"Which one is this?" asked Amy.

"Vire Tower. I'd take you higher but the elevator's broken. And there's no one at the tills you can pay."

"It's high enough. I can see over the walls. The art exhibition's nice." There was no wind on the balcony. Winged sphinxes adorned the cornices and melted into the stonework. She suspected that they'd been looking out in stone-carved silence onto this view longer than she could think imaginable. They were smooth from a distance, battle-hardened up close. Otter didn't tell her why, but he did tell her how long they'd been there. She leaned on one of the plaques etched into the balustrades that showed the scenery in annotated stencils. They told her what she was looking at, and when she blinked the runes melded and superimposed themselves into phantom English that swam and re-centred itself whenever she moved her head. She asked Otter to stop, and the annotations over the city flashed out.

"Where's the temple-bank?" she asked.

"I don't know. You yourself don't remember where it was, and so neither can I."

"I came down from the hills, roughly around there, probably," Amy pointed. "More or less."

"I'm sorry. Things have changed so much. I'm trying, really, but there's just too many places it could be. Your memories aren't giving me much except stairs and laptop to go by"

"Shame."

She headed back indoors and into the main lobby of the Vire Tower Art festival. Soft fabric walls stretched flush into the floor above and stopped at the upper catwalk. She imagined the echo with her half-size-too-small boots would speak for itself in here, and that you'd have to stand on that catwalk on way above to really appreciate the mosaic floor of the central rotunda. On the walls were oils in colours that felt wrong by people whose names she couldn't pronounce, and mixed sculptures of Kavaldish myths in evenly-spaced clusters. It was as empty as the rest and she passed it all to head to the gift shop. She took a brochure, stole what looked like and was confirmed to be a pencil, and headed downstairs through one of the lower floors of the tower to emerge half-way up Fertez Mount at a point before the hill became a real struggle to conquer. She'd seen a lot on the tour. There'd been museums and abandoned stalls, government buildings that needed tickets she didn't have and a plethora of recommended closed bars and restaurants within walking distance. And there was a lot more still, the main larger towers higher up, institutes and universities of Vern-Delnitz, and Otter even pointed her towards the best way to get between them all if the public transport had worked. But this was enough, and she turned down the hill towards the Return Key.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"I don't quite know. I'll find a PC, I guess. I only need the keyboard, so I'll just carry one with me. We'll try it again. Either that or I'll find a thesaurus, and work through it here while everyone outside is paused."

"Be careful," said Otter. "And come back soon, okay? I'll be here."

"I'll keep my head down, and with luck maybe we'll make it out," she said. 'The sick one has it', she remembered Raynes saying through a blur of heat. 'Which sick one?' the other had asked. She winced.

"What about weapons?" she asked. "Does this city have a gunsmith, or a Wal-Mart?" Otter was quiet, and stayed quiet as the cobble side-streets fell away for a while.

"I'm sure there are," he replied eventually, "and I'm sure if you looked hard enough then you'd find a weapon to tackle your agents, but even if you did, I wouldn't be able to tell you how to use it."

"Okay," she said.

"You've got to understand that this place has certain laws, many of which I've tried to violate just now, and even when all the people who held them are gone their imprint is still there. I couldn't show you, or point out the weapons even when I'd like to," he said. "I've checked, and I've tried to get around it, but I can't."

"On an off-chance I didn't leave the 'Enter key' here, did I? Or any others?"

"You tried to change the keys last time Amy, and it didn't work. I wouldn't bet on using that copy of 'enter' to travel elsewhere, even if it did exist. It's calibrated to come here. You'd probably need a different version."

"But are there any other keys left? Wait, there must be, I didn't have them in the hospital."

"There aren't any. They're gone," said Otter. "The ones you brought were lost."

The hill flattened out and the tree-lined avenue where the leaves never fell opened out into GeDevez Courtyard where one corner held a statue of an otter and half of it was dominated by a portcullis to the suburbs beyond. For what it was worth it would never be anything but Otter's square to her. He'd planned the route well. It had been a straight run from Vire Tower.

