“Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy…” Bec was despondent. She had been through a lot today. Killed a man, fired a gun for the first time, might have doomed a woman to an excruciating death, got trapped in a parallel dimension, and that was all in the last two chapters of her life… so to speak. The fact that this parallel dimension wasn’t easy to escape was just “chocolate” icing on the “chocolate” layer cake of her life since ending up on Dust. Was she being naïve when she signed up for the adventure of exploring the cities of Earth? Yes. She knew that now. Did her naïveté mean she deserved to end up in this fucked up sci-fi romp? No. She was sure it didn’t.

“Yup, I cahn remove the hyperbolic crystal easily, but what happens next will be anything but easy. Ahm inclined to believe that removal of the crystal will lead to this whole base imploding then exploding.” Mr. Purple tapped the offending part of the FAB. The gang was gathered on the third floor of the FAB, on wide platforms abutting the towering device.

“That’s bad. Scarlet, can you substitute out the crystal at a distance.”

She shook her head. “I get terrible headaches when I try to swap things that manipulate space. I also need to see it or be intimately familiar with the object to swap it. All these crystals look the same to me, so I doubt I can pull the right one.”

“They look the same to me, too. It’s only where it’s placed in the FAB that lets meh know that this one is the one.” Purple sat on the ground, leaned with his hands on his bat and let out a big sigh. “Black would have been able to technobabble us out of here in a jiffy. Ahm a rank amateur compared to him. He’d say something like, ‘Frankly, having a crystal imbued with the specific Word we need means we’ve already escaped!’” Purple snorted.

“How long does it take for the space to collapse. Maybe we can grab it and run?”

“Naw. No comically long self-destruct timer. Space expander failures happen in mere moments and are typically massive.” Mr. Purple pressed his face into his bat.

Bec was determined to solve this crisis, but it wouldn’t happen if morale was low. This was, in more ways than one, a predicament of our own doing. “Let’s hope the cafeteria is stocked. We’ll talk out options!”

~~~

Thankfully, the cafeteria was indeed running. It was nice to have some warm food to eat as they came up with a game plan.

“I know you can’t sub space-manipulating stuff, but this ‘identical items’ problem is something we could deal with in the future, eh? Could I draw an X on something with marker, show you a bunch of pictures of it, and have you bring it to me?”

“The mark thing would work but I’ve not managed to move stuff I’ve only seen in photos… or I probably would have kidnapped a few cute celebrity hunters when I was younger.” Ms. Scarlet blushed brightly at the self-deprecation. Bec laughed.

“Yeah, I could see that. Ok, so are the crystals durable? Can one survive a space collapse?”

“They’re pretty durable. They’re usually what salvage teams look for in a disaster like a space collapse, but they’re not guaranteed to survive. Not to mention this is a huge space. I don’t know if we should risk it.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask, how has kinetic shield technology advanced since Dust started? Please tell me there’s a bubble we can put around the crystal?”

“Hmm, that might work. People are starting to try to get personal shielding working but there are some hitches. Cars have been rolling around with them for a hwile… We could… hmm. It’s ridiculous and stupid but hat if… hermm… that’s still risky…” Mr. Purple hummed and tilted his head.

“What is it?” Ms. Scarlet asked, picking at her sandwich.

“Hwat if we found the beefiest tank of a car, slapped on some shielding, programmed a robot to pull the crystal out of its socket and pull it into the car? The implosion would definitely crush the car but maybe it would shield its contents enough to increase the odds of the crystal surviving.”

“And how would we recover the crystal afterward?”

“We dig… We dig and dig and dig… It would take a while, but we’d get to it eventually.”

“Hmm, I guess we could do that. I could displace anything big… How long, realistically, could it take to dig this complex out?” Ms. Scarlet didn’t seem happy about this plan.

“Months.” That soured her mood worse.

“Could we hope to find a rescue? Robert… Black… He was supposed to come back eventually. Could he possibly stage a rescue?”

Ms. Scarlet nodded. “Yes, but do we want to count on that? They certainly think we’re dead in the warehouse. I’d think that. People don’t usually take prisoners, since their Words are always major liabilities.” Scarlet said that staring at Bec. “Realistically, they’ll go in, kill everyone like we were supposed to do. Salvage everything, including the generator that we’d need to escape. I doubt Tamara had an agenda lying around saying, ‘trapped the Mountain’s Border operatives in a parallel dimension’ so they could figure out where we are.”

Bec leaned back in her chair, thinking about things… nothing concrete, nothing brilliant, nothing was going to save them without some real plan, and one was eluding her.

“Uh Bec, bad news,” Al said.

“Great… what?” At this point, Scarlet and Purple were used to Bec talking to thin air. She had a tone to it that, like a person on a headset, indicated she was talking to someone else. Eventually, they stopped getting confused by it.

“I wasn’t sure until you really started digesting the food but… it’s not real.”

“What do you mean it isn’t real?”

“I don’t pretend to know anything about nutritional chemistry, just basic human needs and micro/macro nutrition, but I believe, like a chiral sugar molecule in diet soda, everything in here is comprised of mirrored sugars, proteins, and fats… I don’t know how it seems to be chemically the same but somehow not, but the real rub is this stuff has no food energy whatsoever. It’s completely incompatible with your metabolism. In fact, I’m going to ask to purge your system ASAP, it’s likely toxic. The air seems to be fine. I have no clue why; maybe diatomic molecules don’t change when they’re mirrored?” Bec’s stomach started to grumble angrily.

Fantastic. I don’t know how morale can fall any lower after this…

“Al said the food is… the food isn’t food. It’s also probably poisonous…”

Mr. Purple took in a deep breath. His mouth opened. Then closed. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Ms. Scarlet put her sandwich down. The group just sat in silence. They all went to bed knowing that, as Bec’s Timelet ticked over to another checkpoint, they were sealing their fate.

