* * *
NOM NOM NOM
I wake to everything falling apart. Again. It sounds like something is chewing through the walls. Alarms are going off everywhere, but nobody comes to see me. They must be dealing with the chewing.
I twist about and try to get upright. I am still cursed with a little weightlessness, which means orienting myself is difficult. The wall on one side of the cell is starting to collapse, big bitey marks appearing on the steel or whatever it is until finally it bursts open.
A very large shark pulls up alongside the cell shuttle. An earth-looking shark, with void dark eyes and teeth full of walls and guards and barriers. Great. I’m going to somehow die by shark in the middle of space.
Its mouth hinges open, revealing Zed, lying in a prone position with his big hands wrapped around internal controls. It’s another machine.
“Get in,” Zed says. “I just stole this. I don’t actually know how to fuel it. I suspect it might take its energy from the sun, or maybe from consuming its prey.”
“How did you get back here so quickly?”
“In the belly of this inter-dimensional shark. I know it’s weird. The universe is weird. You don’t get anywhere in this reality if you’re not prepared to push the boundaries of it. Get in.”
“What is happening?” I ask, hesitating. This feels like it could be an out of the frying pan into the fire sort of situation.
“What’s happening is we are a little bit massively fucked.”
“That doesn’t sound good. At all.”
“It’s not. Come on.”
I don’t hesitate. I hook my leg out over the remnants of the wall and I let him drag me out through it. There’s still enough ship atmosphere to stop me from being immediately frozen in the depths of space, which is nice, and together we swim away into the abyss of space. I’m pretty sure at this point that my babel chip is malfunctioning, or maybe what’s going on is so grotesquely weird it can’t even. It was never calibrated to handle events this far outside my realm of normality.
* * *
“Did they hurt you?” Zed asks me the question as we swim through space far too slowly for my liking. Sharks don’t have to be fast. They just have to be aggressive.
“Hurt me? They harvested my orgasms for something.”
His jaw clenches. “I should never have allowed you to fall into their hands. Whichever version of me sold you to them has a lot to answer for.”
“A version of you?”
“We’re looping,” he says. “Remember I mentioned that a while ago? The possibility that things are repeating because of an imbalance in the universal mathematics?”
“Yes. That’s what they were saying! They were talking about having caught us before, like, every time. Like, this is happening over and over.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
He’s listening. Thank god he listens. I was half-afraid that he wouldn’t believe me, and I’d be stuck in a loop with an arrogant alien who thought he knew better.
“Okay. Alright. Change of plan. We don’t spend the next year trying to get rich. We spend the next year trying to survive, and when we get the chance to change the timeline, we take it.”
Sounds like a plan to me.
CHAPTER 6
Several months later
Ava
We are in the middle of a vast alien city. This is a tactic on our part to try to avoid detection by becoming one of many millions. So far it is working. We live in a small apartment in the basement of a building which contains three thousand units. We could not be less rich. We have less money than I’ve ever had, and I used to have no money at all.
The city is located on the lee side of a moon orbiting a sun. There are planets in this system, but they’re not inhabited. The city is a low-income place of residence for aliens of all backgrounds. It’s basically where aliens are sent when they can no longer manage themselves wherever they came from. Not quite criminals, but wildly unsuccessful. Moon losers, that’s what some of them call themselves with a cheerful irony.
I can tell Zed is miserable. He’s not the sort of guy to sit in a little room and let life pass him by. He’s a mover. A shaker. A hero. Right now, my hero is sitting on a second-hand couch where the springs seem to be primed to attack the sitter when they least expect it, watching a reality show on the grainy wall screen.
“Are you hungry?”
I don’t know why I am asking. He’s always hungry. So am I. We barely have any food at all in the house.
“No,” he lies.
“You’re starving,” I argue. “I’m going to see if we have any ration tickets left.”
“Even if we do, there’s nothing at the ration store.”
I look at him and remember how it was when he rescued me from the trolls, and then again when he rescued me from the old cannibals, and then again when we discovered time travel together. We may be safe here, but this is changing him in ways I do not like. He had ambition.