I accepted the device from Lannon. I’d lost my phone when he’d chucked it out the window of his car approximately ten minutes after meeting me. I’d picked up plenty of gadgets on the widow’s nest, but only Lannon’s palm computer was specifically wired to hack wireless satellites on this Earth.

I hit the call button and pressed the device against my ear.

One ring.

Two rings.

Three rings.

I began to lose hope.

Four rings.

A click and a voice.

“Hello?”

Elation swelled in my chest like a balloon accepting a lungful of air. The voice was Jack’s. Unmistakably.

“Jack,” I said. “It’s me! Laura.”

There was silence on the other side. I wondered if he was stunned into speechlessness by the good news.

“You really think I’m going to fall for this, Michael?”

Huh?

“My wife is dead,” Jack said. “You can give up this bullshit.”

“I…No, Jack. It’s really me. I’m not dead. I was stuck in another reality.”

“Listen,” he sneered. “I know one of you is hiding at my house pretending to be Laura, but calling me and pretending to be her? You think I’m stupid enough to fall for that?”

Now I was stunned into speechlessness.

“I’ve already told the authorities about you and your kind,” Jack continued. “They’re hunting you down as we speak. You’ll burn in hell for what you did.”

“Jack.”

I scrambled for words.

“I can prove it’s me. Ask me something that only Laura would know.”

Another pause on the line.

“The officer I’m with wants to know why we can’t trace this call.”

“That’s because this is from Lannon’s phone. You remember him? The yeehaw-sounding guy with the laser gun who was hunting Michael.”

Jack considered what I was saying.

“Please. Ask me something only I would know.”

“Okay. What were we going to name Violet if she was a boy?”

“We never agreed. I wanted Mark. You wanted Jackson.”

To this day, I thought the name was stupid.

“Laura?”

Jack’s voice wavered. Like he didn’t want to believe it.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Where are you right now?”

“Near our house. We just ran into my lookalike.”

“Come to Seventeen Deervine Road. It’s just ten minutes away.”

“I’ll be there soon. I love you.”

There was a pause on the end of the line.

“I…love you, too.”

He spoke the words like he didn’t trust them. I figured he might not let himself believe I was back until he laid his eyes on me. I felt a fresh wave of guilt. Jack had thought I was dead. I could’ve at least sent him a message before leaping into the portal. I hadn’t realized I was going to be gone for months, but that didn’t change the fact that I’d put him through hell the entire time I’d been away.

“Seventeen Deervine Road,” I said to Lannon. “It’s not far from here.”

We all climbed into the van and Lannon drove us to the address. It was a boring-looking industrial building located on the outskirts of Pendervale. We rolled up to the small lot beside the building and a man emerged to greet us. His uniform suggested law enforcement. A gun was holstered at his hip.

Lannon lowered the window.

“Just so we’re clear,” the officer said, keeping a few feet from the van. “We still haven’t confirmed that you’re not a threat. We have snipers watching you right now, and there’s currently enough explosives buried underneath you to throw this vehicle sky-high. Understood?”

“Understood,” Lannon echoed, smiling with the confidence of a man wearing a body shield.

The officer turned to the building and waved someone forward. A man approached the van. He wore a loose-fitting polo. He’d lost weight. His eyes had sunken into his face, and his skin had grown pale.

Jack.

I climbed out of the passenger side of the cab. He didn’t react when he saw me. I hurriedly walked to him and embraced my husband. He wrapped his arms around me, squeezing weakly, like he was holding onto a ghost.

“I’m sorry I disappeared,” I said. “I got stuck on another Earth.”

“I thought you were dead,” he whispered.

“I’m sorry.”

“I thought you were dead.”

He released me and stared me up and down with disbelief.

“I told Violet you were never coming back.”

That one slapped across my eyes like burning onion.

“Why did you leave?” he asked.

“It was an emergency,” I said. “Lannon was dying. We needed to get him to a life support machine on another Earth, and the portal got destroyed behind us.”

Jack was statuesque. His face was haggard, but I still recognized the expression. The gears were spinning helplessly behind his eyes.

