Leo—never Leonard, that was his dad—Evans was about to make cheap, plentiful drinking water available to the world. Assuming exhaustion didn’t kill him first.

For the last two years, he’d been working so hard, and at such odd hours, that it surprised him he hadn’t acquired evolutionary adaptations to his new lifestyle. Perhaps low-light vision like a cat, or a hump on his back, camel-esque, where he stored Red Bull instead of water.

Leo stared down at his gut. The actual adaptation I’ve developed is a lump for storing fat where my abs were two years ago.

Most evenings, long after the lab closed, Leo could still be found working at his home office. He had taken his mock-ups and multiple files home from the lab this night and toiled away until two in the morning. He sat at his desk, surrounded by six screens, three desks, a pile of empty energy drink cans, and a book on engineering megaprojects.

But at this stage of the night, eighteen grueling hours after he had woken up that morning, Leo was a candle burned down to its last sad remnant of wax, a tiny flame flickering before it gave up the ghost. He tried to focus on his work, but his head dropped into his hands, his thoughts turning more and more to Audrey, his boss and sometime girlfriend, as he sank toward dreamland.

Leo was tugged back from the edge of sleep with a wrench. He raised his head from his hands, and wiped a small line of drool from his lip with his wrist.

Intuitively, Leo knew the tug feeling had come from below him. He shifted, glancing down at the wheels of his rolling chair. A complete mess of cables and surge protectors snaked across his floor to every available outlet in his otherwise bare, dimly lit, one bedroom apartment.

He saw nothing else.

Until…

Leo’s eyes widened. A circle of sparkling, multi-colored lights surrounded his chair, like thousands of rainbow-colored fireflies crawling all over each other.

He watched, fascinated. A few seconds later, the floor seemed to fade away, becoming transparent, like looking through a glass pane. Leo stared at the new floor, his mouth imitating a carp. He spotted a beautiful feminine face, pale skinned, with a cute button nose, light gray-brown eyes, and metallic bronze hair, beneath his chair. The woman narrowed her eyes in confusion at him.

Leo yelled as he leapt back out of his chair in a single athletic bound like a cat startled by a dog. He landed just outside the glowing, multicolored circle.

Then it disappeared.

No more lights. No more transparent floor.

Leo rubbed his eyes.

He stared down at the place where the glowing circle had been, and saw a faint, black outline on the cheap tile flooring of his front room.

Not just my imagination then. Leo marveled at the spot on the floor. He tried to make sense of what he had seen—he felt about intellectual puzzles the same way a kitten felt about red laser dots on the floor—if he failed to grasp it, it certainly wouldn’t be for lack of trying.

If it wasn’t my imagination, then what? If it had just been lights, I’d assume it was a discharge from my rig, even though the lights were colored. But operating on the assumption that I’m not completely insane, how would I see a face inside the colors? Inside a floor that is obviously still there?

Leo glanced at his desk, hoping that it wasn’t his computer giving off electrical discharges. The project was the holy grail of water management—a combination of a retroviral engineered algae that captured salt and then died, but was easily filtered out of the water after that. It allowed for the easy—and cheap—conversion of salt water into fresh water. The filtering part was thanks to a system Leo had designed. They could give clean water to the denizens of Los Angeles and Angola, the farmers of California’s central valley and Australia, and they wouldn’t even need dams like Hetch Hetchy.

Although, ironically, dams and hydroelectric power had been what attracted Leo to engineering in the first place. He wanted to build great works, but he supposed a giant desalination plant to quench the thirst of millions would be almost as amazing as the giant dams his forebearers had built.

My three percent share of the company will probably be more than a billion with a capital B. And I’ll be as famous as Einstein. Or, well, at least Elon Musk.

I probably just dreamed the part with the face. Given how many hours I’ve put into this, it wouldn’t surprise me if I was going a touch loopy. I’ve had a ‘maintenance needed’ light on my dashboard for the last hundred thousand miles.

As he mulled everything over, Leo crouched and edged forward, pushing his chair as far under his desk as it would go. He tentatively reached out, one finger extended, to touch the black line.

