Somewhere far below us, something groaned, low, immense. The ground quivered, like a subterranean mountain turning over in its sleep, and the surface of the water pinched and jittered in sympathy. And just as this happened Niko reached up, eyes wide, and touched two fingers to my lips. Made a zipping motion across them. I was shocked into silence by it all: the sound, the absurdity of the gesture, his fingers on my lips. The fear on his face.

“Don’t,” he said, quiet. “Please.”

We both took a breath.

“You have to trust me, Orion. Everything will work out for us. Everything. But you have to trust me, now, here, about this if nothing else.”

The rumbling receded. The water smoothed out.

He took another breath, seemed to notice his fingers were still touching my lips, pulled them back. Stared at them.

And as his eyes flicked back to mine I saw something there I’d never seen, no matter how much I’d wanted to. Something hot and desperate, yearning, vulnerable. Something that rippled in the space between us, flickered and grew, a mass, almost a shape.

And I understood.

The finger, lying cold on the carpet inches from my eye, the whorled texture of his fingerprints.

I’ll hunt that bitch down, and kill him. Again.

How easily he’d found the trapdoor, led us straight here to the way back through. How sure he was about what I’d find on the other side.

And the way he’d fought for me. The way he’d been looking at me.

He wasn’t my Niko.

The ground groaned again beneath us, more dangerous this time. A brick fell from somewhere above, made a splash loud enough to make us both flinch. But we didn’t break eye contact.

“Don’t say it,” he breathed.

Synchronicity.

I felt like we were balanced on an impossibly heavy pivot, a mountain peak turned upside down. If we leaned too far in any direction...

Two soap bubbles, pressed together, floating in a vast empty void. Trembling.

Somehow we were closer than we’d been a moment before. The curves of his jaw, his cheek, were aches inside me, blood-memorized, bone-familiar.

The air around us held its breath. Where the water touched my knees, it thrummed.

His lips were too close to mine. It would be so easy. It would last forever, like dying winter sunlight slanting into a room through melting icicles, lighting it up, setting fire to the neurons that had always struggled to keep truths and fictions apart and burning them away forever, every universe fading away like stage lights until the spotlight of that kiss would be the only thing left. The possible I’d always wanted made real, at last.

“I want to,” I breathed.

“Then do it.” The need in his eyes was almost too bright to bear.

I shook my head. “Not that. I want to trust you.”

He blinked. “Then do that.” But I pulled back, biting my lip, and his brow creased with worry. “Can’t you?”

I wanted to laugh. Trust? Could we trust each other? The question unraveled into a million strands, tendrils stretching back through everything that had happened down here, and everything that had happened before that, back to the first time we met and much, much earlier. Trust. What a beautiful, fucked-up, irrational concept.

He kept his gaze locked on mine.

I tried to see him. Really see him. I willed the layers of muck and confusion between us to pull back, to clear away and reveal someone, at last, who I could understand. The Niko who forgave me. The Niko I’d hurt. The Nikos I’d saved, damned, slept with; the ones who needed me, who hated me, who wanted me dead. The one I’d tried so hard to find, looked everywhere for, down here, up there, inside us both and beyond possibility. Each of them were tales disguised as truths; worlds that I yearned to slip into like tailored gloves, sized just right; stories reassuring me that I finally understood what I deserved, good or bad, where I belonged and who I belonged to, and who belonged to me, where I didn’t have to be alone in a dark bedroom any more with no one who loved me to tuck me in, too afraid to fall asleep.

But people don’t wrap up like that into nice little cages, contained. We weren’t each others’ stories. He wasn’t the Niko I wanted. None of them had been, even if this one thought maybe he could be, was as deluded as I’d been. We’d mistaken shadows for substance, all of us down here: chased them and failed, of course, to grab them, become shadows ourselves in failing.

But we weren’t shadows. We were more than that. We deserved more.

Something swayed inside me, as if I’d let go of one handhold and gripped another, shifting my weight even though I wasn’t sure the new grip would hold. But by then I’d already done it, already committed. And it held. It didn’t let me fall.

“I’m going through.” I took a deep breath. “But it’s not because I trust you.” He looked alarmed but I raised a hand. “It’s okay. Let me finish. I don’t deserve your trust, and maybe I don’t know how to give it to anyone else. But if I have to start somewhere I should start with myself. And I think I can do this. I trust I can. Okay? I made Tiger Shark in swim club and I can hold my breath for three minutes and I can make it. I can make it through. I can. But Niko, you can’t come with me.” Tears sprung like pinpricks to my eyes, but I blinked them back, fierce. “You can’t come with me.”

“Bullshit,” he said, stepping forward, even though I could see he knew I was right, see it in how his faced creased with pain. “I belong with you. Your double, on the other side...” An ominous crack sounded from somewhere above us, but he pressed on. “He doesn’t feel the same way about me. I don’t belong with him.”

The ground dropped out from under us, like a plane hitting turbulence. Rumbles quivered in stone far below.

“Niko, stop,” I said, afraid to look away, to even glance at the walls around us, as if they could read the truth in our eyes. “You can’t come through. You know why you can’t.”

“I can live with pain,” he said, reaching out for me; but I must have looked shocked, because his expression changed to placating alarm. “No, it’s okay.

The pain doesn’t matter. It’d be worth it. You’re worth it.”

