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No sound of birds.

No sound of life.

There’s not even a whisper of wind and no trace of our tracks. Everything smoothed-over and drifted.

The temperature must be miles below zero, because even in the direct sun, I’m not anywhere close to warm.

Beyond this neighborhood, the skyline of Chicago looms, the towers snow-blown and ice-encrusted and glittering in the sun.

A white city.

A world of ice.

Across the street, I survey the open field where we nearly froze to death yesterday.

There’s no sign of the box.

—

Back inside, I find Amanda awake, sitting up at the edge of the hearth with the sleeping bags and blankets wrapped around her.

I head into the kitchen, locate some silverware.

Then I open the backpack and dig out a couple of MREs.

They’re cold but rich.

We eat ravenously.

Amanda asks, “Did you see the box?”

“No, I think it’s buried under the snow.”

“Fantastic.” She looks at me, then back into the flames, says, “I don’t know whether to be mad at you or grateful.”

“What are you talking about?”

“While you were upstairs, I had to use the bathroom. I stumbled into the office.”

“So you saw them.”

“They starved, didn’t they? Before they ran out of fuel for the fire.”

“Looks like it.”

As I stare into the flames, I feel something needling the back of my brain.

An inkling.

It started when I was outside a moment ago, looking at the field, thinking about us almost dying in that whiteout.

I say, “Remember what you said about the corridor? How it reminded you of being trapped in a whiteout?”

She stops eating, looks at me.

“The doors in the corridor are the connections to an infinite array of parallel worlds, right? But what if we’re defining these connections?”

“How?”

“What if it’s like dream-building, where we’re somehow choosing these specific worlds?”

“You’re saying that, out of an infinite number of realities, I intentionally picked this s.h.i.+thole?”

“Not intentionally. Maybe it’s a reflection of what you were feeling at the moment you opened the door.”

She takes the last bite of food and tosses her empty MRE packet into the fire.

I say, “Think about the first world we saw—that ruined Chicago, with the buildings crumbling all around us. What was our emotional state as we walked into that parking garage?”

“Fear. Terror. Despair. Oh my G.o.d. Jason.”

“What?”

“Before we opened the door to the hangar and saw the other versions of you and me getting caught, you had mentioned that very thing happening.”

“Did I?”