"Is it because I stepped backwards to before they existed? My laptop was there when I woke up, so-"

"No, it's not that. I'd rather not talk about this," said Otter. "I don't think it would help. Get the thesaurus and come back."

"Screw that. If you know something, tell me. Otter, at this point I'm fucked. I need to know everything about these keys. Anything can help, especially why they'd disappear. I mean you can't get me weapons, you can't come with me, so at least do this."

Otter thought for a while. She walked carefully down Fertez mount and there was a good stretch where she only heard her footsteps, and felt once again alone. He spoke eventually, slowly.

"Alright. Fine. I'll tell you."

"Good. I thought you'd disappeared."

"I wouldn't do that."

"So what is it? Why did the keys disappear."

"It's a property of that key you used to get back to your hospital. That's the easiest way to put it. Don't use that one, ever, please. Never again. Promise me that and you'll be fine."

"The rewind key? It's for controlling video, so it's useful. Otter it could solve our problem if we could go far enough back into the past with it"

"You'll need to promise. Never use it."

"I don't know if I can, but I'll try."

"Never. I mean it. Don't go near it. It's not a good one. And don't touch End either. It just looks wrong," he said, teeth bared with no-one to see.

"Why?" she asked. It was something he'd said before, wasn't it? Put your hand through it and pull it out. There was a good reason to do that. Amy wai-

"Oh dear holy lords, do you want to know that? Look, I'm only a tour-guide, not a specialist in matter-transfer, and what you're asking me has to do with a lot of ethics, and what it means for the soul to exist, and I don't know if my English can handle that. Please, don't make me answer. I'm obliged to answer you, any questions you have, and help you to have a good time here in the city. Please, don't make me do this."

"Tell me, I need to know."

Otter spoke slowly, and she thought in parts that the rumbling Kavaldish intonation took over, or just sent her pictures and diagrams. One or two of the words weren't English but she understood what he meant.

"There's lots of portals, many types," he said. "The safe way is wormholes, which is how the two of you got here both times, you and the other version of you. The other kind of portals are deconstruct-reconstruct, which only transfer the bare minimum of information, and recent recorded memories, then then copy it into another position along the timeline, or on another world with the relevant neural pathways and memories. That's what the rewind key uses. And no-one really knows if the two are the same. Some people think you are your memories. Others say that the soul is transferred. Some don't believe either."

She said it out loud, across the empty square "so what does that mean? What does that mean for me? What do you mean by deconstruct, Otter? I've met you before, I've been here before. I shattered my laptop on the hills of the temple-bank and prayed it would help me survive. I made a plan and I went home, I helped my friends escape. It was me, me who did it. I did. I escaped Raynes and Schofield that first time, it's my blood smeared for miles."

And Otter said that maybe she was right, or maybe she was wrong, but what was certain was those memories of a past world where a girl was stabbed by a broken key were real, and that memories of that were all that were transferred and layered across to a different person by those kinds of keys in another world where those events hadn't happened yet. And he told her that he'd watched a girl turn to ash before him as she stepped through a door back in time, and alongside it all she carried was turned to ash too.

Amy pulled her shoes out from the door, and put them on. She stepped over the threshold, and didn't look back despite his pleas. The door slammed shut and the dead fuchsia city of Vern-Delnitz disappeared with it. The sirens returned. Broad hands gripped her by the shoulders.

"What in Christ's name are you doing? Don't you goddamn run away from me again, Miss Packard," roared Schofield over the sound of the streaming sirens. If they would just listen, just follow the plan, thought Schofield. Why did she have to make it so difficult? Couldn't she see that he and Raynes had saved her life, all their lives in the park when without their help they'd be blown into thick chunks across the café patio? You lost your laptop, that's tough, but here we are moments away from freedom and I've put my life on the line for this and– "I swear to all that is holy–", he shook her. "You have no idea how hard it was and what it cost us to find you. Don't run. We need you to help us, Amy. Raynes and I are not screwing around, we're not your enemies. We're not here to hurt y-hmph." Schofield took a brunt blow to the side.

"Get the fuck off me," she kicked him down "you murderous prick," screamed Amy. "Stay away from me."