~~~

Bec woke to find someone trying to kill her. “SCARLET, NO. PLEASE!”

“I HAVE TO KILL YOU, GRAY. WE’RE TRAPPED HERE. NO FOOD. NO HELP.” Bec was pressed against the wall of her room. Scarlet was wielding a sword and was poised to lob Bec’s head off.

Bec voice wavered. “We’ll figure this out, Scarlet. We can do this. Either we figure it out or…”

“We can’t do this. We’re dead. Fairytale rescues aren’t real. We’re dead. There is a way out and it’s with your head.”

Bec felt a little sour at that. Ms. Scarlet took most things in stride, but she’d acclimatized to Bec’s time loop shenanigans faster than anticipated. Flexibility was an admirable quality when it didn’t mean killing her with gusto.

“Come on. Give it some thought.”

“I actually have. I spent all night thinking of reasons not to kill you.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Why couldn’t you stay asleep so I could put you out easily?”

“Should it be easy to put out a friend?”

“You aren’t a friend. You’re a kid. Kids die fast on Dust.”

“I wouldn’t have. You didn’t know it, but I wouldn’t have stayed dead.” Bec was trembling.

“How do you know if you died that you wouldn’t just leave us a Bec corpse in each of those timelines?” Scarlet hissed. She took a step closer. Close enough that Bec would be dead before she knew it.

“I—I don’t know. I thought that as long as I lived at some point, it wouldn’t matter. The smartest, luckiest, strongest me survives. I guess… I guess I can’t promise you that if you killed me, you and Mr. Purple wouldn’t just have to sit here and die all the same. I guess you would have the consolation that another dice of fate would be rolled, and you’d have another chance at life in some other timeline.”

Ms. Scarlet closed her eyes in frustration. Bec saw an opportunity. She pushed off the wall, barreling towards her sword, arms outstretched to get a hold of it. She slammed into concrete. Ms. Scarlet turned her around and Bec was still there, pressed against the wall. Only this time with what felt like broken fingers.

“Oof, hehe, worth a shot, eh?” Bec gave a shrug. Bec was honestly and truly trapped. She was totally at the whims of Ms. Scarlet. The master of all that was Bec sat down on the bed in frustration. Bec scrambled for the door, but the knob turned to flat concrete as she groped for the same portion of wall she’d started near.

“Really?” Ms. Scarlet asked. “You really thought that would work?”

Bec flopped back, sitting against the wall. “No. Not really.”

They sat for a moment. Ms. Scarlet laid back. “Bec, I want in.”

“Into what?”

“I won’t kill you, but if we make it out of here, I want in.”

“I don’t know what you mean, I can’t just make you immortal. I’m not even immortal.”

“That’s just it. I want to give you a kill switch. If I die, you die. I’ll keep your secret because it will be our secret from now on…”

“You’re… threatening me?”

“Is it working?”

Bec sighed. “Yeah, sorta. I was kind of relieved after I outed my secret. It was really stressing me out to hide stuff like ‘I’m a walking, talking time paradox and I’m only alive because of luck.’”

“I don’t see that. You are creative and quick-witted, a lethal combo on Dust. I think you really have what it takes.”

“You didn’t see me almost die, fighting a pinky sized fish… twice.”

“Almost.”

“No, I died, too. Before.”

“Ah… that’s going to take some getting used to.”

“I’m going to key you in, Scarlet. But I see an issue, we need you to get a SensoLink and something to record data. If you and I separate, and you die, I’ll loop. If I can’t find you and get to you before you die, there isn’t anything to stop it from happening over and over again. We need to make a new Timelet, in essence.”

“I see. Yes, that would do it.”

“Maybe it’ll be nice to be in on it with someone else. Is Mr. Purple going to be okay? What about Black?”

“I don’t know if Black would want a SensoLink, even if it meant a possibility of being unkillable. We’ll talk to Purple. I think we have to bring him in or kill him. The secret can’t leak. He’s an honorable boy, but we can’t exactly trust hundreds of years with him.”

“Can you trust hundreds of years with me?”

“I’ll live.”

Bec laughed. A laugh of gut-wrenching stress. She didn’t tell Scarlet how scary this was. What would it mean to have their fates permanently intertwined? What happens when one’s desires conflict with the others? What would they do with near immortality, together? She had to know what this meant, so she just asked, “Do you ever feel like a small, insignificant fleck of sand on a small insignificant speck of dust hurtling through an endless void?”

“I’d like to think that most everyone struggles with that feeling one way or another. Questions like the meaning of life, place in the universe and all that.”

“Do you want to answer them with me?”

Ms. Scarlet looked up at the ceiling. She thought for a bit. “Sure. Why not?”

A few quiet minutes passed before Mr. Purple slid the door open with a grim expression on his face and a bat in his hand. He was surprised to see Ms. Scarlet already there. “You here to stop me from doing what you know we have to do?”

Scarlet and Bec exchanged a laugh, confusing Mr. Purple.

Bec asked him one question. “Do you ever feel like a small, insignificant fleck of sand on a small insignificant speck of dust hurtling through an endless void?”

He lowered his bat. “Why?”

“Answer the question.”

“Ah… don’t always. But Ah do right now, stuck here… helpless…”

Bec offered him a hand. And a chance at immortality. He heard the conditions, thought about it.

“Ah guess it’s a good deal… We still have tuh get out of this damn empty dimension.”

“Let’s sit and wait. The Timelet will point us in the right direction.”

They sat and waited for the Timelet to update. When it did, it gave them answers, and it told a story.