“What happened after I left?” I asked gently.

“I filed a missing persons report,” he said. “But I figured the demon had killed you. I told the police, and they didn’t believe me at first. But then there were sightings of a giant lizard monster. People started disappearing. Eventually, someone found a semi-functioning laser gun in the wreckage of a warehouse that exploded the day you disappeared. That’s when people started believing my story. The FBI stepped in. I’d been living in the motel because I was afraid to go home. They moved Violet and me to this safehouse, and we’ve been here since then.”

Lannon approached us, moving cautiously under the piercing gaze of the officer.

“Do you know how many of them there are?” he asked Jack. “We know there were at least two – the original demon and the offspring we encountered at your old house.”

He stuffed his hands into empty pockets.

“There’s guys on the computers in there trying to track them,” he jerked his head toward the safehouse. “The demons are all disguised as humans, and the only way we can identify them is with infrared imaging. The techs told me they think there’s at least twenty in the first brood that began hatching a few weeks ago.”

“You won’t have to worry about finding them now,” Lannon said. He held up the scanner he’d claimed from Revella. “We can track them with this.”

Jack didn’t look particularly thrilled.

“Look,” Lannon said. “I’ll let you two have your moment. Just tell me who’s in charge here. I need to speak with them. We’ve got a small army coming, and I want us to be working together on this.”

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The officer joined us.

“I can take you to Agent Clifton. She’s the one you want to talk to.”

Lannon waved to the van, and the rest of the MEAD soldiers poured out. They followed the officer into the building, leaving Jack and me in the lot.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.

“Because I refused to let myself believe you survived. I told myself that no matter how convincing you looked, if I ever saw you again, it would only be a trap set by the demons.”

“But I…”

“I know you’re not!” he said. “I just can’t make myself believe it. I don’t want to get my heart broken again.”

And my husband, who once grinned after slamming a car door on his hand hard enough to break two bones, began bawling like a baby.

“I told Violet her mom was dead,” he gurgled.

I sat down next to Jack, generally feeling like a piece of shit. I rubbed a hand on his back.

“She’ll be okay. She’s tough.”

Jack snorted and shoved his palms into his eyes to stem the tears.

“What happened to you while you were stuck in the multiverse?”

I instinctively put a hand to my chest, where a lattice of mesh now coated my heart and lungs like a suit of chainmail.

“I had a few bits of technology installed. I spent a lot of time with my mom. It went well, as far as our interactions go.”

The part about the dreadhawk didn’t feel necessary to mention at this time.

“She’s alive, too? Your mom?”

“Yeah. She’s back on the other Earth.”

“I guess nobody actually died, then. What about that woman who wanted to kill your mom?”

“Revella? She’s alive too. She’s in prison back on the other Earth.”

Jack shook his head incredulously.

“This doesn’t feel real.”

“It is. I promise.”

“Will you kiss me?”

I leaned in and pressed my lips against my husband’s. They were dry, and rough from having the skin chewed off, but the motion was familiar. I felt him gently pull away after a second, and I did the same.

“Did that help?”

More tears trickled down his cheeks.

“I don’t know.”

I tried to summarize the process of creating a biometric clone of Revella so that we could steal a bridgemaker. I explained that Revella had destroyed the thread we’d used to escape this reality and recounted the raid on the factory and hacking of the machine.

“So you’re telling me there’s an interdimensional portal sitting on the playground at Violet’s school?”

“Well, in the field next to it, but basically, yeah.”

“It’s been so hard doing this by myself,” Jack blurted after a moment of reflection.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I thought you were dead. A demon was going to destroy this planet. The only thing keeping me going was protecting Violet. And that was hard. I wanted to drink myself to death. I wanted to punch the wall until my hands were broken. I wanted to go to bed and never wake up. But I couldn’t. I kept calling law enforcement and scanning news articles, trying to catch this shit lizard before it was too late. And it was…hard.”

“You were incredible,” I said. I waved at the safehouse. “You set this up. You did exactly what I asked. You got everyone ready for this moment when I returned with backup.”

