With shocking suddenness a hand wrapped itself around the doorframe. It gripped it tight as a body appeared behind it, skidding on the carpet, coming to a halt on the edge of the drop-off. I shivered as I saw it, every part of me shocked into motion like I’d leapt into an ice-cold stream. I wanted to scream but couldn’t. My gaze was fixed on the thing in the doorway.

And then I recognized its face.

It was Niko. Young again.

My Niko.

He raised his hand and shot his older clone with my gun.

But even as he did, Elder Niko was throwing himself to the side, scrabbling frantically for purchase on the jangling net (and it can’t be my gun, I thought distantly, no more bullets) and younger Niko changed his aim, steadied himself; but Elder snarled, leapt back up four feet of net in a frantic bound, and wrapped his arms around his double’s lower legs, hanging his whole weight on them, and younger Niko’s knees buckled and he tumbled forward onto the net with a cry.

Or maybe it was me who cried out, I wasn’t sure, and I couldn’t breathe, because both Nikos were snarling, scrambling for purchase on each other, on the gun, on the precarious net beneath them as they tumbled roughly down. They were seconds away from slipping off the side, from plunging into the void of empty space beneath us.

“Look out!” I shrieked, but young Niko had jammed his gun hand through a gap in the net, jerking them both to a halt. The web of chandelier-stuff buckled wildly, tinkling like a dump truck full of glass. An eyebolt connecting it to the doorframe wrenched free with a splintering groan. I felt the same crawling horror of watching a spider fight a scrabbling insect, vicious, instinctual. Elder Niko plunged his hand through also to the underside of the net, wrestling for the gun. It went off again with a muffled thump, swallowed up by the void around us. Something zipped past my face in the same instant and I ducked, belatedly, eyes still glued on the fight above me.

Elder Niko lifted his other arm high and elbowed his double hard in the gut, but was met with a savage kick; he grunted and started sliding again, grasping at the beads of glass for purchase. Young Niko struggled to pull his gun arm out of the net but all his weight was on it now and the wire frame dug into his skin. Elder had grabbed his leg and was yanking on it; he kicked at the grasping hands, and as he did I remembered something vitally important.

“He’s tied to me!” I screamed.

Elder laughed as Niko’s eyes widened. “That’s right, asshole,” he shouted. “If I go, your boyfriend goes.”

Niko bit his lip, recalculating (and I hated myself for handicapping him; maybe I deserved to fall) and pushed himself higher with a grunt, yanking his arm free. But as he did the gun caught on one of the glass baubles, and before he could grab it the thing was sliding and scraping down the net. Toward the other Niko, who lunged for it, laughing.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

In a clear mental flash I saw exactly what would happen: he’d grab it, he’d shoot young Niko between the eyes; his face would go slack and he’d fall off the net into the void and vanish, and it wasn’t that I loved him or couldn’t survive without him but something else, a pure flash of righteous indignant anger rising up in me. After coming back for me, after rescuing me, when he could and maybe should have left me behind, he didn’t deserve to die like this.

Elder was stretched out precariously, hand only inches from the gun, and without thinking or planning I grabbed the rope trailing up to him and yanked it, with all the strength I had.

He let out a whoof as his torso lurched back, all the air forced out of him, and balanced for a heartbeat at a crazy angle, only one foot touching the jangling net. Then momentum pulled him backward, over the side, and he fell.

Everything happened very fast.

The gun slipped through a gap in the net and tumbled into darkness.

Elder screamed in fury and grabbed for the edge of the net. He caught it, and the whole thing twisted violently; but he’d snagged only a single strand and it couldn’t stop him. It shrugged him off, slicing the skin off his fingers, and he fell, arms and legs flailing, trailing rope behind him.

But his grab for the net had dislodged my Niko too, and he was head down and slipping, flailing, grasping, tangled up in Elder’s rope.

All this happened faster than movement. Maybe my brain had sent signals to my muscles, but they hadn’t arrived yet, or my body was too confused to interpret them.

Elder tumbled down, rope twisting behind him. He reached toward the cylinder, but it was too far away; he was going to fall past it. He stretched for a piece of furniture instead and collided with it, face scraping against the top of a sideways bureau; a spurt of blood exploded from his cheek even as he scrabbled to get a grip but he was moving too fast and was too heavy for its weight to stop him. His momentum pulled it a quarter-revolution around to the underside of the sphere and away from his grasp, and he kept falling.

Above me, my Niko cursed and slid off the edge of the net. The tangled rope had gone taut and yanked him off, and he was falling too. Only he wasn’t tied to anything.

I finally moved, lurched forward to do something, anything. But Elder had fallen out of my sight line around the curve, and the rope tied to the bed I sat on snapped taut with a creak, wrapping tight to the cylinder’s curve.

Young Niko plunged by on the edge of my vision, colliding with a piece of furniture and tumbling with it, but then the bed juddered and groaned underneath me. It started to slide, to pull me toward, around, the edge.

I realized I’d made a mistake.

I’d thought if someone fell, the stress on the rope would be basically downward. Since the bed and armoire were heavy, especially with my own weight on top of them, they would act like an anchor. Enough to arrest a fall, surely.

But I’d forgotten that down, for the bed—for everything in the Confusion but us—was relative.

The weight on the rope was pulling the bed not down but sideways, like a bodybuilder tugging it across a floor. But this floor was curved. Imagine a magnetic ball bearing pulled around a sphere of iron. The force of Elder’s weight on the rope was sliding the bed around the tube towards the bottom.

But the tube’s magic gravity didn’t work on me. My down was toward the lights of the city of houses, miles below. I was starting down the hill of a roller coaster without a seatbelt, and the hill wrapped past the vertical.