Jonas doesn’t understand. “Finished with what?”
“Your calculations. Whatever you need to do with your tether. Are you ready to go?”
“Yes.” In truth, he finished only the previous night, while sleep eluded him like a fugitive.
“I called Dr. Kobayashi this morning,” she says. “He’s expecting us.”
Suddenly, the world seems clearer, brighter. The birdsong wafting through the park takes on a cheery timbre. Jonas looks at Eva, this incredible woman. This woman who can think of him even after he’s broken her heart. This woman who chooses him even though he rejected her.
“What did you tell him?” he asks.
“I told him a colleague of mine needs a favor, but the request has to be in person.”
“Probably safer than the truth.”
“Probably.”
Her heartbreak seems all the more gut wrenching for the will she’s summoning to overcome it. “Eva . . . ,” he says, unsure of what words will follow.
“Loving you means helping you,” she says, answering the question held in his thoughts but not formed. “I don’t like it, but that’s how it is. Because if you don’t find her . . . then it was all for nothing.”
Jonas marvels at the enormity of the gift she’s given him, greater than anything he can conceive of. He’s panged by the guilt of knowing that loving him as she does means letting him go to be with another woman in another universe. The idea is so big that he couldn’t embrace it even if his arms were the diameter of the world.
Eva looks away. It seems as though she might cry, but no tears come. Instead, a curious smile forms on her lips. Her voice carries the slightest lilt of hopefulness when she says, “Somewhere . . . there’s another me. And there’s another you. And that you . . .”—her voice pitches upward—“that you chooses to stay.”
She turns toward him, her eyes still lit with the spark that envisions a reality where the two of them are together and that may have been one of the hundreds of universes Jonas might have just created by flipping a coin.
It takes a little over an hour for Jonas to return to the apartment, calibrate his tether with its new battery, and change into his all-natural “traveling clothes.” The living room turned workshop is a muddle of whiteboards, stray dry-erase markers, and tangles of wire. It’s as if science itself exploded in the modest room.
He moves to gather up the mess, but Eva stops him. “You don’t have that kind of time.”
“I don’t even know if I still have time,” he admits.
“Only one way to find out.” She draws a halting breath. “Come on.”
They get into the Honda Civic that Jonas rented solely for the purpose of traveling to the Spire. He drives. He’s never been to the Spire before but doesn’t bother with GPS. All he has to do is drive toward the giant needle piercing the earth. But as they pass over the Enko River, the Civic slows to a crawl. The street is choked off by traffic.
Jonas hits the brake and throws the car into reverse. He yanks the wheel to spin them around just as another tidal wave of traffic surges to meet them.
“It’s too early for rush hour,” Eva points out.
“You’re right,” Jonas says. An instinct about what is happening begins to rise in him, turning his stomach. He jerks the wheel hard and guns the accelerator. The car rides up on the curve, two-wheeling the sidewalk. Pedestrians scatter.
“What are you doing?” Eva almost screams.
“We have to get there.” He’s white-knuckling the wheel, leaning forward, jaw set. Complete determination. Total focus.
“It’ll be okay, Jonas,” she reassures him. “You’ll get there. You’ll be able to reality-slip. But not if you get us into an accident.”
“It’s not that simple.” Cars honk in protest. People volley epithets, which he doesn’t need to speak Japanese to understand, at Jonas. “Dammit!” he screams and punches the steering wheel, his frustration boiling over.
“Just calm down,” Eva implores. Despite the circumstances, her voice is as soothing as a cold breeze.
“You don’t understand—”
“Then explain it to me.”
Jonas swerves the car off the curb and around a corner. He keeps the Spire in his peripheral vision. The tower appears to erupt out of the horizon itself. They manage to get half a mile when the car unexpectedly drops to the ground.
“What happened?” Eva asks in a panic.
What happened was that all four tires just exploded in unison. The odds of this are incalculable. Inertia carries the hobbled Civic forward, its steel undercarriage scraping the pavement, birthing sparks. When it stops, Jonas bursts out of the car. Eva is close behind. She stares at the quartet of ruptured tires, which have been reduced to shards of rubber.
“This is impossible,” she says.
“It’s the universe.” Jonas sets his jaw, speaking with deep conviction. “The universe is trying to stop me.”
He watches as a battle between what Eva knows and what she’s just observed rages inside her. He grabs her by the wrist, and they sprint toward the Spire. It’s closer now but still too far for comfort.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Eva says between heaving breaths. “Why is the universe trying to stop you now?”
“Because I’ve never been this close before,” Jonas theorizes. “Newton’s third law: ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.’ The closer I get to my goal, the more the universe is going to fight me.”
They turn another corner, and Eva stops abruptly. “There. It’ll be faster.” She points to a subway entrance, but Jonas stops her.
“No. We’ll be trapped underground.”