She ran down the corridor towards the junction and tried her best not to slip. Back then she'd stepped over the pile of dust that had been crushed on the purple-silent cobbles. Amy Packard for the goddamn win. Master of screwed-up purple worlds, she'd said in the hospital. And hadn't she thought it was weird to just wake up? And wasn't there a moment, a few seconds when she hadn't remembered, when instead she'd just been staring and counting the tiles in that room? Then there was that headache. Ripped apart by the atom. Deconstruct. Reduced to a scan. Reconstruct. Maybe all she was could be summarized as a scan, but part of her hoped that the other girl was dead, and that her life had amounted to being more than scanned from one place to another as nothing more than a pattern of memories.

"Amy, what the hell? D'you hit Schofield-", it was Scott, eyes squinting from the hair that ran in soaked plaits into his eyes. How about you, Mr. Rowenstein? Maybe if you had your front teeth.

"Run. We need to get away. Please." she grabbed his arm and almost dragged them both. "We've got to go. The minute they get what they want, they'll kill you too. Please." They'd look like tears, but to Scott fundamentally Amy Packard did not cry.

"What? Amy? Are you future-Amy again or-"

"No, Scott. Come on, let's go." She turned the corner to where she'd left Matt and April, but Raynes was on the other side of the corridor wasn't he? And Raynes had more than mints.

"Matt, get April. We've got to go. Come on. Run. The plan failed. We haven't got the keys. Go," Amy hauled April in vain by the arm, said a quick apology and smacked her hard across the face. "Wake up, April. Just wake up. Please. If you don't then they'll get you too." Scott dragged her back and she roared.

"Amy calm down, you're gonna mess her up. Stop. Stop!" He shoved her off and left April there sprawled in the corridor. He held Amy in a vice grip.

"Tell us, just for once Aims, what's going on? Why do we need to go?" asked Matt. "Who's going to kill us? Raynes?"

Schofield emerged from around the corner, gasping. The fight went out of her. "He's going to kill us, Matt. He has. He's killed me already. I've seen my own body," she sobbed "turned to ash." Maybe it didn't matter so much what happened now. Amy Packard had been killed in the square as far as she was concerned and this, this was limbo. Otter had said that maybe she hadn't died and that it depended on what you believed, what you think the soul was. Her gut feeling was that Otter had his own well-researched views on the matter. The siren cut out, and the sprinklers stopped. In the distance Raynes argued with a fire-marshall about evacuation.

"You did what you had to," said Schofield. "And you were the one who ran to the door in the hospital and used whatever key you did, alone. I never hurt you, Amy. Never." Matt and Scott let go of her. "Look," said Schofield. He pushed the plunger on his revolver, and threw it down. "Here." The gun smacked against the floor and sprung itself open empty. "Keep it. I've kept it like that most of my life. That gun's been in combat twice in twenty-five years of work." He kneeled down to her level. "And you want to know a secret?"

"Fuck you."

"It was empty when we met you in Hyde Park. I almost died loading it to cover Raynes."

"You hurt us the minute you stepped foot in Hyde Park. Don't talk to me about that. Without you my plan would've worked. We were safe in there."

"How could I know that? How could we? Now I know why you did what you did to Hyde Park. Now I know. Before I didn't." Schofield wiped his brow, and struggled with his bad knee. "Raynes and I didn't know - how could we, Amy? We never meant to hurt innocent people. For Christ's sake Raynes volunteered. If he wanted to he could've gone home with half the keys and sold them off to the fucking American government. We both could have. But we didn't because this shit can't get out, and it can't be used, do you understand me? And when we're done with it there'll be no evidence except hearsay. So then why on God's good Earth would we be your enemies?"

"Because you'll kill him. You'll shoot Matt the minute he walks through that door, and then April too, and me," she said. "Otherwise it'll just start all over again. A narcoleptic who knows everything. And a guy wh-"

"It will buy us time," roared Schofield. "We need time. Nothing more. We are with you. We are on your goddamn side."

"What?" asked Matt. "I thought that would be it, I'd wake up two days ago."