A buzzing from his hip, accompanied by ringing, caused a panicked adrenaline dump. Already tense, Leo fell sideways into the desk as he tried to stand and grab his phone at the same time.

Leo let out a loud “Frik!” and finished grabbing his phone from his pocket, half-ready to throw it against the wall despite his usual phlegmatic personality. But when he saw who was calling, a different type of panic poured through him.

Audrey.

He stared at the phone for half a second.

Audrey Melendez had been his boss, and sometimes girlfriend, for the last two years of his life. Originally, she had been a hard-charging optimist and dreamer. She had seemed the perfect woman—brilliant, beautiful, vivacious, driven. She was responsible for the genetic engineering of the protista, in fact.

But Audrey had become skittish and scared over the last few months. She had even talked about shutting down the project and moving to the United Arab Emirates, a non-extradition treaty country—despite the fact she had mortgaged everything she owned to keep the project going for two years.

Leo half-suspected, after the fact, that Audrey had hooked up with him partially to keep him around at his ridiculously low salary, despite his degrees in multiple forms of engineering. He had no proof of that, but their hook-ups and dates had almost disappeared now that he was fully committed to the project.

Of course, the timing matched up with her recent fears, so maybe it was just that.

Leo glanced around at his apartment, the darkness of the night cut by a single lamp and the glow from his six screens. Why is she calling me at two in the morning? Sadly, I seriously doubt it’s a booty call. Is she going to shut us down?

All of it flashed through Leo’s mind quickly, and on the third ring, he hit ‘accept call’ and put the phone to his ear.

As he answered, he tried to make his voice seem as groggy and tired as possible. “Hello,” he said before yawning. “Audrey? What’s up?”

Her voice was completely flat, a change from the vivacious and borderline flirty tone she usually had. “Don’t play games with me, Leo. I know you work all hours of the night. Some stuff is missing from the lab. Did you take it home to work on?”

Leo took stuff home to work on all the time, which Audrey well knew. “Yeah, why?”

“I need you to bring me the mock-ups and all the files.”

“What?” Leo asked, his heart sinking. “Why?”

There was a pause, in which Leo heard no sound at all from the phone, before he heard her breathing again and she answered, “I’m your boss. I don’t have to answer that.”

Something is really wrong, Leo thought. She’s never flat like this. What did she do?

When they had first met, Audrey had seemed wonderful. But as Leo’s time under her had gone on, he had realized that she wasn’t just a hellcat in bed. She was driven by demons—and was willing to make bargains with the devil to get what she wanted. She’d probably met someone at her own proverbial crossroads and made a decision they were both going to regret.

Leo frowned at himself. Wordplay jokes when the going gets rough again, Leo? How about you just do what’s right?

“Well?” Audrey asked. “How soon can you be here?”

I can’t just ignore the CEO and not bring what she asked for… although she sounds really out of sorts now. “Yeah, Audrey, sorry, it’s late. I’ll bring the stuff to you. Meet at the Taco Bell down the street from the lab in thirty?”

There was another pause in which Leo heard nothing. “Just bring it to the lab, Leo. You have a keycard.”

Leo’s mind was already thinking through the angles of the situation, and he absently nodded before catching himself. “Of course. I’ll be there with bells on.”

“Lovely,” Audrey said tersely. “I’ll see you then.”

The call ended.

Leo was torn on how to proceed. He was pretty sure Audrey was in some kind of trouble, probably related to her financing. But he truly didn’t know.

A part of Leo wanted to wait, to avoid the chance of a shutdown of the project. But a larger part of him knew that he couldn’t abandon Audrey when she might be in trouble.

He grabbed a baton for safety, and the mock-ups, and headed out to his old beater.

I’m coming, Audrey.

***

Thirty minutes later, Leo turned his old and beat-up blue twenty-twenty civic into the side parking lot of their rented lab, the one for employees.

He glanced around the parking lot, his eyes taking in the details—and lack thereof. Audrey’s Tesla Model Q wasn’t visible anywhere. Instead, there was a large, black SUV near the entrance to the lab, outside any designated parking spot.

Why wasn’t Audrey’s car here? And who drove a black SUV? It wasn’t anyone at the lab…

Darker scenarios came to Leo’s mind, and he absentmindedly reached out and touched his baton. Where did she get her financing?