“I’m not.” I shook my head, angry, never more certain of anything. “You think I could live with myself, putting you through pain like that each day?”

“Everything will be all right,” he pleaded, ignoring me. “It’ll be fine, it’ll all be fine, just let me come through. Let me try. Let me try.”

And I couldn’t bear to see that need in his face, reflected back at last after all this time, and wondered if he’d seen it too, how sad and jagged and pathetic and painful it was, and how the way I’d hidden it for so long had only made it more of all those things, and I couldn’t stand hurting him anymore, and then the words came that we should have said to each other long before, not that any words could fill the gaps inside us but these were the ones I had and they were better than nothing, so I said them: “I’m not the only one who can love you.”

He stopped dead, face draining of color.

The surface of the water twitched, rippled. Waiting.

I took a long, ragged breath and slowly realized what I’d said was true.

He broke our gaze. His eyes fell to the water beneath us like he’d dropped something, watched resigned as it sunk away for good, no longer trying to save it.

“Guess, from your perspective,” he said carefully, “that should have been my line.”

“Yeah, well.” I waved my hand at the architecture around us. “Life’s got a funny way of fucking everything up.”

He laughed, sudden and loud, and even if things weren’t right, even if the edge between us was jagged and always would be, it was good to hear that laugh again.

We breathed. It was settled.

“So,” he said finally. “You’ll swim through. Pass your other.” He swallowed; I nodded. Just my other. Not his. “And then we’ll each be where we should be.” His face hardened into a mask as he said this, grim and colorless. Then he looked at me, the corner of his mouth twisting in pain but also a challenge, flinging some of the pain back: “You’ll be fine without me, I guess. Yeah?”

It did hurt, like he knew it would. Well. At least we were saying truths to each other. Not quite the same as trust, but a good start.

I stripped down to just my jeans, self-conscious, but Niko was spinning a theory about the identical set of clothes I’d find on the other side. If alter-me was swimming through too, he should have had this same thought, and we’d both have dry shirts and shoes waiting, and wasn’t that cool?

I wasn’t really processing this, still overwhelmed. Trust. Pairs of universes, pulling apart. Drowning, death. Dry clothes seemed like insubstantial details. I tied the glow stick to my belt loop, emptied my pockets of everything non-essential.

“Oh hey,” he said as I did this, affecting it as a casual afterthought, “I want you to take something through for me.” He pulled a plastic bag from his pocket, folded-up pages with something written on them inside. “Hold onto it for a while, okay? Just till you get back through.”

“Sure.” I took the bag. “I suppose I shouldn’t read it until—?” A faint judder rippled through the ground; for an instant the water danced in interference patterns.

He looked pained. “Please, please don’t.” Glancing around, he took a deep breath. “Okay. You ready?”

I wasn’t, so I stepped forward and hugged him, fierce as the roiling lump in my throat.

His bare skin, still damp, felt hot against my own. He held me tight, wet curls rubbing against my face. Heat passed between us, but it was the least of what had.

We’d loved each other, at times. Even if the people we’d loved were mostly in our heads.

It was nice, but his curls were tickling my nose, and I pulled back before I meant to, reflecting his surprise at this with embarrassment. For a second it looked like he thought I was going to kiss him, and then I thought maybe he was thinking of kissing me, and we both stood uncertain for a second or two before dropping arms and stepping back.

Awkward. But sort of perfect for the mismatched shape of us, which was, if nothing else, our own.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked, without spite this time.

I didn’t know how to answer, because despite these tidy revelations, the thought of never seeing him again still stabbed at something deep inside me, and maybe always would; and the idea that anyone in this or any world would ever know me as well as he did seemed impossible. But I nodded. Eventually, maybe, it would be true.

“How about you?”

He grinned. “I don’t plan to spend a couple decades sulking down here like that asshole, if that’s what you mean.” He looked up at the arched roof above us, scanning the bricks like there might be constellations in them. “I’ve never known what I wanted, man. Just what everybody else wants me to want. I’m sorry I mixed you up in all that.” He shrugged, lightly. “Guess I should figure that out, yeah? Spend some time with myself. Maybe more solo camping, you know? Wandering in the wilderness. Worked for Jesus.”

“Sure,” I said. “You see that wolf again up there, man... you fucking wreck it.”

We grinned at each other, one last time, or maybe for the first time, depending on how you looked at it: and then I turned away, toward the submerged portal, the way out, the way home. I stared down at it.

The thought of swimming into that hole without knowing the way to the other side stabbed a different part of me, the one concerned with oxygen and continued existence. I pushed the fear down but it kept manufacturing images for me: jeans snagging on hidden nails that held me back while I flailed uselessly; huge dead fish swimming the flooded halls with flaking gray skin, bulging eyes growing larger and larger as they closed on me. I imagined drowning. Breathing water instead of air. Spasms of lungs. Knowing you were about to die, only not soon enough. Not nearly soon enough.

I took a deep breath, then another. I tried to slow my heartbeat. I didn’t look at Niko.

Another breath. Breathe. Deeper and deeper.

I stared at the circular opening, visualized the motions I’d make. I tried to believe I could do this. I tried to push down the sliver of doubt lodged somewhere in my throat.

Gripping the sides of the hatch, I paused. I wasn’t ready. But if I waited any longer, I’d never be.

“Later, skater,” I said, not looking back, then took one last huge breath and dove headfirst into the hatch.