Expressionless, the man approached the bed and addressed Evan. His voice was honey smooth, peppered with an anomalous accent.
“Listen up, boy. Time is short and I have much to do. In five minutes, everything around you will cease to be. If you wish to continue living, extend your wrist quickly.”
Evan raised his arm with meek and dreamy deference. Azral’s thin lips curled in a smirk.
“Your cooperation is a welcome change. I won’t forget that.”
He procured a featureless silver bracelet from his pocket. Evan’s thoughts screamed as he watched it break into four floating elbows. They glided over Evan’s fingers, reconnecting at the thinnest part of his wrist with a clack.
“What is this?” Evan asked in a tiny voice. “Am I dreaming?”
“I don’t have the time or mind to explain your situation, child. Just keep your head. Stay where you arrive. Help will come for you shortly.”
Azral squinted with revulsion at the unwashed garments on Evan’s floor. “You’ll wish to find proper clothes, if you have them. Then say good-bye to your father. You won’t be seeing him again.”
Amidst all the daft and scattered notions in Evan’s head, it occurred to him that he’d rather eat his own arm than suffer one more look of disapproval from the bearish old man.
Suddenly Azral’s white brow crunched in wrathful scorn. He lurched forward and grabbed Evan by the collar.
“Only a weak man fails to honor his parents. You should be grateful. It was your father’s unique genes that saved your life today. Clearly I didn’t choose you for strength of character.”
As the fearsome stranger walked back to his white liquid portal, Evan suddenly found himself in a small pool of yellow.
“Pathetic,” said Azral, before disappearing into the breach.
Over the course of his long and lawless existence on Earth’s wild sibling, Evan would find many reasons to hate Azral Pelletier. Near the top of the list was the ridiculously short amount of time he’d given Evan to prepare for his great upheaval. He’d only just zipped his jeans over fresh boxers when the silver bracelet buzzed with life. Shirtless and barefoot in his father’s moldy bathroom, he was sealed in light, safely preserved as the house and sky collapsed around him.
It was in that final moment that he forgot his fear. In the space between worlds, the space between lives, he was briefly at peace with himself. The old Earth faded away to an empty white void, and Evan Rander felt nothing at all but gratitude.
—
As the proprietor of a dreary midtown mini-market, Nico Mundis was used to seeing odd behavior in his store. Aside from the typical assortment of ne’er-do-wells who would rob him at gunpoint or speedlift his wares, he’d suffered his fair share of rants, raves, threats, and propositions. The sexual come-ons always baffled Nico the most, as he was sixty-eight and quite obese.
His favorite strange incident occurred three years ago, when a group of egghead scientists traced an invisible signal to his canned goods aisle. The group leader, a spiky-haired Poler named Constantin Czerny, offered Nico three thousand dollars to let them affix a small device to his wall. Some kind of particle scanner enhancer thingy. Sure, why not? Money was money. At the end of the transaction, Czerny gave Nico his phone number and advised him to call should anything unique happen. Nico had no idea what Czerny meant by that and wasn’t sure if Czerny knew either.
Now, just minutes before opening for Saturday business, something unique happened.
As Nico filled the register, the overhead lights died. The table fan came to a stop. Even his electronic watch went blank. Only the white tempic barrier continued to function. It coated the windows from the outside, giving the shop a hazy, snowed-in look.
A flash of light filled the back of his store. Nico grabbed his shotgun and aimed it at the disturbance. He blinked through the dancing brown spots in his eyes and reeled to see a shirtless young man where previously there’d been no one.
Evan blinked twice at the gun, then raised his scrawny arms in terror. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
Nico moved closer to survey the damage. The blast had taken a curved bite out of his store, leaving a concave groove in the wall and slicing half the cans and shelves around the intruder. Tiny wet vegetable morsels dripped onto the floor, covering broken pieces of bathroom tile that had come from God knows where.
“Who are you?” Nico shouted. “What are you doing here?”
“Look, just don’t shoot, okay? I have no idea! The last thing I—”