The interstate is dark and empty.
Jisoo reaches over Jennie and pulls the mask off the latter's face.
The smell of death from inside Jennie's home lingers in her nose.
She can't shake it.
She keeps thinking of Lisa, lying dead under a blanket on their front porch.
As the three of them pass to the west of downtown, Jennie glances out of her window.
There's just enough starlight to profile the towers.
They're black, lifeless.
Rosé says, "Guys?"
"What?"
"There's a car following us."
Jisoo and Jennie looks in the rearview mirror.
With no lights, it looks like a phantom riding their bumper.
Blinding high beams and red-and-blues kick on, sending splinters of light through the interior of the car.
A voice booms through a megaphone behind them: "Pull your vehicle onto the shoulder."
Panic swells.
They have nothing to defend themselves with.
They can't outrun anything in this piece of shit AKA the old Hyundai Porter.
Rosé takes her foot off the gas and watches the speedometer needle swing counterclockwise.
Jisoo says, "You're stopping?"
"Yes."
"Why?" Jennie asks.
Rosé ease down on the brake pedal, and as their speed falls, Rosé veers onto the shoulder and bring the car to a stop.
"Rosé." Jisoo grabs her arm. "What are you doing?"
In the side mirror, Jennie watches a black SUV pull to a stop behind them.
"Turn off your vehicle and drop the keys out the window."
"Rosé!" Jennie shouts.
"Just trust me."
"This is your last warning. Turn off the car and drop the keys out the window. Any attempt to flee will be met with lethal force."
A mile or so back, more headlights appear.
Rosé shifts the car into PARK and kill the lights, then she lowers her window several inches, sticks her arm through, and drops a set of keys outside.
The driver's-side door to the SUV opens, and a man in a gas mask steps out with his weapon already drawn.
Rosé throws the car back into gear, hit the lights, and floor the accelerator.
They hear a gunshot over the roar of the engine.
A bullet hole stars the windshield.
Then another.
One rips into the cassette deck.
Looking back, Jennie sees the SUV now several hundred yards down the shoulder.
The keys were fake.
The speedometer is at sixty and climbing.
"How far are we from our exit?" Jisoo asks.
"A mile or two." Jennie answers.
Jisoo looked back, "There's a bunch of them coming."
Rosé glanced at the side mirror "I see them."
"Rosé, if they catch us—"
"I know."
They are doing a little over ninety now, the engine straining to maintain speed, the RPMs inching into the red.
They blow past a sign giving notice that their exit is a quarter mile ahead on the right.
At their speed, they reach it in a matter of seconds.
Rosé hits the exit at seventy-five and brake hard.
Neither of them are buckled in.
The inertia slams Jennie into the glove box, shoves Rosé forward into the steering wheel.
At the end of the ramp, Rosé take a brutal left turn through a stop sign—tires squealing, rubber burning. It slings Jennie against her door and nearly sends her flying into her seat.
As they drive across the overpass, Jisoo counts five sets of flashing lights on the interstate, the closest SUV now speeding onto the exit ramp with two Humvees in tow.
They tear through the vacated streets of Seoul.
Jisoo leans forward, stares out the windshield.
"What is it?" Jennie asks.
She's looking at the sky.
"I see lights up there."
"Like a helicopter?" Rosé mutters.
"Exactly."
They passed through empty intersections, past the shuttered station, and then they're clear of the ghetto, speeding alongside abandoned warehouses and train yards.
In the boondocks of the city.
"They're getting close," Jisoo reports.
A round thunks into the trunk of the car.
Followed by three more in fast succession, like someone taking a hammer to metal.
Jennie's eyes widened, "That's a machine gun."
"Get down on the floorboard!" Jisoo shouts.
They can hear the anthem of sirens drawing near.
This antiquated Hyundai Porter is no match for what's coming.
Two more rounds pierce the back window and the windshield.
Through the bullet-riddled glass, Rosé sees the lake straight ahead.
She says, "Hang on, we're almost there."
Rosé makes a hard right onto Pulaski Drive, and as a trio of bullets peppers the rear passenger door, she cuts the lights.
The first few seconds of driving without headlights feels like they are all flying through total darkness.
Then their eyes begin to adjust.
All three of them can see the pavement ahead, the black silhouettes of structures all around them.
Rosé takes her foot off the gas, but she don't touch the brake.
Glancing back, Jisoo sees two SUVs make aggressive turns onto the opposite way.
Up ahead, Jennie can just make out the pair of familiar smokestacks spearing the starlit sky.
