The night before his release, Voss Thripp ate two dinners, one in each universe, and both tasted like ash.
In Universe A, he sat at a pine table in a farmhouse kitchen, buttering bread while a woman named Hulda hummed off-key at the sink. She had kind eyes and rough hands and believed they had been married eleven years. The bread was warm. The butter was real. Voss had killed a man in a parking garage, but that crime belonged to a self he no longer fully inhabited.
In Universe B, he picked at gray meat in a concrete block with numbers for a name. His cellmate Ruddigore snored against the radiator. This was the truth he had signed for, a twenty-year stretch in a prison that traded time for possibility.
"You don't eat, they notice," said the CO, Bantam, through the slot. "They notice, I notice. I notice, the warden asks questions. Eat the meat, Thripp."
Voss ate the meat.
He had signed at thirty-two, drowning in debt and guilt and the particular stupidity of youth. The Long Stretch facility promised: serve your sentence across the divide, live a whole life in the meantime, return with your time done and your memory intact. They did not promise you would want to come back.
"Hulda's making pie tomorrow," he told Bantam, which made no sense to either of them.
The induction had been simple. A needle, a hum, a splitting—not physical, but deeper, the sense that you had become a story told two ways at once. In one version, you were punished. In the other, you were whoever you managed to become.
In six hours, the merge would begin. The warden called it reconciliation. Voss called it drowning.
He thought of Hulda's pie, of her calloused palm against his cheek, of the child they had buried nameless in hard winter ground—a grief that had happened to him, that he had earned through living. He thought of gray meat and concrete and Ruddigore's wet snore, of the victim's mother in courtroom three, her face collapsed around a single sound.
Both dinners sat in his gut, two futures pulling apart the seams.
"What happens if I don't choose?" he had asked at induction, young and arrogant and playing for time.
The technician, whose name he no longer remembered, had shrugged. "Then they choose for you. They always choose the hungrier version. The one with more wanting left."
Voss lay on his cot, Universe A's pine table still ghosting his fingertips, and tried to measure which self wanted more, which self wanted less, which wanting was the kind that let you sleep.
He heard Hulda humming. He heard the cell block's night count. The humming won, then lost, then won again, a tide without moon.
At 0600, a bell he could not place would ring.
He would stand. He would walk. He would become one man, or the other, or something the facility had built from hunger and pie and the particular silence after a wrong thing cannot be undone.
Somewhere, ash waited. Somewhere, ash had already been swallowed.