Jirayu’s safehouse, we soon discover courtesy of Noor, is surrounded and observed. By cognates and a few Vector drones, but I know those to be short-range, meaning their users would be nearby. Either way, we opt to leave by the underground passage Jirayu has had constructed for this express purpose. Over the years, she’s come to own quite a few parts of Krungthep nobody ever sees. Gamayun claims they cannot spirit us out of this place; each time they do that, they risk being discovered, and they have finally admitted that in this branch, they are outnumbered. “To the tune of a hundred to one,” they said, blithe. “The problem with getting behind enemy lines. You’re cut off from your own support structure.”
I make Ingvild take point while I bring up the rear, Jirayu bracketed between us. The tunnel is enormous and echoing, and the flashlights at our hips illuminate only so much. Distant noises of vermin and water lapping—it’s not connected to the sewers, but leakage is inevitable in a city this close to the sea. Jirayu is looking at a laminated map; phones can be traced, as secure as her devices are. “This path will take us to a subway station that never came into use,” she is saying. “From there, it should be easier to orient ourselves.”
“I don’t suppose your underground properties connect to each other, Khun Jirayu.” This from Ingvild in the front. “Like a supervillain lair.”
“You watch too many cartoons.” My wife does not quite roll her eyes but she does send me a look, as if to say: Can you believe this question. “I’m rich. I haven’t quite been able to bribe my way through the Ministry of Transport so they’ll sell me half the subway network, and in any case that’s as good as making it public that I want my own underground warren for nefarious purposes.”
“Bureaucracy really gets in the way.” Ingvild moves her flashlight; the circle of illumination falls upon two dead rats. They must have been here for a long time—what stink emanates from it has, mostly, gone. A glint of pointed skull. “In case it comes in useful, I feel I should let both of you know that I can translate within a branch.”
I consider that for a moment. “You mean teleporting.” Which is how the fight between us went the way it did. Cheating, but I don’t say that aloud; it sounds petulant.
“Essentially. Now here.” She snaps her fingers and in the next instant she’s beside me. “Now there. Great for pranks and hostage situations.”
Jirayu cranes her neck to eye both of us. “Quite practical. It’d be so much more convenient if you were Gamayun’s chosen one.”
Our conversation dies down as we venture further. The space is wide, but our footfalls echo too loudly, such that I might miss the noises of an oncoming ambush. It’s a straight path, at that. Nowhere to hide, and no cover. Only the hollow enormity of concrete and load-bearing structures. I imagine Krungthep’s cacophony, distant above us, so far removed from us that we may as well be inhabiting a different stratum of reality. A pedestrian would never have any idea if a fight breaks out down here, if our blood wets these tunnels and brightens the gray-black to a more vivid shade.
But our passage is uneventful. No waiting landmines, no flash grenades, not even a single bullet hurtling out of the dark. I watch my wife’s back, memorizing as I do the minute movements of her limbs, the lines of muscles. Perhaps I have become obsessive, yet after everything, how could I not be? There was a time during my modification and training where I became terrified that I’d begin to forget details of Jirayu—the angle of her nose, the slope of her shoulders—and I built myself a corkboard full of her photos. They were inert, and did not compare to the living, breathing reality of her. I’m thinking of reaching out and telling her, Please don’t forget me, when she stops.
“We should be near the unused station by now,” she says, voice quiet. “There’s too much tunnel. This passageway is supposed to be no longer than six kilometers.”
Meaning we are further from our destination than we should be. I straighten, readying myself, and—
The flashlights extinguish. Or rather its light is suddenly blotted out, and I come face to face with a writhing, susurrating shadow. I hear Jirayu’s voice as if from a great distance: “Yvette? Yvette!”
I’m pulled in.
Or I am not: there is no sense of motion, of currents dragging me down. Simply I am in the tunnel and then I no longer am, and yet I know—instinctual, primally—that this is not a translation; that I remain in Helix Three Corolla. I haven’t been thrown out. Instead I’ve been drawn in.