And at the same time, he could tell, from the light emanating from the tiny windows high up on the walls, that the main lab was occupied.

Leo drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He briefly considered trying to look inside, but the windows were fifteen feet up a smooth wall.

Instead, he grabbed his club and stuck it in the back of his jeans. Then Leo opened the door and gathered everything else under his left arm again. He rushed across the parking lot, the cold rain beating down on him as he did. No idea what I’m up against here, if anything. But that Black SUV makes me certain that something is deeply wrong.

Leo reached the door to the lab. He pulled his keycard out, then hesitated. We’re well past the point where you’re guessing, Leo, he thought to himself. There are probably bad men inside. You have no idea how many there are. Or how well armed they are. You’re tough, but this is a job for the police.

Leo pulled his phone out and turned it on, prepared to call 911. As he did, however, he heard yelling from inside and a brief, feminine scream.

Audrey!

Leo pushed into the lab in a panic, and raced through it to the main lab near the back and pushed in.

It was large, over fifty feet on a side. It had numerous mid-size tank prototypes, complicated hydraulics everywhere except for a twenty-by-twenty-foot space in the center. The sequestering protista breeding and alteration tanks were in other rooms.

Leo’s attention was immediately drawn to Audrey in the middle space, between all the hydraulics. She knelt on the ground, her hands on her head. The side of her tan face looked like one massive bruise, and tears ran down her cheeks from her deep-green eyes. Her black hair was a mess, and she was dressed in just a sleeping shirt.

Around her stood six men—one of whom was holding a gun to Audrey’s temple.

The man holding the gun to Audrey’s head was almost as tall as Leo, but the similarities ended there. He was muscled like a professional body builder and had scars crisscrossing his face and bare arms. His brown eyes had a hint of cruelty to them, but God must’ve preemptively gotten his revenge—the dude was bald. Ugly bald.

He also wore an extremely expensive, black Armani suit. Real mob type.

The man smiled, a half-sneer that seemed to exult in the pain of others. He turned his head slightly to Audrey without ever removing his gaze from Leo.

"I’m glad that you were right about your employee and his dedication, Ms. Melendez,” the man said. “It pleases me that I don’t have to aerate your brain.”

One of the other men, a short Irish looking guy with wispy orange hair and a crooked nose, gave an ingratiating laugh. “That’s funny, Kruegar.”

“Liam, please, not now,” Kruegar snapped. “We’ve got business to take care of.”

Then he pointed the gun toward Leo. “All right, bring everything over here. Your CEO here is late on her payments, and so I’m repossessing her business. You guys get this back when I get a very hefty share of the company. Any sudden moves and I shoot you. Don’t do what I tell you, and I shoot your woman. Plain and simple. This is a business transaction between me and little wannabe CEO here. Got it?”

Leo hesitated. Kruegar held himself like a trained fighter, his body language subtly conveying a deadly grace and confidence in the use of physical violence. Leo knew the signs of someone familiar with violence--he had been an amateur MMA fighter once, going six-and-two in unpaid but formally sanctioned fights on a local circuit. He had also kept going to the gyms until a couple years ago.

Plus, the other five guys had guns at their hips.

My chances of stopping this man and getting out alive are between a snowball-in-hell’s and absolute zero, unless something radically changes, Leo thought. And if I try, I’ll probably get Audrey hurt. Damn it! This was supposed to be my ticket to fame and fortune and a life that didn’t suck, building things that mattered!

But I can’t let them kill Audrey.

With a heavy heart, Leo carefully put everything down on the ground at his side.

Kruegar’s lips twitched back upward in a satisfied smirk.

A tear slid down Audrey’s cheek, and she glanced up at Leo with wide, watery eyes. “I’m so, so sorry, Leo. I didn’t mean to get you caught up in all this. I just wanted to make sure—”

"I know,” Leo said, his heart going out to her, even as he saw all of his own dreams, and two hard years’ work, disappearing before his eyes. “It’s okay.”

