De Lancre stood at the end of the hall. His fingers started crackling with small bolts of lightning that illuminated his face from below, giving him an eerie glow. 

“Oh sh!t!” said Kepa. “I’ve seen this movie…”

Lightning flew from De Lancre’s fingertips and across the walls and ceiling as it marched down the hallway to where Kepa and Latxe stood.

“What is that?” Latxe barely whispered, paralyzed as she watched the lightning dance in front of her.

“Magic!” bellowed Kepa as he pulled Latxe and ducked into a side room. He grabbed her shoulders, looking into her eyes. “That was magic. He’s a powerful… magic user. That sounds so lame when I say it outloud…” he mumbled to himself. Shaking his head, he continued. “He’s going to fry us if we don’t find a way out of here!”

Latxe nodded numbly, but then swiped furiously across her tablet as light flashed through the open doorway with increasing frequency and brightness. Suddenly, the door disappeared and a new staircase appeared in the room before them, vanishing into the ceiling. 

“Goazen!” barked Latxe as she rushed up the stairs, Kepa on her heels.

As soon as they got to the next floor, Latxe swiped at her tablet and the opening faded as if it were never there. They found themselves in the dining area of de Lancre’s suite. Kepa quickly looked around, seeing the balcony that overlooked the city on one side and several closed doors on the other.

“Maite!” he yelled.

“Hemen!” he heard in reply from behind one of the closed doors.

He rushed to the door, fumbling for some kind of door knob or control panel that would let him open it, but finding nothing. He pounded on the door in frustration. “Maite!” he bellowed again.

Latxe nudged him gently aside as she again focused on her tablet. The door disappeared.

Maite burst from the room and threw her arms around Kepa. “I knew you’d find me!”

“I would never leave you!” exclaimed Kepa. After a moment, he broke free. “I couldn’t have done it without Latxe here.”

Latxe smiled at Maite, and then quickly looked away, pretending to focus on her tablet. 

“We won’t have much time…” she began when the doors at the end of the dining room burst off of their frame and flew across the room.

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De Lancre’s suite was at the top of the tower and it took Kepa and Latxe a long time make their way up. The nanobots were efficient at making stairs and openings for them where none had existed before, but the two would-be rescuers were extra cautious after their encounter with the security guard and make sure to check every opening and hallway for others. 

“For such a large building, it is remarkably empty,” noted Kepa as they climbed what felt like the hundredth set of stairs.

Latxe nodded. “I sometimes wonder if these big towers exist only to give those in power a high perch from which to scan their realm.”

“Like the kings and queens of old, eh?”

Latxe nodded again. “Precisely. For all of our technological advances, we still can’t root out the desire for power. Or how power corrupts.”

Latxe sighed. “How is it during your time? What is life like back then?”

Kepa chuckled. “Not too much different, at least in terms of people wanting power. We of course don’t have all of the marvels you do, and we are in a bit of an existential crisis, with climate change and the impact on our environment.” 

He paused a moment as he poked his head out from the opening at the top of the stairs. He scanned left and then right. The hallway, like so many before, was dark. He climbed the rest of the way out and reached out a hand to Latxe. She smiled as she took it and pulled herself up.

“But, it is good to know that some of those problems have been solved,” he continued.

“I remember reading about the climate problem in school,” said Latxe. “For someone today, it is inconceivable that we let things get so bad that it threatened the very existence of the planet.”

Kepa shrugged. “As a species, we can be pretty short-sighted.”

Latxe laughed, and the melodic tone of her laughter made Kepa smile. And then blush. He turned away, pretending to examine the darkness down the hall. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t fret so much,” said Latxe. “I like you, and maybe in another world you and I could, you know, be together. But I know that, in this one, your heart belongs to Maite.”

“In another world,” Kepa mused. He hadn’t told Latxe about the zatiak and the bubble. He couldn’t bear to think about how he might be extinguishing her life, her history, when they pop the bubble. He kept telling himself that this bubble wasn’t real, it wasn’t the real time line, and that she had another life that maybe was better than this one. Maybe.

Latxe smiled, thinking Kepa was considering that what if scenario. She looked at her tablet.

“We are very near Salazar’s floor,” she said. “Only one or two more to go before we reach them.”

Suddenly, the lights burst to life, nearly blinding them in their intensity.

“Oh,” said a voice at the end of the hall. “Don’t worry, you’ve already found me.”

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Kepa watched as Latxe’s fingers swiped around on the surface of her tablet, trying to figure out what the strokes might mean, but they were incomprehensible to him. She might as well have been waving her hands in the air, casting some kind of magic spell, for all it meant to him.

When she was done, stairs started materializing in the space in front of them, growing almost organically out of the floor and the ceiling until the two halves met perfectly in the middle. At the same time, a small opening appeared in the ceiling at the top of the stairs.

While Kepa had seen the nanobots create doors out of nothing before, this was a whole new level. He couldn’t help stare at the stairs in front of him. He ran his hand along the smooth surface. There was no seam or anything where the two halves joined. He would never have been able to tell where they met. 

“These nanobots are so amazing,” he said. “I never would have believed something like this could be possible. It’s almost like magic.”