Above me, the sun is setting. The sky is bruised by the force of its descent. I stand on a plain of black grass that stretches in every direction, featureless and windless, no tree lines, no sign of civilization. A thought strikes me that this is an image of the aliens’ home world, an eternal expanse of stasis, the sky always this same shade, the sun always setting.
I take a step. Two steps. The ground beneath me feels solid enough for what must be—a forced hallucination? A simulation in which my brain is trapped? The grass bends. The blades tickle my chin. Everything is accounted for, sharply realistic to my senses.
I start moving, if only because staying still will do me no favors. There must be a way for me to break free. There must be a way back to Jirayu. I have leaped through countless branches to find her; I will do so again. As many times as it takes, until my body or mind breaks.
Jirayu shouts. She reaches out and lunges, but Yvette is gone.
A sensation of something slithering against her skin and then the air fills: a thin, high-pitched noise; the impression that a writhing, enormous mass has overtaken the tunnel—
Her insides twist. Her feet sink into the muddy banks of a river. Beside her, Ingvild says, “Fuck. I had no idea if that would work, and now I feel like throwing up.”
She is unsteady on her feet, bowed over and wiping at her mouth. Jirayu feels better but not by much, vertiginous and slightly sick. Before them, a ferry cuts through the Chao Praya. A waterfront cafe to their far left, patrons sipping lattes and polishing off souffle pancakes. Perfectly normal people doing perfectly normal things. Oblivious to all that has gone on around them, or what’s just happened next to them.
“Yvette,” Jirayu says. Her voice grates against her own teeth, her dry throat.
The Norwegian straightens, shading her eyes against the sun. “I don’t know. Beg your pardon, Khun Jirayu, but I was concentrating on getting you out. We’re lucky I can translate another person with me.”
River stink and automobile exhaust, the scents of Krungthep. The muted roar of trains and car horns. A plane flying overhead. No Yvette. “What happens if I ask you to bring us back there.”
“Then I’ll be telling you I’m not doing that.”
Jirayu nearly, nearly laughs. “You sound like my wife when we first met.” Always saying no because Jirayu’s demands and preferences were scandalous or outrageous to American sensibilities. “But no. Yvette was taken from there, too. Was that an alien’s true body?” The whispering, tangled mass. She felt it against her, and her skin crawls now with the remembered sensation—something like metal but more supple, like wood but smoother, an unlikely tactile mixture. It was like nothing living at all.
Ingvild grimaces. “I don’t know any better than you do, but we’re out in the open.”
They take cover next to a ramshackle edifice of corrugated iron sheets, rust, and the kind of stench that makes it clear this is a communal outhouse. Jirayu does her best to avoid the particularly wet patches in the soil leaking out. A stray dog, mangy, passes by and gazes at them curiously. It sniffs.
“Or you could bring us somewhere more pleasant,” Jirayu mutters even as she attempts to make sense, to formulate some sort of tactic. Then she remembers and pulls out her Bulwark compass. She hesitates—it is much likelier to bring her to a different instance than to take her to her Yvette’s side, and yet it may prove the only path. One translation out of this branch and another, and she should snap back to her Yvette.
“Oh, fuck,” says Ingvild.
She follows the woman’s gaze up. Far up.
In the sky, one of the Vector ships is moving. It takes her a full second to grasp that it is not making a controlled descent; it is falling.
Both of them stand paralyzed as the ship’s outline twists and frays. Metal strands thrash and unfurl, blackening as they dissolve. There is no explosion, no apparent ballistic impact. Simply the ship seems to be tearing itself apart.
Jirayu shakes herself out of it: this is the distraction Gamayun promised. This is her window of opportunity.
“I’m going to Yvette,” she says, closing her fingers around the Bulwark compass.
“What about the thing Gamayun asked you to—”
But she is already gone.
A house in the old style, all wood flooring and teak furniture and rattan chairs; the door opens and instantly she knows who is going to walk through—a version of Yvette who has lost a version of Jirayu to the quantum disappearance, and who has come to bargain with Tatiana . . .
