The escape route brought them to the end of the corridor and a pair of metal doors set in the wall. One was closed, the other open to reveal the ominous black of an elevator shaft. Having watched enough movies to know what happened next, Adele considered surrender to the government.

“My name is Adair. Nice to meet you and all that.” Her newfound comrade wrenched something that looked like a scientific calculator from the elevator panel, keying in a sequence. “You know, when I set this up, I never thought I’d have any use for it. Started to question whether I was getting paranoid, actually.”

“So we aren’t going to slip down the elevator wires?”

He stared at her as if she had developed a third eye. “Why would we do something like that? We’d burn the skin off our hands.” He lifted one of his, displaying broad palms and long fingers, which he wiggled as if in greeting. “I need mine, thank you very much.”

How cliché, she thought. He’s a hacker. They always were in these sorts of high-technology worlds. Or glorified bike couriers. Never accountants or administrative assistants or school teachers. At the very least, it explained his attention deficit disorder, if nothing else.

The closed elevator opened with a ding.

“There’s something I should warn you about,” he said, once they were both inside. The doors slid shut, his finger hovering over the control panel. “This isn’t exactly going to move as a regular lift does.”

“What do you—?” He pressed the button, her sentence snapped off by the overwhelming sensation that she had left her stomach behind. The elevator did not descend; it dropped like a stone.

She stumbled onto her knees and stayed there, too wretched to push herself back up. Squeezing her eyes shut did nothing to help, only heightened her awareness of the velocity at which the tiny room plunged. It occurred to her that she might die.

Why did I trust him? Why had she stepped into a broken-down machine with a man she had known for the span of minutes?

The falling slowed. Perhaps it had been slowing the entire time, but in an imperceptible and gradated manner. The sensation of movement continued long after everything jerked to a standstill, the world tilting when she picked herself off of the ground. Her stomach returned to her in a nauseated state, though she wished it hadn’t.

Her companion appeared none the worse for wear. With another grin, he heaved the sliding door open to reveal a lobby. And one of the operatives, gun at the ready.

“Oh, really?” Adair wrinkled his nose, hands lifted in surrender. “All that, just to get caught? She almost died in there, you know.”

“Arms up,” the operative told her with a shake of his gun. Whatever they used for ammunition rattled like a baby’s plaything, metallic and harsh.

She raised her hands above her head. “Are you alone?”

The officer narrowed his eyes, but was given no chance to respond. Lightning licked out from her ring, a great white arc that reduced him to a twitching, smoking heap on the granite tiles.

“Did you kill him?” Adair asked.

“Of course not,” she said, “and I didn’t ‘almost die’ either.” The look he sent her implied he thought otherwise. She fought with the urge to either smack or zap him. “How do we get out? The bottom storey is boarded up.”

“This way.” He almost took hold of her right hand, then thought better of it and grabbed her left. A ping of static electricity crackled between their fingertips, too slight to do much more than startle, and then they were off.

The corridor smelled equally of urine and mould, many of its doors open to reveal stained mattresses and nests of bedding and newspaper. No one presently occupied the first floor as far as she could tell, though they ran too fast for her to catch more than glimpses into the apartments.

At the end of the hall, the heavy metal door yielded when crashed into with what appeared to be all of Adair’s meagre body weight. Pavement stretched beyond, a parking lot with worn numbers to denote which slice belonged to which apartment unit.

They didn’t slow for one moment, pressing onwards through a gap between buildings. They raced along sidewalks, some vacant and some not, worming through crowds when necessary and halting at intersections for the lights to change. They etched out a complex tangle of a route through the city, a winding maze sure to lose anyone on their trail. She couldn’t ascertain whether this was intentional or not — she doubted he was entirely in his right mind — nor did she know to where he led her.

More importantly, she had no idea why she followed.

✖

After so much time spent running, twenty minutes passed before Adele could breathe regularly once again.

They found a coffee shop, a hole in the wall between high-rises, fragrant with burnt grounds and pastry. Both she and Adair ordered water to accompany their mugs of caffeine; she chose coffee so syrupy as to appear gelatinous, and he ordered tea sweetened with several packets of brown sugar.

If she could afford curiosity, she would have asked about the white liquid he poured into his tea. The likelihood of it being milk seemed low. In most of the similar worlds she had tumbled into, cows were extinct.

“Well, that was fun.” He dipped a jam-dolloped cookie into his tea, scarcely swallowing before he spoke again. “We should do that again one day. Excellent workout.”

“Yeah. Sure.” She grimaced into her coffee, both at the suggestion and at the horrible taste. “Sorry for revealing you like that.”

At that, he offered her an impish grin. “They were looking for me anyway. Why else would they have been in that area?”

“I don’t know.” She never did understand the majority of government systems she came across. The feeling was mutual, as far as she could tell. “Searching for people like me?”

He released a sound, something between a snort and a laugh. “Ordinarily, they couldn’t care less about your kind. They must have really thought you were trouble.” He regarded as much of her as he could see, and she instinctively folded her arms over her chest. “Aside from the clothes, I don’t see why they’d think you weren’t from the city.”

