Sagitta wasn’t going to turn me into a girl.

This fact tormented me as I navigated the twisting paths of the mountains. I was so close. Closer than I had been since the moment I was conceived, I supposed. She could do it if she wanted to, but she wouldn’t. And I couldn’t even ask her to. I couldn’t even talk about it. I was disgusting just for wanting to so badly. Was I really so sick that I couldn’t keep my fetishes to myself?

What was I going to do when this was all over and Sagitta was gone?

I decided to distract myself by asking her some more questions. “What’s stability?”

“It’s a measure how consistent reality is in a given universe,” she explained.

“So my universe is only seventy-five percent stable?”

“That’s just an estimate,” Sagitta continued. “Different worlds naturally have different degrees of stability, so even if a world has only ten percent stability it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that for some reason, worlds have been encroaching on each other, destabilizing one another. For example, the world I just came from? It has a natural stability of fifty-four point six percent. The last report I saw had it down to forty-two point eight percent. This has caused political and civil chaos and now it’s encroaching on your universe. It’s a bit of a domino effect and we can’t seem to figure out where it started.”

I wondered who “we” referred to, but by now I’d realized that if I asked, her answer would just confuse me. I needed to take things gradually.

“So what’s that device that keeps beeping?” I asked instead.

“My RSB? It measures changes to stability. When robots show up in a world that isn’t meant to have robots yet, maybe even one where the physical laws don’t permit robots like that, it causes localized instabilty. The RSB measures that and warns me when it happens. Problem is, it has to be calibrated and since I came straight to this world to escape the last one, I didn’t have time to prep first. That’s probably why I got that false alarm yesterday. What’s with this traffic jam?”

We had pulled to a stop behind a line of cars.

“We’re at the border crossing.” I felt a stab of panic. I had thought about this several times and meant to ask Sagitta about it, but had always been distracted by something else. And then today it had slipped my mind entirely. “How are we getting across if you don’t have a passport?”

Sagitta moaned. “You need a passport here? What a hassle.”

She unbuckled her seatbelt and twisted around to dig through my duffle bag. Eventually, she pulled out one of my boots, and untwisted herself just as the border guard was approaching.

“Hideous boot that Abner thinks gives him charm, it’s time to finally actually be dazzling,” she said.

The boot crumbled to ash with no other visible changes. That ash is still staining my car, by the way. The border guard reached my window and held out his hand for our passports. I passed him mine.

“So here’s the thing,” Sagitta said, drawing out the word “thing.” “I kind of left my passport at home.”

“Oh, okay,” said the guard. “Just remember to bring it next time.”

And that was it, we passed through the border with no problem.

Once I was back up to highway speed, I held a brief internal debate about whether to say anything about what had just inspired. I eventually decided that I needed to. “That was really mean.”

“What was mean? Manipulating him? Who cares about that?”

I shook my head. “No, the thing you said about my boots.”

She groaned. “Seriously? They were ugly boots. Grow a thicker skin.”

My reply came out louder than I meant it. “They were important to me. And you knew they were important to me because your magic wouldn’t have worked on them otherwise. You said that knowing it would hurt me.”

“I didn’t know it would hurt you,” she shot back. “How was I supposed to know you were so delicate? Excuse me for forgetting about your precious little feelings when I’m trying to save the world. What’s so important about those stupid boots, anyway? Does wearing them make you feel big and tough?”

“Wearing them makes me feel…” I paused. How could I find words the words to describe what they meant to me? “They made me feel real. Like I’d always just been half a person and having them meant that I had my own personality instead of just being a collection of interests.”

Sagitta didn’t respond. We continued in silence for the next several hours before we chose another town to stop in. Checking in to a hotel proved difficult due to the language barrier and ordering food was even worse.

As bedtime neared, Sagitta spoke up from where she sat curled up on her bed, chin on her knees. She had spoken several times when ordering food and choosing how high to turn on the air conditioner but this felt like the first time she had spoken to me as a person instead of an order-following automaton since our argument.

“Kind of weird that there weren’t any attacks today.”

“To be honest, I don’t understand why they aren’t attacking us constantly,” I admitted.

“Their dimension-traveling tech is pretty rudimentary. They can home in on my location easily enough by detecting my RSB, but actually pushing through is a little more tricky. I wonder if I’m mixing up the cause and effect of the local stability shifts. Maybe the robots arriving aren’t their source, they’re the result. They need the local stability to dip below a certain level before they can reach us.”

“Wait, in that case what would be causing the instability?”

She shrugged. “Small reality fluctuations are normal. They happen in any universe.”

I didn’t ask any more questions and she didn’t say anything more.