Latxe looked at him. “Look,” she began. “You keep saying things like that, being amazed at things that anyone from here would simply take for granted.” Her eyes almost turned cold as she looked at him. “Who are you? Where are you from, really?”

Sweat started beading on Kepa’s brow. Latxe was the one friend he had in this bubble, and his one hope of rescuing Maite. He couldn’t afford to alienate her. “The United States?” he asked more than answered.

Latxe threw up her hands. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. For all I know, you work for him,” she said as she gestured vaguely to the ceiling above them. “I don’t know what you’ve done to Olatz, what kind of threat you made to her, but I’m done with this.” Latxe turned away from him and began swiping at her tablet.

“Ez!” exclaimed Kepa. “No!” His shoulders slumped. “I’ll tell you.” 

Latxe turned back to face him, her fingers paused above the screen, her face expectant.

“I’m from the past,” began Kepa as he more fell than sat on the stairs. “Maite is too.”

“The past?” exclaimed Latxe incredulously. “You expect me to believe in time travel? Of all of the bullshit I’ve heard, this tops it all.”

“Seriously,” replied Kepa. “We’re from the early twenty-first century. We’re here to retreive a magical artifact…”

“Time travel and magic?” interrupted Latxe. “What next? Are you going to tell me we are all part of some computer game controlled by some kid in his mother’s basement? That none of this is real?”

“It’s real,” replied Kepa with a tinge of guilt. “But so is the magic.” He held out his hand, palm up. His brow furrowed as he focused on his hand. It started to glow, only slightly at first, growing in intensity and brightness until Latxe had to look away.

“What the hell was that?” she asked as spots danced in her vision.

“Magic,” said Kepa. 

Latxe shook her head. “No, I don’t believe it. It has to be some new nanobot trick. And you keep acting like you don’t know what the nanobots are.”

“What the hell?” exclaimed a voice from above. “Where did this hole come from?”

The face of a woman peered into the hole. “Who the hell are you two? How did you get in? Central,” she began, “there are… ah!”

Kepa had thrown his hand up and released a flash of light that took the woman by surprise, blinding her. He rushed up the stairs as the woman staggered back, covering her mouth before she could alert her colleagues. Latxe followed him up, and helped him tie the woman up. 

“Magic, huh?” asked Latxe as she pulled on the knot of the gag that covered the woman’s mouth.

Kepa nodded sheepishly. “Bai.”

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Maite had entered her pod with the hope of getting some rest and taking her mind off of de Lancre and his obvious attempts to get into her good graces. She found it hard, however, to truly relax without the familiar comfort of a blanket that she could pull over her head. Simply standing in this mechanical tube, no matter how refreshed she felt when she woke up, wasn’t the same. And she always woke up with a strange itching sensation all over her body.

The tube would normally emit some kind of gentle mist that had the effect of making her drowsy. Before the mist came, Maite canceled the tube’s sleep routine and stepped out into her room. Lights at her feet came on automatically, lighting her way. Lights also appeared in front of her, almost like the beam of a flashlight, but followered her gaze as she looked around. She shook her head, momentarily causing the lights to shake violently across the wall before they equilibrated. She sighed. Sometimes, she thought, technology makes things more difficult, not less.

She opened her door and stepped outside. While she was technically de Lancre’s prisoner, he knew she had no where to go so didn’t confine her to her room. She stepped through the dining room and out to the balcony. While the city was nearly unrecognizable from her own version of Bilbao, she still found comfort in gazing over the wonderous skyline. She even recognized some of the mountains in the distance. She gave herself a small hug as she thought about her ama and aita back at home. Though she missed them, she knew she would see them again. The bubble had to pop some time, didn’t it? It couldn’t last forever. Even if it was centuries after she died, if anyone found that zatia and popped the bubble, she would return to her own time.

She cursed de Lancre for not popping the bubble of this timeline. She didn’t even care if he collected the zatia for himself and got its power. Keeping these bubbles going when he had the power to pop them, to end the disruption to all of these lives, how could he be so damn selfish?

Maite looked down at the ground below her. Even though it was the middle of the night, she could see people moving between buildings and hanging out in the street, almost as many people as there were during the daytime. She wondered if any of them ever slept. With the tube, maybe the human body didn’t need to sleep so much. And she suspected it also helped clear away toxins from alcohol so there were little after effects of drinking too much. The future had become one long gau pasa.

Watching the people, almost like ants from her view, Maite realized that these people had lives too. Yes, they were part of this bubble and, because of that, they weren’t living the lives they were intended to live, but they were still living their lives. Who was she, or de Lancre, or Marina, to pop their existance away? Was there no other way of collecting the zatiak and preventing de Lancre from becoming so powerful than to end the trajectories of so many lives?

But, at the same time, all of these people had parallel lives, in the main timeline, that they were also living. At what point did they become a different enough person that they deserved to live their own lives? What about babies and children that were born in this bubble? Maybe they never existed in the regular timeline. What about them?

Maite shivered, not so much from the cold but from the unsettling thoughts that clouded her mind. She really wished Kepa were here to hold her. He’d have something clever to say to put her mind at ease. Feeling defeated, Maite wandered back to her room and welcomed the numbing mist that enveloped her.

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