Uri’s car left the building’s garage. The sun’s fingers, still reaching out between the treetops of the sidewalk and the tall towers looming behind, couldn’t go through the tinted windshield.

“Go straight for five blocks and turn left,” Malin said, not fully leaning back in the seat; the wound hurt.

Uri glanced at her.

“Why don’t you tell me what this is all about while we go to the hospital? I have a friend who can see that ugly wound for you.”

“I wanna avoid hospitals, at least for a while,” she replied.

Her presence in the car was as disturbing to Uri as Juzo’s had been that Friday night. Although, unlike his brother, she at least had the decency to give him a precise direction to go.

“Cross the avenue and the pedestrian street,” she said, “then continue about six blocks until you reach—”

“—Dana’s,” he concluded. He knew every corner of that area perfectly and had traced the route in his mind. “One of the oldest shopping malls in Proxima, is that where we’re going?”

“You know it. Good.”

“You bet I know it, it’s close to where I work. But what will we do in a shopping mall?” Uri insisted.

Malin wandered her eyes from here to there, looking at the streets where they passed; remembering the path she had traveled a few minutes ago.

“We won’t go into the mall,” she answered. “We’ll go to the alley next to it.”

“What the hell are we gonna do in an alley?”

Malin didn’t reply. Within a few minutes, they arrived.

The architectural structure of Dana’s was more like an old three-story warehouse than a shopping mall. The only thing that distinguished it as such was the old-fashioned luminous sign with the logo done with green fluorescent lights, welcoming them to the first shopping center in Proxima City. Fortunately, there was room in the parking lot to maneuver and pick a spot.

The light from Dana’s sign painted a shy green stain on the pavement and over parked vehicles; in a few hours, when night fell, that same light would become an emerald beacon for the entire neighborhood.

“Take nothing electronic with you, it could get screwed up,” Malin said before getting out of the car.

“I’m not the one with implants in my wrists,” he commented.

“They are designed to withstand it,” she replied and walked away.

Withstand—what? Who knows! Uri didn’t ask for details; it was too late to have qualms. He left his cell phone in the glove compartment just in case and followed her, intrigued.

And as they headed down the alley, unable to contain his untimely lust, Uri watched her from behind. The movement of her legs, her butt… Malin was as beautiful as she was unsettling. Even the gauze patch that now covered her shoulder and the dried blood on her T-shirt only intensified that strange feminine rudeness she exuded so naturally; the same one he had sensed when he met her in the elevator.

“I can send you a picture if you want,” she said, without even turning to look at him.

Flushed, Uri shook his head to shake off all erotic thoughts related to her. It was then that he recognized a car passing by on the street, and he turned toward the wall so they wouldn’t see him. It was Trevor Homam. Of all the people who could have passed driving by at the time, why Trevor!

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“It’s a friend,” he said. “I don’t want him to see me with you.”

“Oh! Thanks… I think.”

“Don’t get me wrong, but I prefer my boats on different docks. Besides my friend Sarah, Trevor is the only anchor to my normal life that remains intact, and I want him to remain that way. I don’t want him to ask about you and I have to lie to him.”

“Fair enough,” Malin said, and stepped into the shadows of the alley, getting between brick walls.

The passage was about six feet wide and, luckily; it didn’t smell as bad as other alleys in the city did. The garbage container had the lid closed; the spoiled fragrance of waste wasn’t that strong; the smell of pee wasn’t quite as penetrating either. Likewise, Uri walked carefully; he saw little in the gloom and didn’t want to step on something slippery and fall flat on whatever was there.

“I don’t understand what we’re doing here. You’re not gonna tell me there’s a secret passage to Markabia or some nonsense like that, are you?” he laughed, but she didn’t laugh, so he got worried. “Are you?”

Malin took out the small rectangles from her pocket and re-shaped them into bracelets.

“Here,” she said and handed them to him. “These are yours. Put them on.”

“What do you want me to wear them for?”

“Just do it, will you?”

