Page 30

The Locked Door

Marsh speeds across the desert, her gas pedal permanently jammed to the floor. She keeps waiting for something to prevent her from leaving—for police cars to appear out of nowhere, for the road to veer in a wrong direction, for her car’s battery to spontaneously die—but nothing does. Mile by mile, she rushes ever closer to Phoenix.

After another hour, dawn peeks over the horizon, a peachy orange glow that turns the windshield into a mirror. The road widens, and the glint of Phoenix’s skyline begins to shimmer in the distance. By the time the sun is fully up, Marsh is entering city limits, and buildings replace the cacti.

She speeds down the freeway, dodging pickup trucks and semis as the glare bounces harshly off their polished hood medallions. The asphalt ripples with heat, and she almost starts to sweat before the Bubble upgrades her car’s air-conditioning so it blows arctic cool.

How strange it is to be back here, she can’t help but think as she drives. Already, this old life of hers seems as far away to Marsh as another planet.

Like it was all a dream, perhaps.

A new life is where she belongs.

But in order to make her new life everything it should be, she has to escape Chrysalis. And to do that, she has to find Dylan.

Because regardless of the form, Marsh knows that whatever’s happening to her season isn’t a narrative problem.

It’s a quantum physics one.

And that makes Dylan Marsh’s best chance at understanding how to fix it.

Her tires squeal as she pulls into the old apartment complex. It’s the same one that Dylan lives in now outside of the Bubble, and also in the first half of her season. It looks exactly the same as it did then, she notes, encouraged, as she flings herself out of the driver’s seat and sprints toward the stairs without bothering to close the door.

He has to be there.

But what will he say when Marsh tells him she finally believes that something really weird is going on inside her Bubble, and that it’s only gotten much, much more intrusive after he left at the midseason special? Will he let go of his ego for one second, instead of starting a fight over how he knew better all along? Will he, for once, not pretend their life is a college classroom, that everything is a teachable moment? Will she have to strangle him first?

“Dylan!” Marsh shouts as she reaches the concrete landing. She throws herself against his door. “Dylan, it’s Marsh!”

She waits, but nothing happens.

“Please, open the door. I know you don’t want to talk to me anymore, but this is an emergency!” Marsh slaps the wood with her palms, rattling the whole door in its frame. “Dylan!”

For an instant, she wonders if he’s not home, but it’s very early morning on a weekday. Where else would he be but here drinking his coffee and getting ready for work?

Marsh suddenly stops her assault, and then rips open her purse. When they divorced, because they shared custody of Harper, they traded house keys with each other. For use only in emergencies.

This might not be entirely about Harper, but Marsh would bet that Chrysalis tampering with her Bubble, the Bubble that their daughter is in, definitely qualifies as an emergency.

The keys jingle on Marsh’s key ring as she flips through them to find the one she’s never had to use before. It slides into the lock with a metallic scrape and turns.

“Dylan, I’m sorry, but I need to talk to—” Marsh says as the door swings open.

But the sentence dies on her lips. She stares into the apartment, surprised.

Because it’s not Dylan’s apartment inside.

It’s not anyone’s apartment.

“... Dylan?” Marsh calls in confusion.

The whole unit is completely empty. There’s not a single piece of furniture inside of it.

“Dylan?” Marsh calls again, her voice small.

She steps cautiously inside and lets the door swing shut behind her. She touches the light switch on the wall, and the room is suddenly pitched in a quiet, yellow glow.

When he quit All This and More, did he... move out?

But that’s not it.

As she studies the brightened room, she realizes that something is off. Even more than that Dylan isn’t here.

Silently, she inspects the floor where his couch used to be—but the ground is perfectly clean there. There isn’t dust on the counters in the kitchen or bathroom. There are no indentations where a bed frame would have rested on a carpeted bedroom floor, nor any other indication that objects have been recently moved out of any of the rooms.

At last, after she’s scoured the entire place top to bottom, Marsh finds herself back in the living room again. She’s trembling, and crosses her arms to be still.

If Dylan had merely moved, there would be signs here. Dings, nicks, spots, dust rings. But his apartment looks more like no one was ever here to begin with.

How is that possible?

He can’t just vanish from existence.

Right?

Regardless of what kind of a husband he was, Dylan has always been a devoted father to Harper. Maybe he and Marsh couldn’t make it work together, but she knows he would never give up on his daughter. No matter what, he would never let anything—even his anger over this show—stop him from being there for Harper.

But then... where is he, if not here?

As Marsh stands lost in the center of the empty living room, for the first time in what feels like a hundred lifetimes, the All This and More jingle finally begins to tinkle quietly in the background.

She must finally have reached the end of her eighth episode, she realizes, as she watches a little Sharp Purple butterfly flutter past the window and alight on the bare sill.

Marsh has walked so many paths here, and lived so many lives, and all of them have ended the same way.

With Chrysalis finally catching up to her.

Maybe Alexis was right, after all—maybe she can’t outrun Chrysalis, even with infinite tries. And maybe Talia was wrong—that whatever it is, it’s far more than just a benign quirk to be tolerated or ignored.

Maybe the only way to make her season everything she wants it to be is to stop running, and face it head-on.

She knows which path she has to choose now.

The one that Talia first offered her after the midseason special, which Marsh turned down. The one in which she was supposed to be a lawyer, Ren a journalist, and Harper a violinist, not some other kind of musician or artist. It was the nearest version to true—and also the one in which she could have gotten close to Chrysalis, if she’d been brave enough to try.

Marsh looks up at the edges of her world, as they slowly blur and darken, the Bubble whisking her away, across an ocean of water and to another reality.

She doesn’t know what could be waiting for her in Hong Kong, but there’s only one way to find out.