The Exhuman--Aesa, watched with the same disinterest from across the room as I kicked my guns off the small railing. They fell towards the ceiling, dipped, hovered for a second between two gravities, and then sailed to the ground dozens of feet below.

I frowned. The scattergun had been a favorite of mine, and all the weapons were custom-modified for minimum weight and to be anchored to my suit's hardpoints. It was hard to let them go like this.

One bounced and ricocheted through the wall with impossible acceleration. A little reminder of how physics weren't currently. I got a proximity alert and tensed involuntarily as Aesa appeared among us.

"Arc welder, welding hood, circuit 6-a, precision drivers," she stopped and thought, her eyes still dim "eighteen 8B deulith cells."

"Eighteen?" Smith asked as he followed her into another gateway, and they disappeared.

"And what now?" I asked Deej. As if in reply, a portal opened between us. He shrugged and went through, and I peeked my head in before following. If I'd just turned to look at the machine instead, I would have seen the partner portal, at the top of the machine where I'd put the charges.

Aesa was already working, her jeans and boots being the only thing visible outside of the machine. Flashes of light from inside indicated she'd been handed the arc welder already, and if I wasn't completely mistaken, it felt like every time she tweaked something in there, reality rippled just a little bit.

Smith paced anxiously around the perimeter of the hole where Aesa was buried, holding a circuit board and some screwdrivers gingerly. Even from here, I could feel the heat and see the smoke rising from her welding. A few moments later, she emerged and stripped off her huge red jacket, throwing it directly at me. This seemed to make Smith unbelievably happy as she took the circuit and drivers and withdrew again.

"And who the hell does she think she is, barging in here and blowing up my stuff?" she shouted, her voice distant and echoey from being inside a machine, but speaking like she was just casually continuing a conversation. It wasn't an unpleasant voice, maybe a little high-pitched, but it caught me off guard after all her silence.

"This is Aesa," Smith said with a smile. "Her...I guess you'd say Exhuman powers, but we've always just thought it was a gift...they only activate when she's cold. Which is why we keep it so cold in here, usually, you see."

"Stop explaining things to them, dumbass!" She made a frustrated noise. "I don't remember which way this circuit goes in!"

"It should only fit one way, dear."

"It fits any number of ways!"

"It should only fit one way without breaking, dear."

"Oh aren't you a smartass. Want to come in here and fix this?"

"I'm sure you've got it, honey."

It was bizarre seeing the two of them argue like this when she'd been nothing but murderous and completely fixated before. Exhuman powers which only activated conditionally were reasonably common, but ones which overrode the personality of their user were almost unheard-of.

Or, perhaps, what was rare were powers which overrode their user's personality but still left it otherwise intact. I was certain most every other technopath I'd ever heard of had been compulsive and obsessive in their creation, and it was difficult to imagine that each of them had been like that prior to their powers manifesting. Watching Aesa emerge and inexpertly banging against the machine in frustration with the butt of a driver, it was difficult to believe this was the same person who had built the thing originally.

"She ought to hold for a few, but only just," Aesa explained. "Now, mind spending your last few living minutes explaining to me why you thought it was a good idea to subvert a pocket reality while you were inside it?" she turned to me, and instead of icy indifference, there was fiery rage in her yes.

"I thought it an expedient way to kill you," I said with a shrug.

To my surprise, she laughed. "I'm the one person it won't kill, doofus. Who do you think entered this void and built all this shit to begin with? There's so much dangerous bullshit out here that I can only live by using my powers to control my machines and keep myself intact. One void flare or aether wind and poof, you're all just so much more nothing in oblivion. This thing," she kicked the machine underfoot "hell, all of this was built just to make a little habitable space for people like him."

Smith shrugged. "I was wrong. She doesn't tell me anything."

"You never ask."

"You're always working. I don't like to interrupt."

"I tell him to thaw me out every couple days so we can spend some quality time together, but he's always like 'oh no, you looked like you were really focused on your work' and just leaves me to it for weeks at a time."

"But you do look so happy!"

"I've seen pictures! I look dead! I've got the glossy eyes of a dead fish!"

The world shifted uncomfortably under us, thankfully reminding the two lovebirds to stop yelling and start...doing whatever it was that needed doing.

"Hmm, right," she said. "We need to get to the suit."

"And why is that?" I asked. I hadn't intended it to be a threat, but also hadn't intended for it not to be.

