid of not being able to get home until Nouresh said that. A tight knot of muscles loosened in the center of her back, and she was able to breathe.
“It’ll take me some time,” the captain said. “In the meantime, though, I’m sure you’ll be able to occupy yourself.”
She stuck the FINNA in the deep pocket of her coat, and wrenched open a door. The noise hit Ava first, a cheerful hubbub of voices, music, bodies, and business. She shared a quick look with Jules and felt a pulse of excitement pass between the two of them. She followed Jules through the hatch and into a wild, chaotic bazaar.
Vendors stood in front of a labyrinth of stalls. The ceiling here was higher, and tent walls stretched up toward it, rippling with movement as large, leaf-shaped fans circulated the air in the room.
The market—which stretched the resemblance to the LitenVärld she knew—didn’t take cash, only trade. Jules, veteran of many church basement rummage sales, found a table with piles of clothing to trade in their seawater-soaked uniform. They reappeared in what looked like sailor’s garb: a cotton shirt, loose pants, and a coat, though they had to give up the steel-toed sneakers they’d bought at Kmart in order to work in stocking and assembly. They seemed happier to be barefoot.
“Nice,” Ava said, catching sight of them after they haggled. “You fit right in.”
Ava ended up trading in the bottle of Ursula’s perfume along with her uniform for a tunic, skirt, and a warm knitted shawl. She felt guilty, but also figured that Ursula wouldn’t miss the bottle, and her granddaughter wouldn’t realize it was gone.
“Thanks,” Jules said. “You look … comfortable.”
“Wow,” Ava said drily. “Great.” She’d picked out clothing as close to pajamas as she could find, and probably didn’t look anywhere near as cool as Jules.
“In a good way!” Jules said, holding up their hands. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you look anything besides …”
Ava could fill in the blank. Miserable. Angry. Depressed. Fair enough.
“Let’s get some food,” she said, and Jules nodded.
They followed their noses toward the center of the market, and found a plethora of food stalls. The food stalls, weirdly, shared names with the chains and franchises that Ava found herself eating at too often in their shitty suburb. The Olive Grove had mounds of freshly baked pita bread and hummus. Dumpling Express was half-obscured by clouds of fragrant steam, serving little bundles wrapped tightly in leaves. El Buckarito, the worst Tex-Mex chain to have ever given Ava food poisoning, offered skewers of grilled meat and vegetables, liberally coated with spices.
Jules tapped on Ava’s shoulder, and she turned to find them pointing at a sign that said Pasta and Friends, staffed by a single old man hand-rolling noodles.
“Think they take gift cards?” Jules asked.
“Who said I was going to share?” Ava asked. She relished Jules’s look of utter betrayal before handing them one.
The noodles were delicious, and Captain Nouresh graciously bought them a round of sweet, ginger-flavored wine to drink with their meal. Jules eventually got distracted by a group of kids kicking a ball around—they always said that soccer was a language that transcended all borders, and apparently that held true across the multiverse—and Captain Nouresh started tinkering with the waterlogged FINNA, pulling out a set of tools from a pouch on her belt.
“You should tell her,” Jules whispered, right before they went off with the kids. “Why we’re here.”
Ava had actually managed to forget, for a while, that they were on a mission from their lords and masters at LitenVärld. She resented the reminder; it was nice to blame LitenVärld for making them face murderous clones and carnivorous chairs, but she didn’t want to credit her corporate overlords for sending her here, the first new world that actually seemed cool.
“Do you often get travelers like us?” Ava asked Captain Nouresh. “Coming through wormholes?”
The captain poked confidently and curiously through the guts of the FINNA as she spoke. She sketched out the world of the Anahita, one of a class of merchant ships that moved between underwater city-states, migratory nations that traversed the ocean’s surface, and the nomadic townships that hung at the edges of both.
“I wonder if our universe is some kind of hub for others, if we have more marejii. Or maybe it’s just that our ships know to look for travelers.”
Captain Nouresh pulled a magnifying eyepiece out of her pocket, peering closer at the circuitry in the FINNA. “It seemed like your world was so scared of strangers and strangeness. It gets covered up, renamed, cut up until it fits into a familiar skin. Like this.” She gestured at the guts of the FINNA, now spread out across their table. Ava was struck by how different some of the components were; there were bits of plastic, a circuit board, and the hex bolts that were a hallmark of all LitenVärld design. But other components were utterly alien: something that looked like neon-orange moss, crystals that glowed a dusky pink, bright brass gears, a glass vial that contained a swirling, crimson gas. “I can see the work of three different worlds in here, maybe four. But all they want you to see is this.”
She tapped the white LitenVärld logo on the gray plastic cover: the letters L and V in a cutesy, corporate font, and nestled between them, a sphere chopped into meridians and parallels. Ava thought about the training video, and the specs of the FINNA on the instructions booklet: Property of LitenVärld Inc., LLC.
Now that she thought of it, that same phrase had been printed onto the sky-blue polo that was her uniform, just below the tags. A reminder and a warning. Jules often called their job soul-killing, raged that retail was designed to wear down wage workers into hapless drones, too scared of poverty to rise up in revolution. It’s just a job, she’d always said. No better or worse than any other job.
That’s exactly the problem, Jules would groan.
Much as “Ugh, capitalism” was a running joke between them, their system was too big to do anything but joke about it. It’s not like they had a plethora of options waiting for them out there.
But now there were options. Doorways into other worlds and other possibilities opened all the time, apparently. LitenVärld liked its worlds small, contained in their claustrophobic cubes, and under their control. No wonder they had gotten rid of the FINNA division. Ava wondered what they had found out there; what they’d brought back, what ideas they’d been infected with. Maybe some teams had chosen not to come back at all.
