The matte-black, heavily modified kinetic interceptor pulled into the damp, trash-strewn alleyway with barely a whisper of its repulsor engines.
The passenger side door popped open, revealing the aggressively neon-lit dashboard and Dulcinea Lace sitting in the driver's seat. She had traded her tactical goggles for a pair of sleek aviators, despite it being completely dark outside.
"Get in, Doc," Dulci ordered, her eyes sweeping the perimeter for corporate snipers. "Before the X realizes they left a piece of their property on the sidewalk."
I didn't offer a witty retort. I physically did not have the caloric energy left to form a complete sentence. I dragged my exhausted, battered body into the passenger seat, my scuffed leather oxfords scraping against the floorboards. The interceptor's doors sealed shut, and Dulci immediately punched the accelerator, throwing me back into the headrest as we merged violently into Sector Four's midnight traffic.
"You look like you fought a lawnmower and lost," Dulci noted dryly, glancing at my shredded, acid-burned silk sleeve and the dried blood crusting on my forearm. "I thought you said you had an interview."
"I did," I rasped, staring blankly out the reinforced window at the blurring neon lights. "I was offered a highly competitive salary and dental. I declined."
"You turned down Dulcamara X," Dulci laughed, a sharp, cynical sound. "You're a dead man, Doc. You know they own the air you breathe now, right?"
I didn't answer. I just closed my eyes, letting the vibrations of the interceptor soothe my aching spine. I wanted nothing more than absolute, thermodynamic silence.
Instead, I got the Alter.
*It defies the linear progression of temporal physics!* my Alter shouted, pacing frantically in the pristine, mahogany office of my subconscious. He wasn't just panicked; he was profoundly, intellectually offended. *The math is completely, utterly broken, Helian!*
"Freud, please," I begged silently, rubbing my throbbing temples. "I am going to have an aneurysm."
*Look at the variables!* my Alter demanded, summoning an imaginary chalkboard and frantically scrawling invisible equations onto it. *In your timeline, you are thirty-two years old. Your sister is thirty-five. Her son, Mulberry, was seven when you left. If this parallel dimension aligns with your relative biology—which it must, considering Sarah and Dulcinea are physically identical to their Earth counterparts—then Mulberry should be a child!*
The Alter threw his hands up in absolute exasperation.
*How is he twenty-two?!* the Alter shrieked. *Did he age rapidly? Did the parallel dimension deposit us fifteen years behind the parallel timeline? Or did his mother simply give birth to him a decade and a half earlier in this universe?! The chronological dissonance is a nightmare!*
"I don't know," I muttered aloud in the passenger seat, too tired to care if Dulci heard me. "Maybe the corporate Warlords have a fast-pass for puberty."
Dulci gave me a sideways glance but wisely kept her foot on the gas.
*And the cognitive bypass!* my Alter spiraled, completely ignoring my sarcasm. He collapsed into his imaginary leather armchair, dragging a hand down his face in sheer, aristocratic humiliation. *He read my jingle, Helian. A Class-B telepath bypassed a Class-D geometric authority because our apathy was too... depressed! We are broadcasting our deepest tactical secrets on an unencrypted frequency! We need a metaphysical Faraday cage! We need cognitive encryption! If he knows we are a dimensional anomaly, he owns us!*
"He already owns us," I thought back, the bleak, crushing reality settling heavily over my chest. "He has the memory of the raincoat. If we run, he lobotomizes my sister's variant. He put me on a freelance retainer, Freud. We are the corporate IT department for a Warlord."
My Alter went quiet. The sheer indignity of the situation finally overpowered his mathematical outrage.
*I will not wear a polo shirt with a corporate logo,* the Alter whispered darkly.
"I'll make sure it's in the contract, besides we already wear them. Like who thought of sports logos." I replied.
The interceptor banked sharply, taking a service road that bypassed the heavily policed commercial sector. Ten minutes later, Dulci killed the repulsor engines and drifted smoothly to a halt in the back alley behind *The Open Mind Café*.
