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The water bottles are calling out to me. I haven’t had anything to drink in hours, since lunch. My thirst is blaring.

I open the leather bag. It looks custom-made for the ampoules, each gla.s.s vial held in its own miniature sleeve.

I begin to count them.

“Fifty,” Amanda says. “Well, forty-eight now. I would’ve grabbed two backpacks, but…”

“You weren’t planning to come with me.”

“How f.u.c.ked are we?” she asks. “Be honest.”

“I don’t know. But this is our s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. We’d better learn to fly it.”

As I begin to cram everything back into the pack, Amanda reaches for the injection kits.

This time, we break the necks of the ampoules and drink the drug, the liquid sliding across my tongue with a sweet, borderline unpleasant sting.

Forty-six ampoules remaining.

I start the timer on Amanda’s watch and ask, “How many times can we take this stuff and not fry our brains?”

“We did some testing a while back.”

“Pulled some homeless guy off the street?”

She almost smiles. “n.o.body died. We learned that repeated use definitely strains neurological functioning and builds up a tolerance. The good news is the half-life is really short, so as long as we’re not slamming one ampoule right after another, we should be all right.” She slides her feet back into her flats, looks at me. “Are you impressed with yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

“You built this thing.”

“Yeah, but I still don’t know how. I understand the theory, but creating a stable quantum state for human beings is…”

“An impossible breakthrough?”

Of course. The hair on the back of my neck stands up as the improbability of it all makes sense.

I say, “It’s a one in a billion chance, but we’re dealing with the multiverse. With infinity. Maybe there are a million worlds like yours, where I never figured it out. But all it takes is one where I did.”

At the thirty-minute mark, I note the first sensation of the drug taking effect—the flickering of a s.h.i.+ning, bright euphoria.

A beautiful disengagement.

Though not quite as intense as in the Velocity Laboratories box.

I look at Amanda.

I say, “I think I feel it.”

She says, “Me too.”

And we’re back in the corridor.

I ask, “Is your watch still running?”

Amanda tugs back the sleeve of her sweater and illuminates the watch face into tritium green.

31:15.

31:16.

31:17.

I say, “So a little over thirty-one minutes since we took the drug. Do you know how long it’s supposed to alter our brain chemistry?”

“I’ve heard about an hour.”

“Let’s clock it to be sure.”

I move back toward the door to the parking garage and pull it open.

Now I’m staring into a forest.

Except there’s no trace of green.

No trace of life.

Just scorched trunks as far as I can see.

The trees look haunted, their spindly branches like black spiderwebs against a charcoal sky.

I close the door.

It automatically locks.

Vertigo hits me as I watch the box push out away from me again, smearing off into infinity.

I unlock the door, drag it back open.