"Maybe, but I doubt it." she said "If you use enter you'd just step back to where the world was normal, but it would still be you from now, Matt, and you'd still have all these messed up thoughts that manifest into reality. The reverse key doesn't go far back enough to help us." She turned to Schofield. "Hell, you told me you used 'escape' and that didn't help you either. The only way is the enter key because the only other way, the real time-travel way was what killed me. That's what would kill you all too if you used the reverse key."

"What did you see through the 'enter' key, Amy?" asked Schofield.

"That? That wasn't an 'enter' key. The plan failed, didn't you hear? All that happened was I met with a friend and found out I'd been killed."

"What do you mean? How? Amy, it's either stepping through that door to wherever we can go, or staying here and being ripped to shreds by gunfire when Hortez gets here. It didn't work?"

"There's no 'enter' key. There's only a 'return' key, and they take the same place on the keyboard. The return key takes you back to a world where you've been before. Go check. Here, take it." She threw the 'return' key on the tiles before him. "Find out how you murdered me. Drink from the fountain."

"Fine," said Schofield. "I will." He picked up the key. "But before that I want to remind you you're not alone in watching your own death." He got up. "What do you think my superiors would do if they found out there were two of the same student, or one of me dead? That's not a hypothetical. What would that do to my freedom, eh? Have you forgotten? Just think about that. Raynes' boss thinks we've tried to fake our deaths in a car fire. If we use an enter key there's a good chance our past selves die instantly. Doing this was never a permanent solution, and we'd never get away with killing you, Amy, or hiding the dead bodies of our doubles. The only way to win is to get rid of this power permanently or, Christ knows, making half the world forget."

***

April just about felt something strike her. The pain was muted, and –oh it's was a long, long way to Tipperary- that was an old song, April hated it, but it was accurate. The field of April's vision from May could make out someone saying something urgent. She got confused when the vision seen with binoculars shifted to the tiles, and then back, and finally settled somewhere out of focus. It was a long, long way away. The waves were deeper, and there were tides. High tide was now when Matt had concentrated on keys. The whole thing reminded her of sandbanks off Grimsby with green mush signposts warning of the depth. The signs off the coast would be submerged before long, waving algae to and fro. Sure enough the waves were still deep, fading but still high enough to submerge her. It was safest near the monoliths. There it was solid, even if the monoliths themselves seeped liquid white glass. You had to get close enough to them without losing your balance, but she'd lost it a while back and had brushed against one of them, and found the monolith gave way as if made of rubber when she stuck her whole arm through. Vaguely May was still there itching in the back of her mind, but it was fainter than ever. You couldn't ever have both completely. She could see that now. It was a balance out here. Either you're Miss Suzuyama, as the fat guy Schofield called her, or you're April. The longer you're both, the harder the scales tip in each direction.

She'd thought the monoliths were flat, but the liquid material was springy, gave way and moulded itself sharply into bleached-white shapes that solidified without a sound. The monolith stayed razor thin, blank and flat from one side, and became a doorway to a white room on the other. She thought the pure-white furniture might crackle as it set. It seemed like it should. The white metal had rippled, and extended out to drip far into the horizon. She knew in broken dream-like logic what it would be, in each direction tessellating the same. It was a library, and the archways extended each way to give rise to the next identical room. That's how she imagined in her gut that information ought to be arranged, and that's how it was, forever moving outwards, repeating. The reception was domed in simple curves that dripped over the storeys, and the metal beads fell soundlessly to meld with the floor. There was a glass-thin roof up there where the metallic pearl stretched into crystal sheets that allowed the blackness of the outside to filter through and darken the bookshelves below to a bearable level. And when she walked through the 2D razor-thin door she halted at the foyer before the front desk. Her gut feeling was that there should be an index of all this information to hand. The room was perfectly clean. There was no dust here, nor ever could be. And the desk was blank.