The wood creaks; the hinge turns.
She should no longer be capable of shock. This is an experience through which she has already gone. And yet the sight parches her throat and freezes her in place. It seizes her with a terrible need, with the improbable thought that if only she could gather every severed, lost instance of her wife; if only she could bring them to a branch of her choosing, where they would be safe and never feel the pain of parting again.
“Jirayu,” the instance begins, voice hardly more than a whisper.
“I don’t have time.” She takes Yvette’s hand, grips it tight. In any branch, she will do her part to protect her hound. “Don’t trust Tatiana or the Vector. I will . . . you’ll meet a version of me, one day. I am sure of this. We can never stay apart for long.”
Yvette’s expression fractures. She is reaching out, about to speak, about to weep—
She does not have time. She activates the compass again. It pulses and now, elsewhere:
Her breath freezes in her lungs. The cold blisters her skin. Crepuscular lights above, undulating across the sky—the Aurora Borealis, she distantly thinks—and all about her is a perfect landscape of white. Stripped trees stand around her in silent witness. Whether this is Helix Three Corolla, her native branch, she doesn’t know; has no way of knowing. When she tries to activate the compass, it does not hum as it should—it must be on some sort of timer—and she remains where she is, in the killing cold. What an irony it would be, to freeze to death here, to lose not to the Vector’s plots and brute force, but to the simple fact that the human body is not meant to survive subzero temperatures.
Footfalls muted by snow. A figure emerges into the clearing, thickly coated, wrapped and covered in muffler and gloves. She moves faster when she sees Jirayu. “You—why are you dressed like that?”
Jirayu tries to respond. Her teeth chatter too much for speech. This version of Yvette takes her by the hand and wraps her up in the coat, leads her through the gleaming dark.
A cabin; a roaring fire. She’s seated in front of its heat. It is like being before a furnace. Jirayu knows she couldn’t have been that long in the cold, but the minutes blurred beneath the patina of frost. Now she is thawing. Meltwater trickles down her scalp and her cognition, slowly, twitches toward something like coherence again. Her circulation returns. She rubs her hands together, then at her arms.
“Where did you come from?” asks the woman with her wife’s face.
It dawns on her: this is a permutation that has never met Jirayu, any Jirayu. And that means they would have to be in North America, somewhere truly north, frigid—perhaps this branch has undergone an extreme climate change, different from what she has known. She searches the face of this Yvette, unable to stop her own curiosity; she finds in this image of her wife a younger woman, less worn than what she found back in Three Corolla’s America. Not so scarred or so stained by war. This, then, must be a timeline where the empire fell into something resembling peace, or else a wasting winter occurred that in its own way prevented conflict. The white of frost hiding all the filth, covering the blackened craters.
“I’m from quite far away,” she says, at length.
A frown; a hard look. “Which field-general do you answer to?”
Perhaps not so different from the America she knows, then. Jirayu tries to smile; her lips crack. She clutches at the compass. Tries it once more, again to little avail—she may be stuck here for minutes more, minutes she cannot spare. “None of them. I’m a gunrunner. Got separated from my personnel.”
“Ah.” Distaste flickers through the woman that, in another time, would have been her bride. “One of those. Well, I have nothing to pay you with, if you want to peddle.”
“As it happens, I don’t have any of my wares with me.” Jirayu can’t quite help it: nostalgia for those difficult first days, for Yvette as yet untamed. “Unless of course you mean my body, and you are very handsome . . . ”
The instance recoils, as if Jirayu has slapped her. “Listen—”
“It is a joke, Yvette. I don’t come that cheap.”
“How do you know my name?”
The familiar sensation comes, and Jirayu knows this branch is rejecting her—meaning a permutation of her lives in this world, and perhaps in a few years will be on a collision course with Yvette. She wonders if she has changed anything, has altered the outcome of that trajectory or if she has cemented it all the more. A day will come when Yvette sees that Jirayu, and remembers the strange woman she met in the snow. “I can’t answer that. I’ll be away from here soon. But you’ve done me a good turn—I may return the favor, in the future. As long as you don’t forget me.”