Uri didn’t have time to comment, pulled the sleeves off his shirt, and adjusted the Auriga to his wrists. For some reason, he felt handcuffed. Malin grabbed him by the arm and showed him that, by pushing aside a sheet on the left bracelet, he could display a series of coordinates and tiny holographic maps.

The blue halo of the projection painted their cheeks.

“It was a wrist phone, now it’s a futuristic GPS. Big Deal!” Uri said.

Malin entered a code on the light keyboard.

“You work with technological equipment, right?” she said. “This is gonna make you lose your mind, you’ll see.”

Uri tried to draw away his arm to prevent her from doing so, but she held it back until she finished marking the last light cell in the Auriga, then activated the holographic data on her left Auriga and repeated what she had done with his.

The bracelets beeped, and then…

The sensation was horrible: a chemical revolution that seemed to burst the blood vessels of the body, a physical explosion that detached his muscles from his skeleton, making them go through energy currents and then rejoining them, making sure that each detached ligament remembered the pain from the sparks received.

The shock lasted only a few seconds for Uri to promise never to forget it. And he was so grateful it was over that he considered having appeared in midair, half a meter above the ground, and then collapsing face down on the warm, damp asphalt, as a blessing.

With the blow, Uri bit his lip; he was bleeding a little and his jaw was aching. His head was spinning, his eyes were full of multicolored flashes and his muscles were numb.

As he tried to get up, he staggered and came back to the ground on his knees.

The noise in the surroundings had suddenly stopped. Was it because his ears were plugged? Or had the traffic slowed down considerably in front of Dana’s? He waited a moment for the dizziness to subside and tried again to get to his feet.

Even with cloudy eyes, he noticed the brick wall in the alley had changed. It was no longer brick; it was concrete. He moved his head—his neck creaked—and found that the alley was no longer an alley. On its left side was a fence, and behind it, some kind of refinery.

It was dark. A blue glow licked the ground beneath his feet and glowed over the facility’s pipes; a light that came from somewhere he failed to differentiate. He took a deep breath and caught the smell of pee; some drunk had made that place his chamber pot. The humidity didn’t help either; it was suffocating. He looked up, and the sky had no light. It was night, and the moon glowed from somewhere hidden behind one of the many buildings that surrounded him.

“It can’t be… Can it?”

Malin helped him to stand up and held him until he could balance himself. Unlike him, she didn’t seem much affected by the experience or was hiding it well.

“Easy, it’ll be over soon,” she said. “You get used to it after the second time.”

Uri coughed a little as he choked on his own saliva. When he felt better, he brushed off his shirt. Guided by the noise of a lone vehicle, he walked to a narrow street, a little less shadowy than the alley. A cargo truck passed in front of him. Uri followed it with his eyes, then looked around: warehouses everywhere. They were in a kind of factory neighborhood; maybe near the harbor.

Across the street, a man dressed in a gray jumpsuit and cap lowered the gate from one warehouse.

It had gotten dark in the blink of an eye, almost literally, and there were no signs of Dana’s, or the parking lot, or anything he recognized.

About twenty or thirty blocks from them, there were sophisticated buildings, very different from the dingy sheds around them; and spread over the horizon, rising from between the buildings, stood a bunch of thin towers that looked like kilometer chimneys, so high that the city lights did not touch their tips.

There were no blinking obstruction lights visible on the tops of the buildings or in the antennas. Right. What pilot in his right mind would fly a plane among those things? What he saw were groups of little white lights flying over the city, although they were too small to be airplanes.

Uri had never been there before but knew the place through photos and videos. It was Markabia. Of course it would be night there; they were on the other side of the ocean, in another time slot.

“W-we have teleported!” he muttered.

“Moving through a small pocket universe with this.” Malin touched her bracelets. “We’re in the Markabia shipyards.”

“It can’t be. No.”

Malin hesitated for a second and then turned to the man in a jumpsuit and cap who, having closed the gate, was walking down the opposite sidewalk with a leisurely and very familiar gait. It wasn’t a man; it was a Cyclops.