"So Al doesn't die. Duh." She looked at me like I was legitimately stupid for asking, but only for a half moment because in the next, a portal opened under her and she fell in with a 'whee!', followed by 'Al'. Deej and I followed. I think he was curious, and I simply didn't want to be abandoned, alone, in an imploding universe.

Back in the final room, lava cooled on the ground, and Aesa was strapping Smith…'Al'edonis into the exosuit we'd seen earlier.

"Pardon my ignorance," I cut in. "But what exactly is this exosuit?"

"It's not an exosuit, dummy," Aesa answered. "Though I guess if that's the best your stupid meathead can wrap itself around, feel free to keep calling it that."

I wanted to ask if there was a reason she was so obnoxiously provocative, but realized there were plenty and decided to endure whatever she had to throw at me.

"This is the Void-Killer version 1. Dimension exploration unit. As I said, I can use my tech to protect myself from dangers of other universes. Al can't. So this gives him that shot."

"But...why? You can go yourself and build chambers such as these?" I asked.

"You really are the densest person I've ever met. Do you think infinite dimensions and exploring them is fun because you can build a house there?"

"I suppose anywhere you can build a house is preferable to anywhere you couldn't."

"Ugh, you're so infuriating. Alright, I'll spell this out clearly. Imagine you're a tourist and you want to visit places. Mount Rushmore, New York, hell Chicago if you want. Now imagine you have a fiancé you want to bring along, because that's what couples do, right? Totally alien concept for someone like you, I'm sure, but pretend."

I bristled at the insinuation but attempted to let it go.

"Now imagine in order for him to see anything, you have to build a freaking house there by hand? See how that'd get annoying? Hence the suit. It's like an RV in this metaphor. Get it now, smart stuff?"

"I...suppose." I felt vaguely bad if she were telling the truth. The fact was, she was creating an ultimate defensive/offensive weapon...to put her beloved in so they could spend their lives together?

"Knew you weren't all just tits and blonde. Had to be a peanut rolling around in that head somewhere."

"Excuse--"

"Okay, you're all checked in, lover," she said to Smith affectionately. "Time to get you out of here."

"Wait, what about them?" he asked.

"These assholes? Like I give a shit."

"Honey."

She sighed and rolled her eyes with tremendous effort. "They came here to kill me, remember Al?"

"Well they're not doing it anymore. I told them everything would be fine once you thawed out, and here we all are. So could you please possibly not vindicate them by letting them die here?"

"I GUESS. If you INSIST."

"I do--"

She snapped her fingers and Al, Void-Killer and all dropped through the floor into a sky-blue semicircle before he could finish his thought.

"All right, assholes. What do you want, then? He's gone, so...if you want to live, I can help you help yourselves. If you want to kill me…" she readied her fingers to snap again with a devilish grin.

"Living will be plenty, I think," Deej volunteered.

"Not asking you, boy scout. Asking bimbo here."

"Bimbo!?"

"Sorry. Struck a nerve? What should I call you then? Sorority slut? Queen bitch of the boobverse? Tittyfuckems?"

"There are plenty of character attributes much more descriptive of my being than my...than this…" I gestured at my chest. "Than these!"

"And yet no argument against being a slut. Good to know."

"You infuriating, Exhuman, heathen, God-blighted--"

I felt a ripple as the room crunched inwards on us slightly, like an empty can in a pressure chamber.

"Ooh, better wrap that insult up. It was gonna be a good one too, I could tell," she said with a wink. "Or, you could keep going if you don't mind going down to an AAAA-cup. 'Cuz you'll be flatten--"

"I understood!" I shouted at her. "Yes, you may live."

"And apologize for destroying my house?"

"You are certainly kidding me."

"Hey man, no skin off my nose Al's gone, I don't have to save you if I don't want to."

"No!" I shouted. "This is moronic! I refuse to subjugate myself like this. I bow to no man, and you are Exhuman, less even than man."

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"Ooh, you're actually getting further from me helping you."

"Karu," Deej asked imploringly, and I looked over to him and his serious eyes. There was another crunching noise and one of the railings halfway up the room fell down with a bang.

I did realize how stupid I was being. Loathe though I was to do so, it wasn't merely my life I was throwing away here. If Deej's kids grew up orphaned on account of my foolishness, I would cast myself out of heaven on their account. As though I had a chance of getting in.

