I have been awake since the alarms started at dawn, outside for eleven minutes, and I am already regretting both of those decisions in equal measure.
My wrist device buzzed for the fourth time since I left the gate.
Father: Come back inside. The projections are unstable today.
Mother: Mani, please. You can send the supplies later.
I stopped walking long enough to read them, then kept moving, because Robert had not answered me in four days, which was apparently the kind of thing I was willing to cross an empty city on a wormhole morning for. My parents built half the city's security systems. They knew when danger was coming. They were, historically, never wrong about these things.
I had a bag of supplies and a bad feeling, so naturally I kept walking.
The streets were the kind of empty that told you everyone who knew something had stayed home. Shops shuttered, windows behind steel panels, not a single person on the pavement except me, moving toward the old residential blocks where Robert said he'd been staying since the power outages began. The sky looked wrong above the rooftops, pale in that particular way it got on wormhole days, stretched thin like something had been pulling at it.
I turned into the alley near the old blocks, called his name at a volume that felt embarrassing given how quiet everything else was.
"Robert?"
My voice came back off the walls. Nothing else did.
Then I heard laughter.
I knew that laugh. It was not Robert's. I slowed without deciding to slow, stepped forward without deciding to step forward, turned the corner, and stopped.
Robert was there with Lina's hand curled around his sleeve, her head tilted toward him, both of them close in the specific way that told me this was not the first time they had stood exactly like that. The bag slipped out of my hands before I thought to hold onto it. It hit the concrete, split open, tools scattered, power cells rolled into the dark at the edges of the alley.
Robert turned. His smile left his face so fast it was like it had never been there.
"Mani." His voice was sharp in the way that suggested I was the problem. "What are you doing here?"
"You haven't answered me in four days," I said, which was reasonable, "so I came," which was apparently unreasonable based on his expression. I looked at Lina, then back at him. "Why is she here."
Lina's grip tightened on his arm. Her eyes went wide and soft and a little wet at the corners. "Mani, please don't misunderstand, I didn't want to upset you, I tried to stop him from seeing me." She said it with the right pauses in all the right places, gentle, careful, convincing, the voice of someone who had been practicing.
Some part of me wanted to believe her. That part of me has caused a lot of problems.
"He's seeing you," I said, quieter than I meant to.
"I didn't want to hurt you," she said, tilting her head, her hand brushing his arm again.
Robert held Lina's hand, looked at me, and something shifted in his expression, something that had less guilt in it than I would have expected given the situation. He stepped forward. "I'm done pretending," he said, flat, deliberate, like he had rehearsed it.
I waited.
"I never loved you, Mani. I need you to understand that. I never loved you."
I heard every word separately and clearly. "You said you did."
"I said what I needed to say," he told me, "to keep you close, to keep your family close, to keep things convenient. Your name, your money, your connections — all of it was convenient. But I never loved you. I should have told you sooner."
I looked at Lina over his shoulder. She was watching me with an expression she hadn't quite finished arranging into sympathy.
"I carried supplies across the city on a wormhole morning," I said, mostly to myself, "because I was worried about you."
"I know," Robert said, which was not an apology. "That's why I'm telling you the truth now. I respect you too much to let you waste your life married to me."
Behind him, Lina nodded along like this was a very generous thing for him to be doing.
I bent down and started picking up the tools from the ground because my hands needed something to do while my brain sorted through what was happening. "I gave you four years," I said. "I gave you my family's trust."
"Which is exactly why you can't stop me," he said. "Lina is who I love. Lina is who I've always loved. I'm sorry, but you're in the wrong story."
I stopped picking things up. "The wrong story."
"You're the obstacle, Mani."
Lina stepped forward with her soft voice and her careful eyes. "You can step aside. Nobody has to be hurt here. We just need to be honest about what's real." She said it like she was doing me a favor, like stepping aside from four years of my life was something I could do before lunch.
I was trying to locate the words for what I wanted to say to both of them when the sky cracked open above the alley.
Not a metaphor. The actual sky, splitting apart with a sound that went through the walls, through my coat, through my back teeth. The wormhole appeared above us, black at the center, silver at the edges, rotating, and the pull came immediately, not the distant kind mentioned in safety advisories but the kind that lifted the hem of my coat and moved my feet without my permission.
Lina screamed. Her feet left the ground and Robert grabbed her and then turned and shouted, "Mani, help me," which was, given what had just occurred in the previous two minutes, a remarkable thing for him to ask of me.
I went forward anyway, because apparently that is my damage, grabbed Lina's arm, pulled while the wind tried to revise my location. We pulled together, feet scraping against the concrete, arms burning, the roar of the wormhole making it impossible to think, thirty seconds that felt like ten minutes.
Then the pull shifted direction and came for me specifically, my feet went out, and I heard myself say, "Robert, I'm falling," before his hand closed around my wrist.
He had both of us. One hand on Lina, one hand on me, and for a moment it held, and I thought: fine, we survive this, I go home, I tell my parents they were right, I figure out the rest later. One problem at a time.
Then Lina looked up at him, her face completely calm in a way that had no business being calm given the active wormhole, and said, "Let her go."
Robert said, "What?"
"If she's gone," Lina said, clear and quiet under the noise, "we survive. We're free. They'll say you tried to save her."
She had thought about it before this moment. That was the part that got me. It was not a desperate impulse. She had already worked out the math.
"Robert," I said. "Don't."
He looked at me. He looked at Lina. He looked at me again, and I watched him think about it, which was the part I will remember longest, not what came after but the thinking about it, the actual visible consideration of it, like I was a variable in a problem he was trying to solve.
"I'm sorry," he said, barely audible over the wind.
His grip went slack. Then it went away.
The wormhole took me instantly, completely, no negotiation. The last thing I saw before the darkness closed over everything was Lina pressing her face into his chest, his arms going around her, the alley already looking small and far away.
I did not scream. I was too angry to scream.
Wherever this thing was taking me, I was going to find my way back out of it, go home, sit across from my parents at the table, and tell them they were right this morning, which was going to be its own specific kind of awful. Then I was going to figure out what happened next.
I was not the obstacle. I was not in the wrong story.
The darkness held me. I held onto that, waited for the landing, and started planning.