"We're here, Doc," Dulci said, tapping the steering wheel. She turned to look at me, her mercenary professionalism shining through the gloom. "I don't know what game you're playing. Biting the Armsterwhite Syndicate in the morning and getting headhunted by the X at night. But my retainer fee starts at 8:00 AM tomorrow. Three thousand credits a week, plus hazard pay. If you miss a payment, I stop catching the bullets."
"Email me the invoice," I deadpanned, blindly reaching for the door handle. "And Ms. Lace?"
"Yeah?"
"If a twenty-two-year-old in a midnight-blue suit ever approaches you..." I paused, my hand on the door. "Run in the opposite direction at maximum velocity."
Dulci's brow furrowed, but she nodded slowly. "Noted. Don't die in your sleep, Doc."
I pushed the heavy door open and practically fell out of the interceptor. I didn't wait to watch her leave. I stumbled toward the heavy steel rear entrance of the café, swiping the security keycard my Alter had forged.
The door clicked open. I stepped into the amber-lit gloom of the first floor.
The café was silent. The heavy City grade plywood Mari had nailed over the shattered bay windows blocked out the streetlights, making the room feel like a dusty, wooden tomb.
I kept my head down, dragging my feet toward the wooden stairwell in the back corner.
"Helian?"
The voice came from behind the ruined espresso counter.
I stopped. I didn't turn around.
Mari stepped out from the shadows, holding a clipboard and a battery-powered lantern. She looked completely exhausted, her clothes covered in sawdust and pulverized coffee beans. But when she saw me standing in the doorway, bathed in the dim light—missing half a sleeve, bleeding, and smelling like ozone and bug acid—her eyes widened in genuine, unadulterated shock.
"Oh my god," Mari gasped, dropping the clipboard onto the counter with a clatter. She rushed out from behind the register. "Helian! What happened to you?! You're bleeding! And the money you left... five thousand credits?! The contractors said it was corporate capital! What are you actually involved in?!"
She was projecting a wave of frantic, deeply empathetic concern. It was the kind of genuine human warmth that, just two days ago, I would have killed for.
Tonight, it just felt like another noise.
I manually clamped the lead-lined vault of my apathy shut. I didn't drop my emotional temperature to hide from a monster; I dropped it because I physically, fundamentally did not have the bandwidth to care about a coffee shop.
I turned my head slightly, looking at her out of the corner of my eye.
"Not tonight, Mari," I said. My voice was a flat, hollow, robotic drone.
"But you're hurt!" she pleaded, taking another step forward, her cerulean-blue Ego flickering faintly in the dim light, reacting to her rising anxiety. "Let me get the medical kit. You can't just drop a fortune on my counter, disappear for twelve hours, and come back looking like you fought a war! We need to talk about this!"
"No, we don't," I replied, completely deadpan.
I didn't wait for her to argue. I turned my back on her, grabbed the wooden banister, and began the agonizing climb up the stairs to the second floor.
"Helian!" Mari called out, her voice echoing in the empty café. "You can't just ignore me!"
I completely ignored her.
I reached the second-floor landing and stepped through the melted brass frame where my front door used to be. The apartment was completely dark, but the glorious, deafening roar of the heavy plastic window AC unit I had installed earlier hit me like a physical wave of salvation. The room was perfectly, artificially chilled to sixty degrees.
I didn't turn on the lights. I didn't check my phone. I didn't go to the bathroom to wash the dried bug acid and blood off my skin.
I walked straight past the vaporized coffee table, collapsed face-first onto the unmade bed in the corner, and didn't even bother to take off my scuffed leather oxfords.
"System shutdown," I mumbled into the mattress.
My Alter didn't argue. He didn't pace. He simply curled up in the imaginary leather armchair of our shared mind and pulled the plug.
I was asleep before my heart took its next beat.