Two days later, a taxi dropped Ava off in front of Saint Joseph’s. The enormous edifice reminded her of the L. V. Anahita when it had surfaced beneath them: too big to understand, to hold entirely in her mind. She almost got back in the car, the request to take her home on her lips. Then she shook herself and went inside, following the complicated directions to Ursula Nouri’s room in the recovery unit. She’d timed her arrival to coincide with the beginning of visiting hours, but it took her nearly half an hour to find the correct floor, and then the correct room. Customers at LitenVärld complained about getting lost in the store, unable to find their bearings. Ava had felt the same when she’d first been hired, but it was even worse at the hospital, which felt like a labyrinth by comparison.
Ava sighed in relief when she finally spotted the paper plaque with the name Nouri on it. She raised her hand to knock, put it down, shook herself. Why was she so nervous? She’d carried this woman barely conscious through a tunnel in time and space. A fifteen-minute conversation wasn’t too much to ask. She rapped on the door.
It opened, after a moment, to reveal the young woman who had come to the customer service desk in the first place. Ursula’s granddaughter. She stared blankly at Ava until recognition washed over her face. “Hi!” she said. “Sorry, come in. Grandma, look who it is!”
Ava blinked at the sight of Captain Nouresh in the hospital bed; she looked smaller without her imposing coat and sword. She seemed paler, as well, either from blood loss or from the gray February light filtering through the window. Bulky bandages peeked out from the neck of her hospital gown, and wound around her arms.
Still, her eyes were lively and sharp as they alighted on Ava. She shifted a bit, sitting up with a pained grunt. “Hello, hero,” she said. “I hear I owe you some gratitude.”
“Grandma, use the buttons on the bed to sit up,” the girl fussed. She adjusted the pillows propping Nouresh up, and said, “Sorry, I don’t think we’ve properly met. I’m Farah.”
“Ava,” she replied, and they shook hands.
“I don’t know if thanking you is like, even appropriate?” Farah said. “But holy shit, thank you so much.”
Ava, unnerved by the girl’s sincerity, muttered, “It’s fine, really, I—”
“Are you a hugger? Do you hug?”
Ava looked over at Nouresh helplessly, and the older woman shrugged, then winced as she pulled at her wound.
“Sure?” Ava said. Before she could prepare herself, Farah’s arms were around her, squeezing her fiercely. It was sort of alarming, really.
Farah released her, but only long enough to plant a kiss on each of Ava’s cheeks. “If you need anything—like, seriously, anything—I will help you.”
Ava nodded, quailing under Farah’s intent gaze. She was a lot more like Nouresh than seemed possible.
“Farah, dear, could you get us some tea? Maybe give us some time to talk?” Nouresh asked.
Farah nodded, then looked back at Ava. “Make sure she doesn’t wander off, okay?”
Ava nodded again, and Nouresh added, “We’ll keep each other firmly on this earth.” Farah squeezed Ava’s hand once, with a terrifying strength, and then went out into the hallway, shutting the door behind her.
“She seems … cool,” Ava said after a moment.
“She does, doesn’t she?” Nouresh said. Her voice was fond, a little surprised. “I wasn’t sure what to expect, but her grandmother raised her well.”
“Pour one out for Ursula,” Ava said.
“May the sea keep her memory,” Nouresh agreed.
“How much does Farah know?” Ava asked delicately. “About what happened?”
Nouresh pursed her lips. “She’s chalking some of what I said up to a concussion. To be fair, I said most of it when I was barely conscious …” She sighed. “But it hasn’t escaped her notice that her beloved grandmother has many more scars and significantly longer hair.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
“Eventually,” Nouresh said. “She deserves that. Ursula does as well.”
Ava sat in the chair by the bed. It was comfortingly warm; Farah must have been sitting there. “Captain Nouresh,” she started.
The older woman raised a hand. “You carried me through a collapsing marejii, I think you’ve earned the right to call me Uzmala.”
Ava nodded. “Uzmala. Do you remember what happened to Jules?”
Uzmala sighed. “I know they saved my life. I know they pulled me through that door. It gets hazy after that. Farah told me that the two of us emerged alone.”
Ava chewed on her lip. “Jules stayed behind. They held the door. I think they fought the drones.”
“A good place to make a stand,” Uzmala mused. “Those bulkhead doors are narrow, and they would have had to come through one at a time. Someone handy with a sword could hold off a horde for quite a while.”
Ava’s stomach roiled. She’d forced herself to go back to her own apartment the night before, to eat and to gather the things she’d thought she needed. Her meal sat uneasily in her stomach now, and she had to swallow a couple times before she could speak the question she’d come here to ask: “I don’t suppose you still have your coat, do you?”
Uzmala smiled at her. “They bagged all my belongings and left them in the closet in the corner. What you’re looking for should be in there.”
Ava got up, pulled the red plastic bag from the closet, and tore it open with shaking fingers, even though she could already feel the FINNA’s bulky shape through the thin plastic. Ava only had dim memories of running through the last maskhål, but she clearly remembered slipping the FINNA into the wide pocket of Uzmala’s red coat, worried that it would slip from her sweaty hands. Uzmala had still been wearing the coat when the ambulance crew strapped her to the stretcher, and Ava had been hustled off to the break room.
The coat was stiff with dried blood, but she was able to maneuver the FINNA out of the pocket. She carefully put the bag back in the closet and then sat back down by Uzmala’s bedside.