"Very well." I took a knee as quickly as I could force myself to. "Aesa, I humbly apologize for disrupting your lifestyle and violating your sanctum. I beg your forgiveness and assistance, for Deej, and for myself."

"And now bark."

I froze entirely.

"I must have misheard you," I said, eyes still on the ground.

"I said bark."

My brain ceased to function, and the red from my cheeks, I was certain, was sufficient to reheat the cooled lava to boiling. This was too much. She could not be serious. I glanced at Deej, who smiled apologetically and gave me a sorry thumbs-up.

I closed my eyes and said goodbye to whatever fragments of dignity I had left. I did this for him. I did this for Ashton, and the hope we would one day be reunited. And after that, I would hunt this bitch to the end of the universe if I had to.

"Haha, just kidding," Aesa said. "Man, could you imagine? That would have been so embarrassing. For you. Funny for me though. Anyway, we don't have time. This place is coming down in seconds."

"Yes. Let's. Go. Then," I grit out, my eye twitching uncomfortably. I was very much reconsidering why anyone would leave this girl alive, even without her being Exhuman.

"I can't take you all the way out," she said, seeming to look at nothing in particular. "And I see the water chamber's broken, that's your issue. It's a good thing you didn't swim for it...they might look like normal aquatic life, but the stuff in that dimension is really really hungry."

As she continued to muse, the chamber imploded again slightly, and a shower of metal tiles rained down on us from where the walls weren't large enough to support them anymore.

"And...so…" Deej pressed.

"I'm, thinking." She turned towards me. "This is what thinking looks like," she explained.

I blinked at her, hoping that possibly, shaking her would make her a less frustrating being or improve the clarity of her thought. Or possibly break her neck. After making me kneel and...and bark...was this just yet another way of wasting our remaining seconds? Even without my weaponry, I swore if she was just dooming us after all of this--

"Okay, the storeroom looks stable enough. Good luck, you two!"

She clapped her hands and a portal appeared before us.

"Good luck to you and Al as well," Deej said with a courteous nod before stepping through.

"Please do me a favor and never return," I muttered.

"Why would I?" she said with a shrug. "I'll send you a postcard, Bimbo."

I stepped through before I had to endure any more words, and immediately reconsidered the possible meanings of the phrase 'looks stable enough'.

We were on the narrow walkway, our goal within our sight in front of us, but reality in this room was even more tenuous than anywhere else we had been. The path was no longer straight, instead bizarrely twisted left, right, up and down, terminating in a good fifteen-foot overhanging ledge where the dimension had twisted itself completely askew, directly before the exit.

Even as difficult as that obstacle appeared, even the relative ease of the path leading to that point was much more difficult to navigate than it looked. Loose crates--somehow still defying gravity while we were stuck on the narrow path--drifted like asteroids, crossing the path and crashing into each other, the crumpling wooden edges of the world, and the fragile path, and ricocheted off with completely unnatural physics.

Arguably even worse than that gauntlet was the fact that moving did not take us in a linear path either. A single step sometimes stretched out for entire seconds, or flashed past under me, threatening to carry me over the edge into the crushing abyss below. Once or twice, I even wound up lost amongst the shelves above us, not at all certain how the path was suddenly weaving between them, but having nothing to do but press forward as fast as possible.

The world made its distress clear, howling with fracturing wood and screaming metal at intervals when it imploded upon itself ever more. New twists emerged in the path and the ceiling and floor lurched towards us claustrophobically. We ran and ran and ran, the cliff in the path ahead of us looming ever closer and apparently ever taller.

Deej arrived first, launching himself at the ledge above us, the fingers of his exosuit missing the lip by inches. He frowned and I stood behind, doing calculations as best I was able. Before I could formulate a plan, he wheeled on me and picked me up as though I were a javelin.

"Deej, put me down!" I yelled.

"Sure thing, yute!" he shouted back, and threw me up over the ledge, my arms and legs pinwheeling uselessly in the air, but his aim was good and I crashed atop the lip painfully, jarring the bullet fragments in my shoulders. It took me a second to turn back to him, but there was no way I could help him up in his heavy exosuit.

He'd already had this realization, and by the time I turned, he was exiting the back of the suit. There was another crack in reality and splinters rained down upon us even as the path back twisted so badly that the opposite portal was lost somewhere in the bouncing mess of crates beneath us. I wondered for a moment if many of them would wind up in the ocean, and what the sharks would make of it.