Their speed is under twenty miles per hour, and though the SUVs are gaining fast, Jennie doesn't think their high beams have touched them yet.
They see the fence.
Their speed keeps dropping.
Rosé steer across the road, and the grille smashes into the locked gate, splitting the doors apart.
They roll slowly into the parking lot, and as Rosé maneuver around the toppled light poles, Jennie looks back toward the road.
The sirens are getting louder.
Three SUVs streak past the gate, trailed by two Humvees with machinegun turrets mounted to their roofs.
Rosé kill the engine.
In the new silence, they listen to the sirens fading away.
The slams of their doors bounce off the brick building straight ahead.
They move toward the crumbling structure.
A helicopter buzzes overhead, a brilliant spotlight scraping across the parking lot.
Now Jennie hears a revving engine.
A black SUV skids sideways across.
Headlights blind them.
As they run toward the building, a man's voice through a megaphone orders the three to stop.
Rosé steps through the hole in the brick façade then gives Jisoo and Jennie a hand inside.
It's pitch-black.
Ripping open the pack, Rosé quickly dig out the lantern.
The light reveals the destroyed front office, and the sight of the place in the dark takes Jennie back to that night with Jennie2, when she walked Jennie naked and at gunpoint into another version of the old building.
They move out of the first room, the lantern piercing the darkness.
Down a hallway.
Faster and faster.
Their footsteps pounding the rotten floor.
Sweat runs down their faces, stings their eyes.
Jennie's heart beats so hard it rattles her chest.
She's gasping for breath.
Voices call after them.
Jennie looks back, see lasers cutting through the black and splotches of green from what she assumes are night-vision goggles.
Jisoo hear sthe noise of radios and whispered voices and the rotors of the helicopter bleeding through the walls.
A torrent of gunfire fills the hallway, and they flatten themselves against the ground until the shooting stops.
Struggling back onto their feet, they push on with even more urgency.
At a junction, Rosé takes them down to a different hall, mostly sure it's the right way though it's impossible to be certain in the dark.
They finally emerge onto the metal platform at the top of the open stairs that lead down into the generator room.
They descend.
Their pursuers are so close Jennie can pick out three distinct voices reverberating through the last hallway.
Two men, one woman.
Rosé move off the last step, Jisoo's next with Jennie right on her heels as heavy footfalls clang on the stairs above them.
Two red dots crisscross Jennie's path.
Jennie sidesteps and keep running, straight into the darkness ahead, where she knows the box has to be.
Gunshots ring out above them as two figures in full biohazard gear launch off the bottom of the stairs, hurtling towards the three.
The box stands fifty feet ahead, the door open and the metallic surface gently diffusing the light of their incoming lantern.
Gunshot.
Jennie feels something zip by her right ear like a passing hornet.
A bullet strikes the door with a spark of fire.
Her ear burns.
A man behind them screams, "There's nowhere to go!"
Rosé is first into the box.
Jisoo follows then Jennie crosses the threshold, turns, digs her shoulder into the door.
The soldiers are twenty feet away, so close Jennie can hear them panting through their gas masks.
They open fire, and the blinding muzzle flashes and the bullets chinking into the metal of the box are the last Jennie sees and hear of that nightmare world.
_________________________________
The three shoot up immediately andstart walking down the corridor.
After a while, Jisoo and Rosé wants to stop, but Jennie can't.
She needs to keep moving.
She walks for a full hour.
Through an entire cycle of the drug.
Jennie's ear bleeding all over her clothes.
Until the corridor collapses back into a single box.
Cold.
Coated in dried sweat.
Jisoo is standing in the center of the box, her skirt dirty and ripped, sweater torn off completely from their run through the abandoned building.
Rosé is heaving, her shirt with stains from Zeus knows what. She sets the lantern on the floor.
Something inside of Jennie releases.
The strength, the tension, the anger, the fear.
Everything flooding out at once in a stream of tears and uncontrollable sobbing.
Rosé turns off the lantern.
Jennie crumples down against the cold wall, and Jisoo pulls her over into her lap.
Runs her fingers through Jennie's hair.
_________________________________
AMPOULES REMAINING: 45
Jennie regains consciousness in the pitch-black, lying on her side on the floor of the box, her back to the wall.
Jisoo is pressed up close against Rosé, their bodies contoured together, Jisoo's head resting in the crook of Rosé's arm.
Jennie is hungry and thirsty.
She wonders how long she have slept.
At least her ear has stopped bleeding.
It's impossible to deny the reality of their helplessness.