“Ah,” said Captain Nouresh, who’d continued to work while Ava was lost in thought. She set down her tools, wound the wires back into the FINNA’s shell, and flicked the switch again. There was a brief pop, and Ava flinched back, worried it would explode. But beyond a puff of briny-smelling vapor, the FINNA seemed fine. The bubble lit up purple again, and the console—despite some moisture under the glass screen—flashed and came back on. There was no arrow, though; instead, a bull’s-eye blinked.
“That’s amazing,” Ava said, taking it back from Nouresh.
Nouresh smiled wryly and put her tools away. “I’ve got a way with old and useless things, being one myself.”
Ava looked up at the captain. “You don’t seem useless to me.”
In fact, she was one of the most formidable women she’d ever met. Aside from Jules’s aunt, who Jules had lived with briefly, and who wasn’t formidable as much as she was actively horrible.
Nouresh shrugged. “I should have passed control of the Anahita to my first mate years ago. She’s still young, but plenty capable.”
“What would you do instead?” Ava asked. She wasn’t sure how she was going to convince Nouresh to come with them. More intel couldn’t hurt.
But Nouresh gave her a thin, brittle smile. “That’s the question, isn’t it? All the captains I admired retired to a seafloor grave.” Her smile shifted, became stronger, realer. “I would have happily gone down with my ship, but that would have meant losing a battle, and I was never very good at that. So here we are, the Anahita and I.”
After watching her put away her tools, Ava offered tentatively, “You could travel again? If you retired?”
“I could,” Nouresh agreed, though she didn’t sound excited by it.
“But you don’t want to,” said Ava.
Nouresh shrugged. “Getting lost for lack of a better option loses its appeal after a while. I’ve already got too much free time for comfort. How else do you think I was able to wine and dine you and your …” She looked at Jules for a moment, then back to Ava. “Partner?”
Ava swallowed thickly. “Not anymore,” she said. It was the first time she’d actually said it aloud to anyone. She’d texted her friends, emailed her brother, but hadn’t actually said it aloud until now. Three days, the words had been kept in her throat.
“Ah,” Nouresh said delicately.
“I think we could be friends, though?” Ava said. Now that she’d started to speak, she couldn’t seem to stop. “Like, we never really got to that stage. We went straight from coworkers to crush to codependent dating. Traveling with them has almost been easier, despite all the stuff that’s been trying to kill us.” Ava watched Jules showing off their soccer skills, kicking the ball up, catching it on their chest where it seemed to hang, defying gravity for a moment, before dropping it onto the ground again. The kids fell momentarily silent in amazement, then started yelling in excitement as they tried to get the ball back from Jules, and then each other. A couple of kids started fiercely arguing, and Jules held up their hands, trying to circumvent a fight.
“There are beautiful worlds out there, you know,” Captain Nouresh said. “You might want to take the long way back, once you find whatever it is you’re looking for. It might help you find your footing with each other.”
Ava looked from the bull’s-eye to Nouresh, who met her gaze calmly. She really did look a lot like the young woman at the customer service counter. Ava set the FINNA down. “Can I ask you something? Do you have a family?”
Nouresh’s face changed, falling a little. She looked older. “Not anymore,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Ava said. Sorry for bringing it up, sorry for dragging that unnamed hurt out of the past. Appropriate replacement, she thought. What an awful way of thinking about it. Was that why the FINNA had led them to Nouresh? Some algorithm had matched her grief to the hole Ursula would leave in their world?
“It’s an old sadness,” Nouresh said. “Doesn’t heal, but you get used to bearing it.”
Ava nodded, thinking again of Ursula’s granddaughter. Ava had never been particularly close to her own grandparents, not like the girl—whose name she didn’t even know, she realized. All Ava could think of was the way the young woman had stared at the selfie, the way her worry seemed to diminish her in size and age, make her a child again.
The captain’s eyes suddenly cut away from Ava, narrowing as something else caught her attention. Ava turned to look as well, at Jules. They had managed to distract the kids with a story about their recent misadventures in the so-called hive. The kids watched, entranced as Jules acted it out with their whole body. They’d drawn a sizable crowd, some of whom surely couldn’t understand the words Jules spoke. But Jules had always been a dynamic storyteller, and the past few hours had given them even more fodder.
“And then, they look at each other and say, let’s take them to Mother. Mother wants to meet you. Mother wants you to answer some questions. And we’re like—” Jules made a comically fearful face, but nobody seemed to laugh. Instead, they all looked nervous.
There was a fierce grip on her arm, and Ava turned back to find Captain Nouresh looking at her intently.
“You came here through a hive?”
Disquiet squirmed in Ava’s chest. “That’s what they called it.”
Nouresh cursed under her breath, then squeezed Ava’s arm in a tighter grip. “Answer me truthfully. Did they see you come through the marejii?”
Ava hesitated, suddenly afraid—not just of the weird LitenVärld murder clones, but selfishly, of angering the woman in front of her. “Yes? I mean, I don’t know. We were running from them, they chased us to a pit, and the maskhål was below us, so Jules threw us both into it.”
Nouresh stood, yanking Ava to her feet as well. She pulled her along toward Jules, and snapped, “You! With me!”
Jules flinched at the shout, but then leapt to their feet, looking to Ava for explanation. Before she could offer it, Captain Nouresh—and Ava realized that she was definitely looking at the captain now, a woman who had run an enormous ship for years, with such efficiency that she’d made herself redundant—pulled Ava along through the market. Jules darted along behind them.