In all three directions before her lay identical rooms with identical archways which she felt she knew. She looked down one and saw it stretch into mirrored blankness beyond. All that was missing was her reflection from the infinite gallery of mirror-like rooms. Behind her was the fourth direction, the exit, a black rectangle cut out of the monolith door, simple and elegant. The waves rolled against it and brushed their way into smooth tendrils against the threshold. She watched them darkening the entryway for a time, maybe hours or days. She tried to count how many crashed up against the library's entrance but lost her place. At one point she turned towards the front desk, and wondered why she'd been shaking. She had been shaking before and had been worried about something to do with losing May, but now her hand didn't hover over the counter. April pushed aside the fear and dipped her arms through the surface up to the elbow, and when she pulled her arms out the pearl-white swirled into ever smaller swirls as the white glass dripped off in beads down her fingertips. Fractals, the word came into her mind unannounced. The glass made hapes within shapes, it was a type of geometric pattern that repeated itself more the closer you looked. She knew that from somewhere long ago. It was fifteen across, eight letters. The metal dripped, and resolved itself into gloves that were pure white, elastic and comfortable. Handle the books with care, she knew. Don't rip the pages. Each book was hers, she felt, and she took a walk through the library's bleached art-deco hallways. She found the right rooms with ease and the right books slid into place when she needed them. She handled one or two, and read at her pace. She didn't need to really open them to understand what she was looking for, but did for fun, partly out of ritual. There were things of her own, personal parts of last month she'd forgotten, and she ran through the conversations from the perspective of the other people. There was colour in those books, but the edges of the pages were still bleach-white, and the tomes fitted back seamlessly and airtight when she was done. The knowledge was emotionless, and objectively true. You couldn't argue with it. It was how it was, and that was all. There were older tomes, links to other monoliths of other years across chasms, occasional cut-out doorways back into other places in the ocean. Her eyes struggled to adjust to that darkness when she looked out. There were the waves, but everything else out there was just black.

She didn't notice it at first, but over months and what felt like years the disruption to the library got worse. As she moved from book to book the shelves became distorted and overlapped one another. They superimposed, and when she picked up one tome, she found the place filled almost fully by another out of phase, slightly greyed out. Some books were heavier, twice as heavy, and when she turned the page she found a ghost of herself turn it again out of time in echo. Then the screech began, a chalkboard cracking blow of turning hinges that felled her to the ground. That sound of a door opening marked the end of logic, the end of reason for her library. She dropped the book, and she barely registered it splayed open multi-coloured on the pearl cream floor. April fell in pain and felt the library strain as a second one tried to cram itself in the same position. There were two identical indexes here now, linked. They meshed and roared and broke through one another in chaos. The rows of information phased, solidified, and cracked again in liquid metal. One library was dead. It was gone. There'd never be more Aprils in that world. There'd never be more. This was it. Where in her library she saw the potential for more rooms the other one stopped. She crawled for what seemed like hours and found the point in the library that marked the last April in that world. That world was the same as hers. It wasn't the weird purple place that had opened itself for a second. She screamed out in pain because in that other library that was so similar to hers there was nothing more and the world had ended. She felt faint. It was okay, I've read the important parts, she thought. Even if the library fails, all I have to do is remember the most important parts. She'd had months of dream-like thoughts that had coalesced into a plan. There'd been dozens of thesauruses printed in April. There'd been time for her to find a way forward. She winced.

"No more. Stop it. Enough," she shouted. "Go away. Leave my library be. Your world is dead. There's no more, it's a ghost ship. And there- agh."

There was just black.

"I've really overdone it," said a familiar voice. "Oh fuck. She's bleeding.

"Let me help. Here-"

"You get away from her, Raynes."

One of the libraries shuddered into a dying screech. She heard it echo. Echo there and die. Christ she couldn't move. There were shapes in colour in May. The images were lengthways, and standing wrong. No. She was looking at them wrong. April hit a blank. It made no sense. How was she back in May? She felt cold without her gloves and she shivered again. The two voices resolved themselves into people. The angry one squared off with Raynes.

"-You and your psycho. That's what Ichor said and-" said Amy.

"Raynes, come here! I can't close it. Come on, help me. For God's sake help me and close it! Leave Packard! Just come here."

That girl, Amy Packard. She'd lived her life in one world, a different one to this one. Two, even. She'd moved from one that had died to one that survived.

"April, stay here. Just wait. Are you awake? I'm sorry. Hold on-" the words melded themselves together, too fast for to process. This was May. May again. She grasped onto the last of the monolith. Two worlds, two wonderlands. One gone. One alive.