And then the cabin, the fire, all of it recedes.
She stands on the rooftop of a high-rise. Completely unremarkable, dwarfed by other, even taller skyscrapers. Surrounded by condos of identical facades, by innumerable offices. Below, the train speeds by. Highway traffic flows like an uneasy river, metal now slow-moving, now blurring by at rapid speeds.
Gamayun appears before her. Hovering a few centimeters off the ground and then landing, soundless as a moth, turning to her. Showing her their mask of a face, this terrible parody of human features.
“Welcome back, Khun Jirayu.” A half-bow, as though she’s their liege lord returned from war. “I’m very glad you translated back to such a convenient spot. You may have noticed the distraction I arranged overhead. Now is a pretty good time to plant your seed in this last fault line, so I can activate all of them and have this over with.”
Jirayu closes her hand around the cube; she sees, now, the fault line—this is where they were supposed to be all along, before that alien mass ambushed them. A mesh of shimmering gold, a part of reality that is not entirely holding together, where the alien calculation has not quite sealed the crack. “Where is Yvette?”
“Which one?” They are smiling. “Once we have removed the Vector’s influence here, what they’ve wrought in Helix Three Corolla will be undone—all of it. Including the quantum shift that disappeared the version of Yvette Vihokratana native to this branch.”
“Where,” Jirayu says again, “is the Yvette from One Nucleus?”
“Physically, she is right around here—why else would you have snapped back to this location? In all other ways, well, I suppose that her consciousness and waveform are caged inside a member of the Vector. Very unpleasant. She is held hostage exactly to prevent you from doing what you’re about to do.” The mannequin face leans close. “And you will do it, won’t you? The instances are practically interchangeable. I’m sure you recognize and appreciate that, or it wouldn’t have been so easy for you to reassimilate the One Nucleus permutation back into your life. When your original Yvette returns, you can just pick up where you left off with her the same way.”
“Yvette. What is going to happen to her.”
“Rejected by this branch and returned to One Nucleus. As the best case.”
From the corner of her eye, she watches the Vector ship still twist and spin in the air, as if waging combat against its own innards. “The worst case is that she’s going to disappear the way my original wife did. Or she’s going to just die in Tatiana’s belly.”
Gamayun puts their hand on their skeletal chest. “We don’t have bellies. That’s Tatiana’s brain your wife is stuck in. Please—such a misunderstanding of our most basic anatomy; we haven’t even a proper digestive system. But you don’t have a lot of options, Khun Jirayu. My little distraction will last only so long—the Vector is resolving it as we speak—and then this window of opportunity will close, and Tatiana will just kill you both. Do you prefer that, or do you prefer an outcome where you survive and get to enjoy a version of Yvette?”
Her smile is thin and bitter. “You have no more options than I do. If you fail here, you aren’t getting another opportunity, at least as far as Three Corolla goes. You’ll have start over with another branch, another cognate pair, and you’ve been investing a lot in us, haven’t you?”
“Come now. You must be able to intuit that I’m investing in many other pairs, many other branches; putting all your eggs in one basket is a terrible idea, though then again I’m not sure what baskets have to do with it. I’m more interested in seeds and trees, anyway.” An expansive shrug. “I could just leave you outright.”
“Leave, then.” Jirayu sneers: what does she have to lose. “This is the closest to fruition your schemes have come in a while, I’ll bet. The closest you have come to yanking Vector territory out from under them.” And maybe, out there, Gamayun’s previous attempts even involved instances of her and her wife. She has already seen that a branch may be a year behind, another that’s decades ahead. How many of her has been sacrificed, how many of Yvette.
The mannequin stops moving entirely, for so long that she thinks they’ve made good on their threat to withdraw. “Oh, well, there is something to the idea of the sunk cost. Give me a few minutes to slip myself into Tatiana’s brain, and I’ll see what I can do about your wife. In the meantime, would you please take care of that fault line?”