“I might have hinted that I wasn’t,” she said. “To a man at a newspaper stall. Who then decided to have a fit.”

“Ah, yes, that would do it.” The mug of tea emptied in one, long gulp. He paused their conversation to order another from the waitress.

“So.” Adele leaned closer, lowering her voice. As much as it stereotyped the world, she expected Big Brother to be listening in. “What is August?”

“A month, you silly girl.” He added whitener to his new mug of tea until it was opaque and beige, then poured in a few packets of sugar. “A lovely month at that. The very height of summer.”

She pressed a hand to her forehead. Her skin felt grimy, coated with dust and dried sweat. What she wouldn’t have given for a shower, better coffee, and a straight answer. “Not that August. The people chasing me.”

“A. U. G. S. T, the All-United Government Special Task Force,” he said, without bothering to whisper or change his tone. “Minus the F, because the acronym doesn’t work with it.”

“Nothing good ever comes from acronyms. I think it’s a law of the universe.” Universes, she corrected mentally. “Does the government have an acronym, too?”

“You really are a lowsider.”

“Answer the question, please.” Before I hit you.

“The All-United Government. Officially, they go by A.U, but we regularly call them A.U.G. instead.”

“Or Aug.” Pronounced like ‘ugh’ and with identical meaning. How quaint.

Another grin. He had perfect teeth, even with his imperfect mouth. In the dirty fluorescent light, she noticed a smattering of freckles along his cheekbones and curved nose. They suited him. Mad and scattered like his attention span.

“Are you going to tell me who you are?” he asked.

Adele. Adair. The similarity — an eerie coincidence — was not lost on her, something she sensed he would have a field day over.

“No,” she said. “I should be going, anyway.”

“Whatever for?” He glanced into her mug, partially full. “You haven’t finished your coffee. Or your water.”

The latter she drained in one swallow. Even if her body neglected to let her know, she had to be dehydrated. “Alright. Water gone. Now, I have things to do and places to go—”

“Pfft!” His speech was uncharacteristic for a hacker, which she blamed on his British dialect. “You and I both know that’s not the case.”

“Why not?”

He gestured at her hand. The silver ring was just an innocuous object when not electrocuting those who got in her way or forming barriers capable of halting gunshots. It was an ornament, nothing more. “No lowsider has technology like that. No one has technology like that.”

She slipped her hand onto her lap, effectively hiding it from his view. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“You aren’t from around here.” Any hint of humour had been erased from his face. Only a dark solemnity remained, the downturn of his lips all the more apparent for his grim expression. “You don’t speak like anyone I’ve ever met. You dress in natural fabrics. Lastly, you know nothing about our world — which leads me to wonder if you’re even from it.”

Every ounce of blood left her face, leaving her faint. She felt out of control, as if in another dropping elevator, free-falling to the center of the earth. How did he have any notion of who or what she was? People had to be told if they were to know; they could guess a million things and never come near the truth.

No one thought in terms of alternate universes and parallel realities, even when surrounded by sorcery or vampires or extraterrestrials from Jupiter. This world was no more special than those.

Or was it?

She blinked and his grave mask fell, like a funereal veil lifting. He beamed across the faux-wood table, cheeky as ever. It occurred to her that his facial expressions were always extremes, as if incapable of the subtle variations between that most people had.

“But that couldn’t be,” he said, “right?”

Whether or not he had been joking, she couldn’t tell. His tone gave little indication that it had been a jest, and even less that it wasn’t.

“What?” He leaned in, squinting at her face. “You’ve gone a funny sort of olive colour. Not feeling well?”

“Tired,” she said, and then realized it was true. She wiped a hand over her face and straightened against the back of the booth. “Lots of running for me today. As I said, I should go, before those August people find me.”

“Changing your excuse? You just said you had things to do.”

“Maybe I do.”

“You probably don’t.”

She sent him a dirty look in reply.

“By now, August has accepted that we’ve run away. This city is too massive for them to locate us, and they don’t care that much to expend the energy it would take for a proper manhunt. Meanwhile, they have my computer system, which is far more intriguing than a couple of teenagers. Believe me.” He pushed his teacup aside, empty already. “Where else do you need to be?”

She didn’t know. She never knew. Her focus slid over to the dirty window, beaded with condensation and grey from smog. A steady stream of people walked by oblivious to the time-traveler in the coffee shop. They wore shiny synthetic fabrics, most of it polyester or latex, a legion of the black-clad. Many wore gas masks, some painted and decorated into fashionable accessories.

“Fine.” She had made acquaintances on her journeys, but seldom was she invited to join anyone on theirs. Why turn him down, crazy hacker or not? “Where to, then?”

The vinyl booth creaked when he moved. He swung his legs around, trousers smudged with silver powder, and got to his feet. “We’re going to go see my friends.”

“There’s not going to be more running, is there?”

He chuckled, depositing a handful of square coins on the tabletop. “No. I promise there will be no more running.”