Once he was out, he climbed atop the empty suit and I lowered my arms, having not much to hold onto up here but to wrap my knees over the sides of the walkway. I braced my chest against the ledge and held my arms out, and he jumped and grabbed them.

I screamed, the bullets lodged in my shoulders and sides announcing themselves like fire over the adrenaline which had been keeping me going. I buckled, and found myself sliding forward towards the ledge, unable to hold both of us up.

Before I could fall, Deej released me and I hung halfway off the edge, arms feeling broken, gasping for air, fire coursing through my veins.

"Just go!" he shouted over another implosion, this one destroying a set of shelves near the ceiling, and showering the room in a hail of small machine parts.

"I will not," I gasped "leave you!" I forced my arms to move, trying to consider the pain of their every motion a punishment for all the idiocy, all the self-sacrificing, moronic heroism I'd attempted today. All the bigotry and hypocrisy, and putting not just my life in danger, but Deej's as well, and felt the pain become white within me, burn with purifying fire, even as I could sense the jagged metal fragments catching on and sawing at my bones.

I turned around, hooked one leg under the platform to press against the back of the ledge, and dangled the other leg down for Deej to grasp. If my arms were useless, so be it, I had more of my body yet to offer up.

He jumped again and grabbed hold of my ankle. My body screamed in protest and again I slid towards the edge, no matter how hard I braced with my leg. I activated my pack, despite its damaged state and the reasonable risk of an explosion, and it feebly complied, only two arms engaging to provide thrust pushing me away from the ledge.

It still wasn't enough. Deej was simply too much for me to hold onto. He had climbed only as far as my knee before my body failed and I collapsed forward off the ledge, sending him crashing down onto his exosuit with a painful bang, and I smashed into the platform, blacking out from the pain of my shoulder impacting.

A moment later, I came to, on my back with the imploding universe above me. I was in a slightly different position, and supposed that Deej had moved me to prevent me from rolling off the ledge to my death. For his part, he was back in the exosuit again, and looked to be preparing to throw me back up there.

Above me, there were no straight lines anymore. The lines and lines of shelves were twisted in on themselves in spiraling patterns that drew thicker and thinner at random, and the wood panelling of the ceiling was all but gone now, revealing only blackness and stars, stars so close it was as though we were in the midst of a nebula, so many colors did that glimpse of the night sky have.

"Get up, Karu," Deej said, sounding irritated for the first time since I'd brought us on this fool's errand. "You survive today."

I was laughing. I couldn't understand why. Maybe because, if I lived, but he didn't, I wasn't sure I could consider myself surviving?

I'd gone and done it again. I'd let someone close to my heart without meaning to, and now I was going to lose them, like Siad and Chase and Fletcher and the others. But this time, I had nobody, no Exhuman showing up or poor decision making by our leader, nothing but myself to blame. It was my fault I was here, my fault Deej was here, my fault this world was imploding, and my fault that I'd made an enemy of the Exhuman who could have saved us.

I truly was the world's most foolish woman. In this dimension or any other.

"Damn you, Karu, get up and let me save you!" he shouted, stooping to pick me up. "Don't fall off, okay?"

"Deej, no. I should be the one throwing you up there. If I leave you to die, I won't be good for anyone. Please."

"Ja shut up, yute. Ja young and gots a whole life to be learnin' from this and all da othea' mistakes you be makin'. Now git ja ass up there."

"No. I refuse. If you throw me up, I'm not going through."

"You are--!" he looked like he wanted to give me a piece of his mind, but the room crunched uncomfortably again, bringing the floor towards us.

"Put me down and let me in the exosuit, Deej," I pleaded. "It's the only way one of us is getting out of here."

"Or put down de stubborn act and let me save ja!" he shouted.

I looked down at his face, so angry at me through the bubble of his helmet and lifted my visor so I could see him with my own eyes.

"I'm tired, Deej. I'm tired of hurting, and if I leave you...if I give up on my promise to protect those around me, if I fail again...there won't be anything left of me. Let me do this, I beg you."

He just stared at me for several long moments, emotions crossing his face as though in fast-forward. The room crunched again, and again, and sparks flew as metal parts fell from another ruptured shelf above us and shattered against the walkway.

"Fine," he said at last, with disgust, and put me down. "But only because I'm not leaving you behind."