“Not until—”
But they are already gone, leaving her with the concrete, the winds, and the slow descent of the Vector vessel.
An interruption in the black grass and vivid sky.
I see it, in the distance, as a gate of rusted metal bracketed by brick. Beyond it, a hint of green shadows and bright fruits; it reminds me of something I’ve passed on the way elsewhere, following Jirayu to one of her business lunches. Hard to put a finger on it, but either way I begin making my way to this spot.
It is near, and then it is far; the gate seems both a mirage and not, solid and vivid, and yet spatially ambiguous. I’m beginning to think I will march forever without reaching it—that I’ll be trapped in this monotonous grassland forever—when I, quite abruptly, come to it. Up close, the gate is much taller than I thought; it looms, seven or eight meters high at least, scaled to giants. Its iron is a latticework of barbs. The brick is surprisingly sheer, no indentations or gaps for handholds, and towers far over me. Still, I should be able to manage.
A bird screams overhead. I startle, twist around, and then they descend on me.
I’ve been in all sorts of combat, from the most planned to the most frayed sort; I’ve been on the winning and losing ends; I’ve advanced and I’ve fled. None of that prepared me for trying to shield my head against talons that feel like metals, from beaks that feel like razors. Their shrieks fill my skull. Blood fills my mouth.
On pure, primal instinct, I hurl myself at the thorned gate—
And, instead of tearing myself up against its ironwork, I hurtle through.
Gamayun is on the other side; they don’t catch me, instead allowing me to collide with a wall of hard stone, or what feels like it. I recover, righting myself. What a plain room I’ve fallen into, unfurnished, black marble and nothing else. A vestibule for no one.
“A question for you, Yvette,” they say. “What will you choose, reuniting with your wife from Three Corolla but under the near-certainty that both you and she will die in the next few minutes or so? Or, the possibility of returning to One Nucleus and then starting again, looking for another one of her? There are still some out there, alive.”
“I’m going back to her,” I say, instantly. “She’s expecting me.” Yes, all of her—across the universes, no matter the permutation—is important. But this one, this is the one I shall be with, whatever the cost. If the worst has come for her once more, then I will be at her side. We will fall together. The sense of us is what supersedes.
“I like to think it is this bond, more than the quantum equation, that cements the anchor factor; that the coefficient of it cannot be quantified by plain computation.” Gamayun chuckles, soft. “But I’m sentimental. Go, then, and we shall see if this is the secret ingredient after all.”
I’m pushed through. I brace myself.
Concrete hot under my hands. The Vector ship descending, slow, above me. But I barely pay attention to that because all my senses point to Jirayu, and when she turns to me I know that I’ve made the right decision. That I do not want to do this again; that I will refuse to seek another one of her as though I can callously choose between Jirayu’s different selves. There is no try again, not anymore. There’s only the act of preserving this Jirayu who stands right before me.
We grip each other’s hand. And we face what is to come together.
The ship’s shadow is upon us, and where it touches the concrete a solid mass is coalescing. A mass of ribbon-like structures, gleaming in the sun like lacquered wood, the geometry of it knotted inside and overlapping, each strand branching into more fractal strands. It is otherwise featureless. Instinctively I grasp that this is a living thing, but there are no eyes or mouth, no face or even distinct limbs. The entire thing resembles an art installation more than an organism.
A curtain of lustrous ribbons parts and Tatiana is extruded from it as if in grotesque birth. But the mannequin stands dry, perfect and new-minted, untouched by vernix.
“I extend both of you,” they say, “a final courtesy. You must understand that you act against your own interest and that of your species. The Bulwark may deliver on its short-term promises. In the long run, it still wants to wipe your kind out. Cede control of the quantum tree to them and you might as well sign your own collective death warrant. Show me the way to One Nucleus and I’ll leave you and Khun Jirayu alone forever. What do you owe the Bulwark?”
Jirayu has stepped forward, in front of me when I am the one who should be her shield, her fortress-wall. “The Bulwark didn’t wipe out my wife, for one.”