“And we still haven’t been able to kill a single one. The first generation of offspring is probably going to start laying their own eggs soon.”

“That’s okay. We’ve got three hundred soldiers coming. They know how to deal with these things.”

“Then what do we do now?”

“We figure out how to tell Violet I’m alive.”

“That’s easy.”

He tried to force a laugh, but it sounded more like a seal being drowned.

“It was her birthday last week. She told me she wished you would come back when she blew out the candles on the little cake I got her. I don’t think she ever really processed that you were gone.”

That’s right. Violet was six now.

“You think she’ll buy it?”

“I think so. We can explain what really happened after this is over. Maybe when she’s older.”

“Okay.”

Jack pushed off his knees and rose wearily to his feet. I accompanied him as we entered the safehouse. I set the metal detector ringing when I passed through the security checkpoint at the door.

“Go ahead,” the guard sighed. “All your friends were made of metal, too.”

Jack was too fried to even bother asking me for specifics. He led me down a hall and pressed a combination into a keypad on one of the doors. It swung open.

“Violet,” he called. “I have a surprise.”

She appeared from behind the corner and froze, staring dumbstruck at me. My heart bulged in my chest like a water balloon under tension.

“Mom’s back!” Jack said, forcing fake cheeriness into his tone. The same way one would tell their child they were going to Disney World or that it was mac and cheese for lunch.

Violet snapped out of her disbelief and hurried toward me with bumbling child’s steps. She wrapped her arms around my waist. I picked her up and hugged her back, being careful not to crush her with my augmented biceps.

“My wish came true!”

I smiled despite my own tears.

“You bet it did. I’m back. For good, now.”

I looked over at Jack as I said that last part. He smiled weakly.

“Dad said you weren’t coming back. I knew he was wrong.”

I set Violet down.

“You’re right,” Jack said. “I was all wrong.”

“Now we’re all together again,” Violet declared.

We sat at the small dinner table and gave Violet a much-simplified explanation of what happened. One of my friends was hurt. I’d needed to help him, and I’d gotten stuck far away for a long time.

She listened happily, kicking her feet under the chair and sipping grape juice through a straw.

When she seemed satisfied, she ran off to go find a new toy to show me.

Jack rested his elbows on the table.

“The innocence of children, huh?”

I dabbed at my eyes with a tissue.

“I’m glad she was five when this happened. Maybe she won’t remember it when she’s older.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “You were only eleven when your dad died, and I know that was hard.”

The truth of the words rubbed me like raw granite. I’d also just been a child when the death of a parent permanently altered my life and deeply schismed my relationship with my mother. To be fair, much of my anger was at how she’d collapsed entirely after his passing, but the man sitting across from me now didn’t look much more put together than she had.

Violet reemerged with a stuffed bear and a fistful of drawings made with colored pencils. She eagerly set them out on the table like a merchant hawking her wares. I leaned back in my chair, still processing how quickly I’d been folded back into Violet’s world. Jack sat next to me. He held my hand, but he was still a man in a trance. He would need more time.

That evening, the first MEAD soldiers began to arrive at the safehouse. Vans, trucks, and armored dune buggies streamed from the portal we’d created by the elementary school. At the order of the FBI, local police blocked off the streets, allowing the arriving army to parade their way to the safehouse.

I had no idea what the locals of Pendervale made of that. It sounded like the town was already in a state of alarm thanks to the dozen residents who’d gone missing over the last two months. Poor souls who’d gone peeking around the wrong radish-reeking corner and seen something they weren’t supposed to.

The safehouse itself was just an old office building that had been bought and repurposed by the FBI over the last month. It probably couldn’t house a hundred people, much less the three hundred-plus person army we were bringing. Fortunately, the MEAD soldiers had come prepared. The property around the safehouse was mostly undeveloped flats littered with weeds and anthills. The soldiers quickly erected tents and portable shelters made of shiny synthetic fibers. They unspooled a fence of barbed wire around the entire perimeter and erected small obelisks of steel panels and lead piping. The structures looked like steampunk outhouses, but I’d been assured they served a defensive purpose.