“Quit the waterworks,” Kruegar said. “This went smoothly for once. Liam, go get the goods while I keep an eye on this dude. And, friend, just in case I wasn’t clear, if you make any kind of move against Liam, I’m going to perforate you. He’s mu boy and your corpse would be a mild inconvenience.”

Kruegar’s eyes flickered downward, and his eyes widened. “What the fuck is that?”

A flash of multicolored lights appeared around Leo’s feet. The same circle from before.

Kruegar pointed the gun back at Leo. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m not doing anything, you asshole!” Leo exploded back. “How the fuck would I be doing anything?”

Audrey glanced between the lights and Leo’s face, and he had the sudden thought that she might also think he was somehow responsible.

Although, she no longer looked fearful. An intellectual puzzle could pull her out of nearly any emotional state, same as Leo. She stood up as Kruegar kept his gun moving between Leo and the lights at his feet.

Then the circle became glass-like all over again. Leo saw the same beautiful face as before. It appeared under his feet, the brow furrowed and gray-brown eyes darting between him and something to the side.

This time, Leo waited, and as he did, the circle became more vibrant and filled with images. He now saw that the face wasn’t truly looking up at him—it was looking down, as if someone were standing on the opposite side of the glass, upside down from his perspective. And he also saw a stone ceiling with a glowing crystal hanging from it behind her face, and he could make out the top of her body bent over.

The beautiful woman turned and screamed soundlessly at someone, or something, and motioned frantically back toward the circle with her pale hand.

The circle expanded rapidly, until it was about fifteen feet across.

“What are you doing?” Kruegar yelled, his hands shaking as he aimed his gun at Leo again.

“It’s not me!” Leo cried, his body tensing, hoping Kruegar wouldn’t do something foolish.

A six-foot-tall but quite thin man with androgynous features and long, golden hair, rushed onto the circle on the other mirror side. The man lay down, his back pressed upward against the circle below Leo.

The man’s fine clothing was soaked in blood, even the satchel at his belt. He carried a sword in his hand that he put down beside him. And his ears were entirely too long, like Vulcan ears. He didn’t move like he was hurt, in spite all the blood on his raiment. He had a bow and quiver on his back, which made his pose appear uncomfortable.

Kruegar screamed, “That’s it, bastard, you’re going down!”

Something wrenched, and Leo felt as if he were having an intense, out-of-body experience. His actual body slowed, and he saw through widening eyes as Kruegar raised the gun. Simultaneously, he watched from above as Kruegar fired the gun into his chest from just a few feet away.

Then Leo felt no connection to anything at all for a brief second.

He rolled to the side, pain lancing through him. His lungs struggled for air, finally dragging some in as he explosively coughed. He was inside a huge, stone room decorated with ornate statues—abstract geometric patterns carved into the floor, walls, and ceilings. Multiple glowing gems hanging from iron chains provided light.

Leo was on the stone he had seen before. Some kind of altar, he thought. At the end of the altar was a purple crystal, floating in the air, threads of energy lancing down from it in glowing lines around the altar that defined the fifteen-foot radius. A single drop of blood had been smeared across the purple crystal.

The woman that had been staring at him through the portal was next to him, staring down at him with furrowed brow.

Then Leo realized he wasn’t in his body.

He stared at the pale skin of his thin wrist and the long, golden hair running down his shoulders. I’m in the body of the elf that lay down on the altar a moment ago. What the…?

A battle of sorts was happening inside the chamber, chaotic and bloody, and after a shocked half-second, Leo glanced up. Honest-to-God orcs, judging by their gray-skinned, overly-muscled, pig-faced appearance, were fighting with slender people with long ears. Elves. And the orcs were winning—most of the elves were lying in pools of blood, hacked down or apart.

The rest had formed a clear defensive line and were trying to hold the orcs back from the altar.

One orc, however, was far different than the others. That one was nearly nine feet tall and had four tusks poking from his face, around his mouth in a near circle, that made him look almost like the Predator. Although the tusks were larger, almost eight inches long each.

Leo stood. The main orc went berserk, pointing at him and screaming, “Da elvesti jal demokranthak dar uruk! Bahk qo!”