The mannequin might sneer if its immobile face was capable. “We must all make sacrifices, Khun Jirayu, and in any case you yourself are no longer useful to me.”
I move: gun out of the holster, finger on the trigger. Not fast enough. The ribbons have snaked around Jirayu, lifting her in the air. I fire into the mass that must be Tatiana. Nothing connects. I might as well be shooting at a ghost.
A keen whistle in the air. Ingvild has appeared on the other side of the roof, and her drones are hurtling straight for Tatiana. They might have done something too, if they hadn’t been caught by the tendrils of the alien body, speared through and shredded. They fall to the ground in pieces. She shoots but, like mine, her bullets never reach—or simply pass through—Tatiana.
The mannequin creaks. “You’re of great value to us, but your value is not infinite. The Bulwark is no threat. Most of the tree belongs to us, and we merely need to root out a few parasites. It is a shame. It took us some time to find an instance of you that has this specific affinity. But if you insist on standing your ground—”
A sharp, brittle crack; my wife’s expression twists as her arm breaks, and I shoot again, to no result. I throw away the gun then and charge the creature; I will tear it apart with my bare hands if I have to.
And then I realize Jirayu isn’t trying to get away; I don’t understand at first, but she’s holding onto Tatiana’s appendages. They don’t know what she’s trying to do, either, making no effort to dislodge or shake her off.
Her Bulwark compass flashes as she thrusts it deep inside Tatiana. A noise like the pop of barometric pressure shifting; a radiance like the moon—
Imagine standing beneath gathering storm clouds. Imagine that they have unnaturally dispersed, leaving you beneath a noon shining in full force.
The sky bright above us. Quiet around us. Distant noises of traffic. Tatiana has vanished. There’s no corpse left behind. I blink and try to make sense.
Gamayun materializes, as usual from nothing. Their shadow is more muted, more tamed, though the outline of it still fails to match the avatar. “Congratulations,” they say. “You’ve achieved your victory condition. Or mine, at any rate. Very bright, Khun Jirayu, to activate my device inside Tatiana.”
My wife is collapsed on the warm concrete, clutching her arm to her, the Bulwark device on the ground. Inert, now that it’s exhausted its use. I go to her and find her arm bent wrong—Tatiana’s disappearance did not undo the damage they inflicted—and carefully help her up. Through the pain she says, “You were never going to tell me your ploy was to provoke Tatiana into showing their real body.”
“Then you wouldn’t have taken the risk. By the way, the being you call Tatiana is no longer present in any branch. Their presence within the quantum tree has been extinguished. You killed them for good.”
Jirayu grips my wrist with her good hand. Through gritted teeth, she makes something like a laugh. “Did I?”
“It’s a simple theory that I’ve been waiting to put into practice. The death of one of us echoes across all branches, and in the blood we may write new parameters for any given timeline. Helix Three Corolla has now been severed from the tree, or the tree the Vector can access, at any rate. No more interference from them, and none from me either—I don’t want to chance it, and I don’t need anything more from this timeline. Translation to and from Three Corolla is now, essentially, near impossible. This branch has become hermetic. This means the broad-waveform effect’s not going to reach you anymore. You can rest a lot easier, Khun Jirayu; you’re going to be only marked for death the normal ways. Illnesses, old age, natural disasters. Not so much the universe trying to correct itself by murdering you.”
“You never meant to let Yvette back into Comet One Nucleus,” Jirayu says. She is holding her broken arm as still as she can.
They laugh. It is a sound like knives grating against each other. “Obviously not! It is something like my stronghold. I’m selectively sending away cognates so there will be few anchors for anyone there, effectively sealing it away too.”
“And now what?” I ask, because I have to know. One last answer from this frustrating creature.
“Now you have your world back. Your fate, henceforward, will be dictated mostly through your own terms.” They sweep a bow that would have looked smooth and antique if their mannequin limbs weren’t so many-jointed and stiff. “Do with it what you will.”