“Hey!” Malin called him.

The android stopped short and spun on his heel. Uri saw that single red eye fix on them and couldn’t help but jump; the experience with Broga was still fresh in his mind.

“Android,” Malin said. “I need to know what city this is.”

“This city is Markabia, capital of the Imperial Republic,” replied the Cyclops with his synthesized voice. “We are in sector 650 of the shipyards. If you are lost and need help and-or transportation to the metropolitan center, I can inform the nearest military post of your location and request a vehicle so that—”

“No need!” she interrupted him with a courtesy greeting. “Thank you!”

The android turned and resumed its particular gait.

“How is that…?” Uri looked at the bracelets on his wrists, and couldn’t fathom what he was wearing or what they had just done. He took his hands to his head, then lowered them and patted his face as if he wanted to check he wasn’t dreaming. He looked around and thought about the Project Binary, the implants, the antigravity thrusters, and now this. “How is it possible the rest of the world doesn’t know that this is possible?”

“Perhaps because we’re not interested in them doing so,” she replied. “When it comes to discoveries, let’s say you guys from Proxima are a bit more…”

“Bombastic?” Uri suggested.

Malin nodded.

“We’ve always been more advanced than the rest of the world,” she pointed out. “Don’t forget the first Cyclops were manufactured here; even some say that so did public service robots.”

Uri said ‘no’ with his finger.

“Those are ours. Homam Enterprises put them into operation in the year 2095, in Proxima. Anyway, here we’re talking about creating fire out of nothing! Hell—about teleportation!”

Malin asked him to keep his voice down. “Want to lower it a bit?”

“Sorry.”

“Do you remember the Particle Reactor?” she asked.

Uri nodded.

“You guys put it into operation about forty or fifty years ago, right?”

“The same one. Thanks to the Reactor, we discovered sources of an unknown type of radiation that altered time and space. No, it is not Red radiation; it’s another one that they called Lavra, which means passage. These sources are scattered throughout the planet and are radiation jets that escape from a small pocket universe; something like invisible geysers connected to a parallel dimension, get it? Right now, we’re standing in one of those geysers. A Lavra Geyser.” Malin unfolded the holographic map on her bracelets again and pointed to one of the many dots in there. “Auriga is nothing but miniature Particle Reactors that help you enter the Geyser you are in, leading you through that pocket universe to the Geyser where you want to appear.”

“Like phone lines connected to an operator,” he said.

Malin snapped her fingers. “Exactly.”

Uri held up his hands as if asking for a moment to process such a revelation, it was too much, but Malin continued:

“The discovery of Lavra radiation created alternative sources of energy and triggered our science to where we are today,” she said, rubbing her bracelets. “My rulers are not known to be charitable with their discoveries, though, not even with their own people. There are only a hundred Auriga out there, and only the military authorities of the Imperial Council have access to them… And we, who stole them.”

“I’m sorry, but in this case, I’ve to agree with your rulers. Do you know the mess that personal tele-transporters in the hands of thieves could cause? And of terrorists?”

“I know. That’s why they’re priced more than all the resources of a city on the black market.”

They heard a muffled hiss, like that of an airplane’s turbines, but much lower; a sound Uri recognized immediately.

Malin dragged him back into the shadows.

“Don’t let them see you,” she whispered.

And before he could ask, ‘Who?’, above the light towers of the street, five soldiers flew past with thrusters attached to their backs; all dressed in an olive-green uniform like Juzo’s. Then, he also saw another squad flying a few streets ahead. The little white lights he’d seen before, flying over the city between those huge chimneys, came from those thrusters.

“Patrol time before midnight,” Malin said.

Uri wanted to continue observing his surroundings, but she grabbed his arm and inserted other coordinates back into his Auriga.

“We’d better move,” she told him. “Okay, ready for our next stop?”

And before Uri could say ‘No!’, that he wasn’t ready to endure that electrical whirlwind again and that he might never be, the bracelets whistled, and the torment began again. The electricity in his body, the pain in his muscles. And then, nothing.