The giant tusked orc slammed into the elves, killing one with his giant axe and kicking another so hard its arm broke with a snap audible even over the din of battle.

The woman with the gray-brown eyes grabbed Leo, her face breathtaking but now speckled with blood, as was her pale-bronze hair.

She spoke to him in a melodious language he hadn’t heard before. It reminded Leo of a beautiful Ugandan accent or someone speaking something close to Chinese, as near as he could parse it. Somehow, Leo understood it.

“In the religious tone, position of inferior addressing a high superior, most formal: My deepest and most sincere apologies: which is bourn from necessity regretted: o’ Star-Guided Champion. The situation is untenable: regret at failure to control: due to the unfortunate presence of our enemy: ancestral, deservedly hated, victorious:”

Her language used sentence prefixes to indicate the context of the conversation—in this case, for some reason, a church conversation. It also used word suffixes to indicate the comparative authority of the speakers, and this woman was indicating that she thought Leo was far, far above her. And lastly, it used words to modify the meanings of adjectives and emotions, giving them subtle clarifying alterations. He knew, somehow, that she was speaking something called High Averian, a most complicated but expressive language.

But after a mere heartbeat, his mind translated the words to his English thought patterns.

She had said, basically, “I’m sorry but we need to run because the orcs are murdering us!”

In the half second that it had taken Leo’s mind to absorb and process that, the nine-foot orc had managed to move next to him. Leo stood on the altar he had been sitting on, his body feeling lighter and more agile than he remembered, as the giant tusked orc swung the axe at him.

Leo jumped back, precariously, to the edge of the altar, barely dodging the axe. He glanced down, briefly, at the stone his new body had just been lying on.

The stone surface now faced upward into the lab, and his body—his real body!—was lying on the ground, blood pouring from it, covering part of the sight through the circle. He saw Kruegar and Audrey fighting.

Kruegar flung Audrey down onto the ground, next to Leo’s old body.

I have to do something to save her!

But he had no idea what. Leo spasmed, almost empathetically, as Kruegar slowly emptied his gun into Audrey, whose body jerked with each shot. No, damnit, no! I did the right thing to save her! Not to watch her die mere seconds later!

The tusked orc climbed onto the altar next to him, and Leo grabbed his sword from its sheathe at his waist, his mind somehow having skills it hadn’t before. He danced forward on the balls of his feet at the orc. But the orc was incredibly quick and strong. He kicked at Leo, hard and fast.

Leo blocked with his arms and felt both snap as he was propelled backwards to the edge of the altar, inches from the floating purple gem.

A translucent box appeared over his view, like a message in a computer game.

System not connected. Attempting to calibrate. Remain still, please.

 

Like hell I’ll remain still! And get out of my face, whatever you are!

The box obliged, disappearing.

A delicate feminine hand fell on Leo’s leg, and he felt a soothing warmth pass through him. One arm healed entirely. His other arm also felt better, although not perfect.

The gray-eyed woman from before—who was also an elf, Leo realized with certainty—was beside him, looking up at him from her position standing next to the altar.

“Run!” she screamed at him again in her melodious voice.

“Then follow me!” Leo shouted as the giant orc started another charge.

“I have to shut down the ritual and take the gem, or all will suffer!” she cried out. “I can’t let the Blood Tribes have Asnandi’s Key!”

The orc swung his axe, and Leo dodged. The clumsy swing resulted in the orc accidentally striking the purple crystal, which fell to the ground.

The crystal cracked as it hit the floor, and a massive surge of power flowed into the lines around the altar. The view into Leo’s realm seemed to expand, rushing out until the entire lab and even the nearby rooms were covered.

But Leo’s eyes were on the people in the lab. After-images—their souls?—of Kruegar and his men, and of Audrey, were being pulled from their bodies as each of the men slumped to the ground. And the souls were being pulled toward the portal. At the same time, the room started to spin in Leo’s perception.

He briefly saw worlds, plural. Alternate Earths, where people wore strange clothing. A world where dinosaurs roamed. A hellscape of fire and molten metal. A vast void filled with unknowable beings that looked like cephalopods large enough to swallow the sun. The elf woman reached for him before she spun off into nothingness.

Then everything exploded.