Aside from each other, the box is the only constant they have.
A very tiny boat in the middle of a very large ocean.
It's their shelter.
Their prison.
Their home.
Pulling off her hoodie, Jennie folds it into a pillow and slide it under Rosé's head.
She stirs but doesn't wake.
Jennie feels her way around to the door, knowing she shouldn't take the risk of breaking the seal. But Jennie has to know what's out there, and the claustrophobia of the box is wearing on her.
Turning the handle, she drags it slowly open.
First sensation: the smell of evergreens.
Shafts of sunlight slant down through a forest of closely spaced pine trees.
In the near distance, a deer stands motionless, staring through its dark, wet eyes at the box.
When Jennie steps outside, the deer bounds off soundlessly through the pines.
The forest is startlingly quiet.
Mist hovers over the pine-needle floor.
Jennie walk out a little ways from the box and sit on a piece of ground in direct morning sun that feels warm and bright against her face.
A breeze pushes through the tops of the trees.
Jennie catches a hint of woodsmoke in the wind.
From an open fire?
A chimney?
Jennie wonders, Who lives here?
What sort of a world is this?
Jennie hears footsteps.
Glancing back, She sees Jisoo coming towards her through the trees and register a pang of guilt— Jennie almost got her and Rosé killed in that last world. She isn't just here because of Jennie. She's here because she saved Jennie. Because she did a brave, risky thing.
Jisoo sits beside Jennie and turns her face to the sun.
"How'd you sleep?" she asks.
"Hard. Awful crick in my neck. You?"
"Sore all over."
Jisoo leans in close and studies Jennie's ear.
"Bad?" Jennie inquires.
"No, the bullet just trimmed off part of your earlobe. I'll clean it up for you."
She hands Jennie a liter of water they refilled in that futuristic Seoul, and Jennie takes a long sip that she wish would never end.
"You doing okay?" Jisoo asks.
"I can't stop thinking about her. Lying dead on our porch. We are so lost."
Jisoo says, "I know it's hard, but the question you should be thinking about—we should both be thinking about—is why did you bring us to that world?"
"All I wrote was, 'I want to go home.' "
"Exactly. That's what you wrote, but you carried baggage through the door."
Jennie's face completely shows confusion, "What do you mean?"
"Isn't it obvious?"
"Obviously not."
Jisoo looked straight into Jennie's eyes, "Your worst fear."
"That type of scenario isn't everyone's?"
"Maybe. But it's so perfectly yours I'm surprised you don't see it."
"How is it perfectly mine?"
"Not just losing your wife, but losing her to illness. The same way you lost your mother when you were eight years old."
Jennie looks at Jisoo dead in the eye.
"How'd you know that?"
"How do you think?"
Of course. She was Jennie2's therapist.
Jisoo says, "Watching her mother die was the defining event of her life. It played a critical part in why she never married, never had kids. Why she sunk himself into work."
Jennie believes it. There were moments, early on, when she considered running from Lisa. Not because she wasn't crazy about her, but because on some level, Jennie was afraid of losing her. And Jennie felt the same fear all over again when Lisa was once badly sick.
"Why would I seek out a world like that?" Jennie mutters to herself.
"Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn't make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat. I happen to think that world taught us a lot about how the box works."
Passing the water back to her, Jennie says, "Forty Five."
"Forty Five what?"
"Forty-five ampoules left. That gives us each fifteen chances to get this right. What do you want to do?"
"I'm not sure. All I know at this point is that I'm not going back to my world."
"So do you want to stay together, or is this goodbye?"
Jisoo smiles, "I don't know how you feel, but I think we still need each other. I think maybe I can help you get home."
_________________________________
Jennie leans back against the trunk of a pine tree, a notebook resting on her knees, her thoughts teeming.
What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.
It's a troubling paradox— you have total control, but only to the extent you have control over yourself.
Your emotions.
Your inner storm.
The secret engines that drives you.
If there are infinite worlds, how do Jennie find the one that is uniquely, specifically hers?
Jennie starse at the page and begin to write down every detail of her Seoul that comes to mind. She paints her life with words.
The sounds of the children in her neighborhood walking to school together, their voices like a stream flowing over rocks—high and burbling.
Graffiti on the faded white brick of a building three blocks from their house that was so artfully done it was never painted over.
Jennie meditates on the intricacies of her home.
The fourth step on the staircase that always creaks.
The downstairs bathroom with the leaky faucet.
The way her kitchen smells as coffee brews first thing in the morning.
All the tiny, seemingly insignificant details upon which her world hangs.