“Did I mention that I quit my job?” Ava said faintly.
“Good for you,” the older woman replied. “I might be biased because I was dying at the time, but that store seemed like a depressing place to spend your hours.”
“It’s only the second job I’ve ever had,” Ava said. “My boss, Tricia, always said that we were a family. I should have realized she meant that I would have to put up with constant bullshit.”
Uzmala nodded, though she winced as she did, and put a hand up to her bandaged shoulder. “Was my tool bag in the closet? Fetch it for me, will you?”
Ava did, laying it gently on Uzmala’s lap. “Give me that thing,” Uzmala said, holding her free hand out for the FINNA. After a brief hesitation, Ava did so.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you have nothing really holding you here. And one compelling reason to leave,” Uzmala said, popping the back of the FINNA open. “Not to mention a good vehicle out. This thing is old, but hardy.”
“You would know, right?” Ava said weakly. “Being old and hardy yourself?”
There was a hint of steel in Uzmala’s eyes as the woman looked at her, unimpressed. Ava shrank back in her chair.
“Anyway,” Uzmala said. “What’s holding you back?”
“You mean besides the monsters that nearly ate us?” Ava shot back.
Uzmala fished a thin, copper-and-steel screwdriver out of her tool bag. “Every world has its monsters. I’ve been watching the news, and yours is no exception. What’s the real reason?”
Ava shut her eyes. She didn’t want to say it; saying it made it real, instead of just a nebulous, nightmarish fear inside her head. Then she thought of the two lines in an unfinished letter, and all the things that she and Jules might never say to each other.
“What if I tell the FINNA to find Jules,” she said slowly, quietly. “And it says they’re … indisposed? Like Ursula was?”
The look that Uzmala gave her this time was longer, softer, and more thoughtful.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Ava said, “I’m glad that you and Farah are doing okay, but I don’t want an appropriate replacement for Jules.”
“Even if the alternative is never to see them again?” There was no judgment in the question, just a soft understanding. Ava remembered Nouresh’s sad smile, back at the Anahita’s bazaar, when Ava asked the captain if she had a family. Not anymore.
But this wasn’t the same, was it? She didn’t know if Jules was dead. They were Schrödinger’s Cat at this point, alive and dead and all points in between until Ava made a choice to find out. And if they were alive? What then? It was hard to articulate what Ava wanted, even to herself. She didn’t want to find Jules and run straight back into their arms. But she’d felt something new growing between them, something fragile but important. And she wanted to protect that, nourish it, and see it mature.
Uzmala waited her out, not pressuring her to answer, just patiently poking around in the FINNA. Ava watched her careful, precise movements with a sort of distant focus, thinking about Nouresh’s question.
“I want to know if they’re okay,” Ava answered finally. “Everything after that is negotiable.”
Uzmala nodded. She worked in silence on the FINNA, examining it with steady, sure movements, for a few moments before asking, “You know what I loved about traveling by marejii?”
It took Ava a second to catch up with the conversation. “No, what?”
“It showed me that there were infinite possibilities, at all times. After I made captain of the Anahita, I worried over every decision, doubted whether I was brave or smart or strong enough to pull my mission off and protect my crew. I could remind myself that somewhere in the multiverse of possibility, there existed a world where I was all of those things. Maybe it was the world that I already lived in.”
She bent her head closer to the FINNA, then used a delicate pair of pliers to yank something out: it looked like a cross between a computer chip and a spider, and Ava pushed back in her chair as it gave a weak twitch. It had the LitenVärld logo on it.
“There you are, you bastard,” Uzmala said, smiling grimly at it. She dropped it on the bedside table. The thing tried to skitter away, pulling itself along with its two front legs, though it didn’t get far. Uzmala stabbed it with the pliers still in her hand, cracking it into pieces. There was a wisp of bright, sky-blue dust, which dispersed almost instantly.
“That should make things easier,” Uzmala said. She slid the cover back onto the FINNA and screwed it shut.
“What did you do?” Ava asked.
“I freed it to call up marejii in any labyrinth, not just ones that are analogous to your former job. Anywhere that gets you disoriented enough so that the walls between universes are not so firm can hide a marejii.” She gestured to the room around them. “This hospital would probably work. I almost perished of hunger just trying to find the damned toilet down the hall.”
She held the FINNA out to Ava, who reached cautiously for it. At the last second, Uzmala pulled it back.
“Now the way I see it,” she said, “there are infinite universes where Jules died. And infinite universes where they’re alive. Similarly, there are worlds where you are too much of a coward to find out, and worlds where you are brave enough. So. It’s up to you: which of those worlds do we exist in right now?”
* * *
As she walked the hospital’s twisting hallways, a curious feeling came over Ava; that she almost didn’t need the FINNA. To go where she wanted, she had to get lost, and it seemed almost instinctual to do that now. She’d been lost for a long time, rudderless.
Still, she wasn’t so brave or so stupid as to rely on instincts alone. She looked back down at the FINNA. The bubble, where she’d placed a tassel cut from the scarf she’d knitted for Jules, glowed a bright, verdant green. The color seemed appropriate: something new, different, and just beginning to grow.
Ava chased that particular sense of disorientation, recognizable now; somewhere between the feeling of falling in love and falling out of it, of pursuing and fleeing, of not knowing and still going forward. Ahead of her, she saw the crackling energy of a split in the world she knew, a doorway into a world that she didn’t. Ava ran through it and kept running.