Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

The possible worlds hung and spun in five-dimensional space like ever-twisting jewels of sand-brown and burgundy, frost and ocean.

Mother, Father, and Amelia made their camp on a relatively flat piece of spacetime, stretched between three clusters of possible worlds. Mother and Father were careful campers. They’d drilled Amelia on the dangers of disturbing the possible worlds, so she watched them float and sway from the corner of her eye, making sure that her soft footsteps didn’t jostle them.

Everyone was exhausted. They had left their reality only yesterday, but that yesterday was long long ago; the space between possibilities was an eternal today.

It was Amelia’s job to assemble the little kerosene stove and unpack the cans of beans and vegetables and the double-wrapped crackers. Behind her, her parents bickered through the assembly of the tent. Who put the poles away in the wrong bag, and why can’t you just hold that side down for one goddamn second while I get this stake set, and well I’m not the one who set off an entire reality’s descent into militia rule, so maybe you should give it a fucking rest.

They always fought like this, between realities, and they never asked Amelia if she was sad about leaving her friends behind. Or her dog. Glumly, she put her hand on the spacetime around the stove and told it to be a ring of stones. Safety first.

Father was a research anarchist, studying the most effective way to transition hierarchal societies into equitable anti-hierarchical ones. It involved a lot of trial and error. Amelia was sick of his trial and error.

She wrapped her arms around herself. It was bad enough when Father’s sociological tinkering created stable socialist-capitalist hybrid economies. At least then they gave her a couple weeks to say goodbye to her friends, before they all packed up their camping backpacks and took the big sideways step out of that world and into the space between realities.

At least then, when Father cataloged his failures (leaving Mother’s and Amelia’s failures unspoken), he smiled.

She told spacetime to make a grove of trees around her. They were small and scrubby; she hadn’t really got the hang of controlling reality yet. It would be better once Father got tenure, she reminded herself. Then they could go back to their own reality, which Amelia could barely remember, except that nobody ever carried machine guns around. Father just needed to get a really good publication. He just needed a reality to finally go right.

This last reality had gone bad. Really bad. Her friends probably thought she was dead. Her friends were probably dead. She felt weirdly numb. She tried to feel like it didn’t matter, whatever’d happened to them; she’d moved on from that reality and she’d never go back. But it did matter.

Father’s voice broke through the little protection of the trees: “Consequences aren’t my purview, Meera, how many times do I have to tell you that!”

Ugh. This was the worst of their fights. Amelia curled up on her side and stroked the spacetime. Slowly, it began to hump up under her fingers, warm, soft—tufted—and then head and wagging tail lifted free, and the fabric of spacetime sucked in to fur the belly, four little paws pulled free, and a puppy galumphed over to Amelia to cover her in kisses.

She giggled and shushed it; as bad as it was when her parents fought, it was even worse when they remembered mid-fight that she existed. She’d rather be forgotten than be a symbol of bad parenting and bad life choices. Anyway, they’d already gotten to You Knew Who I Was When You Married Me, so it would be over soon. And the puppy looked like Sir Slobberton had, when they first got him.

It was quiet behind her now. She looked out over the clustered worlds, drifting on their possibility-tethers, and pretended the next reality would be better. She’d be older, there, and stronger, and she’d finally know how to make friends. Under her fingers, the dog grew up. Its fur coarsened.

“Amelia?” That was Mother. Then Father: “Amelia, how many times have we told you, you need to get dinner started!”

Amelia scrambled up and toward the waiting stove. The scrubby trees melted out of her way as soon as she stopped wanting them, as spacetime usually did. She didn’t check on the dog; it was made of raw spacetime, too. Of course it would dissolve, too.

But it didn’t.

As Amelia lit the kerosene stove, and yanked the pull-tabs on the cans of beans and tomato paste and corn, the dog galloped along the edges of their spacetime plateau, tongue and tail wagging. It was cute, Amelia thought. And it was so rare that they met anyone else, here on the long trek between realities; the dog’s uncomplicated friendliness was a relief.

She’d let it live a little longer, before unmaking it. It deserved to live.

Then one particularly exuberant wag of its tail collided against a possible world, the closest one in its cluster—

And Mother lurched forward, shouting, “Dog, DOWN!”—

And the dog slumped back into spacetime, gone forever—

And it seemed possible that the world would settle back into its orbit—

But it didn’t, it collided with its infinite neighbors hard, and shattered, all its glittering possibility swept up into a short-lived dervish in the five-dimensional winds. Rust and diamond, cobalt and gold, all gone. All become wreckage, thrown against its neighbor-realities, which rocked in the shock-wave.

Rocked, and broke.

In horrible slow-motion, an expanding ring of worlds broke upon one another. A ripple of silent, beautiful violence. A world shattered in strawberry and starshine colors. A world shattered in midnight and whisper colors. A world, a world, a world, a world, gone, gone, gone, gone.

Not all of them shattered. Not even half. But Amelia quickly lost count. Spray after spray of shattered possibilities erupting up and howling away.

She clutched at Mother’s hand. “We’ll step outside of it, right? That’s what we do, when we make mistakes. And I’ll be careful next time.”

Father blew his lips out. “Sorry, Millie-Pie. Here between realities, we just have to live with our mistakes.”

Amelia chewed on her knuckles. “So it’s different than being in the worlds?”

“No,” Mother said, “it’s the same.”