While Jack and I were reconnecting, Lannon had met with Agent Clifton. She’d sent off a team of FBI agents and MEAD soldiers with the neutrino scanner while Lannon coordinated the army’s arrival.

The presence of radish demons in Pendervale had left little tracks of neutrinos all over the place. The next morning, the team reported back to base claiming that they’d discovered a single location where many of the trails converged. A hive.

Lannon examined the data in the scanner. He sat in a conference room with Agent Clifton, some MEAD leadership, a few FBI agents, and me.

Jack had wanted to come, but Agent Clifton had forbidden it. I was only allowed because I was the missing link between Earth five hundred ninety-six beta and the MEAD forces.

“This probably won’t be all of them,” Lannon admitted. “But it looks like there’s two dozen radish demons in there with at least a hundred eggs. They’ve probably picked this place to nest up because it’s out of the way and near a radish farm. They won’t be expecting us. We can drop in together and blow the place up before they know what’s hit them. Then our mission will just be to track down the few who weren’t in the hive.”

“How do you propose we blow the place up?” Agent Clifton asked.

She was a tall woman with a quiet voice. Every sentence was spoken with a suspicious tone.

“We brought a few thermic missiles with us,” Lannon said. “Should be enough to destroy all the eggs and any demon caught in the center of the blasts. We can set up our forces in a perimeter around the hive to kill any survivors when they come running out.”

“And where would we fit into this? You said our guns would be ineffective against these things. Are we supposed to sit back and watch?”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“I want some of those laser guns,” Clifton said. “Ideally, at least thirty. I’d like to send some of my best agents with you. To make sure things go according to plan.”

“You sure it’s not just because you want an excuse to get your hands on more of our toys?”

“Lannon,” I murmured, giving him a look.

I felt like I’d just brought two dogs to the park and was praying they’d get along with each other.

Clifton smiled.

“That’s a clever thought, but we’ve already obtained one of those laser guns from your last expedition to our reality. Anyways, that won’t be necessary if this Earth is going to be connected to the multiverse now that a bridge has been established, as you’ve claimed.”

“That’s right.”

Agent Clifton let the silence simmer.

“So why do you want the guns?” Lannon asked.

“Because we’re in charge of this mission. I trust you, but not enough to let you go gallivanting around on American soil with lasers and thermic missiles unsupervised. And if we’re coming, we’ll need to be appropriately armed. For our own protection as well as yours.”

“Fine.”

“Will you be ready to do this tomorrow?”

“The sooner, the better.”

The meeting continued over the nuances of the attack on the demon hive. Civilians would be cleared out of harm’s way. Forces would establish a tight encirclement. The missiles would launch, and a combination of explosives and armor-piercing lasers would be used to emulsify any extradimensional parasites that survived and tried to come scrambling out of the hidey-hole.

That was the plan.

Things continued accordingly until early the next morning.

I’d been standing beside Lannon, watching the troops slowly gather in the yard behind the building in anticipation of the planned assault. Jack was with me. He was holding my hand absentmindedly. The sun had just risen, and the morning was innocent and coated in dew.

We’d slept together over the last two nights, and it had been easy to fall back into our natural contortions, with my back pressed up against Jack’s side and a lazy arm of his thrown over me.

We hadn’t had sex yet. I hadn’t broached the subject. He hadn’t seemed ready, looking at me like I was a ghost during the daylight hours. It hurt, but I wasn’t sure what to do besides give it time.

Plus, Violet slept on the other side of a thin wall. Not the best setting for things to get heavy.

I wanted him to talk to me, but prying words from his lips was like pulling teeth. He hadn’t wanted to leave the bedroom this morning, but when I said I’d be watching the soldiers get ready with Lannon, he’d insisted on joining.

The angry blaring of sirens cut through my thoughts, snapping me back to reality. Soldiers scattered, scrambling to operate defensive positions. Lannon stiffened, listening to a voice in his micro-communicator.

“What’s going on?” I asked him.

“Cod fucking knocker,” he muttered.

“What?”

He snapped out of his trance, noticing me.

“It’s the Republic. They found us.”