I sighed and boarded the suit. Deej had left it configured to accept the next user and it closed up behind me without complaint. It took me a second to orient myself to his configuration, and the suit was unbearably cramped, pressing my armor into my wounds so painfully I was worried I would black out, but I managed to pick him up, and throw him on the ledge somehow anyway, almost overshooting him into the void.

"Now get out," I said.

"No, now you get out. Disembark and climb on top, and I can pull you up."

My heart leapt into my throat, and the dull pain through me, which I'd resigned myself to faded to the back of my mind. Such an obvious plan, how had I not even considered it? How many minutes had we wasted here arguing who should save whom, when the solution stared us in the face?

I stumbled backwards out of the suit, almost blacking out again as my shoulder armor caught on the frame and jarred me, but I battled it down, forcing myself to stay lucid, turned the pain into purifying fire within me. I would not submit as easily as that. Not now, when we were so close.

It seemed to take ages to clamber up the loose handholds of the suit, and the ceiling above us was now so low, I doubted I could fly in here, even if I had that option.

My arm would not rise above the shoulder. I could run and jump at his offered hand, but I could not reach him, and I could not simply will my way past torn ligaments.

"Deej," I shouted, feeling tears threatening to well within me, the last pain of hope and the reminder of the cruelty of the world very nearly ready to overwhelm my taxed emotional state. "It was a good plan, but please go."

"Go, my ass!" he shouted. "Are you a master hunter or ain't ja? Jump, goddamn it!"

I took as long a run as the short runway of the exosuit would allow and launched myself as full-bodied as I could towards the ledge, giving everything I had left. My pack kicked on, feebling providing me what tiny amount of thrust it could. I was wholly committed here, if I didn't catch Deej, I'd slam into the vertical wall, shoulder-first, black out, and fall to my death.

And then he'd have to leave me, and everything would be okay.

My arms, again, would not rise, and his outstretched hand grazed my hair. I sailed past and slammed into the wall, jarring my arm upwards and sending a shock of pain through all of me. Echoes of the pain multiplied and magnified, and I felt my senses shutting down as blackness enveloped me.

Yet I didn't fall.

I only came back to lucidity minutes later as he and I both lay on our backs on the concrete of the plaza, dripping with sweat and body racked in pain.

I was only dimly aware of the past minute as the dimension finished imploding. When I hit the wall, my momentum, not my strength, made my arms lift upwards just enough for Deej to seize my wrist, and all of his exceptional musculature which had made it impossible for me to lift him made this grip sufficient for him to heave me up.

He was panting for breath and dripping sweat despite the cold when my body finally crested the ledge, and I tried to give him a smile and some thanks, unnecessary though such words are between companions, but I do not think my body or face cooperated. I found myself on his shoulders, and he made the final few feet through the portal as the ground and ceiling crashed into each other behind us.

Even after we made it through, there was a moment of panic when the gateway became a vacuum, drawing us back in with its last breath as the dimension beyond it imploded into nothingness. The perfect sphere of sky-blue fragmented and twisted, and Deej and I were pulled several inches towards its final gasp, before it simply ceased to be.

Truly a last-moment escape, and proof that if there were a paragon of virtue among the hunters, it was certainly not me. Against impossible odds, in a situation he did not even need to partake, he had nearly sacrificed everything for my sake, and for that alone.

The XPCA on watch had advanced at our reappearance and the sudden implosion and were shining lights on us and radioing updates into their comms. So composed, so military, they seemed alien to me in that moment, when all I could consider was that I wanted to strip off my armor, have the shards of metal removed from my shoulder and back, and not take another contract for a few months.

"How you doin' yute?" Deej asked, his face strobing weirdly with the roving lights of the XPCA.

"I'm...alive," I panted back. "And...I'm happy I am."

He closed his eyes and sighed contentedly.

"Thank God, and thank you," I said. He shook his head, humble even now. "And…" I began.

He opened his eyes and looked at me again.

"And I think I want to look up Athan and see how he is faring. It seems to me that life is too short to be wasted on stubbornness and fears."

"I think that's a good idea," he said with a smile and closed his eyes again.

Though the air around us buzzed with activity, and the sirens of an ambulance weren't far in the distance, the two of us sat in a bubble of silence, in a dimension of our own, a place which could only be reached through a mortal trial, and through the assistance of an unyielding friend.